Off the Page with Dana DuBois

If you are a newer subscriber, you may be wondering what this is. I’m so happy you’re here, and I hope you’re going to love this as much as I do.

Once in a while I do a Come As You Are Conversation where I go “off the page” with a writer I love. So far I have had absolutely incredible conversations with the fantastic Paul Crenshaw, my beloved soul sister Dani Shapiro and the phenomenal Kate Mapother. I could geek out all day talking to other writers about writing, and the conversations always lead to such vulnerable, fascinating, heartfelt, and sometimes very funny places. Because, writers.

There are the “practical practice” questions I love to ask - do you write every day, do you have a time of day when you write, do you have certain rituals or things you need before you sit in the chair, do you try to hit a certain word-count, what do you do when the words aren’t coming…?*

And then there are specific questions that have to do with the particular writer in the chat. Today I was so happy to be in conversation with the fabulous Dana DuBois. We decided to dive into the topic of: whose story is it? This is a question any writer of memoir or personal essays will grapple with, and the answers may change over time, depending upon the context, or who else is in the mix.

Dana and I are both moms, we both have teenagers, we both have ex-husbands. We have aging parents (I’ve lost my mom and dad in the last few years, but my stepdad is still going strong - and Dana still has her parents, but had to put her dad in memory care recently) and know the tricky business of wanting to write about universal themes like grief, loss and feeling stretched in twenty-nine directions at once - in the context of specific events or personal anecdotes.

Anne Lamott has a famous quote about this, “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.” I love that and I love her and I believe that to be true, but - I think sometimes life can be a little more complicated than that. I could never have written the memoir I’m finishing now while my mother was alive, which is why I didn’t.

Funny thing, I have found the more truthful I am about what happened between us, the more loving it is, even though a lot of it was really painful. There’s a reason so many of our mothers were quietly or not so quietly enraged or resentful or not fully living the lives they wanted to live. There’s a way that river of feeling has been passed from mother to daughter for generations, and I could never have found that current without writing into the center of the wound.

So Dana and I talked about how we navigate these waters, what our different “rules” are, when we break them or in what context, and what stories will die with us. If you haven’t discovered Dana yet, I’m so happy to introduce you. If I lived in Seattle I have no doubt we’d be hanging out.

Thank you to the fantastic Kate Mapother, Lawrence Winnerman, Untrickled by Michelle Teheux, Wendy Gray and many more for tuning in. I look forward to the next conversation, whenever it happens.

Sending you a lot of love, friends. I hope you’re remembering to find some joy, to read, to laugh, to get outside, and to connect with people who make you feel hopeful. I’m off to work on this week’s essay. See you soon.

*For anyone looking for practical and potent writing support for days when the words aren’t coming, or help with establishing a writing habit, period - check out my amazing friend Paul Crenshaw. He kicked off these Come As You Are Conversations with me, he knows a thing or five about writing, and he has a whole ‘stack devoted to this very topic called Establish the Habit.

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