Michael Mohr interviews:

Lucky me and Allison Landa

Nov 03, 2022

Michael Mohr guest posts here with q’s of me and Allison:

As a writer and book editor I love diving deep into other writers’ processes. Since I write “fictional memoir” and autobiographical fiction, I interview two authors who write both fiction and memoir.

First, the biographies:

Mary Tabor: Mary L. Tabor—Author The Woman Who Never Cooked: Short Stories won Mid-List Press’s First Series Award, memoir (Re)Making Love, novel Who by Fire. Recent short stories Catamaran Literary Reader summer 2021, Story Magazine autumn 2019; poem Shortédition.com English site, Circuit #06 and creative non-fiction winner 2020; flash Kitchen Sink Magazine summer 2022. Judge with Lee K. Abbott for U. of Georgia’s Flannery O’Connor Short Story Contest two consecutive years before his death. Visiting writer U of Missouri, adjunct professor George Washington University, lecturer the Smithsonian Campus-on-the-Mall, Woodrow Wilson (now CIC) Visiting Fellow. Interviewed on XM Satellite Radio and Pacifica Radio to discuss Joyce, Shakespeare. Lives in Los Angeles. Other notables: Named “the finalist” (second overall) by Frederick Busch Associated Writers Program Award Series for Short Fiction; Grand Prize Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards. ➡️ Mary's website

Allison Landa: Author of the memoir, Bearded Lady: When You’re a Woman with a Beard, Your Secret is Written All Over Your Face, Woodhall Press, October 4, 2022. Allison and I met in 2016 and all hell broke loose. Kidding. Sort of. She’s become one of my closest friends and has been a fellow writer for the past six years. I respect her as a writer, and her writing itself, more than probably any other writer I know. She has been referred to as “the next Joan Didion.” She writes memoir, essays, fiction and journalism. Allison teaches writing at The Writing Salon in San Francisco. Her work has been featured in Business Insider, Parents Magazine, The Guardian US, The Washington Post, HuffPost. She, her husband and son live in Berkeley. She has a heck of a ‘Hero’s Journey’ writing tale. Check out Allison’s work at ➡️ Allison's website.

Let’s Jump in with Mary.

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MM: Michael Mohr MLT: Mary L. Tabor

MM: I know you’ve written novels, short stories and memoir but I wanted to zoom in and focus today on your memoir, “(Re)Making Love: A Sex after Sixty Story.” (Fantastic title, by the way.) The premise reminds me of Joyce Maynard’s “The Best of Us,” a memoir about finding love late and then losing her love to cancer. How did writing help you turn grief and loss (of a 21-year marriage) into creative juice?

MLT: Perhaps the best answer is this YouTube video about the first edition:

Then horrors, break up with an agent and the publisher went out of business as soon as he published the memoir. Quel nightmare!

The second edition with a new cover (new publisher):

has this prologue that says it all:

“For this second edition that comes now one year after its first publication, I would like to share with you as you embark on the journey of (Re)Making Love what I have learned about living within time’s limits from writing this book and from living beyond its first publication. Rabbi Hillel, who spoke these words 2,000 years ago, has been widely quoted ever since, perhaps most notably in my lifetime by the ilk of Primo Levi and Robert F. Kennedy.

If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, then what am I? And if not now, when?

Truly knowing what these words mean has come from the place of not knowing. And by this I mean that I have had to live this journey without the full understanding of their plain spoken sense. I have had to learn the hard way: through the good, the bad and the foolish that this memoir recounts.”

MM: When you wrote your memoir, what was your writing process? Did you write every day? In the morning? At night? Did you check with people you wrote truthfully about? Did you receive any pushback?

MLT: Mainly in the mornings—rising from that sleepy state where the invention begins for me. I wrote the memoir, a bit risky—even crazy—live, meaning I was living what I was posting in a blog, when that first publisher picked it up: I had readers in 37 countries and on 6 continents—with the exception of Antarctica. What the hell was wrong with Antartica? My literary author friends said, “Mary, you’re writing lyric essays and giving them away. What are you doing?” My answer? “Saving my life.”

For all the men in the book, I use a lower-case first letter except for one. No pushback from anyone. For one thing, this is not a tale of revenge. It’s a tale of self-discovery—and redemption.

MM: What would you say is the single most important lesson you learned, as a writer, while writing your memoir? What advice would you give to new memoir writers now?

MLT: That form needs to match purpose. The lyric essays in the memoir may seem fragmentary. That was on purpose—and reflected my disintegration and work to search. I realize now while studying The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald why she wrote that book that way—and I’ll be discussing this when I post about it. For now here are: Reader's q's for The Blue Flower — though I have little in common with that brilliant novel, I think it may have helped me understand that writerly principle. Other advise: Sleep a lot!

MM: How did you sustain total vulnerability and honesty while writing (Re)Making Love? Due to “ageism” were you afraid of being judged/condemned/mocked? I imagine it takes real courage to write the truth when you’re no longer in your twenties or thirties. My mom, also an author, did it, too. I admire this.

MLT: To write anything, fiction or memoir that relies on one’s own identity—and I do think self-revelation is key to good fiction or memoir— one has to be fearless. No other way to do it.

MM: Was writing the very first thing you turned to when your husband left? Or did you choose other distractions before putting pen to page?

MLT: While was I swooning like an ingenue in my own rom-com, I was lucky to get that visiting author job in U. of Missouri’s Ph.D. Creative Writing program. I taught.

MM: Tell us a little about your other writing; fiction, short stories, etc. I know you have a background working in the corporate environment, as well as teaching high school English. You have several degrees. Tell us a little about this aspect of your life. Lastly: What are you working on creatively right now?

MLT: I began as a high school English teacher in Baltimore at Towson High. I adored this job, advised the literary magazine Colophon that was going down, deep in the red, and that I revived. So literature and writing were part of me. Many of students are still in touch with me—to my honor and disbelief. Then to support my kids, a 16-year career in corporate America. I left that job when I was the most senior woman there and—to my horror! I know that sounds crazy—I kept getting promoted. I knew I had to get out. I made a leap to the work of my life when I was 49: an MFA program—the first time I lived alone and could concentrate solely on my work. My short stories in The Woman Who Never Cooked all appeared first in literary magazines and won prizes before the collection won a prize and was published. That leap to the MFA program at OSU that gave me a free ride is where I learned much—a lot about how workshops ought to work and how awful they can be, creating a kind of “collective think” that throws the “baby out with the bathwater”—by that, I mean the invention can get tortured without a super fab leader and I had two of those: Lee K. Abbott and Melanie Rae Thon. I also have an M.A.T. degree from Oberlin College—and as I keep saying, teaching is my passion.

Next came the novel Who by Fire

I’m finishing a novel tentatively titled Dangerous Love. It’s close to being ready to send out. Right now I have a short story based on it that’s making the rounds of literary mags. So, we’ll see …

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ALLISON LANDA BEARDED LADY INTERVIEW

Allison Landa

MM: Michael Mohr AL: Allison Landa

MM: Before we get going on anything major here, can you lay out briefly your basic background as far as where you’re from, where you went to college, what made you decide to be a writer, etc?

AL: I was born on the East Coast (I like to say Manhattan, because it’s true, but much to my chagrin I have not officially lived there … yet) and grew up in Northern San Diego County, which is well detailed in the book. I went to the University of California, Santa Barbara, studying political science and anthropology, and then a decade later got my MFA in creative writing from St. Mary’s College of California in Moraga.

Writing chose me more than I chose it. My earliest memories involve trying to understand life through narrative structure and story, a Herculean effort as my early years made no fucking sense. The more I wrote, the more connected I felt to a world where I was a bit of an outsider. I grew addicted. I remain so to this day.

MM: What drove you specifically to write Bearded Lady?

AL: I always knew it was the story I wanted to write – but I was scared as hell to put it out there. I figured, okay, I’ll write a book or two (yeah, like it’s that easy) and then tackle the story.

But in 2005 I attended a memoir workshop at Joyce Maynard’s house. She was living in Mill Valley at the time, way up in the hills, and it was such an incredible experience. At one point she talked about her own experience with J.D. Salinger, living with him when she was so young, and she said that she knew she needed to write that story – so she wrote AT HOME IN THE WORLD. “And afterward,” she said, “I wrote two books in quick succession.”

Well, hell, I thought. And I was off.

But it wasn’t that easy because nothing ever is. Later that year my St. Mary’s mentor Wesley Gibson had us write up a proposal for a book we’d like to produce. Red-faced, I turned in my BEARDED LADY idea. He had three words for me: “Sweetheart,” he said, “go for it.” I guess that’s four words, come to think of it.

I grew to understand that this was a story that needed to be in the world. I wanted to enter that cultural conversation, to offer my own experience as a means of better understanding what makes everyone feel weird about themselves. I knew there was a place for this. There had to be.

MM: I know you’ve had a heck of an experience with this book. It’s been a long, slow, sometimes exciting, sometimes agonizing journey. Tell us about it. When did you first write the book? What happened with your first agent? Take us through that whole process, to the present with Woodhall Press.

AL: Holy cow, dude. It’s been a 17-year slog through the damn desert. The first thing I did wrong was querying agents before the book was even close to done. That was Summer 2006, right after grad school. I was maybe 15 pages in and I got a partial request from an agent. I wound up in my backyard, madly typing away, and sending off a shoddy first 50 pages. Surprise – I didn’t get that agent. In the meantime, I was lucky enough to get a residency in Costa Rica, where I was able to make some major tracks and come close to finishing the first draft. That was in late 2006. It was a fucking mess. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. I sent it off to a professional editor and (thank God) she red-penciled the hell out of it. So then it was back to the damn drawing board. This went on for quite some time until 2009, when it was complete and in shape to send to agents.

I sent the manuscript to my dream agent while in residence at MacDowell, using the crappy wifi on the internet card I’d picked up because – even though MacDowell will give you everything you want up to and including an outdoor shower – wifi is simply not on the table. He loved it, but ultimately passed because it was too anecdotal and not thematic enough to connect with a greater audience. By the way, when he told me that I didn’t understand what the hell he was saying … and now I sing the praises of higher themes to my students.

I got my first agent a few years later. I was her first client and she got us close – really close. The book was under consideration by Atria, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. They took it to an editorial board meeting but declined due to lack of platform. (Pour one out for platform.) I broke up with this agent due to a difference in communication styles. Fast forward to 2015, when I found myself unexpectedly pregnant. I decided to restart the hunt for an agent and found a fairly high-profile one who was interested – but believed the book was a Young Adult novel, not a memoir. We tried for four years to make that work, but it didn’t. I never went out on submission and ultimately wound up with a manuscript that never went anywhere. We parted ways.

Fast forward to 2020, when I met my current agent, Marisa Zeppieri of Strachan Literary Agency. Not only did Marisa get my book, but she gets me, and together we were able to sell it even in a pandemic. Woodhall Press decided to take a chance on me and my work, and I am super grateful for that fact.

MM: If you could go back in time what would you say to the earlier Landa, as far as what you went through with your condition? What would you tell your younger self as far as the writing process?

AL: I would reassure her that she was not alone and that there is value in coming clean with the world about who and what you wrangle with. I would want her to get treated far earlier than I actually did (at the age of 30 – meanwhile, I was diagnosed two decades earlier). But would I really? I have no regrets even though the road was painful. It got me here.

I feel similarly about writing. I learned the hard way, the slow and painful way, hacking it out at café tables night after night for years before I even got into graduate school and certainly long before I was published. Would I want it to be different? Honestly, I don’t know.

MM: You teach writing as well as write. As far as new writers with big dreams, what is the single most important thing you could say to them as far as being a successful writer?

AL: Be open to critique, but not so open that you compromise your own sensibilities. Be ready to learn, but hold to your own experience. Coffee helps.

MM: How do you feel about the world of publishing? You’ve had firsthand [combat] experience, in the trenches as it were, with agents and publishing companies and rejection (and, finally, beyond overdo, acceptance!). Have these experiences turned you into a somewhat grizzled writing veteran?

AL: Nah. I’m still wet behind the ears. Here’s what I’ve learned about the industry: they’re just people, many of whom are thoughtful and giving beyond measure. I had many agents and editors offer me wisdom and work with me without any firm expectation of making money off it. They believe in good writing and strong books. I’m proud to finally be a (small) part of it.

MM: What is next? Another memoir? A novel? Story collection?

AL: I’m working on a novel called CONFLAGRATION, which explores the nexus of connection, commitment, and climate change. Stay tuned …

Mary Tabor "Only connect ..."

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