Chloé Caldwell's Blog, page 5

2 thingz

I was interviewed about my writing process in The Inklings which is a new magazine you can subscribe to via Human Parts. Here’s an excerpt. Read the rest by subscribing here.  Thanks for the fun interview Qs, Steph! Though it looks like I forgot to answer the first Q so I’ll do it now. I don’t really begin projects with form in mind. I can say that WOMEN was NEVER written as a personal essay. I started it by writing brief paragraphs but didn’t know (choose?) it would be a novella. Once SF/LD bought it, Elizabeth and I brainstormed and decided the novella form would be perfect for it.

I also forgot to mention that I edited the most recent issue of Story Chord. I was told to choose one musician, one artist, and one writer. This is what I came up with.

Your Personal Essay

Just about 5 more days to sign up for my personal essay class, which starts this coming Thursday, online. It’s a two week class–the first week we’ll focus on editing your personal essay and the second week will be focused on places for you to submit and publish your essay.

If you’re interested in taking an IRL personal essay class, I’ll be teaching one at Catapult in NYC, starting this February, for 6 weeks. For more information on that email me at cocomonet@gmail.com. The class is only open to 6 people so act fast!

the awesome class at catapult yesterday!

Emily Gould & I discussing editor/writer relationships

this is not a good story

A few weeks ago I was talking to Uzodinma (the new SF/LD author) at Cakeshop. We realized we had a bunch of people in common from The Strand (Uzodinma works there and my brother used to).

“Oh yeah your brother was like fuck this place and quit, right? And he wore flip flops and shit?”

Well, no, that was not my brother, that was a different Trevor, but I was friends with him too. My friend Noelle worked with him at The Strand and sometimes we’d walk from my apartment on 181st Street to his apartment on 120-something street. It took a couple of  hours. Trevor–who we called Tray-156 to differentiate him from my brother (we had insane nicknames for people and they didn’t always make sense) lived with his girlfriend and his cat. He had more cool books than I’d ever seen. His place was kind of dirty, the kind of place with pasta left out for a few days and the smell of cat piss. But we liked visiting. I was twenty-two, and catching the writer bug. I’d walk around the apartment an jot down names of books I wanted to get later in my life. Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me by Richard Farina. Chelsea Girls by Eileen Myles. Tray-156 let me borrow Chelsea Girls and it turned me into a writer. He let me borrow whatever I wanted. Even special editions. He was generous that way. I didn’t go to college therefore was never assigned books therefore I remember clearly and am interested in how I came to find certain writers and books. I had to find them on my own and am lucky I did.

I don’t have the book anymore so from here on out, I am quoting from memory. Everyone has their Eileen Myles story and mine is no different except that it’s mine.

There’s a part in Chelsea Girls where Eileen writes she was wearing a striped shirt, sitting on the ledge outside the Strand, smoking a cigarette, because her friend had died. I was wearing a striped shirt and smoking a cigarette at the Strand when my friend died, too! I could to believe the uncanny feeling of being legitimized through this.

I’m the kind of person who keeps diet pills in the pockets of her faded jeans.

It’s my book party. Of course I have my own cocaine. 

Time passes. That’s for sure. 

All of my books that I cared about during this vivid period were Black Sparrow Press. Ask The Dust by John Fante, all of Bukowski’s books.

So it’s 2008 and I read this book aloud to my friends on the subway. Because I can’t believe it this book exists, because I’d never read a NOVEL that read this way. Casual. Conversational. Honest. I’d never read anything by a lesbian before either, that I knew of.

I couldn’t believe it–that when I wrote, I was allowed to just say what happened. That’s what I’d been doing anyway in my writing classes, but here was a published book written that way! The author was probably rich and famous!

I sent Eileen a FB message back then and said, you made me want to be a writer! you changed my life or something like that. she responded, Well, it doesn’t get any better than that, does it?

In Portland when I worked at Powell’s, a friend got me a copy of the book when one was sold back to the store.

When I left Portland a year later, I should have kept it, but was so poor I sold it back.

If anyone wants to get me a copy for Christmas….that’s basically why I wrote this post.

Another thing: (“don’t say thing!” I will now hear in my head forever) Some years ago, a woman on Facebook messaged me. I cannot remember who. Oh! I just remembered: Sarah Greene, she’s a musician. Anyway, Sarah said something like, Legs Get Led Astray reminds of that part in Michelle Tea’s Valencia where her red beads on her bracelet break.

I searched and searched for this part of Valencia that year and couldn’t find it. I’m so weird I think I even ASKED Michelle which book it was in. I don’t remember This was 2012.

So yesterday I was looking up the reprint of Chelsea Girls and opened to the first page on Amazon.

THE RED BEADS WERE THERE. Not in Michelle Tea’s book. I hadn’t thought about this red bead search for four years!

I hope I have this story somewhat correct. Maybe Sarah did say Chelsea Girls and I got confused with Michelle Tea’s memoir, The Chelsea Whistle. Either way, I can’t believe I found the red beads passage four years later while not looking. This is a very anti-climatic blog post for anyone but myself, C’est la vie.

I emailed with Eileen the other week because I’d sent her a copy of my book WOMEN. She said she was having self-care Friday. It’s 4p.m. I said, and I just brushed my teeth.

The day starts late, she responded. That’s just how it is. 

Sounds EXACTLY like a line from Chelsea Girls. 

for the crazies

in your life. the Strand Bookstore knows what’s up. I have FRESH new 2nd edition copies of WOMEN with an intro slash essay my editor/publisher Elizabeth Ellen wrote that is NOT in the 1st edition. It will make a great holiday gift for your ex, daughter, lover, cousin, or frenemy. just tell me who to sign it to, and Paypal me $14.00 at cocomonet@gmail.com for a personalized signed copy and a surprise.

masshole reading

in high school when we’d drive behind a MA license plate, my friends and i would always say: “masshole.”

i’m doing a reading and Q & A at Berkshire Community College on November 19th. it’s at 12:30p.m.

6 things i have learned

while line editing i’ll tell you in person w/ ruth curry:

don’t say ‘things’
do not say ‘things’
don’t say ‘things’!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
don’t say ‘thing’
don’t say ‘thing’ when you can say something else
don’t say ‘things’ when you can be precise

thank you gracie wilcox

I feel compelled to apologize for self-promoting on my website. WTF? It’s MY website. Plus, isn’t that what people do all day on Tumblr? Re-post shit about themselves? So I’m going to re-post things, too. I don’t have a tumblr.

When I lived in Portland in 2013, I taught a class ONE Saturday at the Independent Resource Center. In that class, I met my BFF Fran and also Ben Jatos. Ben was such a kind and funny guy and some how had read Legs Get Led Astray (how, Ben?). He invited me to Fort Vancouver High School where he taught English. He taught some my essays to his students and thought it would be cool if I came to talk to them. He picked me up in downtown Portland where I as dog sitting/housesitting for the writer Cameron Pierce.

Yesterday Ben got in touch to tell me one of his students, Gracie Wilcox wrote the below piece. If I didn’t admit this mde my day…I’d be a monster.

Chloe Caldwell is my Savior


              Last year, I was advised by my favorite English teacher, Ben Jatos, to read one of his most beloved collection of essays, “Legs Get Led Astray” by Chloe Caldwell. I had never even heard of her, let alone expected to be so moved by every captivating word she published from here on out. He handed me the mint-condition, sleek, paperback-covered book and my emotions were never the same. In these essays were the most beautiful and inspiring stories I had ever had access to and I couldn’t believe someone with so much talent, someone I truly hoped to end up like in the world of literature, was not that well known. I finished it in a week.

Whenever I write, I think about her. I think about how open her essay was written on her dear friend who overdosed, and how the last thing they did was paint a mural and drank cheap wine in her apartment until all hours of the night (please don’t quote me, it was a year ago). I think about the super faint memory of the last essay in the entire book, and how I can’t even remember the name of it, but I know that it made me crave and ache for more pages and words.

I thought about Chloe today when I was asked to fill out my theater-bio-questionnaire, and how it asked “Favorite motto”. The first thing that came to mind was this:”I can accept that all I’ve ever wanted

is not very special —all I’ve ever wanted,

like most people, is proof of love.”And trust me people, this is only a hint of how great it gets.

I thought about this when I got home as well, because I didn’t realize how at the time it was so relatable. I mean, of course it’s “relatable”. Everyone is looking for proof of love, whether it be in a significant other, friend, or a stripper. But I didn’t realize how much love I had been longing for until I was tossing and turning over her words.

It’s a horrible feeling, desiring love. Not just love, but acceptance. It’s even worse when you had it. You grasped it, experienced it, and never thought it would leave you… until it does. It makes you feel like this is all the world has for you. Connections with others, people you let down and either love too much or don’t love enough. I’m fearful, because I don’t want to live a life where I’ll never be able to decide for myself, on what I want, how I feel, or what I love. This is why I write. I feel like if others know what I have to say, I’ll miraculously end up surrounded by people just as lost and anxious of the universe around me as I am. Something I always assumed I would have was love, and I’m scared that it’s not something you can possess. What if it’s something that floats throughout us day to day, and we give, and give, and give, never noticing what we don’t take. I think of all the people around me, and it depresses me even more to know that I don’t find happiness or acceptance in any of them. And I’m the only one to blame.

Chloe Caldwell’s “Legs Get Led Astray” gave me so much wonderment for what she had to say. It gives me hope that I can fill someone’s heart with that much satisfaction with just my words, if and when I become a writer someday. She’s what you call, #goals.

I seriously love you Chloe. Thank you for wanting proof of love. The one thing we spend our lives searching for.

Sniff, sniff! It is particularly moving to me when teenagers read and enjoy my stuff. I was such a shitty student and failed my high school classes. I did not know I wanted to write. I did not know high school girls would ever be reading a book by me. I love you too Gracie. You will definitely become a writer–you already are one.

emotionally distraught & bored

 I have read Women cover to cover twice, and flicked through it endlessly. Every single time I am both emotionally distraught and bored. 

this review of Women is fascinating to me, so am re-posting. it is both incredibly flattering and insulting. it is, essentially, exactly the person i want to read this book–or rather, to keep with the motivation to write this book, i kept hoping it would one day lend comfort to an ’emotionally exhausted’ woman going through a break up with another book. it was the book i’d been looking for. the writer says the anecdotes feel like they were ripped from her life. when i read, that’s usually what i’m looking for, so hearing this makes my heart happy. i do not know the writer’s name, but this is her tumblr.

reviews of Women never hurt me even when they’re bad, because i know i did my best. for my essay collection though, coming out next year, i am planning to not read reviews. i can’t. it’ll fuck me up, i know it. when people attack your essay collection, they are usually attacking you too, or at least it feels that way.

i was listening to an interview with jenni konner & lena dunham, and jenni was like, “i always tell lena her gravestone is going to say, she read the comments.

****

Women is a story that came into my life exactly when I could most appreciate it. I bookmarked the webpage, intending to buy it, one day after my first girlfriend had broken up with me. I was heartbroken and confused, but it wasn’t until two months later, still in the midst of the same breakup (and just the right type of emotionally exhausted to really connect with the writing), that my best friend lent me her copy.

I feel like this novella is the type where everyone who reads it takes something very different from the experience. For me, this was less of a love story than a breakup story. There are situations documented in it that are wholly peculiar to having your heart broken by the first woman you ever slept with and loved (and obsessed over). At times it felt like the anecdotes had been ripped straight from my life.

I have sent at least five, badly-edited photographs of passages from Women, to my ex, my real life version of Finn. Hours after picking Women up for the first time she messages me to say that she’s taken the train all the way to my house (I live over an hour away from her), only to realise that we are now broken up, and turn back to the station. Unsure of what to say, I send her the first photograph. 

“Well, it’s cool that my first was you. I’m glad it was you, I say.”

She says she remembers me quoting this to her before. In fact, I said something entirely too similar during our first and official breakup. But I’ve only just finished the book that night so I can’t have quoted it then.

Truthfully, I’m not sure if I can say Women is a good book. It is overwhelmingly maudlin, and saturated in detail. It turns me into all of my friends who told me to just block her already, goddamnit; I want to take the protagonist firmly by the shoulders and make her see that she needs to stop feeding the fire before it burns her out.

Page 42 starts, “On a park bench one evening, after Finn gets out of work, and before I go in, I read her poems from A Dream of a Common Language. She says Adrienne Rich scares her a little. I am learning that many things scare her a little. She has a Tea Tree toothpick in her mouth. She has the posture of a teenaged boy. I want to pummel her, wrestle her in the grass, give her new blue jeans grass stains, hump her leg.”

I understand, I do, the details are important. In love, in heartbreak, they feel like everything. They make it real. They transported me into the protagonist’s world so that I could feel her infatuation myself, so I could feel like Finn was my lover too. They do not become interesting. I have read Women cover to cover twice, and flicked through it endlessly. Every single time I am both emotionally distraught and bored.

I’m not sure if I can recommend this story to you. It feels as if it can’t have been written with any other audience in mind but me. And besides that, it feels like heartbreak–and not the self-indulgent kind. What it feels like is catching the train home after your latest fight with her: you have to keep living your life in the interim (before you see her again), and you have to deal with your feelings while you wait.

I ordered my copy on Monday; I will not be reuniting my best friend with hers until it arrives.

Installment 12: Chloe & Fran are cranky babies

Chloe and Frances Badalamenti discuss writing, escapism, milky drinks, and Friends.

Fran Badalamenti:  It’s good to start this conversation; it’s been a while.  You’ve been really busy editing your book and going to the city for readings and teaching courses and I’ve been busy beating myself up over the new writing project that I am working on and preparing for my first MFA residency.  

It seems that when we both need to be truly comforted at the end of a hard day, like most dumb-ass Americans, we tend to curl up with a movie or a TV show.  Last night, we were chatting about how you watch Friends and that I watch The Golden Girls when we need to feel super cozy and safe.  Ironically I was listening to an older This American LIfe (episode 226, Dec 6th 2002) the other day on the topic of watching rerun sitcoms for comfort.  Like there is something about a sense of comfort in watching old shitty reruns instead of say first runs that are just airing.  The woman Ira Glass was talking to said reruns makes her think of a kid laying on a shag rug in a suburban living room and that makes her feel cozy.  

As quirky as that is, I totally get it.  Like I have these memories of being an adult in my old room at my Dad’s house in Jersey feeling super overwhelmed from spending too much time with family and being stressed and jet lagged by travel and being on eggshells because my stepmother is so OCD but then turning on nighttime cable and finding these reruns of great old shows.  I’m on the crappy pullout couch with my kid who also loves old sitcoms like Seinfeld and The Golden Girls and Full House and then I am suddenly overcome with this true sense of warmth and comfort and familiarity that is almost hard to explain.  I mean, nothing comforts me more than a good book, but is a different kid of comfort because you still have to use your brain to read whereby when you watch a stupid sitcom you can lay in a pool of drool with your brain on the nightstand.  

Is that what you were looking for last night when you said you were gonna watch Friends?  Who is your favorite character on Friends?  Didn’t whats-his-face have a pet monkey for a while?  WTF?

My favorite Golden Girls character was Dorothy, who was played by the late Bea Arthur.  Dorothy is hysterical and dry and had such an epic sense of style.  God I love those old bitches!

CC:  Yeah Ross had a pet monkey with a funny ridiculous name, I forget. To be honest I like Rachel. I really liked her body shape before she got really skinny. I’ve always liked her skin and hair color. If I had to date one of the guys I guess it would be Ross or Chandler, how bout you?? The night I talked to you, I ended up not watching Friends, but Conan O’ Brien. My ultimate escape and comfort though, is Sex & The City.  Last night I watched the one where she gets a job as a freelancer at Vogue, and when she gets there her editor rips her to shreds. 

Lately I’m working a ton on the last leg of my book and teaching so I give myself some sort of treat at night. I notice I bribe myself with chocolate or wine or a movie if I’ve worked all day. It’s so heady—my essays and my students’ essays, so at night I need to not think. I am obsessed though, with this writer Therese Bohman and her novels are my new great escape. I feel about her how people feel about 50 Shades of Gray, I think. She writes about these small towns in Sweden and her narrator always gets in these fucked up psychological affairs and is generally really misanthropic. I wonder, when I am done with my book edits and teaching less if I will still need such escape at night. You recently said you need a hot milky beverage to comfort yourself like a baby while you write. What else do you comfort yourself with? I was just telling my roommate that sometimes at like 6pm. I’m like, yay, the day is over, I don’t have to look at my book for some hours, I can sleep it off. I get excited to go to bed. And then repeat the same thing tomorrow. Is that depressing?

FB:  I think that the pet monkey that Ross had was named Marcel.  I didn’t look it up, I swear.  I would date Chandler over Ross and then Ross over Joey.  Sex and the City is an epic escape, I agree.  One of my all time favorite New Year’s Eves I spent alone on a pullout couch at my brother’s old apartment in Jersey City binge-watching old Sex and the City episodes.  What I didn’t know is that I was about leave my husband for the guy that became my second husband, so it was this beautiful calm before a crazy storm in my life.  

So I do comfort myself with these silly shows and movies that I love like Woody Allen’s Manhattan or like we’re talked about, Lost in Translation.  I also weathered a super depressing and difficult time in my life on a lumpy couch in a damp rental cottage on the Oregon coast with old VHS tapes of the amazing British comedy series Absolutely Fabulous.  Like we are saying, these things become pure escapism from our lives and from the hard work that we do as writers.  Turning to books is wonderful, but like you are saying, sometimes the heady stuff does not fare well during these heavier times and we need to turn to escapist novels that take us to Sweden or Norway or some shit.  I binged all of Vendela Vida’s novels over the summer in that exact way.     

Yes — when I write, I need to have a hot milky beverage near me. It makes me feel like an insane baby who cannot self-soothe.  I also need music, but it has to be a certain kind of music that sets the mood for what I am working on so I often listen to Miles Davis and an assortment of singer-songwriters.  Sometimes I simply have to leave the fucking house and calm my nervous system by being around other human people.  Although the other day, I was working in a café and someone got their laptop stolen while they were in the bathroom.  That has changed my perspective on working in cafes because I pee a lot and can’t imagine dragging all my shit into the bathroom.  Fuck.

I don’t think it’s depressing at all that you punch out at 6pm and find relief in not having to look at your work until the following morning.  It’s more of a survival mechanism, kind of how I feel about shoving my kid out of the house in the morning so I can unravel and feel like a person again.  You take on a lot by publishing the books that you publish and teaching those classes and reading through people’s traumas.  Without proper self-care, you would burn the fuck out and become a dick.  We made a promise to each other that we wouldn’t become dicks, so do what you gotta do to face the work head-on.        

CC:  You’re kind of pulling a Maggie Nelson right now (like in The Argonauts) and writing about someone you live with during the day, and then….living with them. is that weird at all? Do you compartmentalize?

FB:  Writing in what therapists refer to as the “here and now” has been really fucking challenging in ways that I cannot even describe.  I need so much warm milk.  It is also very rewarding and a way to make sense of the current state of my life which is something that I have never really done before.  I have always lived through shit in a pretty checked out state leaning hard on pot and wine and then I would have to somehow face it all later.  Looking at it and dealing with it currently through the writing is very painful because it is very real like a living documentary as opposed to remembering things through the filter of memory or making things up.

Jesus, Who am I?

One more for you — What part of the writing process do you think has been the most painful?  

CC: You are smart.

The most painful part of nonfiction, I’d say isn’t the beginning or end of works. The beginning and end are exciting. But the middle hurts. It’s where the hardest work is being done, and what makes it even more painful is that there is no one to really share it with at the point–it’s the point when it’s still so raw that it’s not ready for feedback from even friend’s or your first reader or editor yet. It’s isolating, but also like a delicious secret you have with yourself. No one is making you do it. I don’t mean the literal middle part of the essay, I mean the middle of the process.

I remember having some bad days while writing Women. I would get angry or hurt, thinking about pain I’ve had in relationships.

Writing some new essays for my new book were depressing at times. It gets to be a bummer—reliving shitty memories. Getting it down is fun, crafting it later, alone, is harder. It’s mind muscle exercise.

Now I’m in the fun part of my book. For example, I mention Cheez-Its in the essay about my parents’ divorce, and my editor Ruth, in her line edits, commented, “Cheez-Its! Remind me to make you my homemade ones sometime.”

I can’t even start to explain how much more fun it is to have Ruth and Emily in my manuscript. It’s so relieving, like, I don’t have to be alone anymore! It is strange to be having this light conversation in the middle of the essay when writing the essay was so dark. When I was in the throes of it, there was no way I could envision someone commenting about home-made Cheez-Its. Her comment was like the light at the end of the tunnel.

Cheez-Its are so fucking good. The ultimate comfort food.

***

animals

i had such a good time at KGB the other night. i’ve been to so many cities w chelsea and elizabeth: tuscaloosa, st. paul, montreal, toronto, los angeles, oberlin, oxford, even montego bay in Jamaica….you get the picture. but we’ve never been in NYC together.

(last night chloe chelsea and i stayed in our hotel room with a bottle of whiskey and played a game where we each took a turn picking a different music video from the 90s to watch/sing/dance along with. i was SHOCKED and DISMAYED that neither chelsea nor chloe had heard this song or (even more shocking – they call themselves feminists!) ‘violet’ by hole (wth). go on take everything, take everything i want you to…–e.e.)

The Standard Hotel

at the chelsea hotel

i acquired three books last week: e.e. gave me BAD SEX by Clancy Martin, i swapped a copy of WOMEN w/ Uzodinma Okehi for his just released book, OVER FOR ROCKWELL, and i bought this book, which is pretty great so far.