Links Mentioned in This Episode:

King the Wonder Dog (Short Story Collections)

Eleanor Lerman’s Website

The Resilient Writers Radio Show: Interview with Eleanor Lerman – Full Episode Transcript

Intro:

Well, hey there, Writer. Welcome to The Resilient Writers Radio Show. I'm your host, Rhonda Douglas. And this is the podcast for writers who want to create and sustain a writing life they love. 

Because let's face it, the writing life has its ups and downs, and we want to not just write, but also to be able to enjoy the process so that we'll spend more time with our butt-in-chair getting those words on the page. 

This podcast is for writers who love books and everything that goes into the making of them. For writers who want to learn and grow in their craft and improve their writing skills. Writers who want to finish their books and get them out into the world so their ideal readers can enjoy them. Writers who want to spend more time in that flow state. 

Writers who want to connect with other writers to celebrate and be in community, in this crazy roller coaster ride, we call the writing life. We are resilient writers. We're writing for the rest of our lives and we're having a good time doing it. So welcome, Writer. I'm so glad you're here. Let's jump right into today's show.

Rhonda:

Well, hey there, Writer. Welcome back to another episode of The Resilient Writers Radio Show. Today I'm speaking with Eleanor Lerman. Eleanor has worked for decades and she has been, she spent more than 50 years as one of American literature's distinctive voices at Just 22. She was one of the youngest ever finalists for the National Book Award with early work so bold that The New York Times Book Review suggested it deserved a double X rating.

She wrote openly about sex, politics, rebellion, and desire at a time when women poets were rarely given that latitude, earning both acclaim and controversy and never sanding down her voice for comfort. Over the decade, she's evolved rather than softened, earning a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, and the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets.

Her current book is King the Wonder Dog, um and she remains attuned to aging, grief, love, and survival. Her book, King the Wonder Dog, is a collection set primarily in contemporary New York, um and it's a group of aging, lonely men and women whose lives are quietly transformed through their relationships with dogs and cats. I absolutely love that. Welcome, Eleanor.

Eleanor:

Thank you very much. Thank you.

Rhonda:

Hi, hi. So tell me, let's talk a little bit about your writing career began as a poet.

Eleanor:

Yes.

Rhonda:

Yeah. And, um what were the principal concerns of your early poetry work?

Eleanor:

I really was very young. The poems that were in my first book, I think I'd actually started writing them when I was 18 or 19. And my mother had died when I was pretty young. The family had transformed into a kind of unhappy, crazy place. And my only desire in life when I was, excuse me, a young teenager was to escape.

So I went to the village. I was living in the East Village and later in the West Village. And these poems were really just an expression of anger, how angry I was at the way things had turned out, that my mother had died and that I felt like I was all alone in the world. So that's what it was. It was fueled by I think by anger and loneliness.

Rhonda:

Right, right. And what was your experience being you know at that time being a female?

Eleanor:

Well, um I never thought of myself in those terms. I was forced to at one point because I got into what became a sort of famous literary feud because the other women who were nominated for the National Book Award that year was Adrienne Rich and Alice Walker and Audre Lorde.

And one by one, they all called me and said, well, if whoever wins the National Book Award should refuse it, because women are discriminated against and women writers are discriminated against.

And I said, no, just a minute. I have been supporting myself basically since I was 14 years old. I'm living alone. I was running a, of all things, harpsichord kit workshop. I had four women working with me and it was like, no, don't tell me about women being discriminated against.

To me, I didn't really know who they were. To me, they were just all academics with established careers. And they were going to tell me about, you know, how to support myself and how to stand up for myself. I didn't feel I needed that kind of help.

And so that was the first place I was sort of thrust into the world of, well, you have to, you are a woman. This, you know, the feminism was beginning to uh be something that everyone was, was on top of mind. And I just felt like, look, ladies, I'm so far ahead of you, don't tell me.

So that was my first experience of, oh, now I have to start thinking about categories. But that was never an issue for me. I was a writer. And to me, that didn't have a gender in particular.

Rhonda:

OK, yeah. So um when did you make the shift to fiction?

Eleanor:

Well, what happened was that through pure happenstance, I was introduced to a lot of men, male writers, men writers who at the time were very well known people like Thomas Pynchon and Donald Barthelme. Pure happenstance. It had nothing to do with anything that I did.

And I thought, oh gosh, if I'm, if I'm ever going to be successful, you can't do it being a poet, you have to write fiction, because my models, my role models were these famous men. So I thought that's what I was supposed to do. Only I wasn't very good at it. I didn't know how to write fiction.

So ah I was, I failed left and right. But eventually, I started writing short stories. And that became the medium that I was really comfortable with. So I gave up the idea of being a novelist because that's just not something I can do. So it really just was, I was reaching for something that had to do with what my idea of success was.

And you know, I had to finally make peace with the idea that you, you work because you're an artist or a painter or a writer. You do it first because you want to, because you really don't have a lot of choice, but this is what you do and whatever comes with it or doesn't come with it, so be it.

So it really was just a matter of my saying to myself, I can't make myself into something I'm not. I have to do the kind of work that I can do that I know I'm good at.

Rhonda:

Okay. And what is it about the form of the short story that you love?

Eleanor:

Well, it's like a poem in that it's an expression of something that in the moment you're feeling or thinking about. It's, you can discuss some issue or something. I think what I do is my brother is constantly pointing out to me. I think I take what's happened in my own life and use that as a jumping off point for some sort of story.

So for me, I think in a way it's almost like therapy. I didn't intend it that way, but I think it is. I think it's a way of my constantly trying to explain to myself something about my own life.

Rhonda:

Right. Yeah. I love that. I do think there's an element to writing that is about understanding the world understand. So tell me about this book. Where did the idea for King the Wonder Dog and other stories come from?

Eleanor:

Well, I'm not exactly sure. know I didn't. I didn't set out to write a book about people's relationships with dogs and cats. had actually there were quite a few short more stories and are in this collection, but it was the publisher at She Writes Press who had the idea of let's put the other stories aside and let's focus on the ones with pets because there does seem to be something here that you're talking about people's relations.

As you started to say, people's relationships with their animals and how as you get older you know, the relationship that you have with your pet, if you're lucky enough to have one, helps you work out a lot of the things that are bothering you, they accompany through loneliness.

And so I think it was really, I'm obviously, I'm getting older when I sit and I, when I'm writing, I have a purple couch, that's my office. And at the end of that couch for many years, it's been one dog or another.

So, it was all of those elements. was, I think also in particular, me talking to myself again about what is, what's happening? I'm getting older. I don't look the way I used to look. I'm not the, don't, you know, feel the way I used to feel. And I think the relationship with pets was my way of talking to myself about, okay, how are you going to navigate this part of your life?

Rhonda:

Right, right. And can I ask a little bit about your writing process? Like, where does a story start for you? Is it an image? Is it a character? Is it an idea?

Eleanor:

I think actually it's the most recently the fiction in particular starts with a place. And yeah, I, I don't know why that is, but for me, I have to first feel where is this story going to be set. And once I have a place in mind, then I can begin.

You know, often I'm often asked about where do you, you know, where do you get ideas for stories? People, that's one of the first things, especially younger writers always ask, where do you come up with the ideas for these things?

And I don't know the answer to that other than I envision my mind as this row upon row of filing cabinets in which everything I think I've ever seen or looked at or has happened to me is in these files and I rifle through them and something comes out. So when I can match the place to whatever is going through my mind at the moment, that's how the story begins.

Rhonda:

Right. Do you still live in New York?

Eleanor: I live outside of New York. It's a beach town called Long Beach. It's just about an hour outside the city.

Rhonda:

Yes. So what is it about New York in relationship to this? I mean they are the stories are set mostly in contemporary in New York.

Eleanor:

Yes.

Rhonda:

So is there something in particular about New York city and pets, I don’t know. I’m just kinda…

Eleanor:

New York, I was born in the city. The village Greenwich Village was my home from the time I was 18. It was the place where everything that I am was formed. It's a very different place now. It's a much more upscale kind of place.

But when I was 18, 1920, it really was still a kind of artist community and, you know, gay community. And it was the place where I finally felt okay, I've escaped from the crazy people at home. And here I can begin my life.

And it was it was where I met the people that made me feel that I was a writer. uh It was where I met the people that really shaped who I became. And so the city to me is, it's the place still I mean, I can get on the train here and get into the city in 50 minutes. It's still the place that I feel when I want, when I'm in the city, it's okay. I know where I am now.

Rhonda:

Yeah. Yeah. I love New York. I could spend hours there. Well days, weeks, um if it wasn't for how expensive it is.

Eleanor:

Yeah, now.

Rhonda:

Yeah, it is now. It's really it's changed a lot. So can tell me a little bit about um when you say you have an idea that begins with place and then you write a draft of a short story. Once you've got your draft, what's your process for revising a story?

Eleanor:

Ah I don't do all that much. I don't go back and read the story as I'm writing it. I try not to do that. So I'll get from the beginning to the end, which can take anywhere from a couple of days to actually sometimes it's taken a couple of weeks.

But once I know that it's finished, then I can go back and sit with it. I worked as an editor for a long time. And so I can put myself in the editor position and try to, first of all, I'm very careful that I'm not being repetitious. It's something, even when I'm reading other people's work, it always hits me. Well, you just said that, you know you can't say it again.

When I was working as an editor, one of the things I was always telling writers is you're not being clear. I know you think in your head, you've explained this, but you haven't explained it on the page. So what's happening is when you're reading your own work, you think you've been clear because you know what you meant to say.

But I'm telling you as the person reading it, I don't know what you meant. And so you have to go back and make sure that it's not you that you really understand and have expressed clearly what you meant to say so that someone reading it doesn't need you to be standing there saying, oh, well, I meant to say this. I meant to say that.

So I'm also very cognizant of that, that I have to be sure that when the story is, in my mind, finished, that someone's going to read it and not be left with some sort of confusion of what was this about.

And I actually, I like reading short stories, other people's work, but sometimes I'm very frustrated because I, you get to the end of the story and it was, okay, I don't know what I'm supposed to take away from this. What did you mean?

There seems to be some sort of fashion with ending stories in an almost ambiguous way. And I think the writer would say, well, I'm leaving it up to you, the reader, to decide whatever you want about this. But as the reader, I don't like that. I want you to tell me how this ended or what's going to, what I should think happened to these people afterwards.

So when I'm writing poetry, I almost always start with the last lines so that I know where I'm going. Yeah, I always have the last lines in mind before I even start. And I do that a lot with the short stories also. After I find the place and I have some vague idea of what the story is, I want to know what the last lines are so that I know where I'm going.

And that's how I'm always writing towards the end of the story. And I hope that when you get to the end of one of my stories, you're pretty sure what happened to these people, what's going to happen to these people, or at least you have some idea of, you you have some relationship with them. They aren't just leaving you walking out the door and saying, you figure it out.

Rhonda:

I’m curious about, um so this is a collection of stories. How did you go about sort of the process that I refer to as like curating the collection, putting it together, deciding what was first, what was last, you know, how the stories speak to each other.

Eleanor:

Well, as I mentioned, I had originally thought it was a longer book and that there were more stories in it. And I think four or five of them didn't involve a person's relationship with a dog or a cat. And it was the publisher who rightly, she was right, decided you know, let's just focus on this aspect of the stories. And so once we had it, I think there's 11 store, nine or 11, something like that.

It really was pretty random how they were put together. I didn't have in mind any particular that one story led to another or led to another. I don't think I, I don't really remember. I don't think I was the one who put them in order. think the, I think the editor did.

Rhonda:

The editor did that.

Eleanor:

And I think so. I mean, I'm pretty easy with things like that. Once the book is written, you know, the process is the publisher sent it to an editor and a proofreader and I'm pretty easy with whatever they want to do.

First of all, the proofreader I'm always grateful for because no matter how good you are at spelling or how much you've used spell check or grammar check, your work is always riddled with mistakes. So I'm always grateful for the proofreader and I'm grateful for the editor too.

And if the editor thinks something needs to be changed, it's fine with me. I mean, I don't think I ever had to argue any point with an editor. If it's like, if you think this needs to be fixed, fine, good. I'm very easy.

Rhonda:

So you really, it sounds like you really value that writer editor relationship.

Eleanor:

Yeah. As I said, having worked as an editor, I know how important it is to, you as the writer can't just be selfish. Like I wrote this, don't touch it. Nobody is that perfect or that perfectly talented that, you know, your work can't be muddled with in any way.

No, if someone's trying to help you make it better, listen to them. You know, you can say no, you can say no, you're not getting it. I would rather it be this way or that way. But if someone is trying to help you, why not take the hell?

Rhonda:

Yeah. I mean, some of the most interesting conversations I've had about writing have been with people who are editing my work.

Eleanor:

Yeah.

Rhonda:

I definitely, definitely agree with you. So this is a it's a literary fiction collection. It's focused on the relationship between people and their animals. Are you drawing from, like, is this based on your life, from people that you know, or is it entirely created, you know, you got the last lines and you just went with it and it's, they're entirely imaginary. Is there anybody in your neighborhood whose dog features in this collection?

Eleanor:

No, no, not even my own dog.

Rhonda:

Okay.

Eleanor:

It really was me dealing with the idea of getting older and loneliness. Because I keep bringing up my brother. Is my brother my younger brother? Both pretty old now, but he and I have talked a lot about as you get older, your friends fall away.

Like a lot of your friends are married, they have grandchildren, they go visit their grandchildren. And so your life tends to get sort of smaller and smaller. And so even, I think, people with a life that has a lot of friends, and you deal with loneliness.

So it really was, it was loneliness that was the subject more than anything else, illness, because I've had a lot of that in my own life, and grief. And interestingly to me, I was, I never really look at how these books sell. I don't really care that much, but someone had forwarded me something from Amazon about how the book was doing very well.

I didn't know Amazon divided things into categories, but apparently there are categories like grief. And the book was somewhere high up on the list of books being sold on the category of grief. And I hadn't really thought of the stories as being struck through with grief in particular. I had just finished a collection of poetry and I knew that certainly dealt with the subject of grief.

But, okay, I went back and looked at them and I said, yeah, there is a lot of dealing with grief in these stories. So it really was not so much my life or anyone else's life, but those subjects, loneliness, illness, and grief.

And the animals, the dogs, and there is one story that involves a cat, really are me, the writer's way of using a tool to discuss how human beings deal with loneliness and illness. So except for the one cat in the stories who is a bit of a magical creature. There is nothing these animals are not the children. They're not a replacement for children. I know that now seems to be something going on in the world with animals, dogs in particular, almost like your child.

Rhonda:

Yeah, fur babies.

Eleanor:

Yeah they're not. It's an animal. It's a pet. You may love it. I love my dog dearly, but I know it's not a child. So it really, it's just using the dogs as a tool for how these people are working through the last part of their life and dealing with these really big troubling issues of loneliness and illness and grief.

Rhonda:

I think people love to read a book, any book, you know, that has an animal in it where animals are featured. Because I do agree with you. I think it's I say this with a Cocker Spaniel snoring at my feet. You know that people are attached to their pets and love they love to read about them. Yeah.

So um this is literary fiction and you come to this from also being a poet. Is there a significant difference in your writing process from when you are writing poetry to when you're writing fiction, or is it more or less the same?

Eleanor:

That's a very good question. I've actually been thinking about that myself. guess I start the answer begins with I either do one or the other. I don't do I'm not writing both in both forms at the same time.

If I'm writing poetry, I'm writing a collection of poetry. If I'm writing fiction, I'm writing a collection of short stories. So it begins with that. I know I'm doing one or the other. The process is the same in that I'm looking for phrases or words. Something sparks the story. Once I have the place before I even have the last line.

With poetry in particular I have a notebook with phrases in it, words in it that have struck me for some reason. And if I have to, go back to that notebook of phrases and I'll look for something that some line or some words that meant something to me at some point or just struck me as something to build a story or a poem around.

So it's similar in that, I'm looking for phrases, words, something to build the story or the poem around. One big difference is that in a story, I have to create people. In the poems, it's me. The person writing is me. The poet is speaking to you directly. In fiction, the writer is removed from the reader by this artifice, the story.

So the writer is not specifically talking directly to the reader the poet is. You're not pretending the poem is not a story. Poets are writing from within themselves and they're talking to people directly. That's very different than fiction.

Rhonda:

Yeah. I write poetry and fiction and I find that the, I also can't write them, you know, I could never to projects going at the same time or work on them on the same day. Yeah. Because I find that the there's something about the mental process that's different with poetry.

I don't quite know how to articulate it, but it feels a little almost like a little more mystical to me, like a little more inexplicable, whereas fiction feels like, right, well, here's how we do it you know.

Eleanor:

Well, poetry is confessional in a way that fiction isn't. That's I guess what I meant by it's the poet speaking directly. You can't pretend you didn't write this. It's fiction. You're standing behind uh someone you named in a story and some things that happened to them. So you can hide. The writer can hide. But you can't hide behind a poem. It's a confession of how you feel or something, how things have affected you

Rhonda:

Yeah. I think that's true. What are you working on now? Are you working on fiction?

Eleanor:

I'm writing more stories.

Rhonda:

More stories?

Eleanor:

Yeah.

Rhonda:

Still about loneliness. I'm kind of getting a sense that you're if we looked at like your body of work over a lifetime, that there is this thread of loneliness. Maybe how people are with one another, but like loneliness, grief, loss, that that might have been there through your whole life. Do you think that's true?

Eleanor:

Yeah, because the seminal event in my life was my mother dying when I was 13. And after that, my father replaced my poor father, who didn't know how to do anything much, replaced my mother with a very damaged person. She meant well, I think, but it was, you know, like the evil stepmother from a storybook. I know she didn't mean to be that way.

So it was, I had lived what I felt, and looking back on it, was a really nice childhood. I had a big family, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents. It's a big Jewish family. And when my mother died, my father and my uncle, was my mother's brother, had an argument about my mother's brother felt my father hadn't found the right doctors for her. And the family completely broke apart.

So not only did I lose my mother, but I lost all my cousins, my grandparents, everyone. So in what felt like overnight, completely changed. And I was pretty much left to my own devices. I don't know why my father let me leave the house at night, but I started going, we lived in the Bronx. I started going down to the village when I was 14. I'd get on the train, I'd get on the subway. I'd go down to the village and I'd wander around.

Rhonda:

Wow.

Eleanor:

Which turned out to be great because I knew where I was going when I left home. But so I was on my own.

Rhonda:

Yeah.

Eleanor:

And I think that you're right. That has always been the thread through all my work. I think what did leave was the anger. I was writing from a place of anger when I was younger. That's long gone. Not angry at anything anymore. But the grief lingers. You never really make peace, I think, with grief that's that deeply imbued in you. So I think grief and loneliness, oh, well, you know, even if I tried to not have them be themes, they will.

Rhonda:

Yeah. Yeah. love that. Thanks so much for speaking with me today, Eleanor. I really enjoyed our conversation.

Eleanor:

Yes, me too. Thank you for asking me. Take care. Bye.

Outro:

Thanks so much for hanging out with me today and for listening all the way to the end. I hope you enjoyed today's episode of The Resilient Writers Radio Show. While you're here, I would really appreciate it if you'd consider leaving a rating and review of the show. You can do that in whatever app you're using to listen to the show right now, and it just takes a few minutes. 

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