Studio of the Voice: Marcia Aldrich Interviewed by Cindy Bradley

Marcia Aldrich’s new essay collection, Studio of the Voice, is a beautiful, elegiac, nostalgic, unflinching rumination on what it means not only to be a woman, but to be alive. Marcia interrogates relentlessly, essaying her way through tough subjects with verve that is distinctly hers. Speaking with Marcia about her new book was an absolute delight.

        

Cindy Bradley, Editor

        

        

Cindy Bradley: First, I’d like to talk a little bit about form. Studio of the Voice is divided into five sections: “The Stronger One,” “Studio of the Voice,” “Sidestroke,” “Enough,” and “The Art of Being Born.” Except for “The Stronger One,” which contains four essays, each section consists of five essays, and each section explores a different theme. Was this intentional, a way to structure the collection, a sort of “sorting” technique?

Marcia Aldrich

Marcia Aldrich: In 2010, I organized a panel at Associated Writing Programs convention called “The Essayist’s Dilemma,” about the challenges of organizing a book of essays that isn’t shaped as a memoir with an overarching narrative, or built around the exploration of a single, identifiable subject, such as the homeless crisis in Los Angeles, that can be stated in ten words or less. Putting together a collection, the essayist must protect the stand-alone essay from being subsumed into an artificial memoir. Like a book of poems or short stories, in a collection of essays each essay should stand on its own, with its own formal characteristics—a reader should be able to open the book to any essay and read it without requiring what came before. That said, I tried with Studio of the Voice to curate a collection of essays that would be enriched by the arrangement and each singular essay strengthened by the others.

To answer your question, the five sections aren’t accidental or arbitrary, and the essays contained within each section are carefully chosen and arranged. In fact, after the book won the prize at Wandering Aengus Press, Julie Riddle, who was tasked with a final assessment of the manuscript before we sent it off to the printers, suggested that “Rejection” was in the wrong place. Originally I had placed it as the final essay of the first section, “The Stronger One,” which, upon reflection, made no sense. Her outside eyes made me see that it belonged where it now is, the final essay in the section “Enough,” which is less explicitly about family dynamics than about the female writer’s life. As a final note on this subject, it isn’t easy to assemble a collection that is more than its parts, or at least it hasn’t been easy for me. At long last, I love the way the essays in this collection fall into place.

CB: Oh, I would have loved to have sat in on that panel! There’s so much to consider when putting together an essay collection. I love what you say about protecting the stand-alone essay from being subsumed into an artificial memoir.

In the “Stronger One” section, you introduce readers to your mother, your fraught mother-daughter relationship, family dynamic, and your subsequent fraught relationship with your own daughter. The opening essay, “The Mother Bed,” maps the relationship between your parents, leading to their practice of sleeping in separate beds. You write that your father seemed okay with the arrangement, as long as no one spoke about it. That was the deal they made. “Here we come to a point that is, for obvious reasons, of special concern to me. For out of this silent deal, I was born, and out of it grew my child’s sense of a self in a family.” What a weighty line! Reading this gave me pause—I realized how this feeling must have been something of a compass guiding you through your childhood, and during an era when we didn’t really speak of such things, instead kept the ways we felt different from our friends to ourselves.

MA: You’re right. I felt like an outsider in my family from the very beginning, and it has been defining. In my first book, Girl Rearing, the first line is “I was born in an alley,” establishing my outsider status from birth. I published an essay called “Grub” in Passages North years ago that begins:

“Who am I: A loner walking. It doesn’t matter whether you put curtains up in my room, make me sit down in a chair at dinner, force a fork and spoon into my hands, or make me wear skirts, it won’t change anything. I am outside.”

And then later in the essay:

“What I am: I am a grubber.

“Nothing comes easily to me—not love—first love or any other, not desire, mine or others for me, conceiving a child, giving birth, burying a parent.”

CB: This is really powerful, Marcia. Reading these words really informs what you’re still exploring in this collection. It does seem that the more memoirists excavate, the more we still have to go.

The “Stronger One” section also explores the many iterations of “trouble,” starting with its origins: “The trouble with troubled relationships is they are troubled.” Yes, so true! You talk about absorbing other people’s trouble, “the sorrow that leaks out of car windows,” your mother blaming you for all the trouble that caused huge fights between her and your father, and then closing out the section, we learn of the trouble in your relationship with your daughter and how “the role of mother swallows the woman—from the daughter’s point of view.” I found so many nuggets here, so many instances of recognition, of what’s relatable. You say you began absorbing trouble at a young age, that it began by trying to understand your mother. Being a woman is often equated with trouble, and vice versa, don’t you think?

MA: Yes. Trouble in its many shapes is one of the recurring themes of the book. Women are often equated with trouble and often find themselves in trouble. It’s so common that most of us grow up internalizing the view that trouble has a gender and it is female. I certainly saw my mother as trouble incarnate. There is a long, troubling history of seeing women’s sexuality as embodying trouble, trouble for others and trouble for themselves. Need I mention Freud? I was haunted by my mother’s depression and lack of affection for me and my father. I struggled for most of my life trying to understand the causes of her unhappiness (and her inability to do anything about it), which I connected with restrictive gender roles that stifled my mother’s independence and sense of self.

A few of the essays in Studio of the Voice address the issue of women’s sexuality directly. I’m thinking in particular of “The Blue Dress,” wherein I tackle living in New York City at a particularly unsafe time when a rapist was targeting buildings in the neighborhood where I lived. That specific occasion opens up my history of feeling preyed upon as a young girl and woman and my evolving anger and retaliation in wearing the blue dress. The whole section called “Studio of the Voice” is about women’s difficulties coming to voice, whether it be me in the title essay or the way Marilyn Monroe was so narrowly appreciated that few saw or appreciated her athleticism, or how the character of Bree Daniels in the movie Klute used her sexuality to gain a power and control she felt had been taken from her.

CB: In the essay “The Stronger One,” you write of your father, who you admit you’ve assigned a supporting role, who you made “small in the stories I told of it. In them you are a secondary character, minor to others’ major status.” I find this so fascinating—we’re part of a generation when fathers were often “absent” or “unavailable,” and the job of parenting fell to the mother. But in your case, you intentionally wrote your father into a supporting role. Can you talk a little about this, any difficulties (or not) in writing about family in general, and specifically, writing about your father this way? Do you ever see family members differently after you write about them compared to how you saw them before?

MA: It’s true—I’ve spent most of my writing life not thinking about my father, instead rehabilitating my mother. When I was in graduate school I read Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, a novel I have written about. In the novel, banishing the father (who dies in a train wreck) authorized an exploration of the female life of generations of women. No work so sharply made me see how a male character and tradition can marginalize female life. I needed to portray my relationship with my mother before I could turn to my father.

And yes again. Writing about my father has changed how I see him now. I can now see how much I identified with him, how much I was like him—for good or bad. It has become clear how much I owe him. It is probably because of my father that I became a girl with ambitions and yearnings that led me into writing. Because at times he treated me like an only son, I had opportunities early on in life. He was behind my being an athlete—a swimmer, a tennis player, an equestrian. Because of him, I sang in choirs and became a lifelong singer. When I look at who I am, what has mattered and matters to me, I see my father behind a great deal. That’s not the whole story, of course. As the essay makes clear, my father did not listen to me, did the best he could to stomp out my voice. Still, writing the essay helped me recover a more complete portrait of who my father was.

CB: It’s interesting to hear your thoughts now, all these years later. Your mother is front and center for much of your book, with your father in his supporting role, yet his influence in your life, your drive, your ambitions, is there on the periphery.

You have a rich history with Under the Sun, from frequent contributor to valued member of the advisory board. In fact, one of the reasons I submitted my own work to Under the Sun was your presence in the journal. I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about “She and I (a Field of Force),” which originally appeared in Under the Sun. Here you examine the mother-daughter dynamic, only this time it’s between you and your daughter. You write so eloquently of the shifting tides, when mother is the sun, moon, and stars, and how, by the eighth grade, your daughter was “openly evaluating my character. She no longer accepted me at face value.” So many mothers can relate to this: our daughters changing, their scrutiny, eyes and souls boring into us, observing our every move, looking for the flaws, the perceived weaknesses. “When I became a mother, I thought that the watching would be finished, or if not finished, that I would be the one who did the watching.” Isn’t this the truth. The cycle continues, and although the circumstances may be quite different, daughters-as-mothers find themselves on the receiving end of what they doled out to their own mothers. This is a wonderful essay to close out the first section, alluding to the “trouble” that is often inherent in so many mother-daughter relationships. So not a question so much as a statement of how well you write of the highs and lows found between daughter/mother and mother/daughter.

MA: Let me then give a nod of gratitude for your remarks.

CB: The title essay, “Studio of the Voice,” written in a list form, is such a delight to read. You reference Jane Eyre, Jamaica Kincaid, Joan Didion, as you explore the ways in which girls and women are silenced, what it takes to find our voices. I’m a big fan of craft and the choices writers make in crafting a particular piece of writing. You’re not one to shy away from utilizing a variety of craft techniques in your writing. “Inflammatory Questions” is an essay about writing where the same sentences appear in different order in three separate columns, providing slightly different meanings. Do you find experimenting with craft allows a certain creativity or freedom in your writing? Did you set out to craft an essay in certain forms, or did the essays craft themselves?

MA: I’ve just published a craft essay on the Brevity Blog called “Too Vast for Words.” Dinty Moore, Brevity’s editor, wisely proposed a subtitle: “Writing Prompts for Large Subjects.” Voice qualifies as a large subject, one that is very difficult to write about head on. Overwhelming. Where to begin? And so I had to come at it from the side or through the back door, and, yes, formal constraints and principles help me begin to get at what I might have to say. The list essay is a wonderful thing—selection and arrangement matter a great deal. There’s power that accrues over the course of the essay, built through the voices of others, my many mothers, as the epigraph of my book puts it.

I’ve also just finished another essay, “On Difficulty,” currently under review, that talks about “Inflammatory Questions” as well as other innovative essays I’ve written, for example, my use of the alphabet as a structuring device. “Inflammatory Questions” was inspired by Jenny Holzer’s “Inflammatory Essays,” which I encountered at the Broad Museum in Los Angeles. Her work consists of monumental columns filled with brief texts that Holzer has written. The same words recur at different positions in the columns, with a dazzling effect that relies on the principle of repetition. Holzer’s mini-essays captured the uncertainty about my voice as a writer, my struggles to understand myself, my origins—questions that can never be resolved. They can only be asked again. Its craft (its power, I hope) is incantatory, not expository. I wrote to a rhythm, a time signature.

CB: Absolutely incantatory, rhythmic, such a unique nod to the circulatory nature of writing, of being inside a writer’s mind.

One of my favorite pieces in the collection is “Bree Daniels.” Bree is a prostitute, or, as we might now say, a sex entrepreneur, in the film Klute, brilliantly portrayed by Jane Fonda. I remember the film, but only vaguely remember the details. In this essay, readers encounter another incarnation of voice: “When she answers the phone, which she does repeatedly, and says Bree Daniels, her voice is dark and throaty and rich—masterful.” Something about this line is so hypnotic. In the essay you also say that if you were asked which film character you feel closest to, you’d pick Bree Daniels. You admit that “She’s mixed-up, hanging onto some core of herself by the skin of her teeth. But she is so very alive.” Can you talk a little more about this, what about Bree is so attractive, so compelling … and why we so often fall for the flawed characters?

MA: Asking what film character you feel closest to is a wonderful prompt. I recommend it for teachers who want to surprise their students and for those outside of the classroom who might surprise themselves with what they write. I came up with this prompt when I was co-writing with Jill Talbot. For a period of time we were trading prompts. I came up with this one, and it didn’t work for her, so I went on to write “Bree Daniels” for myself. What’s interesting about the prompt is the possibility that we’ll pick someone who embodies our fantasies about ourselves, is the heroine we wish we were, someone who excels where we fail. That might produce an interesting essay if the writer examines why she dreams of being something she isn’t. I didn’t take that route. I picked someone who feels like a cinematic version of me, not a prettied-up version but a down-and-dirty version, the real dope. As you say, she is flawed. That’s true, but I’d say she’s struggling to do more than survive in a tough world that works against her at nearly every turn. She isn’t getting what she wants, which is success in her acting career. To support herself, and also to pump up her sense of power, she turns tricks, which she knows she’s good at (in contrast to her acting). She has no control over her acting career, is beholden to the whims of others, casting directors, for example, whereas she believes she has control over her career as a call girl—although this control comes under attack in the course of the movie and she has to reevaluate that as well. For me the movie is one of the most intense studies of a young woman struggling with her own vulnerability and the self-destructive strategies she employs to protect herself. There’s also something about her voice, which again comes close to mine. When I hear that voice, it feels like I’m talking.

CB: Yes! I love that you mention the possibility of picking someone who embodies our fantasies about ourselves, someone we wish we were. You are so right about that. Taking another route, a “cinematic version” of you, a “down-and-dirty” version is fabulous! You’ve got me wanting to watch Klute again with all this in mind.

The section “Enough” explores writing. In “Mothers, Writers” you examine the hurt and harm that can be caused when writing about one’s children, and how she (the narrator) rarely writes about her own children. In “Enough” you write that it’s not enough to be a success, while also acknowledging a constant conflict, that you are the woman who was disappointed and the woman who was tired of being disappointed, and how these two women “never fit happily in the same bed.” You admit that “All roads lead back to my mother.” Wow, Marcia, this is so profound, landing as it does toward the end of the book, when you’ve taken us on such a deep journey. To know that after everything, the circle ends where it began. There’s a simplicity to this line that holds layers and layers of depth. Your writing triggers all kinds of receptors in the reader, and for those readers who are also writers, prompts all kinds of ideas for their own writing as well. In fact, this entire collection can be seen as a map of sorts, which is a beautiful accomplishment.

MA: Thanks for saying so! I don’t have anything to add.

CB: I know we’ve just skimmed the surface of your collection. I also wanted to recognize Studio of the Voice winning the Wandering Aengus Book Award in nonfiction. Congratulations, what a well-deserved honor! What was that process like? Was the manuscript you submitted the same as the finished product or was there lots of editing along the way? So many of our readers are also writers, budding and experienced, and find the publication journey both fascinating and daunting. For instance, there’s the debate of previously published work in a collection, what percentage of previously published is acceptable vs. what’s new. Any nuggets of wisdom you’ve learned along the way you can share are much appreciated!

MA: Earlier I spoke of the essayist’s dilemma, and I speak from experience. I’ve had a fair amount of success writing and publishing stand-alone essays, but I’ve struggled curating a collection that includes some of them. Even now I’ve published so many essays that aren’t in Studio of the Voice and won’t be in any collection (I’m guessing) because they don’t lend themselves to building a book. They operate on their own terms. It’s been a lengthy, often discouraging process to put together the right essays in the right structure that creates a book. I’ve tried different combinations that fell short. The essays themselves were good, were fine, but I hadn’t managed to craft an overall satisfying structure. It’s been harder than you might think. I’ve had to ditch perfectly good essays because they didn’t fit. The rejected pile from the book is quite extensive and sometimes heartbreaking. There are many presentations at conferences about this issue: how to build the book from essays, not a memoir. Some writers embrace the principle of the miscellany, the collection of disparate pieces. That’s great if you can find a publisher. And then, one day, I put together Studio and it worked, it clicked. Why? Gosh if I know. There’s a lot of mystery to this writing business. And here we are, the book is formally available today.

Wandering Aengus does have a review process after acceptance, and it’s a very helpful one in my experience. My manuscript was sent to the very talented Julie Riddle, a fine writer, who went through my manuscript to find any errors, missed words, misspelled words, incorrect verb tense, grammatical problems, and so on. She really made sure the book was clean. She also made the suggestion I mentioned earlier of moving “Rejection,” and that was a good call. She did not tamper with the writing, and even if she had, I was under no obligation to accept her recommendation. I was grateful for her catches and pleased with the process. The women who volunteer their time for Wandering Aengus Press are miracles of generosity and goodwill. I’ve never felt so supported. Well, I’d have to say that my little chapbook Edge with New Michigan Press, edited by Ander Monson, was also a wonderful experience. He’s a very smart, supportive editor.

In conclusion, I find publishing essays to be much less difficult and less emotionally taxing than books. I write the essay, I send it out, sometimes it gets accepted and appears, and then I move on. The process is over. Books are another thing. All kinds of different skills are involved, and when the book is in print, it is often up to you, the writer, to promote it, or get the word out about it. And quite frankly, I’m not very good at that. So while publishing a book is a happy occasion, it is also an anxiety-producing one for me.

CB: This is valuable information, and I thank you for sharing your process with us. The publishing world has gone through many transformations, with self-promoting a big one. That’s tough, especially for writers who may not have a big social media presence. You bring up many points to consider.
In closing, I’d like to ask a few quick-round questions to have fun with:

a) Where is your happy place?

MA: Almost two years ago we moved to Ventura, California, into a three-story townhouse. On the third story is a large balcony porch where I have created a sanctuary of beauty. I have hanging plants and chimes, comfy chairs. I like to go up there and read. I can see the tops of a stand of eucalyptus trees from there and the most intense sunsets of my life. My dogs usually accompany me and sit by my feet. I feel unbelievably lucky when I am up there.

b) What is your favorite word?

MA: Don’t think I have one that tops all others. Looking at Studio of the Voice, I’d pick a few really powerful words that animate the book and my world: Mother. Trouble. Enough. Voice.

c) Which fictional character do you most resonate with?

MA: Jane Eyre. Determined to survive, destined to . . .

d) What is the best piece of advice you’ve been given, writing or otherwise?

MA: “I am writing for myself and strangers” (Gertrude Stein). Otherwise, “First, get serious.”

e) What is your current obsession? Book, TV show, food, drink, we’d love to know!

MA: I asked my husband about this, and he said: “Death.” I said : “Oh no!” So I’ll say Negroni, the cocktail. I visited Italy for the first time last May and had a Negroni in Rome and, well, the rest is history.

CB: Thank you, Marcia! What a pleasure to read your book and have the opportunity to ask you a few questions. We appreciate you!

Marcia Aldrich is the author of the free memoir Girl Rearing, published by W.W. Norton, and of Companion to an Untold Story, which won the AWP Award in Creative Nonfiction. She is the editor of Waveform: Twenty-First-Century Essays by Women, published by the University of Georgia Press. Her chapbook EDGE was published by New Michigan Press. Studio of the Voice is forthcoming from Wandering Aengus Press. Her website: marciaaldrich.com. Her essays have been included in The Best American Essays.