TBR [to be read]
is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly
released/forthcoming, interesting books who will tell us about their new work
as well as offer tips on writing, stories about the publishing biz, and from
time to time, a recipe!
Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in
2-3 sentences?
Tomboyland is a debut essay collection about gender,
class, and the American Midwest. Part personal narrative, part interview, part
cultural reportage, it investigates midwestern traditions, mythologies,
landscapes, and lives to explore the intersections of identity and place. From
F5 tornadoes and fast-pitch softball to gun culture, strange glacial terrains,
kink party potlucks, and the question of motherhood, it explores ideas of belonging
and the body, isolation and community, and what we mean when we use words like woman,
family, and home.
Which essay did you most enjoy writing? Why? And, which
essay gave you the most trouble, and why?
I think the opening essay, “The Finger of God,” was probably
the most fun to write. An earlier version was published in Prairie Schooner
in 2018, and it was about this F5 tornado that destroyed a small Wisconsin town
called Barneveld, eight miles west of my hometown, in 1984, when I was a little
over a year old. When I was a kid, I was obsessed with the story of this
tornado, and with tornadoes and severe weather in general. I was also, obviously,
obsessed with the movie Twister; I thought I’d be a storm-chaser someday,
and had a deep and abiding crush on the local television meteorologist. (I had
a signed glossy photo of him on my bedroom wall; it was serious.) It turns out,
my obsession with this story, and with tornadoes, had pretty much everything to
do with religion—I grew up in a pretty religious town, and for a few formative
years was very into Christianity, but have since lost that religion
entirely. So the essay was also about faith, and destruction, and coming to
understand that life is very fragile and random, that nothing really keeps us
safe, especially not these stories we tell ourselves. It was hard, but it was
also fun to write into all of that, and make those connections on the page. And
the Twister sections were particularly fun, because the process involved
watching that terrible and perfect movie over and over again (Spoiler alert: I still
love it).
Then, last year, as I was finishing the book, I had a
revelation: I had been telling this story about Barneveld all from second-hand
accounts: my mother’s, mostly, neighbors and friends. It had become mythlike in
my hometown, a place called Mount Horeb, which is a sister-town to Barneveld and
has a thing for mythology. (It’s known as the “Troll Capital of the World”—you’ll
have to read the book to find out more about that.) Anyway, I realized that, in
order to tell this story right, I needed to talk to the people who had been
there—the survivors of the storm, whose homes and businesses were destroyed,
some of whom lost family and friends. So last summer, right around the
thirty-fifth anniversary of the tornado, I went to Barneveld and talked to them,
which was a challenging and rewarding experience. It opened the essay up in a
way that was really exciting, and it became something new—a story that wasn’t
just my own anymore, but was theirs, too.
Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s
road to publication.
It was a very long road to get here. I started the oldest
essay in this book in 2010, and I’ve been working on it—very slowly—ever since.
There was a lot of rejection along the way—from magazines, agents, fellowships
and grants and contests. There were times when I couldn’t write at all, when I
was sure I’d never publish a book.
And then, in 2017, something shifted. In February of that
year, I went to the Millay Colony for the Arts in upstate New York for a nine-day,
self-guided retreat. I could only get one week off from work, so I spent a week
and two weekends there. It’s not a juried residency; you pay a little money for
the space, but you get a room and a studio in this very quiet, magical place,
and it was so incredibly worth it. It was like a light went on. Walking through
the woods every day, breathing the crisp, cold air, hiking in the trees where
Edna St. Vincent Millay—who, notably, went by the name “Vincent”—wrote her
poetry, something inside me woke up. In my little studio in the barn that
Vincent built, I wrote a draft of the near-title essay of the book, “Tomboy,” in
a mad rush of inspiration. It would become the essay that crystallized what my
whole book was about—this intersection of the body and the land—and the essay
that got my agent’s attention. A year later I went back, and wrote a draft of
another essay, and that fall we sold the book. I will always credit the Millay
Colony for helping me get to this point. It’s a beautiful place, and there’s
magic in those trees, and it helped me understand not just what I was trying to
say, but what I needed to do to get there. I stood on top of a mountain when I
realized it, so that was a very literal high.
What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?
Every writer is different, and their processes are different
too. Whatever yours is—whether you write every day or just on the weekends;
whether you write complete drafts or revise as you go; whatever it is you do,
honor that process and practice it as often as you can. And don’t listen to
other people if they tell you to do it differently.
Also, a fellow teacher said this recently, and it struck me
as pretty spot on in my experience: Writing is hard. Anyone who tells you it’s
easy probably isn’t a writer.
My favorite writing advice is “write until something
surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?
I love that! And I think it really aligns with the way I
write essays—into a question, never really knowing where I’m going. Over the
decade that I was working on this book, I wasn’t really sure what it was. I had
all these disparate-seeming topics I was exploring: a moth infestation that I
experienced when I first moved to New York, the Barneveld tornado, a rare
geological terrain where I grew up called the Driftless Area. I wrote an essay
about guns, and one about fastpitch softball, and one about BDSM and food; I
wrote one about motherhood, chosen family, and the decision to have or not have
children. I was working something out—somewhere there was a thread—but I
couldn’t quite find it.
When I got an agent, the very smart and perceptive Adriann
Ranta Zurhellen, she read my essays and she was like, “This is a book about
gender.” And I was like, “Oh. Whoa. You’re totally right.” And then everything
I’d been working on, all these seemingly disparate pieces, coalesced. I knew
the through-line of the book was this question of womanhood—what it means to be
a woman, where my body fits into that word or doesn’t; about strangeness and loneliness
and family and violence and love, and how it’s all connected to what I was
calling “the geography of identity”— how our understanding of ourselves is both
defined and complicated by where we come from, and who we come from—our
homeland, our socioeconomic status, our education, our family. It was a book
about gender, yes, but it was also a book about those intersections: class and
land and the idea of home, what it means to belong. That process of discovery
was revelatory, and it helped me take these early drafts and revise and rewrite
them in a whole new light. I also realized I couldn’t tell these stories or ask
these questions alone, and that’s where the interviews came in. In addition to the
tornado survivors, I spent a week in Wisconsin interviewing women and queer
people, mothers and nonmothers; gun-owners and former gun-owners; family and
friends—about fifteen people in total—to help me explore these questions more
deeply.
Who is your ideal reader?
I think this book will resonate most with women, queer
people, and Midwesterners—those who live there now or who, like me, have left,
but still think of it as home. But more broadly, it’s my hope that the book
will reach anyone who has ever felt like they exist in the spaces
between—neither one thing nor the other, unable to fit themselves, or their
bodies or identities, into one neat little box on a form. I also hope that
people will pick it up who don’t necessarily feel those things, but might be
open to learning something about people who do. Overall, I think this is a book
for people who question things—their understanding, their lives, societal or
cultural expectations and prescriptions—and who don’t necessarily seek a
definite answer to anything, but find meaning in the questions.
Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any
food/s associated with your book? (Any recipes I might share?)
Yes! There’s an essay in the book called “Meat and
Potatoes,” which is essentially about food, sex, and my blue-collar Midwestern
family food traditions. On my mother’s side, I come from a long line of Wisconsin
Irish-German farmers and factory workers, and this essay spends a good deal of
space discussing the foods I ate growing up, much of which came from the
quarter cow we kept in the garage freezer, raised and butchered on the family
farm; or from Oscar Mayer, where my dad worked for a while. One other important
part of this essay comes from his side of the family, which is very much not
Midwestern—my Italian grandmother’s Sunday gravy. I would love to share that
recipe with you, but alas, the Faliveno family contract forbids it. What I can
share is a recipe for something very Midwestern: tater tot casserole! (Always
casserole, never hotdish.) I don’t actually cook this often, because I’m mostly
a vegetarian these days. But when I want something that tastes like home, I usually
want either the gravy or this.
Ingredients
- 1 lb
ground beef (we call this “hamburger”)
- 1/2 onion,
diced
- 2 cloves
garlic, minced (my mother probably would have used garlic powder, but
let’s be fancy)
- 1 tbsp Worcestershire
sauce
- 15 oz can
green beans, drained (yup, always from a can, never fresh, extra slimy)
- 10.75 oz can
condensed cream of mushroom soup (Midwesterners have a few cans of this on
hand always; it’s the primary ingredient to like 50% of our dishes)
- 2 cups shredded
sharp cheddar cheese (or more; I usually do like 3 cups, if I’m being
honest)
- 2 cups frozen
tater tots (I recommend Ore-Ida or, preferably, Schwann’s, if the
Schwann’s man still exists, and you’re lucky enough to see him at your
door every week)
- salt
and pepper to taste (by “taste” I mean a lot, of both; salt and pepper are
ingredients, not seasonings, and should be employed liberally)
Instructions
1.
Preheat oven to 375F.
2.
Lightly grease an 8- or 9-inch baking dish. (If
it was my mother it would probably be Pam; I use butter or Canola oil.)
3.
Brown the ground beef in a large cast-iron skillet
over medium-high heat. Add a healthy (or maybe not so healthy) dose of salt and
pepper. Drain excess fat. (Or don’t; I don’t.)
4.
Add the onions to the skillet and sauté until
translucent.
5.
Add the garlic and cook, stirring frequently,
for a minute or so.
6.
Stir in Worcestershire sauce, add more salt and
pepper. (Don’t be stingy.)
7.
Transfer ground beef mixture to the baking dish
and spread evenly.
8.
Top with cream of mushroom soup and spread
evenly. Follow with the green beans, then the cheddar cheese. Add more salt and
pepper. (I mean it.)
9.
Finally, top with glorious tater tots.
10.
Bake for 35 to 40 minutes or until tater tots
are golden brown and cheese is melted.
11.
Serve immediately. Regret immediately. Go
back for seconds.
*****
READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: www.melissafaliveno.com
ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK: https://bookshop.org/books/tomboyland/9781542014199
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