“Even if there’s a little voice in your head telling you that maybe you don’t actually have anything to say. You do. Even if your life is like someone else’s, your mind isn’t.“ –Madeline Vosch
Madeline Vosch is a writer and teacher. Her debut book, Undead: A Memoir, is forthcoming from Beacon Press. Her short fiction and essays can be found in The Washington Post, Ploughshares, and The Rumpus, among others. An excerpt of her memoir was selected as the winner of the Ploughshares Emerging Writer Contest in Nonfiction.
On Wednesday, May 14, Madeline Vosch is teaching a class for the WLT called “Self-Representation in Memoir: Tools to Create Yourself.” In this class, students will discuss how they construct selves in the stories that they tell, think through questions of self-representation, and practice writing themselves as characters.
Here’s what Madeline had to share with us:
Scribe: Tell us a little bit about yourself. What do you write? How did you come to writing?
Madeline Vosch: I am a writer (obviously) and a professor. I teach Religion, Humanities, and Creative Writing at Austin Community College. I’ve done a little bit of everything—I started out as a poet, but moved into fiction and nonfiction. My first book is a memoir, but I love writing short stories. My current book project is a novel.
Truthfully, I’m not sure how to answer the question of how I came to writing. I was doing some scribbling here and there since I was young, but didn’t start writing in earnest until I was in graduate school for religious studies. We were reading a lot of heavy theory, mixing in some literature to see how some of these theories were depicted in art. I had an instructor who let me turn in an experimental work of creative nonfiction as a final project for a class on gender, sexuality, and religion, and that was when something started clicking. I realized that I could take some of these ideas that I’m interested in and explore them in other forms of writing. Being able to write creatively in the context of a more traditional academic program not only built my confidence as a writer but also let me play around with form. I turned in papers that were half analysis of Judith Butler, and half prose poems about gender in America. This was very formative for me as a writer, learning how to mix genres, learning what voices and styles I liked to write in.
Scribe: In your own work, how do you approach overcoming the challenges that come with writing, be it writer’s block or craft or business-related challenges?
MV: Right now, the biggest writing challenge is simply finding time in between work and life to write. I’ve heard stories of people getting up at five every morning to have writing time, but I can’t function well without sleep, so that will never be me. I set myself a goal of writing for at least thirty minutes a day. Sometimes, I start writing and get into a momentum and write longer. Sometimes, it’s the end of a long day of teaching, and I have a stack of papers to grade, and there just isn’t time.
Some people will say that you have to write at least a little every day, some people say an hour. I read an essay once where someone wrote that we should be writing at least four hours a day. After a lot of trial and error, it’s clear to me that there is no one way to overcome the challenge of carving out time for writing, and something that works for me won’t work for someone else. Some folks I know go by word count, but when I try to set myself word count goals, I spend all day staring at the numbers instead of focusing on the writing itself.
One of the other things that has been really important and helpful is having an accountability group. The last Wednesday of every month, some writer friends and I meet on zoom to check in about how our writing went, and to set new goals for the coming month. It’s been really important for me to have a group that is unendingly supportive—if someone doesn’t get a residency they applied for, we still cheer them for trying.
Scribe: Has there been a moment of epiphany in terms of your work, when you thought, “This is it! Now I know what I’m doing!” How long did that feeling last?
MV: I spent a while thinking of how to answer this question. I actually don’t know if I experience this. I think I did once with the novel I’m working on—I was trying to figure out how to have two very different voices in the text, and realized a way I could get it to work by breaking up the structure, but that feeling of epiphany only lasted a day or two before I was faced with the reality of how to actually make it happen on the page. Which might, in fact, be my answer to this question: it is less often that I really know what I’m doing before I do it, and much more a matter of figuring things out as I do them.
Scribe: What piece of advice do you find yourself giving to writers again and again?
MV: Just write the thing you want to write. Forget about publishing, forget about the market. Publishing is all about what sells, and what kinds of books are selling is always changing. What is the thing that you really want to make? Make that, do that thing. Worry about the rest later.
The second piece of advice I find myself giving to writers (especially writers of memoir, especially, especially, women writing memoirs) is that your story matters. There is something to your story, there is a story to tell, even if there is someone who is telling you otherwise. Even if there’s a little voice in your head telling you that maybe you don’t actually have anything to say. You do. Even if your life is like someone else’s, your mind isn’t. The way you make sense of the world is unique to you. So much goes into writing a memoir—the books you’ve read that impact your style, the things you love, the people you love, the people you hate, the person you used to be. No one else has written your memoir, and no one else will. Hell, I know authors who have returned to their work years later, and written entirely different things about their own experiences that they already wrote about because they decided even though they already told their story, now they wanted to tell it differently.
I promise, you have a story to tell. You have a story to tell that matters.
Scribe: What is one thing that people will take away from this class?
MV: I believe that every piece of writing needs something different, so I aim to give writers tools and questions to ask of how they can create themselves on the page. People will come away from this class equipped with questions to ask of themselves and their writing, along with practical exercises to consider how they are representing themselves in their work.
I hope, as I always hope when I teach writing, that everyone leaves the class with renewed excitement for the work of writing.
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Thanks, Madeline!
Click here to learn more about Madeline’s upcoming class.
