Episode 84: the capacity for courage // Saturday, June 27

Micheline: I think it's good to push back, you know? That's what learning really is. I think a vibrant learning situation, which I worry we're not really allowing that much for all the time in universities anymore is there's a place where you're gonna have dialogue. And civilly disagree--but not hate each other. You know? We can disagree.  So much learning happens that way. 

Laura: In the story we tell about how we became who we are today, most of us have a shortlist of people who shaped us the most. Mentors or teachers who were guides along the way, who saw something in us that we maybe couldn’t yet see ourselves, who helped us grow.

On today’s Story Saturday, I’m thrilled to introduce you to someone I’ve admired for a long time. Someone who can take perhaps more credit for the writer I’ve become than anyone else I know.

Micheline: I'm Micheline Aharonian Marcom. I am a novelist and a writer and a professor of creative writing at the University of Virginia.

Laura: When I moved to Oakland back in 2004 to get my MFA at Mills College, Micheline was the first professor I had. She had a reputation for being brilliant and tough. I remember feeling a little terrified of her in that way that I often was of the people I respected most when I was young. 

The first time I turned in a piece of writing for her class, the verdict she delivered was that it was mundane. I was devastated--but I quickly understood that what she said wasn’t personal. And also, it was true. I’d been trying to write the way I thought an MFA student should write. There was no passion in my words, nothing true that I could connect to. 

That day Micheline told our class something I’ve carried with me for years: safe writing is boring writing. When the writing is good, it reveals to us our capacity for courage. 

Micheline’s voice has been in my head a lot over the years, especially lately. As early as the first week of this podcast, I realized I had a decision to make, about whether or not I was going to write episodes that were safe, that cost me nothing, or whether or not I was going to choose to be brave and discover my capacity for courage. And though it’s sometimes been terrifying, I’ve tried to lean into courage. 

And so as we work our way to the final episodes of season one, it only seemed right to rach out to Micheline to tell her thank you.

Micheline: It's so great to reconnect. It's funny. I mean, you don't know, right? As a teacher and a coach, you just sort of try to do your best, [you] mess up many times, I'm sure. But we sort of have this duty to our students and the people we work with, to support them to become their biggest and most empowered, beautiful selves. 

Laura: Micheline has published seven books, and has another one called The New American coming out next month. Her first novel was a New York Times Notable Book and a runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction. She was a Fulbright scholar, and won awards from the Lannan Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, and the US Artists’ Foundation. 

It’s been fourteen years since she was my teacher, but I still think about her and feel grateful to her all the time. I wanted to understand how she became the writer that she is today--someone who writes with courage, and who teaches her students to write that way, too. 

Micheline: I didn't grow up wanting to be a writer. I didn't ever know I could be a writer, or an artist or anything like that. It never occurred to me.  What I was was a reader was always a reader. I always loved books. I found them magical. And I always loved language and the word, and I grew up in a house with four languages. I grew up hearing Spanish, Armenian, French, and English, and a teeny bit of Arabic. And the strange thing was, I was sort of locked out  from most of those languages, ‘cause I'd forgotten the Armenian, I didn't know Spanish or French until later. And I still don't know Arabic. 

I remember when I learned to read. I still remember deciphering letters and entering this sort of closed system. Suddenly, magically, those symbols, signs meant something. And when I could read on my own, I just found it extraordinary, both for the ability that books had for me--and still have--of taking me out of myself into something else. Sometimes that taking out was into fantasy and Storyland, which is so beautiful, that magic carpet ride story. But what later I realized what James Joyce called aesthetic pleasure. Which I, I didn't have until a little bit later, maybe high school was the earliest I really remember it, where a book did something to me that was so soulful, that changed me.

Those experiences of reading are probably what led me eventually to writing. But I didn't have the confidence or the knowledge that I would become a writer until  after college. I went to college thinking I'd be a lawyer. That was my mom's dream for me anyway, because like a lot of immigrants, I think she just wanted me to have a good job. But a few weeks of a political science course was enough to turn me off of that for good. 

And I eventually stumbled into studying literature, and I loved it. I did Spanish, Latin American literature, and English. I thought I'd get a PhD and become a professor. I think it's funny. I am a professor now, but not through that route. I had this great professor. I was taking a class after college on post-colonial literature. And I told him I wanted to get a PhD. And he said, “well, why do you want to get a PhD?”

And I said, “because I want to spend my life reading books and thinking about things.” And he's like, “well, that's a terrible reason to get a PhD. Don't do it. Because that won't happen.” It might not be this ideal life of the mind that I was envisioning. And so I didn't know what to do. And then bit by bit I started writing, by writing poetry, actually, very badly. I think I knew I couldn't ever be a good poet.  I eventually ended up doing the MFA program at Mills and writing because I worked there. I was working for the Upward Bound program, and working with low income first gen kids, and was writing a little bit, and Elmaz Abinader, who teaches there, let me take some classes. I audited. So I found myself doing an MFA in my late twenties, a really great experience at Mills when I was there. And some really extraordinary teachers who really changed my life, most particularly Ginu Kamani, who I'm still friends with, who led me into the extraordinary labyrinth of books that changed my life--books which I I had never even heard of. Christina Garcia was also my teacher, and she was also amazing. And they mentored me, and  supported me in believing in this  bold desire to be a writer. And so that mentorship was really extraordinary. 

I still, I didn't know what I was doing, but by then I had realized I wanted to write the story of my grandmother and my grandfather, who were survivors of the Armenian genocide. I felt this duty to write about what had happened to them, because at that time, there was so little awareness of the Armenian genocide, and I had grown up hearing the stories because my grandparents were survivors. And so I wanted to sort of write that story. I didn't even want to. I felt a duty to write that story. And so I did. I often think that the only reason I finished that novel--beccause it was challenging on many fronts, not least of which, because I knew so little about the Armenian genocide when I started the book--but I made a promise to the memory of my grandparents. And so I wrote that book, and once I had written that book, then I sort of didn't look back. 

Laura: Micheline’s first book, Three Apples Fell From Heaven, is a beautiful, courageous book. I wanted to know if Micheline learned that courage from Ginu and Cristina, and if she’s aware that it’s something she passed onto her student even now.

Micheline: “Courage” comes from the root of the French word cœur, or the heart. They modeled for me, what does it mean to write and teach with that kind of heart? It's not that you're not afraid. You're still afraid, but you act with your heart. And I think a lot of being a writer--maybe an artist--is to listen to your intuition. And I think that intuition in so many ways, is listening to one’s heart, and not to the fear, which is so rampant all the time, everywhere, including now. And so that's not always easy. So to see other people who are doing that, who mentor that for you? Yeah. I guess in that sense we teach it. 

I had so many discoveries along the way. What I distinctly remember, we read some short stories by  the Polish writer Tadeusz Borowski. And it was a collection of stories in English translated as This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. And the stories were so disturbing. I mean, they just really unsettled me. It almost made me angry. And we were supposed to write responses, not imitating, but inspired by that.

And I just remember this moment of like, oh yeah, well, I'll show you! As if, you know, Ginu would care. I don't even know what happened, but it flipped something in me. And  I didn't know what I was doing, but I felt it. It felt scary to do it, but it felt real. And I knew I wasn't using language in ways I had before, which is sort of like to cover up things or to pretend, which I feel like is mostly what we do with language. But it became something very vibrant and alive and it felt real.

That's always  where I want to go into writing. It's like I lean my ear in to listen to the things that are  humming almost, which I think of as truth. Because I never thought I'd be a writer, the only reason to do it was for those reasons. There's no other reason for me to do it than that.  

Laura: I learned that process of leaning my ear toward truth from Micheline. I wrote things in her classes that terrified me, that felt like they came not from my own brain but from some otherworldly source. She taught me not to censor myself, to press in when the writing scared me. Because truth, even in fiction--maybe especially in fiction--can be scary. Sometimes we can find our way to deeper truths in fiction than we give ourselves permission to feel in life. Writing like that can be a revelation. It can show us the parts of ourselves we’ve been hiding. It can teach us courage. 

Micheline: For me, writing is inquiring. I don't know what I think about anything until I'm writing into something. I learn from each book so much as I write it. The first book taught me the very basic principle that it's important to trust the process. I recognize that I go through a certain process of doubt and wanting to throw the book off the bridge and thinking it's useless and worthless.

So I know that that's going to happen. So I don't freak out when that happens like I did in the first book. I also know I can finish a book because I finished others. You can't know that when you write your first book. You're just in the dark, in the woods, you don't know, you know what the bleep is going on. I despair and I don't know that it's always worth it, probably like everyone else, but I still trust it. And I believe so much in books and think that they matter so much. I'm so grateful to the books that I have access to. But you know, writing is hard. It’s really, really hard. I don’t know if I can curse--I like to curse a lot--but it's really hard. Novel-writing is not for everyone. Right? If I were to describe myself, it's like slow and steady and sometimes stupid. But I will stick with something. 

I have the ability to stick with something over the years it takes to write a book. And because books often take so long to write, to think about the whole book sometimes, especially when you're still in the first draft, I find it overwhelming. And so like in some ways, the tricking of my own psychology is to remember, well, you know, a book is written scene by scene and page by page. So sometimes I’m just like, I'm going to focus on this moment. And the next moment. It may not be a scene of action. You know, it might just be a description of something. 

I'll write the book sometimes out of order. But I do that sometimes in order to get myself just, you know, working. I just go page by page or scene by scene or moment to moment. They're like moments of  light that come through. And then once I've written a draft of the book, I'll start to see that there's a pattern there and I have to cull that pattern. And so I might have to add scenes or cuts things or, you know, get it to work. But I have to write my way into it. Almost like you're writing into a labyrinth, and you're following the thread to make the labyrinth itself or the book.  

I've come to realize too, having taught so many students over the years, that writers work differently. There are a lot of writers I know who, in order to know something, they'll write and write and write, write tons of pages, which may not at all be part of the final form of the book. But that's part of  their process. 

When I don't know what to do, I just start reading a lot. If I've got to clear my head, if I want to get out of where my thoughts are heading, I need to move. Movement really helps me. The mind unlocks itself a little bit. When I was writing Three Apples, I biked a lot. And physical activity in general was really important. It's still important. 

Laura: Micheline has been publishing books for almost twenty years. In that time, she’s seen the publishing industry has changed dramatically. 

Micheline: I was so fortunate when I published my first book in 2001. I mean, my first book was from my Master's thesis, which I then finished. I sold it. I sold it for money, which seemed unbelievable at the time. It was magical. And it was published by a New York press, Riverhead Books, which is a great press. And I sold the next two to them. And I was just like, this is never going to end. This is amazing. And there were definitely several years that I was able to  write full time. It was extraordinary. And then 2008 happened and that all changed. 

Laura: I remember 2008 well. It was the year when I’d finally finished my first novel, and was sending it out to agents. At the time, I didn’t really understand what was happening in the publishing industry. I only knew that though a lot of nice agents were sending me notes saying that they liked my work, I wasn’t getting picked up.

Micheline: It used to be that an editor could support a writer for the lifetime of her books or his books, and not every book had to make money. But you could do that because you had other writers, maybe your genre writers or nonfiction writers, who made enough money for the editor’s list. So I think that's all gone. It's gone for the editors themselves. They're under a tremendous amount of pressure and books are commodities like, you know, anything else. Detergent. And so you have to sell, and it has to be sellable and desirable. And to even sell a book, you have to package it by comparing it to another book or books. So that's all very different. 

Laura: There’s a lot more that could be said about this, about how Amazon has conditioned us as a society to prize the cheap and convenient over all else, about the book stores and publishing houses that couldn’t survive, about all of the beautiful books that could no longer find a home. Suffice it to say that the world has gotten a lot more difficult for authors. 

Micheline: So I definitely saw many years and found it nearly impossible to find publishers. I just couldn't sell a book in New York any more to a mainstream press. My work was, I guess, just not commercial by their standards, or what they were seeking. 

And I didn't know what to do. I just kept writing, you know, I just put them in the drawer. And published with small presses. But I love the small presses. And this has changed too, because the small presses have picked up the slack, and they are publishing so many of the great books that are happening now, because they'll take risks, in ways that I think are probably more difficult for the large presses in New York, where again, they have this pressure to make money.

Americans are not reading literature. My agent told me that the Booker winner of two years ago, the numbers it sold in the United States, I mean, the number was so low. I just, I didn't even believe it. 

But the golden years of publishing that I saw the tail end of, it was only a short period of time anyway. Maybe it was 20, 30 years. And other than that, writers and writers in other countries always struggle and have to figure out ways to make a living. So I think we're just having to contend with what most people have to contend with in other countries, or what the poets always have to face, which is your books may not make you money. 

I asked Micheline what that struggle has looked like lately, and whether or not she’s been able to write at all during this time of sheltering in place.

Micheline: I couldn't do anything for at least a month. Also I was teaching. It was in the middle of the semester. I came home for spring break from Charlottesville, Virginia, where I live when I'm teaching, and I came to California where my partner is. And I stayed for seven weeks. You know, I didn't go back. I came with my dog, fortunately, my suitcase, and didn't go back.

And the first month was just so unsettling. I didn't know what was going on. I don't know if anyone else did. I had two things: one was reading the news and trying to understand what was going on and trying to understand this virus like everyone else and what it meant. And also I still needed to be a teacher--the best teacher I could be for my students, because they needed me. And so I needed to sort of keep my head together for them, which was good, because it probably forced me to keep my head together a little bit, and do the best I could for them. 

I've thought a lot about what it means to be witness to your time and what it means to be a writer in those times. And maybe we have certain duties to the times we live in. And some of the great works of literature have been written during very bleak and hard times. I think we're being asked to reflect in a deeper way, maybe. And for me, the only way I can understand anything weirdly is not by reading the news anymore, because I don't feel like I'm learning that much. But I've been weirdly enough reading a huge amount of history, mostly ancient history. I've been obsessed with the near East and ancient Greece and the kinds of work and thinking that was going on in tumultuous times in other times to try to understand now.

Because I think we are in the midst of great change. Not only because of this virus, but because of the climate changing so fast and so drastically, and also because of massive migrations of humans around the earth and all of the economic inequalities,  social inequalities. And this is not new for human beings.

It's funny. I was teaching  Waiting for Godot, you know, by Samuel Beckett. I have read that play many times, but I read it after the coronavirus hit, and suddenly I understood Waiting in a way that I hadn't before. That book wasn't about, you know, the second World War that he was living through when he wrote it, or how he was almost captured by the Gestapo and fled to the South of France, right? It's the symbolic story. But he did a lot of waiting for the war to end. And so those are the kinds of things I've been thinking about. You know, in terms of like doing things in the moment to try to do good work in the world? Yes. I think about that. But then in terms of literature, I think it's always at its highest level, working in this symbolic way.

Laura: Outside of teaching and writing, some of that good work that Micheline has been doing is a project that I found this past year when I was working on another podcast that is still in the works, about cultivating conversations around immigration. It’s called The New American Story Project, and I highly recommend checking it out. I’ll put a link to it in today’s show notes.

Micheline: It's a digital oral history project that I started five years ago. We have been recording the stories of unaccompanied Central American minors, children who came to the United States without their parents fleeing mostly violence, gang violence often, sometimes violence in the home. So fleeing violence and fleeing Guatemala, El Salvador, or Honduras, three countries whereby there's just no personal security and there's no protection, really, for the vulnerable. 

We were living through a refugee crisis. Now, our borders are closed, so it's a different story. It's altered, but at the time when I started it, not many people were paying attention. I’d just finished The New American, that's coming out in a month, about what happens to an American kid, a Guatemalan American, when he gets deported by nothing he's done wrong, and is making his way home and going through this journey. 

And when I was doing research on that novel, I found it nearly impossible to find stories in their own words. It was always through a journalist who was quoting them, or somebody talking about people. And I wanted to create a space where people would tell their stories in their own words, and have it be a repository in that sense, for that kind of storytelling. Very much inspired by the writer Alexievich, who's just an amazing--I think one of the great living writers who does these oral works of literature. Svetlana Alexievich.

We've gone on to record lots of other people's scholars and attorneys and tell a full story. And now we're trying to figure out what to do now because our borders are closed. Most of the kids we met through our fiscal sponsor, which is a legal organization in Oakland called Centro Legal de la Raza, which is an amazing organization, and provides legal services for no cost. And we were careful about who we told stories of and whose stories we revealed. If anyone's face was being shown and they were being videotaped, it's because they had asylum. So they're still here. Some of those kids went on to college. 

The earliest kids I interviewed, it was just me and a grad student. And I'm walking around with a microphone. You know, kids were disappearing all the time. Mostly because they had to get jobs and you know, it's complicated, and the kids are poor and they had to figure out a way to survive here. So it was an issue even in the schools, not knowing where the kids were going. And how do you support the kids when they have to have to work? 

Mostly it seems to me when people talk about immigration, no one knows anything about what they're talking about frankly, because it's really complicated. I mean, even immigration attorneys will tell you that immigration law is  so much more complicated than the tax law. Okay. So it is like for experts, you know? And so it seems like mostly what it is, is an emotional topic. And okay, fine. Everyone has emotions and opinions. So I'm not saying that's wrong--except that I do think it's wrong that  people are concluding all kinds of things not based in reality or the facts half the time. 

Like the Southern border, for example, which, you know, this whole thing around the wall, we didn't need a wall because nobody was getting through. And anybody who lives near the Southern border or works  on the Southern border knew that already, right? It's nearly impossible to get into the United States. Now that wasn't true in the nineties, but it is true now. And so the only way to get in so-called “illegally,” you know, one of the only ways is to walk through the desert, which your chances of making it are very low. Because in the Sonoran desert, it gets to, I don't know, 118 in the summer or something like that.

There's so much misinformation and basically manipulation on all sides of people's emotions and opinions. And I am someone who believes in due process and the law. Immigration is not criminal. It's civil. And everyone talks about rights in this country. You have a right to immigrate and you have a right to come and ask for asylum. That's something that we believe in. It's what, it's our laws. Will you get it? Very unlikely. It's nearly impossible in some states. If you look at the different courts to get asylum, no matter how dire your case is. But you have the right to ask for and go through your due process. I believe in due process. I think probably most people do. 

And I think that people should be given due process. I also believe because it's so difficult to get asylum, you know, there's this onus to prove all these things, so that inevitably, people who I think should be given asylum aren’t, and they're sent back to their country of origin, which might be a death sentence. And I don't agree with that. And frankly, I think there should be for the 11 million undocumented people in this country--I don't understand why we don't have a path to citizenship for them. If you've been here a certain amount of time and you've worked here, you're a good . . . why shouldn't you have a pash to citizenship? That's why we had an amnesty in the eighties. It's very rational to do that for economic reasons and other reasons. So I don't understand that. 

I am such a lifelong Californian, and both growing up in LA and then here, always among all kinds of people, cities of immigrants, and people from everywhere. Half of my family are immigrants, and the reason they were able to immigrate is we sponsored them. They were fleeing a war in Lebanon. It was not difficult to sponsor people in the seventies and eighties. I mean, that's the other thing that people don't realize, is since Clinton, it was Bill Clinton, who passed some of these draconian measures, and it's become nearly impossible to sponsor people. I just don't understand why, we're talking about very small numbers. Everything I've ever read about the economics of immigration is it's good for the country. 

But again, it's emotional. Everyone's getting an opinion. I don't think we have to agree. But I, I surely wish we could have a reasonable, informed conversation about it. Which I just don't think we do.

And just to have so many people living in such utter fear. That just doesn't feel right to me. And I think people realize during this, this quarantine, like, well, you need people to pick your vegetables and those people are not documented and you need them. They are essential workers. So why don't we allow them to work? Legally? Have work permits. 

I don't know what else we can do except try to understand things better than we do, and keep our hearts open. Even to those people we don't like. That's hard. It's easy to just say, “Oh, I don't like them,” and “no, they’re not like me.” I hope that we will listen to each other better across these so-called political divides. 

And also not expecting us all to think alike. It's, like, such a blunt hammer these days, about how you're supposed to think about everything. There's nothing wrong with us being different and having all kinds of differences. It's what makes culture so beautiful. But with listening. Trying to understand. And a certain amount of respect for each other. I hope for that.

You know, complexity and ambiguity and ambivalence and all the things that you find in literature . . . most histories are generally more complicated and complex then we want to admit, and sometimes things are more simple, too, at the very same time, which is interesting.

It's like all the old teachings in all the religions around loving your brother, your sister. Very simple, but I think it is very important. If writing has taught me anything, and writing a lot about war--not just the Armenian genocide, but the Guatemalan one and another things--it’s that we have capacity to do terrible things to each other--and a capacity for great love and compassion and fortitude and endurance.

Laura: When I think back to those early days of learning to write in Micheline’s class, I remember feeling angry and scared. I thought she was asking me to become something I wasn’t. 

I don’t think that anymore. She wasn’t asking me to become someone else. She was asking me to be even more honest about who I really was. She was teaching me to ask hard questions with my writing, to accept that I might not find answers, and that was okay. She wasn’t just teaching me to write. She was teaching me courage. 

As I listen to Micheline talk about embracing complexity and difference, I understand that this is what she was doing all along. It’s a harder way to live, to really listen to the people you disagree with, to love them instead of hating them, to consider that there might be another way. But it also feels so much more hopeful than where we are now. 

Even though it’s really easy to be cynical during these times, when every time we turn on the news we hear more evidence of our division, I wonder if maybe we’re finally ready to move beyond this. In my more hopeful moments, I want to believe that we are. 

And maybe that’s the daily gift of sanity today, the gift that Micheline gave to me all of those years ago, that she’s offering to all of us today. It’s the gift of choosing to embrace our differences and complexities, of finding our way to a future where we could do this together. Of realizing our capacity for courage.