Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Wrong Way to Save Your Life
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.meganstielstra.com/
CITY: Chicago
STATE: IL
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://www.harpercollins.com/cr-125599/megan-stielstra * http://www.startribune.com/review-the-wrong-way-to-save-your-life-by-megan-stielstra/437046923/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2014102078
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/no2014102078
HEADING: Stielstra, Megan
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053 _0 |a PS3619.T53549
100 1_ |a Stielstra, Megan
373 __ |a Columbia College (Chicago, Ill.)
374 __ |a College teachers |a Women storytellers |2 lcsh
375 __ |a female
377 __ |a eng
670 __ |a Once I was cool, 2014: |b title page (Megan Stielstra) page 213 (Megan Stielstra; told stories for all sorts of theaters, festivals and bars ; teaches creative writing at Columbia College Chicago)
PERSONAL
Married; children: son.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Author and storyteller. Instructor of English, Northwestern University and Columbia College, Chicago, IL; literary director, 2nd Story storytelling series. Storyteller at venues including Goodman, Steppenwolf, Neo-Futurarium, Museum of Contemporary Art, and Green Mill.
AWARDS:Chicago Tribune Favorite of 2011, for Everyone Remain Calm; Book of the Year in Nonfiction finalist, Chicago Writers Association, 2014, “Best Books of 2014” citation, Chicago Magazine, 2014; Notables list citation, Chicago Tribune, 2014; “Best of Small Press” citation, Newcity Magazine, 2014, all for Once I Was Cool; Book of the Year in Creative Nonfiction citation, Chicago Review of Books, 2017; Book of the Year in Nonfiction finalist, Chicago Writers Association, 2017; “Best Books of 2017” citation, Chicago Public Library, 2017; “Best Books by Women in 2017,” Bustle, 2017; “Great Essay Collections of 2017,” Book Riot, 2017, all for The Wrong Way to Save Your Life.
WRITINGS
Contributor to anthologies, including Briefly Knocked Unconscious by a Low-Flying Duck: Stories from 2nd Story, Chicago: Elephant Rock Productions, 2012; Best American Essays 2013, edited by Cheryl Strayed, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (Boston, MA), 2013; Friend.Follow.Text: #StoriesFromLivingOnline, edited by Shawn Syms, Enfield & Wizenty (Winnipeg, MB), 2013; Listen to Your Mother: What She Said Then, What We’re Saying Now, edited by Ann Imig, G.P. Putnam’s Sons (New York, NY), 2015. Contributor to periodicals and media outlets, including Buzzfeed Reader, Catapult, Chicago Tribune, Guernica, Lit Hub, New York Times, Other Voices, PANK, Poets & Writers, Rumpus, and Tin House.
SIDELIGHTS
Megan Stielstra’s third collection, The Wrong Way to Save Your Life: Essays, said a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “is a book dedicated to a motley collection of topics, including aging, sex, race, writing, and her hometown of Chicago.” The compilation’s focus is on fear–including the bodily response to fear found in the heart. Stielstra, who works also as a performer and reads her pieces aloud to live audiences, makes a point of examining the relationship between the spoken word and the written text. “I’m interested in how the body lives in a text,” the author told S. Ferdowsi in an interview appearing in the Rumpus, “especially writing creative nonfiction. If I feel hurt, if I feel discomfort, if I feel despair, I take that feeling and I hold it and I try to imagine other people in other bodies and what they go through on the daily. This is empathy. Connection happens through the body. Memory happens through the body. Literature is the bridge.”
The body serves as a metaphor not only for the book’s theme, but also for its organization. “Like the human heart … The Wrong Way to Save Your Life is made up of four parts,” stated Ferdowsi. “The introductory essay serves as the vena cava for the book’s themes—memory and assumption, love and fear throughout her childhood, her twenties, her thirties, and in the present moment. We watch Stielstra grow while her essays examine the anatomy of memory, the physiology of place, and the ways love, loss, politics, and privilege, create (or negate) the avenues in which we navigate the world.” “The understanding of the heart is Stielstra’s true aim,” said A.M. Larks in the Coachella Review. “It is a universal quest. Dissection of the heart is an effective and gruesome metaphor for her self-exploration. Stielstra literally becomes obsessed with understanding the heart, resulting in a need to surgically dissect and, therefore, understand her loved ones. It is through Stielstra’s confessions that she bonds with her audience.” Stielstra’s book “is a lifeline and a microscope,” wrote Booklist contributor Carol Haggas, “a means of examining the dread of whatever one finds daunting.”
Critics appreciated Stielstra’s efforts to bring her thoughts to her audience as directly as possible. “With essays, I find myself coming back again and again to reflect more on the author’s insights. To reread them and learn anew what the author revealed to me about a life lived well,” declared Seth Vopat on the Englewood Review of Books website. “Seldom do I find myself running a google search to find a previously read blogpost. Blogposts make great sprints, but essays endure for the long distance. Megan Stielstra’s new compilation is a set of essays I see myself revisiting. I am not sure I have ever read an author who writes with more clarity and transparency. I grieved her sadness. I celebrated her joys.” “For me, there’s a difference between the practice of writing and the choice of if and when and how to share it,” Stielstra said in her Rumpus interview. “I write whatever I want to write however I want to write it, but when I determine a home for the piece, I’ll rewrite with a really conscious eye for genre and venue. Is this fiction, creative nonfiction, commentary? I care very much about being true to the audience.” “Stielstra deftly reaches out across the generations by pointing out bridging behaviors,” declared Larks. “She may have listened to a boom box [playing] Casey Kasem, and now teenagers listen to their phones and Pandora/Spotify/Jango/Slacker/etc. It’s not just teenagers that haven’t changed. People are still the same, still searching for how to deal with the heart, that powerful and fragile organ. Stielstra banishes the distinctions that often separate us: gender, race generation, political party. Her book is about what affects everyone: fear. It is her own battle with rage and fear and change that prevails throughout the book.” “In a style that is literary but never pedantic,” concluded a Kirkus Reviews contributor, “Stielstra has crafted a collection that has such a sense of continuity that it could pass as a memoir.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, August 1, 2017, Carol Haggas, review of The Wrong Way to Save Your Life: Essays, p. 15.
Kirkus Reviews, June 1, 2017, review of The Wrong Way to Save Your Life.
Publishers Weekly, May 15, 2017, review of The Wrong Way to Save Your Life, p. 48.
ONLINE
Coachella Review, http://thecoachellareview.com/ (September 27, 2017), A.M. Larks, review of The Wrong Way to Save Your Life.
Englewood Review of Books, http://englewoodreview.org/ (October 19, 2017), Seth Vopat, review of The Wrong Way to Save Your Life.
Megan Stielstra Website, https://www.meganstielstra.com (February 21, 2018), author profile.
Rumpus, http://therumpus.net/ (November 13, 2017), S. Ferdowsi, “What Do I Do with My Fear? A Conversation with Megan Stielstra.”
Megan Stielstra’s story collection, Everyone Remain Calm, was a Chicago Tribune Favorite of 2011, and her essay collection, Once I Was Cool, is forthcoming May 2014. Her work has appeared in The Best American Essays 2013, The Rumpus, PANK, Other Voices, and elsewhere. She is the Literary Director of the critically-acclaimed 2nd Story storytelling series and has told stories for all sorts of theaters, festivals, and bars including the Goodman, Steppenwolf, the Neo-Futurarium, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and regularly for The Paper Machete live news magazine at The Green Mill. She teaches creative writing at Columbia College and Northwestern University.
Print Marked Items
The Wrong Way to Save Your Life
Carol Haggas
Booklist.
113.22 (Aug. 1, 2017): p15+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
* The Wrong Way to Save Your Life. By Megan Stielstra. Aug. 2017. 304p. HarperPerennial, paper, $15.99
(9780062429209); e-book (9780062429216). 814.
There may be a wrong way to save your life, but there is no wrong way to appreciate this book. As a
memoir? Yes: ambivalent pregnancy tests in Italian youth hostels, wistful star-gazing on a Michigan lake.
As a treatise on twenty-first-century feminism? Of course: contemplating privilege as a white woman wary
of criticism and irrelevance. As a probing series of essays on fear, motherhood, career, and relationships?
Without a doubt. Stielstra brings all her selves to the table and in doing so provides a crystalline haven of
acceptance and safety to anyone--wife, mother, educator, lover, writer--who is both present in every moment
and wondering how she arrived at any particular juncture in time. Stielstra has both questions and answers.
Is my writing good enough? Am I loving and loved, loyal and worthy? The answers have been amassed
over the years, but more questions crop up for every one that's resolved. For its wisdom and compassion,
honesty and courage, Stielstra's stellar essay collection is a lifeline and a microscope, a means of examining
the dread of whatever one finds daunting and a manner of exorcising demons through the sheer power of
commitment and desire. --Carol Haggas
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Haggas, Carol. "The Wrong Way to Save Your Life." Booklist, 1 Aug. 2017, p. 15+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A501718705/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=bfa69a93.
Accessed 30 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A501718705
Stielstra, Megan: THE WRONG WAY TO
SAVE YOUR LIFE
Kirkus Reviews.
(June 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Stielstra, Megan THE WRONG WAY TO SAVE YOUR LIFE Perennial/HarperCollins (Adult Nonfiction)
$15.99 8, 1 ISBN: 978-0-06-242920-9
Perhaps not lifesaving, but a life-enriching collection of essays by a conscientious writer and teacher who
knows that asking the right questions is more important than having all the answers.Stielstra (Once I Was
Cool, 2014) has often performed her pieces as well as published them, and her strong sense of voice and
engagement with her audience reflect that experience. She is an ardent feminist, but her pieces rarely seem
exclusionary; they are not directed toward any particular gender, race, economic class, generation (though
rites of passage in 21st-century bohemian Chicago figure heavily), or even political persuasion. The author
wants people to communicate, to connect, and to face their fears, not only of each other, but the ones deep
inside. When she was in the process of losing her job within the writing program at a college where she'd
spent almost two decades, she writes, "I outlined a book proposal, a collection of essays about fear." That
proposal became this book. So what is she afraid of? Writing. Those who might be offended by her writing.
Not writing well enough. Falling in love. Getting married. Having a baby. Cancer. Men who grope. Her
response to men who grope. Sex. Not enough sex. Sex with the strings of love attached. Mortgages.
Property values. Her dad's heart and his hunting adventures in Alaska. Guns. When her young son asked
what an essay is, she responded, "It's a kind of question." He responded, "Okay. Did you find the answer?"
After having her baby, Stielstra asks, "How do you write about depression in a way that's not depressing?"
Her own essay is the answer. She also maintains, "at some point, our education no longer belongs to
teachers. It belongs to us." The author sounds like a marvelous teacher, and her collection offers plenty of
teaching moments. In a style that is literary but never pedantic, Stielstra has crafted a collection that has
such a sense of continuity that it could pass as a memoir.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Stielstra, Megan: THE WRONG WAY TO SAVE YOUR LIFE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2017. General
OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A493329226/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4baadb7a. Accessed 30 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A493329226
The Wrong Way to Save Your Life: Essays
Publishers Weekly.
264.20 (May 15, 2017): p48+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Wrong Way to Save Your Life: Essays
Megan Stielstra. Harper Perennial, $15.99 trade paper (304p) ISBN 978-0-06-242920-9
Stielstra (Once I Was Cool) is an affable narrator in this sensitive and funny, if familiar, collection of
personal essays. Perhaps best known for "Channel B," a selection for the Best American Essays 2013 about
struggling with postpartum depression, she returns with a book dedicated to a motley collection of topics,
including aging, sex, race, writing, and her hometown of Chicago. Many of her essays focus on her roles as
a writer and a mother, examining the joys and rigors of both. The title essay is a tender account of surviving
a fire that ravaged Stielstra's home. She has a flair for nostalgia and for cultural criticism that is never
pretentious. Moreover, her take on going from her hapless 20s to her more sophisticated 40s is funny and
smart. It is easy to connect with her experiences as she unabashedly relates embarrassing or discomfiting
moments, whether it is digging through the trash for her retainer at Wendy's as a teenager or sleeping with a
guy during her 30s "who made me keep my socks on. He was afraid of feet." This collection breaks no new
ground, but it is a pleasant and brisk read. Agent: Meredith Kaffel Simonoff, DeP lore and Company. (Aug.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Wrong Way to Save Your Life: Essays." Publishers Weekly, 15 May 2017, p. 48+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A492435659/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e72f8600.
Accessed 30 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A492435659
Megan Stielstra -The Wrong Way to Save Your Life [Feature Review]
October 19, 2017 — 0 Comments
An Earnestness and An Elegance
A Feature Review of
The Wrong Way to Save Your Life: Essays
Megan Stielstra
Paperback: Harper Perennial, 2017
Buy Now: [ Amazon ] [ Kindle ]
Reviewed by Seth Vopat
We have learned a mere 140 characters is all that is needed to express much in our digital world. Twitter has become the ideal platform for those with a sharp whit who speak and connect with the emotional angst we all feel about current events in our world. For those who need more space the blog has become the preferred method to speak and analyze the present.
Some might say the essay format like Megan Stielstra’s new compilation of essays entitled, The Wrong Way to Save Your Life, is outdated and obsolete in our digital wrong. But, they would be wrong!
As much as I have come to appreciate these new platforms the internet age has given us. I still find they cannot replace for me the well articulated and reasoned essay. Without question there is no easier way to hear a variety of voices and different points of view than through a simple internet search if—and it’s a big if—one is willing to leave his or her echo chamber. However, I like the tender and juicy—not to mention delicious—slow smoked meat which is hours in the making. I like words that have been sat with and chewed on and weighed for a weeks and months before being arranged on a page.
With essays, I find myself coming back again and again to reflect more on the author’s insights. To reread them and learn anew what the author revealed to me about a life lived well. Seldom do I find myself running a google search to find a previously read blogpost. Blogposts make great sprints, but essays endure for the long distance.
Megan Stielstra’s new compilation is a set of essays I see myself revisiting. I am not sure I have ever read an author who writes with more clarity and transparency. I grieved her sadness. I celebrated her joys as she reflected upon her experiences in life.
The book is masterfully framed in the first essay as she shares a story about a friend of hers, a man named Pete, who received word that a dear friend of his had passed away. Pete is an artist. He locked himself away in his room as he began to process his grief through his art. One day while Pete was out of the room Megan snuck in to see what he had created. When he came back in the room Pete shared with her how he was processing his grief.
She said Pete told her, “‘I wanted to get it out of me…You can’t fix it if you can’t see it.’”. Pete processed his anger, frustration, and grief in the best way he knew how. This story is in many ways the central arc which runs through Megan’s compilations and ties them all together. Like her friend who is an artist, she is a writer using words to get her feelings out onto a page where she can process them and the reader has the fortuitous opportunity to learn from her fears and joys.
I cannot say for sure, but I believe it was her willingness to be vulnerable—not willing to present a polished image—which invited me to reflect on my journey through life. And more strangely my own spiritual journey in life.
From essay to essay I found myself wondering if even fifteen years ago I would have been willing to read her book?
Or would I have deemed it too offensive?
For when I say she is transparent, I mean she is transparent as she writes about multiple sexual experiences she has had in life and what they taught her about sex and love.
I imagine my younger self would have found her to crass and vulgar. And yet, there is much I can learn from her as could the church. I don’t know many times growing up I have sat in a pew, hiding behind a mask, like the person next to me. Unwilling to confront my fears. Unwilling to try and look like anything less than perfect for fear I would then be labeled “unChristian” and “unfit” as a future ministerial candidate. To dismiss her work would be a mistake.
There are many essays I connected with in her books as I share similar fears. She writes, “Fire drills were easy: get up, go outside. Tornado drills: those were more complicated…Now our kids have active shooter drills.” As a father of two boys who are now in elementary school my heart thought, “these are my fears too!” and wrote amen beside many of her sentences.
As much as I loved her willingness to be transparent there were times I found myself in the role of a sibling thinking, “way too much information, you don’t need to be this explicit!” I have yet to decide whether my reaction is due to not seeing the relevance of some of her experiences to the larger narrative she crafted. Or was it simply a matter of my twenty year-old, more narrow minded self still trying to linger on. I will have to spend more time getting my own thoughts and emotions out of me, so I can see them, before I may know the answer.
Not one to be a spoiler I will simply say, I found her story about a baptism to be one of the most emotionally beautiful descriptions I have read in a long time. Clearly Megan is a gifted writer and a very humble one. I have seldom come across an author willing to make this declaration, let alone leave it print. She writes, “I’m not a good enough writer yet to explain what that did to my heart.” Maybe she does not feel this way, but her essays say otherwise.
They are written with an earnestness and an elegance which becomes infectious by the end. Her words encourage the reader to have courage, begin the hard work of getting one’s emotions and thoughts out in whatever format is preferred. So he or she might begin the task of seeing the beauty in his or her own heart and life.
——-
Seth Vopat is Minister for Youth at Lee’s Summit Christian Church in Lee’s Summit, Missouri.
What Do I Do With My Fear?: A Conversation with Megan Stielstra
By S. Ferdowsi
November 13th, 2017
Like the human heart, Megan Stielstra’s third essay collection, The Wrong Way to Save Your Life, is made up of four parts. The introductory essay serves as the vena cava for the book’s themes—memory and assumption, love and fear throughout her childhood, her twenties, her thirties, and in the present moment. We watch Stielstra grow while her essays examine the anatomy of memory, the physiology of place, and the ways love, loss, politics, and privilege, create (or negate) the avenues in which we navigate the world. Each essay—whether it’s about a shooting at her high school or going into labor, dissecting deer hearts or the entanglement of systems of power—pulses with urgency and rhythm that reminds us how we are alive.
I first encountered Stielstra’s work in 2013, when she was my creative writing professor at the University of Chicago. It was my first exposure to Junot Díaz and Dennis Lehane and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I learned to read closely and to listen, and I left that class with a notebook full of frantic scribbles on narrative strategies and book suggestions, but also the sense that every voice has a value and a home.
In May, I sat down with Stielstra at her home in Chicago. We talked about fear, privilege, and the intersection of politics and everyday life.
***
The Rumpus: I hate to bring this up, but can we talk about the Trump administration? Has this affected your writing process, especially given that one of the major themes in The Wrong Way to Save Your Life is fear?
Megan Stielstra: I wrote a draft of the book the year before he ran for office and I revised it the summer leading up to the election. It was definitely—let’s say a mindfuck.
Rumpus: Why did you choose to interrogate fear?
Stielstra: Every essay in the collection answers the question, What do I do with my fear? If it stays in you, that’s when the ugly things start to happen. So I tried to get it out of me, to look at it, really look.
For example, there’s one called “Here is My Heart,” about my dad and my fears about his health. I dissected all these deer hearts because I didn’t want to confront that fear, and that turned into the essay. Cheryl Strayed has this line I love: “Behind every good essay there’s an author with a savage desire to know more about what is already known.” I wasn’t trying to come up with a solution to the fear. I wanted to understand it. I wanted to find the right question to ask. If it’s Why does my dad keep going up the mountain?, then the answer is simple: He loves it. For me, the more interesting question is, What do I do with my fear?
Rumpus: When was an especially shitty and amazing and complicated part of your life?
Stielstra: I have a son. He is amazing, but the first year or so after his birth was really difficult. I didn’t have the language of postpartum depression, but that’s what it was. When I started coming out of it—when I was able to look back and sort of interrogate what had happened—I was really surprised at how afraid I still was. I was second-guessing myself as a parent, a teacher, and a person, and then I thought, Jesus, what a privilege it is to not have been afraid all of the time. Who was I before this fear? I was really thinking through what that meant and I knew it was something I wanted to explore.
Rumpus: In “What Belongs to Us,” you write about your ongoing discussion on fear, privilege, and motherhood with your friend Dia, who is an educator and a mother like you, but who is a queer woman of color. You write, “My heartbreak is a puddle compared to the ocean you swim every day.” Can you explain that?
Stielstra: You know that famous line, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself?” I don’t believe that it applies to everyone. A black mother afraid for her child in our world is not her being afraid of fear; that’s her being afraid of a long history of systematic violence towards people of color in this country. As a white mother, I need to think about the part I play in that, and what I can do to make it better.
Rumpus: I am a lighter-skinned woman of color whose parents emigrated from Iran—a country that has had a tense relationship with the United States historically and currently. I feel like this combination gave me an intense pressure, necessity, and even desire to assimilate. As an adult, I see that the choices I made growing up have enabled me to navigate white spaces where I am “appropriately ethnic” in a way that makes me privileged. What can I do?
Stielstra: Write about it. Talk about it, if that feels right for you. Read women of color who are navigating those same spaces. I’ve learned a lot reading Eve L. Ewing, a poet and educator from Chicago. Something she said that really struck me: Acknowledging our privilege is no longer radical. What’s radical now is action. I’m thinking through what that looks like for me. So, maybe think about what it looks like for you.
If you are a person with money to kick around, donate to local community programs. They’re responding to the needs of people in their area and including those people in conversations about what those needs are. It’s frustrating when an organization goes into a community like, I am here to make your lives better! but doesn’t know anything about the people, their fears, their goals.
If you don’t have money to donate, that’s okay! Are you a lawyer? A graphic designer? Do you work in the healthcare industry? Can you volunteer? How can you use the specific skill set that you have? I’m thinking of the lawyers who rushed to O’Hare to protest the Muslim ban because, in that moment, that’s what was needed.
Rumpus: Another prominent theme within your essays is the body.
Stielstra: I’m interested in how the body lives in a text, especially writing creative nonfiction. If I feel hurt, if I feel discomfort, if I feel despair, I take that feeling and I hold it and I try to imagine other people in other bodies and what they go through on the daily. This is empathy. Connection happens through the body. Memory happens through the body. Literature is the bridge.
Rumpus: Part of the value of writing personal essays, to me, is that you can make connections between memories you wouldn’t have noticed otherwise and part of the value of reading personal essays is seeing those echoes and parallels in other people’s work. In your essay, “Thirty, or Come Here Fear,” you write about being abroad in Prague and being surrounded by so much anti-Bush media that his reelection in 2004 had seemed impossible. This sounds eerily similar to what happened with the Trump election. How can we break this cycle?
Stielstra: A phrase that I’ve heard a lot recently is, “I’m shocked, but I’m not surprised” or, “I’m enraged, but I’m not surprised.” Trump is doing all the things he said he was going to do. None of this should be a surprise. Anger and fury and depression and desperation and fighting: yes. But surprise? No. We learned these lessons long before Bush in 2004. We’ve been learning them since this country was founded.
How to break the cycle? Jesus. Can we start by examining how we teach American history? Who decides what stories are literature and what stories are history? Whose stories are being told and whose are missing? A thing that I find really alarming is how textbooks are being written. There’s one in Texas that describes slavery like, Black people coming here to work. That is a violent erasure of our history, our cruelty, and the truths we need to reckon with if we’re ever going to move forward.
Some really profound work done by the Chicago activist community is the fight for reparations after Jon Burge. He was the CPD’s police chief for years and had a black ops torture group. The activist community fought for curriculum about Burge and what he did to be written for Chicago Public School students. So, not to erase it, but to say, “This happened. It can’t be swept under the rug. It can’t be hidden from our history.” The fear that people of color have of police officers in this city and all of our cities is not unfounded.
Rumpus: One of my students wrote a research paper on history curricula in the United States and something that blew my mind was her thesis statement. She described everything as narrative, but that one is privileged as history. Weight gets added on based on power and that determines what’s in a textbook and what’s in the margins.
Stielstra: Have you heard “The Danger of a Single Story” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie? She says it’s impossible to talk about stories without talking about power. I went to an education conference a few years ago and the keynote speaker was a professor at Harvard. He totally fit the stereotype: elbow patches and crazy white hair and little spectacles. He was talking about how much he loved Wikipedia and all the educators in the room, like, gasped. He talked about how Wikipedia is something that can be written by everyone, whereas the encyclopedia was written “by guys like me.”
It made me think about the green leather encyclopedias we had when I was a little girl. If you wanted to know something, you went to the encyclopedia. It was fact. It was The Book, same as you don’t question The Bible, right? But now, with the democratization of the Internet, you can look up anything and can get like 30,000 ideas about it. It’s tough, because you have to go through so much information and verify what sources are true, but it’s so much better than when it was just one source written by all the same white, straight, cisgender men.
My husband is a curator on the Internet. He goes through hundreds of thousands of art pieces and makes choices. If you ask him about his background, he’ll talk about growing up in Texas and going thrifting every weekend with his mom, weeding through tons of stuff to find the one great thing. As we move forward as educators, I think we need to teach that. How do you examine multiple sources, and then test and try and analyze and collect and interpret data to find out what’s really true?
Rumpus: Your work is populated with a rich array of characters deeply rooted in a sense of place—Humboldt Park, Logan Square, Michigan, Prague—so when I read it, I am reminded of a novel.
Stielstra: I went to college for fiction. It’s my first love. I think it is very easy to see that in my work. I heard Aleksandar Hemon speak last week and he was talking about how there weren’t genre distinctions between “fiction” and “nonfiction” in Bosnian, his native language. He described it like this: “The medium is language and how it can contribute to public space.” That felt so right to me.
For me, there’s a difference between the practice of writing and the choice of if and when and how to share it. I write whatever I want to write however I want to write it, but when I determine a home for the piece, I’ll rewrite with a really conscious eye for genre and venue. Is this fiction, creative nonfiction, commentary? I care very much about being true to the audience. Amanda Delheimer-Dimond from 2nd Story taught me a lot about this. She’s always asking, “What’s the contract with the audience?” For example, if you’re reading the New York Times, there’s an unspoken contract that what you’re reading is true and fact-checked. If you’re reading The Onion, there is the contract that the event didn’t actually happen, but it’s still “true” in a satirical sense. It always has to be you—your own voice, your interests—but I can fit that into any form.
Frank Chimero has an essay with this beautiful line: “Once the work goes out into the world, it doesn’t belong to you anymore. It belongs to the people who carry it.” So this work isn’t mine to categorize anymore. Which is a little bit terrifying because it’s my life.
Rumpus: In your collection Once I Was Cool, you write about your mortgage, the Great Recession, motherhood and postpartum depression, falling in love and being in love. And we see these subjects pop up again in The Wrong Way to Save Your Life. How do you know when it’s time to revisit a theme and what do you learn each time you encounter or re-encounter it?
Stielstra: I think part of it is your gut and part of it is the world. For example, the day after the election, I called my doctor to replace my IUD because I was afraid about what was going to happen to birth control and women’s healthcare. I knew it was a very long and complicated process, but it was important. I knew I wanted to write about it. I knew in my gut.
That was in November and now it’s almost June. This morning I woke up and I read the articles about how Trump’s administration is moving to roll back the birth control mandates set up by the Affordable Care Act. After I took my kid to school, I came home and pitched the story. It’s not quite as easy as, “AHH! It’s happening in the world, I’ll write it!” but I do think that some of the most incredible writing that I have read these past couple years has been an immediate response to something happening in the world, even though the piece itself is about so much more. One example would be Kiese Laymon’s essay in Lit Hub about sexual violence. It’s huge and complex and beautiful and challenging in all sorts of ways, about a long and devastating history of violence and how that lives in all of us. But when you go to that essay, the picture at the top is Bill Cosby.
He published it the week Cosby was in the news after all the women came forward, but it’s not some twenty-four-hour news cycle sort of a thing; instead, it was, “Hey. We’re going to freeze this moment in time and how this affects actual lives.” It’s not statistics; it’s not an untouchable celebrity court case; it’s about actual lives.
Rumpus: In the essay “We Say and Do Kind Things,” you write about your friend Sarah and her daughter, Sophia, who is currently battling cancer. How is Sophia doing?
Stielstra: Sophia just turned five, and she’s fighting, along with the 175,000+ kids worldwide who are diagnosed every year. We know that statistic, right? We know the numbers: too many. I’m learning more and more about the need for childhood cancer research, which receives only 4%—four fucking percent—of federal research dollars. Sophia is being treated with drugs developed in 1958 for adult lymphoma. And if this lifetime limit horseshit comes to pass, she’ll max out before she’s ten years old.
I want to rip down the sky. I want to go to med school. I want you to see this little girl, how she dances everywhere, and loves the Cubs, and carries avocados in her pockets so she can have guacamole at a moment’s notice, which tends to play out at very inopportune times but her mother, Sarah—my beautiful fucking warrior of a best friend—is like You want guacamole? I’ll make you guacamole. That is a thing I can do.
That’s the question for all of us, right? What can I do?
I can help with the kids, and, when she lets me, get Sarah out of the house and out of her head. I can read and donate and vote for people who support public health policies that protect our children. I can shine whatever light I’ve got on mother-writers telling their family’s stories through loss and hope and grief: Michelle Mirsky at McSweeney’s, and Chicago writer Sheila Quirke. And I can write my face off which, yes, fine, is not going to cure cancer, but what if? What if someone reading this, right here/right now, just inherited a million dollars and decides to help? What if some senator hears me yelling across the Internet and is like, huh, maybe I shouldn’t vote to cut the insurance that funds a five-year-old child’s lifesaving chemotherapy? What if enough people reading this storm the town halls of their state representatives? Jesus, we have to try; this is my family.
But even if it wasn’t—I want to be a person who cares not only about my family, but everyone’s family. Not just my kid, but everyone’s kids. Kids who are sick. Kids with incarcerated parents. Kids at the mercy of gun violence. Kids fleeing violence in Syria, in Gaza. Queer and trans kids.
Rumpus: You mention throughout the essay collection that you were and are blessed with a village of many other writers, educators, friends, and family members who have supported you over your career as an educator, or adjusting to motherhood, or just finishing a writing piece. Do you have any advice for young writers who are just starting out?
Stielstra: A lifetime or two ago, in a creative writing class, there was this guy. I liked his work. I liked how he talked. How he gave feedback, asked questions, and listened, really listened. So many people use the time when someone else is talking to figure out what they’re going to say next. We had coffee, and our conversation gave me ideas. Sometimes, when I didn’t want to write—too tired, shitty day, maybe instead I’d drink beer and watch The Simpsons—I’d think of him. I knew he was at the computer, reading, working, so I went to work, too. I didn’t want him to show me up. He lit a fire under my ass.
He pushed me to be better.
All this is to say: Who are the people that challenge you? That push you to be better: better artist, better parent, better friend, better human being on this planet. Hang on to them. Make stuff with them; a magazine or a movie or a band. Fuck, make a salad. A lifetime or two ago, after that creative writing class, that guy and I stuck together. We swapped work for years. Still do. I just gave him edits on his second novel. He gave me away at my wedding. He’s my kid’s godfather. When I was in the final stretch of this new book, the real bang your head against the wall, second-guess yourself stuff, I sent him texts every day that said I HATE WRITING.
And he’d text back: TOUGH SHIT.
There’s your village.
***
Author photograph © Joe Mazza
S. Ferdowsi is a writer based in Chicago whose work revolves around identity, family history, and the politics of/as prose. More from this author →
Book Review: Megan Stielstra’s “The Wrong Way to Save Your Life
By The Coachella Review
On September 27, 2017
In Blog, Book Review, Nonfiction
By: A.M. Larks
Nothing other than fate can attribute to my review on Megan Stielstra’s book, The Wrong Way to Save Your Life, which took place a week after the events in Charlottesville (which occurred on August 12, 2017), when I was supposed to have received it a month prior. During the last week, the fear for our country has increased, it is undeniably pervasive and palpable. This fear is in every conversation, every communication, and every action or reaction. Fear is exactly what Stielstra tackles in her book. Stielstra ties the broad and the specific by examining fear at its roots, fear in her own life, and fear in everybody’s lives. Written before the November 2016 election, she comments on the fear rhetoric building at that time (which seems to have reached a violent pinnacle with Charlottesville), claiming that we must work through fear by confronting that which lies on the other side. Her words are startlingly prophetic:
You might want to move on, to turn it off, watch something else—but wait, look again. Look closer. How was it made? When was it made? What was happening when it was made? What are you going to do about it? And when are you going to start?
Now I think.
Today.
Steilstra’s examination of fear begins at the origins of her own fears, her childhood: her fear of heights, fear of wiener dogs, fears that bleed into dreams; like the failure to speak in front of a crowded room or failing at her job. When she writes of her childhood nightmares featuring the 1978 TV series Hulk, she simultaneously conveys the hysterical absurdity and intense emotions of childhood. Hulk was her boogeyman. She feared that he would drag her down, down under the bed, down to the basement (where he, of course, lived). This fear seems less naïve when Stielstra describes Banner (Ferrigno) by the open voiceover, “Until he can control the raging spirit that dwells within him.” The Hulk may have had an unconscious influence on Stielstra’s childhood, but in this book, he serves as a representative of the battler we all face: the one to control our own raging spirit. By reflecting on her fear of the Hulk, she is speaking to every uncontrolled raging monster.
Our fears are irrevocably tied to our experiences, especially those we had as children. As Stielstra points out, we become fearful from being stuck in a tree or watching the scary movie with the evil-minded seaweed. Stielstra shares her idiosyncratic fears, and by doing so, queries ours.
Our adult fears take on a different caliber than those that originate in childhood. Stielstra lets the magical world where “a pile of dead bunny popsicles” arise anew after being commanded, where you can speak to the character on the TV, and where alternative realities are easily envisioned by simply pretending, fall away, which is indicative of the collective experience of growing up. In her adult world, her fears have multiplied, and admitting them and getting to the root is more difficult because those fears are obstructed by anger. “Anger is easier than fear,” Stielstra says, as she explores the complications of this anger in her own life that leads her to yell at loved ones and use the wrong words. Her in-depth reflection causes the reader to reflect on their own life when anger had negative consequences, when the underlying emotion was concern and fear. Stielstra and the audience consider the consequences of failing to live like Bruce Banner and control the rage.
The understanding of the heart is Stielstra’s true aim. It is a universal quest. Dissection of the heart is an effective and gruesome metaphor for her self-exploration. Stielstra literally becomes obsessed with understanding the heart, resulting in a need to surgically dissect and, therefore, understand her loved ones. It is through Stielstra’s confessions that she bonds with her audience, illuminating how easy it is to express ourselves when the emotional stakes are lower. This also reveals how quickly we, as people, bond over tragedies, death, and decaying of bodies. This book is yet another representation of Stielstra reaching out to bond with the reader over death, over the shared fragility of our human bodies, and the inability to cope with those choices that are out of our control.
Among the thematic fears that resonate throughout her book, Stielstra emphasizes the imagination as a part of fear. “[W]e learned to fear our own imagination.” No point is more poignant than Stielstra’s recollection of a school shooting that possibly involved her father, which certainly involved her alma mater, her previous teachers, and people she knew in her small interconnected town. Though her father was spared that day, Steilstra’s rage, stemming from the fear embedded in her by the shooting, is tangible as she argues for stricter gun control: “People are dying. That man should not have had eleven guns. That man should not have had a gun. His right to a gun is not greater than outright to walk through this world, alive and living.” It is a rage propelled by her fears, her inner Hulk bubbling to the surface. While Charlottesville required no gun, Stiestra’s observation about what we say in the wake of tragedy is all the more devastating. “Our hearts are with the families, we say and nothing changes.”
Stielstra deftly reaches out across the generations by pointing out bridging behaviors. She may have listened to a boom box Casey Kasem, and now teenagers listen to their phones and Pandora/Spotify/Jango/Slacker/etc. It’s not just teenagers that haven’t changed. People are still the same, still searching for how to deal with the heart, that powerful and fragile organ. Stielstra banishes the distinctions that often separate us: gender, race generation, political party. Her book is about what affects everyone: fear.
It is her own battle with rage and fear and change that prevails throughout the book. She examines her rage at key junctures, like high school, college, and adult life.
High school was complicated. I imagine that’s the case for most people.
Where do you put the frustration?
In college:
I went off, ending with the typically exasperated: “It doesn’t make sense!”
Patty nodded. She sat her book on the floor. Then she leaned forward and said the simple most important thing I heard in college, if not ever, “You don’t get to hate something just because you don’t understand it.”
As an administrator:
“How do you keep it together?” I demanded. “I want to stand on a chair and scream.”
“I hear you,” he said.
“I agree with you,” he said.
“Will any of that help your students?” he said. I sat.
Stielstra stumbles upon her own answer to channeling rage and changing through this examination and this book. It is an answer everyone should employ and it is an answer the world should hear:
“I was all guilt and rage, I stood in my kitchen and yelled the
understatement of the century: “IT ISN’T FUCKING KIND.”
“It’s not,” my mother said. “How can we make it right?”
Sometimes kindness means showing up.
Sometimes it’s trying.
We have to try.
For Steilstra, “making right” involves several actions, beginning with and centering around listening to each other:
And I think that’s the most important thing I ever learned from
my grandfather. No matter how set in our ways, we still have much
to learn. We can Listen. We can try. That is possible.
Listening requires a test of fortitude. When was the last time we stopped talking and listened to one another? When was the last time we felt our “true” feelings? Stielstra advocates that the honesty we have with the world begins with the self:
“It’s okay if a story makes you sad,” I told him. “It’s okay if it
makes you angry or afraid. These feelings are real. Let’s live them.”
Stielstra then implores us to be daring and channel those feeling into making art:
I want to be better for him: better mom, better writer, better
human being on this planet. I want the world to be better, too. I
believe art has a place in that. So what am I going to do about it?
What am I going to make?
She further petitions us to utilize our assets to make a difference, even a small one in the world:
It’s made me look very closely at how we use our platforms, whatever the size. The seemingly smallest gestures can mean the world to someone else.
Finally, Stielstra presses upon us the need to be brave by not giving into fear:
“You know what this guy is doing?” Dad says.
He pauses.
He’s a great storyteller- building tension, landing the punch.
“Selling fear.”
Stielstra argues vehemently for a change in perception, and being an educator, she believes this begins and ends in the classroom. While using her own eye-opening experiences as the touchstone, Stielstra’s commentary shakes the reader in a post-Charlottesville world: “Perhaps, it’s idealistic to think that what happens in a classroom can make a dent in identity-based violence and white supremacy.” Perhaps, it is idealistic, but one cannot help but wonder “what if?” Like Stielstra’s teenager self-wonders: “What if [we] jump? What if [we] fly?”
64) Then I had-
65) Let’s call it an epiphany.
66) It doesn’t matter if the work is personal or political.
67) It doesn’t matter if it’s a story or an essay.
68) Some people will come after us no matter what we say.
69) We might as well say things that matter.
Stielstra’s book stands up and confronts the reader, just as she confronted her class: “Everyone sat there, waiting for me to say something, and finally I looked up and asked, ‘Are you afraid?’” So then, let’s start to deal with that.
AM Larks currently resides in California. She has earned a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature, a Juris Doctorate, and is currently pursuing her Master of Fine Arts from University of California Riverside Palm Desert’s low-residency program. She reads submissions for The Coachella Review nonfiction, poetry, and drama sections.
photo by joe mazza – brave lux
Megan Stielstra is the author of three collections: The Wrong Way To Save Your Life, Once I Was Cool, and Everyone Remain Calm. Her work appears in the Best American Essays, New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Poets & Writers, Tin House, Guernica, Catapult, Lit Hub, Buzzfeed Reader, PANK, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. A longtime company member with 2nd Story, she has told stories for National Public Radio, Radio National Australia, Museum of Contemporary Art, Goodman Theatre, Steppenwolf Theatre, the Neo-Futurarium, and regularly with The Paper Machete live news magazine at The Green Mill. She is currently an artist in residence at Northwestern University.
She lives in Chicago with her husband, their kid, Mojo and Lt. Ripley.
News is here, along with some photos even though having her picture taken makes her break out in hives.