Mindy: Welcome to Writer Writer Pants on Fire, where authors talk about things that never happened to people who don't exist. We also cover craft, the agent hunt, query trenches, publishing, industry, marketing and more. I'm your host, Mindy McGinnis. You can check out my books and social media at mindymcginnis dot com and make sure to visit the Writer Writer Pants on Fire blog for additional interviews, query critiques and more as well as full transcriptions of each podcast episode. at WriterWriterPants on Fire.com. And don’t forget to check out the Writer, Writer, Pants on Fire Facebook page. Give me feedback, suggest topics you’d like to hear discussed, and let me know if there is someone you’d love to see a a guest.
Mindy: We're here with Janet Sternburg who is the author of White Matter, which is a fascinating little bit of family history that touches on something that I personally am very invested in which is the treatment of mental illness and the misunderstanding of mental illness in the past. And how certain procedures - in this case lobotomies - have been overused. Janet writes extensively about this in her book White Matter. So if you would just like to start out by talking a little bit about who you are, what you do and how you came to write White Matter.
Janet: First of all, I am a writer and always have been from when I can remember. But in 1998 to that I added photography. So I am now a pretty serious fine arts photographer. And my latest work, my newest book is actually a book of photography with text. White Matter came out in 2016. So I hope you'll understand me as someone who both shuttles back and forth between two art forms and sometimes connects them. And who spent the years essentially give or take, let's just say 2016 is when it was published, I probably started White Matter in 2006. That means it took me a very long time to write this book because I wanted to first of all answer a question that is fairly unique to my own family. And then I wanted to answer it in the book by both telling the story of my family and then also connecting it with the larger developments in the history of medical treatment.
The unique thing about my family is my mother was one of six children, essentially a Polish, Russian, Jewish second generation family. When the six children became adults, two of the six were given lobotomies, but it's very unusual to have two in one's immediate family. And I say immediate because even though it's my aunt and uncle, I grew up with them, they were around all the time, both before and after. So I felt I had to write a book when I realized many years later how unusual this was. You know, when you're a kid, everything seems normal. It's what you accept and only later did I discover - not at all. And then that posed a whole set of difficult questions for me. What happened? How could it have happened? Were the right decisions made? Had my family, who I always thought were good people, in fact done something rather awful to their own kin? Was it the best they could do given the circumstances? So that was the point at which I felt I have to write this book.
Mindy: You bring up so many good points that I want to continue talking about. But that sense of hindsight - you're absolutely right when you're a child, everything around you is normalized. So you think that other people are living lives that are similar. I grew up in a pretty conservative rural area of Ohio. So I just assumed everyone went to church. That that's what everyone did on Sunday morning, you went to church. I had no idea that there were people that did not participate in Christianity. When you grow up, run into other experiences and you're just like, oh wait a minute! And you have to rethink some of the things that happened in your life.
But in your case, that means actually questioning some of the decisions and then also the motives of people in your family. I know a lot of my listeners have the intent of possibly doing that as well. But when you're writing about yourself and about your own family, there's always the chance that people are not going to like the way they are portrayed. What was that like for you emotionally as a writer to be going through those movements of questioning your own mother and then your aunt's, but then also reactions within the family that you had decided to write about this thing?
Janet: First of all, I want to begin by saying that I don't consider this a memoir. This is not a commentary on your calling it that because the publisher wanted to - as all publishers do - give it a subtitle that essentially defined it. In the days when we all went to bookstores, it would be the cue - this is where to shelve it. Memoir. Why don't I like it? Because when I hear the word memoir, I hear me. That's the first part of it. Moi, that's the second part of it, in French. Me Me. I am not writing a book of Me Me, on the contrary. But let's call it a hybrid book. Some people have experienced it as almost like reading a novel, a page turner, what is going to happen in this family? Even though the reader knows what will happen.
And here is a writerly point about that aspect, which is I came to the understanding that it was going to be my voice that would pull the story along. Not me, Janet, but this person telling the story and I had to learn how to tell that story in a way that that aspect would keep a reader going. At the same time, it is - to use the language of fil, perhaps which I've worked a lot - its intercut with the history of medical illness, with neurology, some facts about how it works. And that goes back to the title. White Matter is the switchboard in the brain between the limbic ie the emotional brain and the frontal lobe, which makes all the executive decisions. So if you cut that switchboard and you are, for example, schizophrenic, or diagnosed as such, you may still hear voices that say “this is a terrible person, you should harm them.” They won't reach the frontal lobe where the decision is made. So to put it more simply. It's the link between feeling and thinking. And I wanted all that to be in the book as well and I won't go on. But there are other layers that I could talk about.
So it was a very large job of weaving, not to put too much information in or speculation or material that you would lose the thread of the story. So, having dealt with that question of “not a memoir,” I'll answer your other question directly. It was really hard because these people were people I knew and I did something, I'll tell you briefly what it is. It doesn't mean that anybody else should do it, but it was a good technique for me. I knew I needed to see them as people outside of me, as characters. It's not my uncle. As not my mother. How do you do that for me? What I found was something that you may or may not know. It's called the Enneagram and it's a personality system, in effect, that I won't even begin to get into now.
But it does have very useful and helpful and not reductive ways of seeing people. Because many personality systems do say, well you're this or you're that. The Enneagram is, I think, very good. So I was able to see, for example, my aunt Jen - somebody who had to get her own way who had underneath that a certain kind of vulnerability. My aunt Etta was somebody who wanted to make peace all the time and would not stand up against others, even though she was a very fine peacekeeper. But it didn't always work. So I was able to take some of those categories and give them to the people I know so that they stood outside me, they were characters. And then I tried - and this is partly why it took so long - to be, and here is a really hard one - as truthful as I could be, without having been there all the time. How do you do that? What kind of license to make things up?
So I kind of invented a guideline for myself, a little lantern and I called it scrupulous imagination, which meant I gave myself the leeway to imagine. But it was that I put so much thought into all of these people, and what might have happened. Also because my family left behind a lot of photographs and one aunt in particular a lot of writing, so I was able to infer from that. And that's where the scrupulous part came in, as close as I could be, to what I think. So now we get to the third part of your question, what did they think about it? By the time the book was published, they were all gone. At this point in my life, I'm quite alone, because my parents are gone. My aunts and uncles are gone. I had no brothers and sisters. I'm an only child, I don't have children, my cousins are gone, so I'm rather uniquely quite alone. I do have one cousin who is with us, She's 90. When I had done an earlier book called Phantom Limb, she was very troubled. She appeared in the book, I gave her a different name, I gave her different characteristics. But of course people know. She actually said to one of the aunts who was then alive, well how could Janet have done it? Then the aunt who was intelligent, but sort of two faced, said to her, well you know Janet is not telling the story raw, she's made it into something - I would like to hope, a work of art. This book with White Matter, that cousin said - you nailed it. You got it right, I can see them all. Because of course they're her aunts and uncles and her mother and her father. She said - You got it, I really could see them and you presented them in a way that brought them alive and yet you told the story in a way that made it fair. It was okay. Thank God.
Mindy: I'm relieved to hear it. I also think that that is probably for a lot of writers that want to write about their own family members, whether they're putting up that filter and that screen of treating it as fiction or like you're saying using like the Enneagram or the personality test to kind of write a caricature of the real person. I think that that's a really healthy approach. I really like that. I am familiar with Enneagram. I think that is a really fascinating choice to help you to develop them as characters. I think that that would probably bring a lot of light and also give you a different perspective.
Janet: One of the great things about the Enneagram, even though there's a typology of people, each individual typology has what they call the wings and they take you to how that person would interact with another kind of personality type. And you could get a sense of what the dynamics that I knew what they were already. But I didn't know why it might be inevitable for the particular, let's just say the wound of one person to inflict itself on another. It really did help me work, but whatever speaks to you, you know.
There was something you just said a second ago that I wanted to come back to. I know what it is. I am a very big fan of hindsight, period. And I'll tell you two examples that go to the point of how hindsight is always changing. I am comfortable with the way that I presented the people in White Matter. But just the other day, I was thinking, you know the way that Sam was not very nice to my father. And the other day I was thinking about that in context of something present in my life. And I could see - you know how with a camera you can shift the focus? Well, the focus shifted. I saw different aspects. I saw long shot, medium shot - to use film - close up, whatever it was. The mind brought something new to that relationship.
The other thing is there are two books of mine that I did essentially in the early 80s, early 90s and they've been in print now… well, the first one for 40 years and the other one for 30 years. Their books about what it means to be a woman who writes, a contemporary woman. They're called The Writer On Her Work. And they were published by Norton. Has kept them in print because, well, for any number of reasons, presumably they still sell. But it was also because they were the first of its kind. And recently the literary archive, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin acquired my archive for those books, which is thrilling. I mean this means that all that material will be there forever. It's everything from my correspondence to the editing notes to the financials. It's all there.
Now, what is the point of why am I telling you this? Because they asked me to do an interview with them, a written one, about my thinking about these books. So we come to the issue of hindsight and I have had occasion to talk about these books and write about them a fair amount through the years. And it would have been very easy to say, well yeah, you know, pull out the regular old stuff that I've said before. I thought no, no, I'm going to look at it fresh. I'm going to look at this with hindsight. And so for example, when the interviewer said - if you were doing these books now, what would you do? And I said they shouldn't be done now. We need the other voices. We need to hear other points of view. So it's so wonderful to spend a life revisiting and continually using hindsight to reinvestigate one's work in one's life. And now that I'm old enough I can do it. I mean you can do it all your life. But now I really can.
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Mindy: But I want to go back to what you were saying about the relationship between Sam and your father and you kind of reconfiguring that in terms of a film and a close shot, medium shot, and a long shot and that giving you a new perspective. So that is a great example of you using your experience in film and also in photography and tying that into not only hindsight in your reactions to other people's relationships in the past, but also your writing. So if you could talk a little bit about those two mediums intersecting creatively and how they inform each other?
Janet: That's just a great question. I will add, it's a question I am going to spend the rest of my life answering. I'll also add that, now there are two books of mine that are out of my photography. The first one is called Overspilling World. And in that book there's an essay called “There For the Seeing” that I wrote. There were some other essays. I'm really kind of happy about that. I mean, the filmmaker Wen Wendors wrote an essay about my work and I didn't know him and I thought that was pretty wonderful. But I did write an essay in which I talked about living in the corridor between writing and photography. I talked about how writing for me, I called it the furrowed brow. I really tried to get things right. I'm waiting for a click - it's right. And that click can take years.
Photography is so much more immediate. It is so much more playful. I don't mean the photographers are playful. I mean the medium encompasses all kinds of subjects and kinds of ways of working. But you do have this joyful thing of going out in the world and seeing what comes to you in that world and bringing it back almost like a fisherman. You know, what do I have in my net? Then thinking, well, is this something that I'm interested in keeping? Do I want to work with it? I don't manipulate, but I crop. Is this something that is saying something about what I'm thinking about and don't even know what I'm thinking about? So it's a dynamic process that does not have as much suffering.
However, one of the things that really really interests me is the relationship of word to image and I got really interested in the long, long, long time ago when I was working for public television and I essentially got money from my then boss to do a very short film on a writer I adored, Virginia Woolf. The film was not trying to make somebody be her, more to evoke her and there was landscape and an actor who was evocative. And then I used a lot of writing of Virginia Woolf in voiceover and I learned this great big lesson. They fight each other, a whole lot of words and a whole lot of images fight.
And so I've been thinking about that one way or another ever since. I tried an experiment with a book of poems, Optic Nerve and it's from Red Hen, which is a wonderful poetry publisher, and now prose. And I tried inserting in the poem, not every poem only if some wanted it, a small image the size say of what a stanza would be. So the experience of reading would be starting at the top, going down, encountering an image, and then going on. And I'm not sure it really worked to be honest, but it gives you a sense of how I'm trying to think of them as forms that intersect.
The newest book that just came out in October is called I've Been Walking and its subtitle is Janet Sternburg Los Angeles Photographs. And they were all images that I took in one year, the year of the Lockdown. Not documenting it. I'm not a documentary photographer, I'm not a photographer who sort of manipulates and tries to make the work into a certain kind of art object. They’re both fine, it's just not what I do. However, what I discovered is that I do have the eye of a poet and that relates now to writing because I'm always, without knowing it, seeing what I think of as the more. And the more is the metaphor, What does this object, what does this thing have beyond how it simply looks on the surface? That's where it comes together. And finally, in this latest book, I do have text sprinkled throughout. So there's lots of times when there's an image and there is no text, it's fair and it kind of floats. I had a great designer I worked with and he got it. He let it float a lot. I think it almost works because it's not completely clear that it's essentially two long sentences, and some people think that it's a caption to the image on the other side. So I keep working at it and also you have to stay interested as you know.
Mindy: I want to come back to something you have mentioned I think is really interesting. The Writer On Her Work, and talking about specifically being a woman, if there were writers out there listening who want to write a biography or memoir that involved family members or a story from their past… and all of us being fairly conditioned as women to always be nice and polite instead of necessarily being truthful. If you have any thoughts on that, as far as specifically female writers who may want to be addressing topics or possibly true life accounts of things that have happened that may ruffle some feathers. The difference between approaching that as a female and cultural expectations, how that works both like internally as the author, but then also maybe even experiencing more pushback because you're a woman.
Janet: The quick answer is, you betcha I know just what you're talking about. The quick answer also is that you have to kind of layer in age culture, the Jewish older woman who has grown up in a culture of guilt, which doesn't mean that everybody hasn't in some way or another. But just the guilt is like really familiar in my culture. Two things - thing number one, the Virginia Woolf film so many years ago, it was that part of Virginia Woolf's writing where she says in effect - these will be almost direct quotes because it stays with me. She said - when I first started, I was a young woman and I was writing criticism and I said, flatter, deceive. Use all the wiles of a woman. Then I realized my writing would be destroyed. And then she conjures up this figure she calls The Angel of the House. And The Angel of the House is the one who always defers. If there's chicken and she really likes dark meat, she'll take the white meat. That's literally an image that Virginia Woolf uses. And then - The Angel of the House, I've caught her by the throat and I strangled her. If I had not killed her, she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my writing.
So yes, it's something I do think people suffer a good deal from, The Angel of the House in contemporary terms, contemporary life. But I want to give it a different valence, which is years and years ago I went to a reading and it was two writers. One was Anais Nin who wrote her diaries and then published her Diaries. There's an awful lot of material in there that has got the potential to hurt somebody, as well as to enlighten people. The other writer was Grace Paley and Grace Paley wrote fiction, but very clearly often about her family. So they're talking back and forth about the very question that you're raising. And Grace Paley said something that hit me a long time ago. She said - I try not to hurt people unnecessarily. There's a lot of writing life, there's a lot of stories to tell. I don't want to live in the world as somebody who just hurts people. I thought, well that kind of takes it to a different place. It's not so much a female place, it's kind of an ethical place. But how you see yourself as a writer. And I found that a useful guide.
Mindy: That is really interesting and it cuts right to the point. The medium in between those two are, not necessarily even a medium - just taking both into account as you are right. I have not heard the Virginia Woolf quote about The Angel of the House and killing her so that she will not pluck out your heart. But yes. Quite a few of my books recently are being caught up in censorship and getting banned and being challenged. I write about dark topics. I write about tough subjects and if it makes people think then that's wonderful if they aren't comfortable with their own thoughts, then that's not my fault or my problem.
I never, as you said, wrote with the intention of hurting or harming anyone, I do not feel guilt for what I have produced because number one, it's fiction, but also it is a true representation of the world. My books are dark and aren't particularly safe because I'm writing them for people that aren't existing in safe places. You know, I'm writing them for sexual abuse survivors and I'm writing them for people struggling with addiction. Those are not happy, comfortable places. I must represent them accurately and faithfully and truly in order to paint that picture. So I don't apologize for my work and I appreciate the Virginia Woolf quote while also appreciating the other perspective And you're right, it's not a gender perspective, it's truly ethical, moral, don't hurt for the sake of hurting.
Janet: Exactly. And something else about that. I think, first of all, the world has really changed. So much more subject matter is out there - permissible, so to speak. One thing that I think is not permissible is what I think of as “triumphal endings.” And a lot of the stuff that's out there that's very dark gets a lot of praise because it moves toward a reconciliation that everybody can understand and feel good about and there's nothing wrong with that. But I personally believe the world is more complex and I don't want to be part of that triumphal - It's OK now, and I've conquered it, even if it isn't in self help, even if it's a really very good writers. I think the world can take the darkness. That William Styron book about his depression, Darkness Visible. But I do know that he did not quote unquote conquer his depression, that notion of conquering and we can do it and the will and all that, I just think life is much more complicated and that his writers and any sort of artists, that's our job.
Mindy: A lot of the flak that I get from my own writing is that I don't write happy endings. It's a gray, it's a “okay for now” kind of ending sometimes. Or “you may have survived, but you have scars now.”
Janet: And scars are interesting. Yes, scars are almost a definition of hindsight because they linger.
Mindy: One of my favorite quotes is from Women who Run With the Wolves, and she says - scar tissue is stronger than skin.
Janet: I don't know if that's true biologically or not, but it's certainly true. I broke my collarbone many many years ago and it wouldn't heal. And so I kept going back and forth. Should I have the surgery, should I have a nice straight collarbone and have everything symmetrical? Ultimately, I decided not to for a number of reasons, one of which, scar tissue turned out to be my friend. Because there was so much of it, nothing hurt anymore. Well, let me put it even in a different way. I'm going to go back to the book Phantom Limb, which has some stuff about it, even though it's very short and very lyrical and very strong. But it is about something that my mother went through and I, the daughter, tried to find out how to help her through losing her leg, amputating her leg, and having phantom limb pain. Did a whole lot of research and thinking about it. But what I discovered is that you really don't want a phantom anything. But if you have it, it can also help you to walk. Because if the phantom makes its appearance - because it's not there all the time. We're talking about the brain now, the same stuff as white matter. I'm fascinated by neurology. If the phantom presents itself, it fools the artificial leg into thinking that a leg is there. Isn’t that wild? What do you take from that? The very thing that causes pain and you really don't, want also helps you to walk. Wowser. That's a good example of scar tissue. No, it's not very attractive. But it is that sense that what doesn't hurt you fattens in some ways. You know, that famous line.
Mindy: Last thing, why don't you let listeners know where they can find you online if you're active online or your website, but also where they can purchase your work?
Janet: I'm kind of out there in that sense. If anybody simply Googles me, they will get a lot of stuff. But there's one thing that's super important. Nobody ever spells my name, right. It's Janet obviously, Sternburg, it's B. U. R. G. You will get my photo website, book website. All my books are on Amazon, both the ones we're talking about and the photography books. For those of you who dislike Amazon, understandable. There's this wonderful thing called Bookshop and it kind of aggregates the independents. All my books are there. There's a fair amount of writing about my stuff. Instagram, which I use a lot these days. It's almost like a diary of what I'm seeing, when I finally decide I like something. Instagram Janet Sternburg, B U R G. So yes, I’m gettable.
Mindy: Writer Writer Pants on Fire is produced by Mindy McGinnis. Music by Jack Korbel. Don't forget to check out the blog for additional interviews, writing advice and publication tips at Writer Writer Pants on Fire dot com. If the blog or podcast have been helpful to you or if you just enjoy listening, please consider donating. Visit Writer Writer Pants on Fire dot com and click “support the blog and podcast” in the sidebar.