Notes on Craft

So, let’s start with a little introduction to your jobs—what you do and how you do it.

Georgia Cloepfil

Ah, yes, my many jobs. I am employed at a college as an assistant, women's soccer coach. It's full-time year-round in Walla, Walla, Washington—a small town, where I have a charming, charming life. That pays me some and gives me insurance. It is very seasonal so it allows for a lot of time outside of work I also teach at the college—an introductory writing class—just one course a semester that gives me extra money. It’s a nice way to interact with the students, in the classroom space. I enjoy it, although it's very challenging and very new. And then I write. I now have this book, The Striker and the Clock, coming out and so it pays me an advance in chunks, which is the first time that writing has felt like a real job. Or I'm trying to make myself think of it as a real job, at least for the time being while I'm making an income from it.

I suppose that’s how I would describe the balance of things.

So how do you divide your time everyday? Is that something you feel like you have to pay a lot of attention to?

Yeah, that's a struggle. You know, paid work always feels the most important for some reason. Or I just feel that I need to do it and get it out of the way to be able to focus on things that I care about more. During the season, I don't have any time to do anything else really. I coach for about two and a half months and I just live with it. The rest of the year, I try to write in the morning uninterrupted, doing my best to not think about things that I need to do. There usually aren’t that many of them. Either that, or I get up and I just get my small administrative tasks out of the way before I sit down with the writing.

I have a little shed in the back of my house that has electricity but limited climate control, so some seasons are pretty tough out there. But I don't like to be in my house when I write—there’s not a lot of private space and my partner works from home. My writing shed is nice because I can go inside and make tea and get snacks and come back outside and be alone again. Sometimes, I also like to write in cafes and places where people will hold me accountable—I'm more productive in those environments when I might be needing to get things done. But most writing days just look like me sitting there a lot and not doing very much. I don’t need anyone to watch me do that.

Do you feel like you can put all that intention into that practice because it does something for you or because you view it doing something for someone else in the future? Or put another way, do you have a view of a public or is that not really your primary concern when you're working?

Man, that’s such a complicated question. Where do I begin?

You know, it changes all the time. I mean, on the larger scale, you have to believe that art matters to other people to do it. I think everyone has days—I certainly have days where I have a hard time believing that, especially when there are very immediately tragic things happening. The power of art is so abstract, but also important. Like God, it changed my life—reading books has changed my life in such profound ways that I sometimes can't remember that it might change other people's lives as well. So that would be the larger scale—the view of someone else. Still, it’s usually just for me because it's sometimes hard to grasp that someone else. And yet, I think knowing in the back of your head that art matters is a very important thing to hold onto.

In terms of a larger audience, or a public—man, it's complicated. I don't know, for a long time I was writing and wanting to publish a book mostly not for people to read it but to be able to sustain a life where I could keep writing. So money and the market comes into it—I don't think in a very disruptive way. But thinking about what people will read and want to read is important at some stage. It doesn't really dictate what I'm writing though. You kind of have to believe that eventually it will be something that people want to read. And then in the later stages, it starts to matter more because finding a home for things and a way in is really challenging.

Of course. If you were paying attention to that the whole time, it would just be impossible to do anything, right?

Well, your voice would get distorted by whatever you think you're supposed to be writing. So I think it's important to have time and space to just explore whatever is there. But then getting feedback from other people and professionals and friends and editors and all of that is really important too because sometimes it just isn't working. So to have people you trust to help you shape your voice is also really a privilege. I can remember the first time I found that and it was really amazing. The truth is, there's not a lot of great editing going on anymore. Or at least a lot less of it is happening at magazines, and especially in publishing houses. But when it happens, it's really important to me.

And what was the first time it happened for you?

I was in Korea and I wrote an essay for n+1 and Mark Krotov is his name—he edited it just really, really thoughtfully and substantially and engaged with me in a dialogue with my own writing. And that was just the first time that had ever happened to me and it felt like a real amplification of my voice instead of a transformation of it. I’ve just always remembered that feeling. It was very—it was very powerful and I’m thankful for him, and to him for that, for sure.

That’s amazing. It’s hard to forget moments like that. So is craft something you think about frequently or engage with at all—do you read other writers on that subject ever?

I think about it a lot, especially because I teach now. It is certainly a craft—writing a sentence that sounds good is definitely a craft. And it can definitely be learned, but it takes time. I think reading is the best way to do this. Reading books that you love and thinking about why you love them is truly studying craft. A lot of the books I read are kind of niche books for people who love books. They’re not about life, not like John McPhee’s Draft No. 4—I might like to read that some day, but that kind of book doesn’t feel as useful to me. Mostly I read people that I love who write amazing sentences and I just bask in that space—that feels like studying craft to me.

It's more abstract than looking at outlines. I remember taking a fiction workshop in graduate school and the framework there was a lot more organized around the rules you should follow. Creative nonfiction is so new. It’s free-form and a lot of it is bad because of that, but with fiction, there's so many more rules—you need to have this escalation; you need to have a climax—it's amazing how people still teach it like that. There were books that I read around those rules because I felt like a total outsider in these fiction workshops. And then I realized that teaching this way is total bullshit and actually the best fiction has nothing going on in it, in my opinion.

Yeah, for sure. I relate to that. But I also think about the Paris Review, for instance, where there are writers talking about writing, and what they believe are the best ways to combine words.

Those are cool, yeah.

But it’s probably one of those things you kind of look at from time to time, and less because you actually want to learn how to make a sentence do the thing you need it to do.

Right, of course.

So, who, if anyone, do you feel is a primary source of inspiration, or who has fueled your purest understanding of the why—why you write, why you believe in it.

Well, that’s a fun question. I thought you were going to ask me about writers working that are an inspiration to me but this is much more fun to think about.

I think I have to say “my high school teachers.” I was just trying to plan a class before you called me about literary analysis. And I thought, let me go back and look at some high school essays because I don't really remember how to write literary analysis. And reading these, I was like, holy shit, the level at which we were writing, the rigor with which we were taught to write a thesis-driven essay and break down evidence and have ideas that were really, complicated—in short stories, like James Baldwin's—that was something. Being taught to read like a writer was the most important thing. And learning how to think about books in that way. Even though it's so far removed from how I write now, paying that careful attention to detail and stories and learning how to talk about it and write about it—that—that was the most important thing in my writing life thus far.

Jordan Gutlerner and Mark Halpern are their names.

Yes, shoutout to them!

So I’ll pose a somewhat related question. When I think about craft, in the traditional sense, it’s in reference to particular trades that are learned through experience and often passed down from generation to generation—of course, writing is a little bit different from that, but I feel like it has similar threads—do you feel like that trade, in a sense was passed down to you by someone. Was there a value in your family or in other relationships that you decided you wanted to emulate at some point?

Yeah, I would definitely say in my family and especially in my relationship with my father, we established a strong value for books. Again, it's hard for me to separate reading and writing. And I should probably think a little bit more about why that is—it's kind of interesting that I can’t.

But there was a huge value placed on physical books in my house.

My dad's an architect; he's not a writer. He writes very poetically and I try to help him write a little more concretely, but there was a lot of reading—reading the newspaper, reading aloud, talking aloud about it, physical newspapers on the table, tons of art books in our house, tons of other books in our house. I know I read a ton as a child but especially growing older, I can see just how much it actually was—I would read a lot at the kitchen table and make my dad sit there while I read my favorite paragraphs. There was a lot of sharing both the physical object and, and the actual text and now into my adult life, there’s a continued sharing of books.

I remember reading one of my dad’s short stories that he wrote on a typewriter during college and had saved, and an essay my mom wrote in law school that she had saved—I read those both and thought they were pretty talented thinkers and writers. They still are, of course. My mom is probably more of a rigorous writer and my dad a more—I don't know—abstract thinker. So together, they made a pretty good combo. But yes, we read a lot as a family and books were just very present.

Yes, shoutout to them!

I love the picture of you reading to your dad at the table. You write nonfiction, which is very much rooted in personal experiences like these. I wonder, do you feel like you're putting yourself or others on the line when you write or does that vulnerability just come with the territory?

I actually don't tend to feel like I'm putting myself on the line. In a way, it doesn't feel very personal even though I write about my life mostly. I think because it is crafted, it puts it at a distance. Of course, I think if I was ever writing into a very specific sort of betrayal, I might have a harder time with that and maybe feel more vulnerable doing the work. I have written some about my family and that changes things and makes it more difficult at times, but I think you have to care less as a writer, in some ways. Having a heightened attention to dynamics and people and an ability to observe the world and think about its complexities is important of course, but so is being able to disregard people a little bit throughout the process. To a certain extent, I’ve had to give myself permission to write about things that are challenging or difficult or might hurt someone else and then, try to go about it in the most sensitive way.

Another word that comes to mind when you say care is discipline and, and maybe that's a totally separate conversation, but I think that a big part of my writing practice is about learning or understanding what discipline is and how it looks and what it means when it comes to making art consistently. That’s a different kind of care than care for yourself and for the work. And it actually takes a lot of practice.

Definitely. Do you want to talk a little more concretely about the role of discipline in that process?

This is something I think about a lot. Those Paris Review interviews—I read those to figure out questions like, “How do you do this all the time?” And I see that one person wakes up at 5am and does two hours of writing before they've even looked out the window and another has five drinks and then writes at 11 pm.” I want to know what the secret is to getting something on the page. Because sometimes I write and two days later, I have no idea how I wrote what I wrote or what facilitated that production. I don't even remember it happening sometimes. And so what to do? Do I show up no matter what? That would be the proper sports-discipline translation—I could sit at my desk for two hours every day no matter what, but that sort of rigor can be really debilitating when the truth is, some days you can't. And then you're just beating yourself up because you didn’t sit there. People who say they write 500 words every day—that feels like it would be a really crippling expectation for me, especially because I write really slowly.

So you have to figure out a middle ground, where you are showing up and facilitating space that might allow you to be overtaken by some sort of forward motion or the spontaneous arrival of a sentence. I think it was Sheila Heti who said that discipline is paying attention to that sentence. Sometimes, when I'm running and sentences are forming, I know now that I have to stop and write them down somewhere, or if I’m at a party and I start having an idea, I just have to leave. Paying attention to that feeling and grabbing that voice whenever it comes is the discipline—not that I'm hearing voices and channeling some person. I have to admit, I tend to be dismissive of the people who say they hear voices, but I do feel like I am chasing a voice, a sentence, a sound, an image from my brain. In that sense, the words are never going to be perfect and you have to live with that. The words are never going to be the same shape as the idea. But that's the whole adventure and ambition of writing. Without it, I think I might stop. So I try to be disciplined enough to actually attend to the sentences as they come. I'm still very much working on this.

To actually get out of bed or go somewhere and write it down; to actually channel that voice when it’s there does take a little bit of showing up. I know that, but still, it’s a big challenge all of the time.

I'm very much the type of person who will stop what I'm doing and open my notes app. Or the post-run, flood of ideas I definitely relate to—

Oh yes, the notes app, it’s unhinged. Sometimes I go back to it, and I’m like, “What does it mean?” “Three triangles over the sky?”

I guess that’s a good lead into a question about starting something—how do you know or realize the content of your writing? Is that something you pursue consciously? Or is it more spontaneous than that?

Yeah, I wish there was some sort of secret generator—I have a project I'm working on now and I’m asking myself, “What’s the next thing?” And it really feels like there is no next thing—like I'm never gonna write again. And then somehow it just accumulates—I think from years of just living with the sort of mind that’s attentive to writing and thinking about what experiences could turn into something. Then those things start to add up and connect to each other. And it all just kind of happens. Sometimes I write a smaller essay—that’s what happened with the book and with this next project—I write an essay and then I just keep writing toward that topic. And things accumulate, but it takes so damn long. That’s the tough thing about it. The time.

Do you want to talk about your book at all? The one that's coming out in the Spring?

Yeah, everyone smash that pre-order link—July 16th, it’s coming out.

I think I started writing this book seven years ago, so it’s not as if it was the only thing I was writing. I didn't really work on it much in grad school except for during my thesis. But it’s accumulated over time, and is now a book. It’s about my professional soccer career and my relationship with soccer and with sports and gender and aging and time passing. I should get better at talking about this—this is really the first time I’m talking about it in an interview. I guess it’s also a study of books and writing and art in parallel to that. Actually, it’s a lot about craft too—craft of elite athletics and craft of writing and how those relate to each other—it took me a long time to acknowledge that they did.