Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Mothers of Sparta: A Memoir in Pieces
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S): Davies, Dawn S.
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Fort Lauderdale
STATE: FL
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES: Eliminated WTOP ref; same as NY Daily News–DP
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| LCCN Permalink: | https://lccn.loc.gov/n2006019673 |
| HEADING: | Davies, Dawn |
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| 040 | __ |a DLC |b eng |c DLC |d Uk |d OCoLC |d DLC |
| 100 | 1_ |a Davies, Dawn |
| 667 | __ |a THIS 1XX FIELD CANNOT BE USED UNDER RDA UNTIL THIS UNDIFFERENTIATED RECORD HAS BEEN HANDLED FOLLOWING THE GUIDELINES IN DCM Z1 008/32 |
| 670 | __ |a [Collector of Past, present, and personal] |
| 670 | __ |a Past, present, and personal, 2005: |b t.p. (Dawn Davies collection) p. 9 (collector of Bahamian art) |
| 670 | __ |a [Co-author of Teenscheme 1992] |
| 670 | __ |a Teenscheme 1992: |b t.p. (Dawn Davies) |
| 670 | __ |a [Author of The role of calcitonin gene related peptide in the activation of the eosinophil leukocyte] |
| 670 | __ |a The role of calcitonin gene related peptide in the activation of the eosinophil leukocyte, 1994: |b t.p. (Dawn Davies) |
| 670 | __ |a [Author of On eagles wings] |
| 670 | __ |a On eagles wings, 2007: |b t.p. (Dawn Davies) BL AL sent 25 Sept. 2007 |
| 953 | __ |a jk09 |
PERSONAL
Married (twice); children: two girls and a boy.
EDUCATION:Vermont College of Fine Arts, B.A.; Florida International University, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, editor, and educator. Teaches college writing classes and workshops in the Miami, FL, area. Also Florida International University, Miami, graduate coordinator for the Writers on the Bay Reading Series; and Appomattox Regional Governors School, Petersburg, VA, writer-in-residence, 2016.
AWARDS:Kentucky Women Writers’ Betty Gabehart Prize for Creative Nonfiction; Arts & Letters Susan Atefat Prize in Creative Nonfiction.
WRITINGS
Contributor to anthologies, including Best American Essays 2015. Contributor to literary journals, periodicals, and online journals, including the Missouri Review, Ninth Letter, Fourth Genre, and Arts and Letters. Served as fiction editor of Gulf Stream Literary Magazine, Florida International University.
SIDELIGHTS
Dawn Davies began writing as a child, including trying to get published in the Reader’s Digest segment titled “Life in These United States” and writing radio show scripts she produced on a cassette player. Davies, who would go on years later to work as a writer and an editor, dropped out of college in her younger years. She eventually returned to college after getting married and having children, earning a master’s degree in creative writing. In addition to contributing to periodicals and online journals, Davies began teaching. Her academic interests include the unreliable narrator, the function of the implied narrator in fiction, humor writing, and the development of the essay from the mid-twentieth century onward.
Another academic interest, writing about family, is reflected in Davies’s debut book titled Mothers of Sparta: A Memoir in Pieces. The memoir is presented via a series of essays that are not arranged in chronological order. Rather, the short essays provide snippets of the author’s life “that shaped who she is, and changed her,” as noted by Booklist contributor Alison Spanner. In an interview with Lynn Rosen for the American Booksellers Association website, Davies noted that she is not sure why she became a memoirist because she is “a private person” and basically an introvert. Although drawn to the escapism of fiction writing, Rosen became interested in nonfiction and essays when she missed signing up for a fiction class in college and took a nonfiction writing class instead. Davies told American Booksellers Association website contributor Rosen: “This came at a time when I was examining patterns and experiences in my life.” She went on in the interview to note that she continued this focus in her essay writing class and “found … that I liked the persona I created and was interested in seeing what she would do within these essays. I also liked the essay as an art form.”
The memoir’s title comes from the nonlinear, short essay approach to reflecting on her life and from the title essay, “Mothers of Sparta.” The essay is about the many issues Davies has had to contend with in raising her son, who suffers from autism and who may be a sociopath. Calling the essay “heartbreaking,” BookPage Online contributor Sarah McCraw Crow noted that Davies not only writes about the child’s mental issues and numerous medical emergencies but also includes “sections in which she imagines herself as a mother of an ancient Spartan warrior, asking a parent’s most difficult questions.” Davies reflects on many of the other struggles and dark moments in her life, from her constant moving around as a young child that led to loneliness to her struggles with anxiety, postpartum depression, and motherhood. Davies also writes about two encounters with death, including the death of a boyfriend. The other encounter, detailed in the essay titled “Keeping the Faith,” focuses on Davies witnessing a college student get hit by a driver. The student dies while Davies holds her hand and sings “Jesus Loves Me.”
Davies also includes more humorous essays and observations in her memoir. She recounts the tale of ordering a designer dress from China for her daughter’s wedding in an effort to save money. The dress ended up being unacceptable, but her daughter decided to call off the marriage in order to continue her education. In another essay, Davies lists the men she would have slept with before her marriage. The list includes a wide range of people, from famed gunfighter Doc Holiday and the actor Jason Bateman to the nineteenth-century African American social reformer Frederick Douglass and the former candidate for the U.S. presidency Ben Carson. “Whether perceptively exploring joy or anguish, Davis digs deeply,” wrote a Publishers Weekly contributor. A Kirkus Reviews contributor remarked: “In the kaleidoscopic array of experiences she has chosen to share, readers will feel the depth and breadth of this woman’s life.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Davies, Dawn, Mothers of Sparta: A Memoir in Pieces, Flatiron Books (New York, NY), 2018.
PERIODICALS
Booklist, December 1, 2017, Alison Spanner, review of Mothers of Sparta: A Memoir in Pieces, p. 8.
Kirkus Reviews, November 1, 2017, review of Mothers of Sparta.
Publishers Weekly, November 27, 2017, review of Mothers of Sparta, p. 52.
ONLINE
American Booksellers Association Website, http://www.bookweb.org/ (February 12, 2018), Lynn Rosen, “An Indies Introduce Q&A With Dawn Davies.”
Arts and Letters, http://artsandletters.gcsu.edu/ (December 12, 2017), “Ampersand Interview Series: Dawn Davies.”
BookPage Online, https://bookpage.com/ (January 30, 2018), Sarah McCraw Crow, review of Mothers of Sparta.
Daily News Online, http://www.nydailynews.com/ (January 29,2018), “Mothers of Sparta Looks at Significant Moments in Life.”
Dawn Davies Website, https://www.dawndaviesbooks.com (May 27, 2018).
Ampersand Interview Series: Dawn Davies
Posted on December 12, 2017
Ampersand Logo
In the latest interview in our new series, Ampersand, we spoke to Dawn Davies about writing spaces, writing habits, and guilty pleasures! Davies was the winner of the 2016 Susan Atefat Prize for Creative Nonfiction for her essay “Mothers of Sparta,” which appeared in Issue 33.
A&L: What is the toughest bad writing habit that you have had to break, or do you advocate for embracing bad habits?
Dawn Davies: I could give you an alarming and deeply revealing list of my bad habits, but let’s not go there. I’m constantly playing Whack-a-Mole, beating them down to where I hope they give up and go away. Sometimes it works. Maybe some people have bad habits they can work around, or work with, but if I let a bad habit linger, it turns into a monster and derails my productivity/health/sleep cycle/insert-your-own-life-function-here. #OCD.
My bad writing habits tend to collect around lack of confidence. I have caught myself, while in the middle of writing, saying things like “This is bunk. This is too grubby. This is just no good. This idea is too much. Who will this matter to besides myself?” The insecure side of my inner voice tries to pull my creativity back, and it has gotten in the way, especially when making stylistic decisions that make my work identifiable as mine, and especially when I am at the beginning of shaping something new. My initial inclination is to take an idea just a little too far…the metaphor will be a little hostile, or an image will be a little violent or visceral, or a theme will be just a tad “out there.” That’s not bad, but my worry-wort inner voice likes to tell me it is. I used to be afraid of the raw stuff, but now I believe people respond to this when they read my work. If I do what the worry-wort wants, which is to question the “grubbiness,” I run the risk of beating the ideas themselves down, and not the bad habit of second-guessing them. I don’t want to tame my work to where it feels beaten down, or tepid, or over palatable to readers. I want my work to be a wild thing. Now I work on not questioning my “in the moment” decisions, and I am getting better at getting the ideas down as fast as they come, without questioning them. They are just ideas. Not tattoos on my face.
A&L: What is the best thing (related to writing) that you ever spent money on?
DD: The best writing-related tool I ever spent money on was a tote bag, though it was my parents who spent the money on my first one. When I was three or four, we filled the tote bag with books from the public library and took the books home. I devoured them, then we went back to the library the next week and did it again. I read as many books per week as they would let me check out, and I did this for years. As soon as I got old enough to ride my bike to the library, I could go whenever I wanted, so I read even more. It was true freedom. I read all the time—in the shower, when cooking, in the car, on vacations, in the middle of the night when I should have been asleep, at school when I should have been studying. I did this long before I knew I wanted to be a writer. I think my exposure to so many books helped me when it was time to write. I still struggled when learning, but I may have struggled a bit less than others who had not been exposed to four thousand books. A committed reading habit makes writing easier, though honestly, I’m always learning. It’s not like you learn to write and then you’ve learned it. You must keep learning to evolve.
A&L: What sort of thing did you write about when you began?
DD: I was about nineteen when I first started “seriously” writing, though really, writing is always so entertaining that I enjoy doing it, so it doesn’t feel serious. When I’m working, I’m still playing. Before nineteen, in high school, I wrote parodies of writers I was reading (Brautigan, Poe, Vonnegut, Fussell, Irving), and before that, in middle school, I wrote radio show scripts that I produced alone on my cassette player, and before that, in elementary school, I wrote little jokes I tried to get published in Reader’s Digest. I now think the writing I did as a child was important, and it was all serious work, especially the parody writing, because it was good practice. I didn’t recognize it as work, though, because I had fun doing it and I had no expectations to fulfill. I try to remember that feeling when I write today. I try to keep my writing life like a playground, where I can mess around and try new things.
At nineteen, I would ride my bike to the library and hand-write stacks of pages that vaguely resembled novels. I threw most of them away, but recently found one, and it was full of ideas that college students might find interesting while drunk at a party. Young women with vague identity and life-purpose problems, or young women with unrequited, somewhat shallow love issues. Or quirky, dysfunctional families that represented interesting character studies, but had no identifiable problems.
I recently found some old poetry I wrote around that age, and realized two things: first, my past and my present have not much changed as I still should not write poetry, and second – that my poetry at the time was similar in content to the novels. A lot of unrequited love and “coupling” problems, the kind that a nineteen-year-old might suffer through. Not to demean anything that nineteen-year-olds experience, but I don’t think the angles I chose to write about were deep enough to be interesting to anyone other than me at the time. I hadn’t yet figured out how to write about universal things while writing about specific things. I did notice similarities, though. My tone is still the same, and my characters—both fiction and my nonfiction persona—are still often wrapped up in their own interior monologues. The inner voice (See Question #1) rears its head again.
A&L: What is your guilty reading pleasure? What is your non-guilty reading pleasure?
DD: The first thing you should know is I am a re-reader. For fiction, my guilty reading pleasure is plot-heavy genre novels. I love a good plot. I read legal thrillers, detective and spy stories, and police procedurals. I don’t feel guilty about reading genre fiction, though I suspect this is the type of secret plot porn about which others might feel guilty. I love commercial fiction. I think page-turners that whisk you away are fun, and fun is important.
My more lit-worthy reading is variable, though I am currently in a weird sort of masculine phase, which should imply nothing about my love for women writers. I read and support them. I’m just in a phase. I have recently been on a Colson Whitehead binge. I have a long-time obsession with The Intuitionist and Sag Harbor.
I read a lot of war books. I don’t know why. When I want to be blown away by tone, I read Paul Fussell, who is my go-to essayist, and who also happens to write very deeply about war. He is wry, and funny, and sad, and informative all at the same time, and he can sustain these feelings even within more academic essays. I have read most of Fussell’s work and he never fails to disappoint technically and tonally. His essay structures are masterful from the seed to the skin and all the flesh in between.
Lately, when I want to write sweetly, I read E.B. White. He can write beautiful observational essays that have very subtle conflict. I can’t do that yet. When I want to get out of an essay funk I read John D’Agata’s The Next American Essay anthology. It helps to remind me of all the ways in which the craft can be stretched, the risks mid- and late twentieth century essayists took with their work, and the ways these risks have changed the craft.
When I want to read essays that are like music, and I need to think about the art of weaving in an essay, I read James Baldwin. This is a constant for me; Baldwin is one of my go-to writers.
When I want to see how far I can bend something I am working on, in both fiction and nonfiction, I have lately been turning to Italo Calvino, usually Cosmicomics, or Fabio Morabito’s Toolbox, which is a lovely, weird book. For fiction, I have spent some time lately with Shirley Jackson, Carol Shields, Charles Portis, and Toni Morrison, though I have read and re-read Morrison and Shields for years. I feel a great comfort re-reading books I love, and I learn from the re-reads.
A&L: Describe your writing space. Where do you write most often? What is your routine?
DD: I try to write every day, but sometimes I don’t. I use non-writing days to think about what I’m working on. I roll ideas over in my mind, try things on for size, consider options. I play with my options so much in my head that when I finally do write, I think it is easier because I don’t have as much to try out on paper.
My writing space is dull. At home it is a small, plain wood desk that faces a wall. It’s not fancy It’s not decorated. There is nothing special on it. It’s in a common room. I sit on a wood chair with a blanket on the seat. I can block out sounds of the house if I don’t hear any actual words aimed at me. I learned to do this when my kids were little, because I didn’t have an office and I wrote either in the laundry room standing up with my laptop on top of the dryer, or in the bathroom, sitting on top of the toilet. Those were the only places I could go where no one would bother me, unless I wrote in the middle of the night, which I also did. After scraping out that kind of writing existence, a plain, wood desk that faces a wall feels like a luxury.
Now, in the mornings, I make breakfast, my husband and I take the dogs for a walk, then he drives to work, and I work out. Once I exercise, I can sit down and concentrate. I turn off my phone and try to get in two to three hours before lunch. Then my husband comes home, and we eat salad and walk the dogs again. Then I ride my bike to the public library and work there for another three hours, or for as long as I can stand to sit still. I wrote a terrible book there when I was nineteen. I wrote my most recent book there, and it turned out better. Even with progress, some things never change. I still like the public library.
A&L: Bonus question: Describe your writing life in 140 characters or less (the length of a Tweet).
DD: Writing is a #playground. An essay is #anotherplanet. Fiction is a #realworld. Art (yours and mine) is a #wildthing to be protected.
Dawn Davies is the author of the essay collection Mothers of Sparta: A Memoir in Pieces (Flatiron Books, 2018). Her fiction and nonfiction have been published in numerous journals, including Fourth Genre, The Missouri Review, Ninth Letter, Narrative, and others. She is proud to have been the 2016 recipient of the A&L Susan Atefat Prize in Creative Nonfiction. Davies lives in Florida.
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http://artsandletters.gcsu.edu/ampersand-interview-series-dawn-davies/
I have been writing since I was a little kid. Early writing activities included multiple attempts at getting published in Readers Digest's "Life in These United States," writing radio show scripts which I produced on a cassette player in my room, and parodying stories in the style of authors I admired (Richard Brautigan, Paul Fussell, James Herriot, John Irving and Douglas Adams). After I dropped out of college, I wrote for fun, then got married, had children, stopped writing for fun and began writing for work (web content, scientific textbook ad copy, and editing for other authors). I went back to college as an adult and earned my BA in Liberal Arts with a concentration in creative writing at Vermont College of Fine Arts' ADP program, under the mentorship of the wonderful Matthew Goodman.
Some years later, I went back to college for an MFA in Creative Writing at Florida International University. I had the good fortune to study with Julie Marie Wade and John Dufresne. While there, I won the FIU Provost's Award for Best Creative Project, the FIU Creative Writing Award in Nonfiction, the Kentucky Women Writers' Betty Gabehart Prize for Creative Nonfiction, and the Arts & Letters Susan Atefat Prize in Creative Nonfiction.
I was also the fiction editor of Gulf Stream Literary Magazine, and the graduate coordinator for the FIU Writers on the Bay Reading Series. In 2016 I was the Writer in Residence at the Appomattox Regional Governors School in Petersburg, VA, where I taught workshops in advanced fiction writing and developing persona in creative nonfiction.
I have garnered over forty publications in literary journals and magazines, including The Missouri Review, Ninth Letter, Fourth Genre, Arts & Letters, as well as numerous other print and online journals, and several anthologies.
Now I teach writing. You can currently find me teaching college classes and workshops in the Miami area. Special interests include unreliable narrator, function of the implied narrator in fiction, writing about family, developing persona in creative nonfiction, lyric essay, humor writing, and the development of the essay from mid-twentieth century to present. For fun, I ride my bike, lift weights and listen to music. My favorite hobbies are people watching, poodles, growing my hair and chopping it off, and saving Pinterest craft ideas I know I'll never do.
About
Contact
Publicist
Marlena Bittner
Director of Publicity
Flatiron Books
175 5th Avenue
New York, New York 10010
marlena.bittner@flatironbooks.com
Twitter: @lenabitts
Agent
Ellen Levine
Trident Media Group
41 Madison Avenue
New York, New York 10010
levine.assistant@tridentmediagroup.com
(212)333-1517
Mothers of Sparta: A Memoir in Pieces
Publishers Weekly.
264.48 (Nov. 27, 2017): p52. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Mothers of Sparta: A Memoir in Pieces Dawn Davies. Flatiron, $24.99 (288p) ISBN 978-1-250-13370-0
This powerful debut collection of essays follows Davies from an unsettled childhood (her parents relocated often and divorced when she was 13) to a fulfilling life as a writer, wife, and mother. A number of these essays were previously published in literary journals; combined here, they portray a sensitive yet fierce woman who battles anxiety and rises from the despair of a failed marriage to find happiness with a second husband in a blended family (three kids from hers, two from his previous marriage). The opening piece, "Night Swim," sparkles with vivid descriptions of Davies's two young, carefree daughters swimming, even as Davies imagines the complications of life that they will face as they get older. "Keeping the Faith," in which Davies details an accident she once witnessed, is startling, tragic, and ultimately redemptive. The strongest piece is the title essay, "Mothers of Sparta," in which Davies tells of the struggles she encountered raising her son, who is autistic and sociopathic. Not all of the pieces are equally powerful: an essay on
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men she "would have" slept with seems both quirky and misplaced (Ben Carson makes the cut, as does Hermann Rorschach), but the author's observations on parenting are spot-on (once you have kids you "must tiptoe through the rest of your life"). Whether perceptively exploring joy or anguish, Davis digs deeply. (Jan.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Mothers of Sparta: A Memoir in Pieces." Publishers Weekly, 27 Nov. 2017, p. 52. Book Review
Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A517575700/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=8ffbbdd0. Accessed 21 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A517575700
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Davies, Dawn: MOTHERS OF SPARTA
Kirkus Reviews.
(Nov. 1, 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Davies, Dawn MOTHERS OF SPARTA Flatiron Books (Adult Nonfiction) $24.99 1, 30 ISBN: 978-1-250-13370-0
A collection of quirky, funny, sad, and moving short personal essays that compress the author's life into the snippets and moments that shaped who she is today.
Davies, whose work has appeared in various journals and the Best American Essays 2015, doesn't offer a detailed, exhaustive account of raising her children or of her own childhood. Rather, she gracefully distills her formative experiences into a purer form, capturing each time frame with a few apt examples that illustrate the impact they had on her. Readers will sense the author's loneliness and despair at the constant moves she made as a child. "You should have known," she writes. "Your happiness should have told you. As soon as you get used to the things in a place, as soon as you find your footing, as soon as you give yourself permission to like it, it is time to go." This early feeling hovered over Davies as she grew into adulthood, married, had children, and toiled through a divorce. She recounts how she offered solace to a young car accident victim but took years to comprehend the magnitude of that moment; struggled with her pregnancies and postpartum depression; and found humor in the stoicism of a New England Thanksgiving dinner. She also shares her many conflicting emotions regarding the joys and challenges of raising an autistic son. Throughout, Davies balances the positive and negative elements of motherhood, and in one laugh-out-loud section, she offers her picks for "Men I Would Have Slept With" (before her marriage), an intriguing list that includes Frederick Douglass, Jeff Buckley, Jason Bateman, LeBron James, and Ben Carson (!), among others. In the kaleidoscopic array of experiences she has chosen to share, readers will feel the depth and breadth of this woman's life.
Forthright, entertaining essays that portray all the love, struggle, and anguish of being a woman and a mother.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Davies, Dawn: MOTHERS OF SPARTA." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Nov. 2017. Book Review Index
Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A512028517/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=84ad165a. Accessed 21 Apr. 2018.
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Mothers of Sparta
Alison Spanner
Booklist.
114.7 (Dec. 1, 2017): p8. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Mothers of Sparta.
By Dawn Davies.
Feb. 2018. 288p. Flatiron, $24.99 (9781250133700); e-book, $11.99 (9781250133717). 649.
Davies' first book is magnetic attraction in memoir form: it will pull readers in with stories that are funny, insightful, and bordering on farce while also pushing them away with darker pieces about loss, mental illness, and an immense amount of physical pain. Davies uses her oodles of talent to remind readers that human beings are never just one thing, and in her essays, we see a whole life revealed. She is not only a college dropout, a child of divorce, a divorcee herself, a mother of three (one of whom is a son with autism who might also be a sociopath), a postpartum depressive, a sufferer of an autoimmune disease--but all those things and more. These snippets do not follow Davies' life chronologically but, rather, give readers an opportunity to see the moments of her life that shaped who she is, and changed her. Her writing jumps from the page as Davies bares her soul, holding nothing back. Readers will laugh and cry, probably at the same time.--Alison Spanner
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Spanner, Alison. "Mothers of Sparta." Booklist, 1 Dec. 2017, p. 8. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A519036105/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=b34defca. Accessed 21 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A519036105
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An Indies Introduce Q&A With Dawn Davies
Posted on Monday, Feb 12, 2018
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Mothers of Sparta by Dawn DaviesDawn Davies is the author of Mothers of Sparta: A Memoir in Pieces (Flatiron Books), an Indies Introduce Winter/Spring 2018 selection and a February 2018 Indie Next List pick.
“To use a favored phrase, Dawn Davies had me at hello,” said Lynn Rosen, co-owner of Open Book Bookstore in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, and a member of the Indies Introduce panel that selected Davies’ debut. “She tells of her life, but she probes deeply and makes her insights universal, and her use of language is spectacular. I felt like she was speaking directly to me, as if she had written this book to meet my personal emotional needs as a mother. She’s honest, she’s real, and she’s a talented writer.”
Davies earned her BA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and her MFA from Florida International University. She lives in Ft. Lauderdale and teaches creative writing. Her work has received a Pushcart Special Mention and has appeared in numerous publications and anthologies. Davies’ debut is a collection of some of those essays, which explore the author’s experiences in life and motherhood.
Rosen recently had the opportunity to talk with Davies about some of the themes in Mothers of Sparta as well as the author’s writing process.
Lynn Rosen: The subtitle of your book is “A Memoir in Pieces.” Can you explain what you meant by that? What drew you to the form of memoir and personal essay?
Dawn Davies, author of Mothers of Sparta
Photo by Mariya Wai
Dawn Davies: One side of this answer is that I don’t know why I’m a memoirist. I shouldn’t be. I’m a private person. I don’t need a lot of friends. I’m introverted at parties. I feel uncomfortable when the lens is pointed at me, and I am somewhat content when lost in the world of fiction. In fiction, no one can blame you for anything, and you aren’t putting anything personally intimate on the line. You are making stuff up. I went into grad school as a fiction writer. One semester, after I slept through my online registration time and the fiction classes filled up, I had to register for a nonfiction class. This came at a time when I was examining patterns and experiences in my life and trying to write about them through fiction, and I didn’t want to waste time, so I took the veil off and kept writing in essay form.
What I found was that I liked the persona I created and was interested in seeing what she would do within these essays. I also liked the essay as an art form. So, I suppose the second side of this answer is maybe I’m not that introverted, because I have now spent several years examining my experiences and writing about them for others to read, and I show no signs of stopping. I guess I don’t mind the lens pointing at me when I am the one controlling the lens.
For me, an essay is an attempt to make sense of something that needs reckoning. At first, I thought it was selfish and a little audacious to write about myself as a “nobody” without a platform or body of work, although I grew up loving Studs Terkel and other oral historians who have captured the stories of “regular people.” But, when I strung a few of these essays together, I saw these experiences were connected by emotions and behaviors that had developed because of earlier experiences, and I was able to look at things with a sharper focus. And I’m no different than anyone else. I believe that each of our lives is constructed in pieces, from memoir bits strung together by emotions that ultimately make a mosaic of something worth examining, no matter how “regular” we are.
LR: In your book’s acknowledgements, you mention the Hall & Oates (Philly boys!) song “Some Things Are Better Left Unsaid.” You say that these words are a musical warning for the memoirist. Do you feel that you said anything in the book that should have remained unsaid? Was it hard to “say” (as in, write about) the topics you chose to address?
DD: First, I love that old song! Second, I left a lot unsaid in Mothers of Sparta. Writing memoir is like writing in a minefield: you must make extra-careful decisions about what truly contributes to a memoir, or your risk explosion and ruin of more than yourself. It’s a different type of editing than in fiction, where, although you are supposed to kill those darlings, it doesn’t really matter, because the darlings aren’t real. With memoir, you craft a story to be as meaningful and artistic as you can, without manipulating the truth of it, while also considering the lives of other people who might be affected by your publication and who didn’t sign up to be your darlings.
I almost changed my mind about publishing Mothers of Sparta on the day I got the contract in the mail. I knew that once I signed, there would be no turning back and many people would now be able to make assumptions about my family and me — about decisions I have made and the thoughts I have admitted to struggling with — without really knowing the whole of what went into those decisions and thoughts. You can’t ever know a memoirist by what they reveal in an essay. It is a small fraction of who they truly are, and no essayist ever “says it all.”
At the same time, with the title essay, “Mothers of Sparta,” I could not have left things unsaid and still convey the depth of my struggles as a mother trying to help with my son’s issues. I had to name all the things because the combination of all the things is what made our situation impossible.
Also, sometimes the hard truth is important, especially if you are writing to make a change in the world, which is the only reason why I chose to publish the “Mothers of Sparta” essay. This essay is a reckoning with something no one seems to know how to deal with, and my son, and the many, many other people out there with similar issues, deserve to have a plan of care that includes something other than “wait until they offend and the prison system will handle them.”
Memoir truth is always subjective. No two people experience an event in the same way. This memoir is a reckoning with my subjective truth, a demonstration of how I processed certain life experiences, and, in fact, how I interpreted these events to be valid and appropriate to share. It is a memoirist’s job to examine how truth looks. I can’t feel bad for operating within the parameters of what memoir is supposed to do here, though if you think it didn’t break my heart to write “Mothers of Sparta,” you’d be wrong.
LR: Speaking of songs, what is the relationship for you between music and writing?
DD: Music is what I turn to when the words aren’t there, whether they have temporarily dried up, or are simply not yet formed. I regularly go down musical rabbit holes, which might include listening to major artists within a genre or era while also reading their biographies, or it could mean listening to only one song on repeat for, say, three weeks. I have a version of synesthesia that allows me to see colors when I hear sounds, and somehow, I connect feelings (even physical sensations in my body) with these. So, music gives me extra-credit sensory input, which I use when writing. And, of course, music is a memory trigger for many people, so listening to music helps give me access to feelings, thoughts, and memories that I use. I keep a record of what music I listen to whenever I write anything. Interestingly, I can’t listen to anything while I write…I listen around when I write, and I start off almost every writing session by watching a YouTube video of Jaco Pastorius playing “Third Stone From the Sun.”
LR: You talk a lot about the relationship between motherhood and loss, or letting go. In the opening section, you describe watching your daughters swim and knowing they will grow up and leave you one day. Are love and loss inextricably intertwined for you?
DD: Sadly, I think so. I think the heaviest thematic takeaway from my book is “don’t like it too much,” which implies that the things you love will always leave. Nothing stays the same. I have the type of imagination that will take something all the way, and, honestly, what “all the way” ultimately means is someone or something’s deathbed, whether it’s a literal or figurative death. It doesn’t have to be the death of a person; it can be the death of a job, or a season in life that you loved but must change, or a friendship, or a family structure. This is sad, but it is also helpful to think of this when I am in the middle of something exhausting or boring or impossible that I wish would be over. It helps to forecast the feeling of what it will be like when it is over, which allows me to be careful of what I wish for. It sounds like I am not living in the present, but thinking like this reminds me to try and live in the present. Now when I say this gloomy thing, it sounds brutal, but when I put it into action, it sometimes comes out humorous, which is always a goal of mine, since humor is one of the best ways I’ve found of coping with the tough stuff.
LR: In the title essay, you ask some very powerful questions that are inspired by your experience with your son. You also wrote about how hard this chapter was to write. How do you think it will be received by readers? What does it mean to you to be a Mother of Sparta?
DD: I do not know how “Mothers of Sparta” will be received. I’ve prepared for the worst. I know the essay, in part, defecates on the ideals of motherhood and the loving stereotypes of how mothers should think about their children, but I use this to illustrate my desperation during that time in my life, and I hope people will understand that. I did not know how to help my son, and everywhere I turned we were told there was no hope. No one wants to hear “no hope.” “No hope” is the worst, especially when combined with the worry that my son might not ever be able to control his impulses and might end up hurting someone.
After I wrote this essay, I shared it with my son, who was brave enough to give permission to publish it. He hopes that his story — our story — will help bring awareness to the fact that there are conditions in life for which no medical or social system is prepared to help, and people can treat children with brain damage as pariahs without ever giving them a chance.
I think what it means to be a Mother of Sparta is to know that you will either always be in battle or preparing for it. That you can sleep, but one eye will always be open. That your role in society is to protect it as best you can, though this can manifest in different ways. For me right now, it includes “outing” my child with the hope that we will get help, and perhaps make a difference in the way children like my son are treated by the medical, education, psychological, and social service communities. It might one day mean turning my son in to the police. It might mean that my worst assumptions were wrong and that once my son’s brain development “catches up,” as one doctor told us might happen, I will spend the rest of my life eating crow for having assumed the worst. That last one is the one I’d like to see come to fruition.
LR: “Kicking the Snakes” is about you overcoming your fear about becoming a writer. How does it feel to have followed that path? To see your book published? What’s next?
DD: I have battled crippling, mostly irrational fears my whole life, and never knew why. By following the writing path and by publishing this book, I began to face several of my primary fears: fear of being misunderstood, fear of public speaking, fear of flying, fear of failure. But everyone can use a leg up now and again, so when the book went into production, I went into therapy! Note: if you write a memoir and go into therapy, give your therapist a copy of your book; it will save you both a lot of time. I was quickly diagnosed with OCD, though I had lived with moderate to severe symptoms of it for most of my life without knowing what it was. Because I was ignorant of the dimensions of OCD, and didn’t have counting or hand-washing problems, I had never considered OCD. I thought it was “just anxiety,” or a personality weakness. In fact, I recall spending most of my life trying to “suck it up,” which really is a terrible way to manage OCD.
In post-diagnosis hindsight, it is obvious that these are OCD essays without the OCD label. I was trying to understand and describe the difficulty of living with OCD without knowing what it was. Even the “Fear of Flying” essay that talks about post-partum depression is actually post-partum OCD, according to a few professionals who have read it. I think it is interesting that my behaviors and thoughts are sort of dissected and laid out on the table for examination, without a label attached, which I think speaks to an unintentional theme of this memoir — living within your label or escaping it: Autistic, overthinker, divorcee, failure, psychopath, dreamer, new girl, new mom, welfare mom, soccer mom, pedophile, “Cap’n faggot,” or whatever your own label might be. Sometimes labels are damning, sometimes they are limiting, and sometimes, if you are lucky, they might help for a bit, though I think they are mostly damning or limiting.
I always wonder what’s next. I think that’s a great question! I have a second essay collection half finished; some of the essays have already left the nest for individual publication. I also spent the last six months revising a draft of a novel that I am starting to get seriously attached to. I have a few other books on deck when those are finished. I’m also teaching now, which I love doing, and which I plan to continue if the avenues stay open.
Mothers of Sparta: A Memoir in Pieces by Dawn Davies (Flatiron Books, 9781250133700, Hardcover Nonfiction, $24.99) On Sale Date: 1/30/2018.
Find out more about the author at dawndaviesbooks.com.
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‘Mothers of Sparta’ looks at significant moments in life
By The Associated Press January 29, 2018 10:13 am
This cover image released by Flatiron Books shows "Mothers of Sparta: A Memoir in Pieces," by Dawn Davies. (Flatiron Books via AP)
“Mothers of Sparta: a Memoir in Pieces” (Flatiron Books), by Dawn Davies
What’s in a life?
Forget celebrities and superstars, or Nobel Laureates and the like, the people who live in the realms of the extraordinary and exciting. On the contrary: What are the significant moments that make up the story of a regular person?
“Mothers of Sparta: a Memoir in Pieces” by Dawn Davies answers this question, and eloquently so. Each chapter reads like a stand-alone essay. You can read them one at a time, but, as a whole, they make sense.
“Mothers of Sparta” opens with Davies detailing her struggle with anxiety.
Davies dropped out of college at 19 and moved from her home state of Florida to Boston, where she worked various jobs and attempted to launch a business selling cheesecakes on sticks.
During this foray, her boyfriend died in a tragic accident while visiting his home country of Brazil. She is then left alone to grieve in Boston.
Yet, not soon after the accident, Davies has her second run in with death as she watches a Northeastern University student killed by an impaired driver on a busy thoroughfare while on a date in neighboring Cambridge. Davies held the dying girl’s hand and sang “Jesus Loves Me.”
Still, “Mothers of Sparta” isn’t just a grim recounting of all the suffering that Davies has experienced. There are laugh-out-loud funny moments — such as the time she rescued a dog with her second husband and young children. Or the story about trying to save money on her 19-year-old daughter’s wedding by ordering a designer dress from China. The dress was a dud, but the daughter called off the marriage anyway, choosing to keep pursuing her education at a top- tier school.
Some of the most compelling writing is on the subject of parenting. Davies’ ruminations about being a mom are all over the place — happy and sad, funny and serious — but they’re sure to resonate with readers who have kids.
“Children can hold hope for a long time without it burning their hand, far longer than adults can, which is what allows them to complete the act of growing up in a world full of people who lie, where people let you down all the time,” Davies writes.
“Mothers of Sparta” offers exquisite writing and storytelling craft. Davies, it seems, can bring to life just about anything with her writing.
Copyright © 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, written or redistributed.
'Mothers of Sparta' looks at significant moments in life
By The Associated Press
Jan 29, 2018 | 10:13 AM
'Mothers of Sparta' looks at significant moments in life
This cover image released by Flatiron Books shows "Mothers of Sparta: A Memoir in Pieces," by Dawn Davies. (Flatiron Books via AP)
"Mothers of Sparta: a Memoir in Pieces" (Flatiron Books), by Dawn Davies
What's in a life?
Forget celebrities and superstars, or Nobel Laureates and the like, the people who live in the realms of the extraordinary and exciting. On the contrary: What are the significant moments that make up the story of a regular person?
"Mothers of Sparta: a Memoir in Pieces" by Dawn Davies answers this question, and eloquently so. Each chapter reads like a stand-alone essay. You can read them one at a time, but, as a whole, they make sense.
"Mothers of Sparta" opens with Davies detailing her struggle with anxiety.
Davies dropped out of college at 19 and moved from her home state of Florida to Boston, where she worked various jobs and attempted to launch a business selling cheesecakes on sticks.
During this foray, her boyfriend died in a tragic accident while visiting his home country of Brazil. She is then left alone to grieve in Boston.
Yet, not soon after the accident, Davies has her second run in with death as she watches a Northeastern University student killed by an impaired driver on a busy thoroughfare while on a date in neighboring Cambridge. Davies held the dying girl's hand and sang "Jesus Loves Me."
Still, "Mothers of Sparta" isn't just a grim recounting of all the suffering that Davies has experienced. There are laugh-out-loud funny moments — such as the time she rescued a dog with her second husband and young children. Or the story about trying to save money on her 19-year-old daughter's wedding by ordering a designer dress from China. The dress was a dud, but the daughter called off the marriage anyway, choosing to keep pursuing her education at a top- tier school.
Some of the most compelling writing is on the subject of parenting. Davies' ruminations about being a mom are all over the place — happy and sad, funny and serious — but they're sure to resonate with readers who have kids.
"Children can hold hope for a long time without it burning their hand, far longer than adults can, which is what allows them to complete the act of growing up in a world full of people who lie, where people let you down all the time," Davies writes.
"Mothers of Sparta" offers exquisite writing and storytelling craft. Davies, it seems, can bring to life just about anything with her writing.
Copyright 2017 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Web Exclusive – January 30, 2018
Mothers of Sparta
An honest, searing collection of personal essays
BookPage review by Sarah McCraw Crow
In this voice-driven memoir, Dawn Davies tells her story in a fragmented way, moving through time in great leaps—childhood, young adulthood, single parenthood, post-divorce love, baffled-but-game mother of the bride. An early essay recalls her childhood spent trying to feel at home but getting uprooted repeatedly: As soon as she gets the hang of upstate New York, she’s uprooted to Florida, starting over while her parents’ marriage disintegrates. An essay about her young adulthood begins like a short story: “Once, when I was twenty, I went on a date with a man I met at the Army Navy store in Cambridge, Massachusetts.” This date goes terribly wrong, but in a most unexpected way. She also recounts a difficult pregnancy through the lens of an interminable dinner party, punctuated by her awful morning sickness and others’ drunkenness.
Some of these essays are harrowing, describing intractable medical ailments, sudden poverty, a husband who bails out. But Davies is also a funny and vivid writer. In a lighter essay she imagines the men she might have slept with, a strangely compelling list that includes Doc Holliday, John Irving and Jon Hamm. She also does a funny takedown of the bizarre realm of soccer moms, implicating herself and her own fixation on her little athletes.
These essays surprise, illuminating odd corners of parenthood. Perhaps most surprising is the heartbreaking title essay, which examines the rigors of parenting a child through multiple medical emergencies and mental illness, but she intersperses these episodes with sections in which she imagines herself as a mother of an ancient Spartan warrior, asking a parent’s most difficult questions. But because the book’s previous essays have very little to say about her son’s difficulties, this essay, late in the book, comes as a shock. Still, Davies’ voice is compelling, and one worth following.