Gayle Brandeis Power Profile

I met Gayle in 1999 at Antioch University in Los Angeles. We were starting our MFA program, and she was a bundle of contradictions. She was quiet, but magnetic. She deferred in conversation until she had the spotlight and then she threw down. We ended up working in the same group and eventually sharing a house together during the residencies. We’ve become each other’s first readers, and even more importantly, phenomenal friends. She’s an activist, a professor, and of course, a writer—poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction.

I read her newest book, a novel in poems, Many Restless Concerns, about six years before it appeared in the world. It elevated both the novel and the poem, and it is a rallying cry for any of us who have felt silenced.

I’m so thrilled to share a little bit about her here.

LH: What issues/ideas/questions do you find continue to circle through your work?

GB: Once when I gave a faculty reading during an Antioch MFA residency, the student who introduced me made an observation that rocked my world: she said all of my novels were about women moving from passivity to action. She was so right; it’s a progression I’ve grappled with in my own life—it’s in my memoir, too!—but I somehow hadn’t been aware I had woven this into all my books. She saw my own themes more clearly than I had! Other than this, I’d say I keep returning to mother/daughter issues, to explorations of the body and mortality, to food (especially fruit!) and all it holds, to seeing the familiar—including language, itself—in fresh ways.

LH: How do you engage with literary citizenship and its role in building a community of supportive writers?

GB: Before we started our MFA together—something I will be forever grateful for!—I had internalized the common story that the writing/publishing world was a cut-throat, competitive ecosystem, and I was terrified to enter it, fearing I’d be eaten alive. What a joy and relief to discover this isn’t usually the case, to discover that the writing community can be so nurturing and supportive, so full of inspiration and commiseration and generosity. It’s important to me to be a generous literary citizen, myself, to help shine light or lend a helping hand to others wherever I can, whether that’s through teaching, or giving space to other voices through my journal Lady/Liberty/Lit, or blurbing books, or doing community events, or sharing links to other writers’ work, or answering questions via email, etc, etc. In the last week, I happened to hear from students I taught in two different programs in 2006 and 2007, each asking for writing advice, and it means a lot to me that all these years later, they still felt they could come to me and knew I’d be excited to help. It gives me so much joy to watch writers claim and stretch and hone their voices, so much joy to watch writers elevate one another.

 LH: Self-promotion is a necessary task in today’s marketplace. How do you approach self-promotion and have your views changed on it over time?

GB: As a naturally shy and introverted person, self-promotion has been excruciating for me at times. Once I started thinking of it less as self-promotion and more as reaching toward connection with readers who may find nourishment or inspiration in my work, it felt less like horn-tooting, more like love. It helps me to look at promotion as being in service of my work rather than promotion being in service of me, personally; my work knows more than I do, and is more interesting than I am, so seeing it this way helps me feel more comfortable putting myself out there (and that’s always been the case. I wrote a little neighborhood newspaper when I was 10, and even though I was too shy to make eye contact with my neighbors on most occasions, I was able to interview them and sell subscriptions door to door because it was in service of the writing.) It also helps (and is more fun) to join with other writers for book events, etc, where we can promote one another as well as our own work.

LH: There are so many extreme crises in the world today demanding our attention. Often, we hear push-back from others about how art doesn’t matter or isn’t worth the time of the artist or the receiver. What is your answer to those who say art is a waste of time?

GB: Art provides such a lifeline during crises. When we’re isolated at home as we are now, we can connect with the rest of humanity through stories and poems and essays and films and other art. I love how James Baldwin said “It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.” We desperately need that connection right now. Art can bear witness to what we’re going through, and it can also provide escape into the imagination when we need such escape. Without art, all we’d get is the party line (which of course is so deeply corrupt in our current administration) and statistics that can so easily dehumanize horror. Story and art are what can make others’ lives, others’ suffering, others’ hope real to us. I’m grateful so many artists are creating today as well as sharing older work—I’ve been so moved by the essays and poems and plays and dance videos and visual art and more we can find online now, shared with such creative generosity. Art helps us see, helps us feel, helps expand our sense of what’s possible.

LH: What metaphor best expresses your creative process?

GB: When my older kids (now 29 and 26) were young, I latched upon the metaphor of being a mermaid—when I wrote, I dove down into the depths, and when the kids needed me, I would surface and grow legs again, seaweed dripping from my hair. It was a pretty fluid dance, finding little windows of time when I could plunge into my work. My life has grown more complicated since then (teaching/editing/touring/etc in addition to raising my now 10 year old son), and I’m not sure the mermaid is an apt image anymore, even though I still love mermaids, and I still do like to take advantage of those little windows of time when I can dive deep. Maybe a mermaid juggling flaming swords and blueberries as she dives in and out of the water? Or maybe not; that image feels too frenetic in our current moment, where I’m spending a lot of time in stillness, even though I continue to wear a variety of hats (including the new one of homeschooling mom.)

 Because I’ve been feeling quite quiet inside of late, perhaps the metaphor that best fits this particular strange time period (at least for my writing process, itself, not everything I have to juggle) is a Quaker meeting, where people sit in silence until they feel moved to speak. Every once in awhile, a poem will bubble up through my body, or an image or question will nag at me until it sends me to the page. I haven’t felt my usual creative fire of late—part of this is because my health hasn’t been great for several weeks, and I’ve been really wiped out physically, but part of it, too, I think, is my nervous system still hasn’t caught up to our new reality and is running on power-saving mode—so when words do rise out of the silence, it feels like a gift.

LH: What are you currently working on and why does it matter to you?

GB: As noted above, I’m not writing a whole lot at the moment, other than small pieces as they emerge, but three projects I temporarily set aside have been calling me and I hope to return to them soon:

One, a much-belated follow-up to my 2002 writing guide Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write called Write Like an Animal, which I’ve been wanting to write, and have been making notes toward, ever since Fruitflesh came out. It turns to the animal world for inspiration this time instead of the plant world, and we have much to learn from nonhuman animals. I actually have this project to thank for my puppy, Pepper—I was doing a lot of research about animal behavior for the book and realized I needed to have more lived experience with animals to be able to write about the animal world with more authenticity. I have horrible allergies and didn’t think it would be possible to coexist with a dog, but after doing some reading, I thought I’d see whether I could handle being around a dog with hair instead of fur. Sweet Pepper soon entered our family, and has been a constant source of delight ever since. Even if I never end up writing the book (although I very much hope I will), it brought me her.

Two, a collection of prose poems about the weekend Marilyn Monroe spent in Lake Tahoe (where I live) just before she died. I had been wanting to write about Tahoe, and hadn’t found a good entry point until these poems started coming to me. I’ve learned a lot about the history and flora and fauna of my adopted home through this project, and have deepened my relationship with this place as a result.

 Three, a semi-dystopian young adult novel I wrote several years ago that didn’t quite come together at the time, but has been re-envisioning itself inside me and seems to want my attention again. It feels timely in a whole new way now.

 There are a few other set-aside projects that whisper to me every once in a while, as well as some glimmers of new ideas, but the three above are the ones whispering the loudest.

LH: What writer’s work would you like to elevate here?

GB: I will use this lovely opportunity to shine the spotlight on my friend, dance partner, and Sierra Nevada University colleague/fairy godmother, June Sylvester Saraceno. June and I made a Google Doc called “June and Gayle take the world by storm”, with several shared book tour events planned this Spring, and we were only able to do a couple of them before the world shut down; thank you for this chance to share a virtual event with her! June has two wonderful new books out, released within months of each other—a novel, Feral, North Carolina, 1965, and a poetry collection, The Girl from Yesterday; both are observant, moving, funny, tender, and charming, just like June, herself. You can find her at https://www.junesaraceno.com/

And, dear Laraine, I can’t wait to elevate your amazing memoir when it comes out, and of course I always look for ways to elevate fabulous you! Thank you so much for these thought-provoking questions—as you know, it took me a while to feel up to tackling them, but once I felt ready to dive in, they got me to write more words in a sitting than I have for a while, which feels good; it reminds me I can still do this!

Gayle’s most recent memoir is The Art of Misdiagnosis: Surviving My Mother’s Suicide. Her novel-in-poems, Many Restless Concerns, about the victims of Countess Bathory, is available now. You can learn more about Gayle at gaylebrandeis.com