Sue William Silverman on "Acetylene Torch Songs" - New Memoir Craft Book
An Author Interview - January 2024
Welcome to the inaugural interview of The Earthly Kitchen’s new, seasonal Author Interview series, featuring Sue William Silverman.
Sue William Silverman is a prolific, award winning creative-non fiction writer and memoirist. She’s had eight books published. Two are craft books on how to write memoir, including her newest, Acetylene Torch Songs: Writing True Stories To Ignite The Soul, two books of poetry, and four essay collections or memoirs. She has been published in many publications, including The Rumpus, and Brevity, and has appeared on TV, is a public speaker, has had a Lifetime movie, Love Sick, made based on her memoir of the same name, teaches CNF and is Co-Faculty Chair at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, from where I graduate in July 2024 with an MFA.
I first met Sue on the phone. It was fall of 2022, and I was coming back from a one year leave of absence after having my baby. I was dreading writing fiction, but excited for school. I love to read fiction, and have written a good amount of it, but it’s not my vibe anymore. Creative non-fiction, writing personal narrative, essays, and memoir are where I feel most compelled and inspired. It finally occurred to me to study CNF instead of fiction when I returned.
There is something about the world we live in today where readers need truth, we need soul. That is not to say that novels and short stories do not illuminate the human conditions we seek to understand—they do. But fiction has certain rules that aren’t applied to memoir (such as plot twist, sub plots, etc.). This allows personal narrative more flexibility of form and function that fiction doesn’t have, and I’m interested in that elasticity.
To prepare for my return to school, I took a 6-week Sackett St. essay writing class. The instructor, Xeni Fragakis, shared a chapter from Sue’s first craft book Fearless Confessions on “the voice of innocence vs. voice of experience.” I immediately recognized her name from faculty at VCFA and knew: I should be studying CNF at VCFA, and I should be doing it with this incredible writer, Sue William Silverman. She agreed to take a phone call with me and help me determine next steps. Here we are a couple years later discussing her newest publication, Acetylene Torch Songs, a craft book which launched this month for fellow creative-non fiction writers on how to write “true stories that ignite the soul.” Even if you, yourself, are not a CNF writer, I invite you to read our interview, where Sue shares how she survives the trauma of child sexual assault, sex addiction, and life through writing. We even talk a little about cars, my first true love.
The Interview
Rachael: What you are aware of that readers aren’t, is I submitted these questions to you several days later than promised. It’s because I ended up doing a much deeper and closer read than I anticipated. Literally every page added some value or advice to how I think about writing. I highlighted, took notes, jotted down creative ideas. Even though it’s impossible to tell someone “how” to write a book, Acetylene Torch Songs truly is a how-to. I imagine a lot of writers can’t answer why they do/write certain things; it’s just intuitive. They write by feel. But you are very deliberate. How did you develop such self-awareness about how you write and why you use certain techniques, like sensory details, window motif, confessional writing, etc.? How did you become so deliberate and conscious? Do you ever write in a way that’s intuitive that you can’t put your finger on?
Sue: I definitely wrote my first book, Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You, intuitively. This is embarrassing to admit, but, at that point (back around the early 1990s), the only memoir I’d even read was The Diary of Anne Frank—and, well, that’s Anne Frank! Up to that point, I’d only read, written, and studied fiction.
So when I started that first memoir, I had no conscious idea what I was doing. It just flowed out of me, the whole thing, in three months. Frankly, I knew so little (nothing) about the form, that I never even second-guessed myself. Which was not ego! Rather, it was complete ignorance. I barely revised it. True, I’d had a lot of practice writing, albeit fiction. But CNF? No idea. Miraculously, it happened to win The Association of Writers and Writing Programs Award Series, and was published.
Then came the second book, Love Sick, about struggling with sex addiction. That’s when I realized: Oh, I need to learn about this genre.
Here’s what happened: The first gazillion drafts of Love Sick were one train wreck after another. Why? Initially, it was all written in the voice of the addict. Well, believe me, that was seriously boring. Finally…finally, I realized what was missing: the voice of the author-narrator who could guide the reader through the quagmire of the addiction. At its heart, then, what I learned is that creative nonfiction needs two voices: The voice of the unaware narrator in the situation in the past, coupled with the more aware narrator who makes sense of this past situation—but in the present, i.e. the author-narrator—who discovers the metaphors of the experience.
All this said, I still write kind of intuitively in early drafts. Initially, I don’t think about metaphor or structure, and so on. Only in later drafts am I more deliberate, which is when I enter a state of Major Revision.
R: Over the course of the book, I picked out a few uncommon, but not unusual words: corporeal, ethereal, prurient, lacuna. How do you develop your language? Do you flip through physical or online thesauruses? Is it all just your natural vocabulary?
S: Oh, thank you. I actually try to avoid a thesaurus as much as possible. I find them to be more unhelpful and inaccurate than not. Mainly, I read and read and read. I think that must be how I developed my vocabulary. I’ve always read, avidly. I was reading the great Russian novelists, Faulkner, what were considered the “classics,” back in high school. I got terrible grades in school because all I did was read novels!
R: In your Overture, you write, “Chapters are accompanied by essays I specifically wrote to exemplify the concerns at hand. I wanted to ensure I could follow my own advice.” I truly love that you do this because when I pick up a SWS book, I’m here to read SWS, though I’m certainly not offended by your use of examples from other writers, particularly in a craft book. I wonder though, why do you feel compelled to prove yourself to your readers when you’ve already done so with successfully published memoirs and craft books?
S: I actually think I need to prove myself to myself! I mean, there I was writing this craft book offering all this advice. Then, at some point (I’d already written maybe two drafts of Acetylene Torch Songs before I realized this), I thought maybe it would be a good idea to see if I could follow my own advice.
Coupled with this was the realization that, by writing these essays to accompany each chapter, it would be a more hands-on way to show the reader what I mean. I could offer a little deconstruction by drilling down into an essay. That way, the reader of the book could learn by example. It’s another kind of showing and telling. Or, in this case, telling and showing. Let me explain what I mean by voice. Now, let me show you what I mean in this essay.
R: This is a follow up to Fearless Confessions: A Writer’s Guide To Memoir. I’ve read both craft books and can see where you have further developed some original ideas. Tell us more about how you freshened up the concepts in Confessions, what you did differently this time around, and why you felt obliged to write another craft book on memoir? Would you ever write a craft book on how to write a craft book?
S: HaHa, I have to laugh about the thought of writing a craft book on how to write a craft book! But I’ll tell you a secret about how to do just that: To write a craft book, you teach writing in a place (Vermont College of Fine Arts, in my case) where you are required to give lectures at the residencies. Each chapter in the book, albeit in a very different form, was originally a lecture. In other words, the ideas in “Acetylene” evolved from a seed of a lecture. Then, after a gazillion revisions, blossomed into a chapter.
Anyway, back to the first part of your question. When I wrote Fearless Confessions I’d only, at that point, written two memoirs. Now, after many more years of teaching, plus writing two additional books, which happen to be essay collections, my awareness about the genre evolved.
For example, while I may have intuitively understood the concept that creative nonfiction is both microscopic and telescopic, I didn’t know how to articulate it. I now better understand how we examine the small details of our lives while, through metaphor and reflection, we offer a larger, more universal meaning.
What does this look like? Let’s say that even if you haven’t, for example, been on a misguided search for spirituality (as I wrote about in The Pat Boone Fan Club: My Life as a White Anglo-Saxon Jew), you probably have felt the underlying emotions such as alienation, loss, a seeking to belong—which is at the heart of that book. If readers relate to these abstract feelings, then the hope is that they will relate to the experience that prompted those feelings. We write universally when we incorporate metaphor into our narratives. In this instance, therefore, the pop music icon Pat Boone is a metaphor for the narrator’s misguided search for spirituality. Therefore, by microscopically gazing inward (in this case, my own search), we’re also, at the same time, projecting universal feelings (feelings we all share) outward to our readers.
R: Tell me more about your mediocre fiction? How do you know it was so mediocre if it wasn’t actually published? How could you feel the difference in the quality of your writing when you discovered CNF?
S: Oh, it was totally mediocre. Embarrassingly so. Well, ok, the writing probably wasn’t that bad: sentence to sentence. But the protagonist, in each novel, seemed stuck in one emotional state: melodrama. I swear I don’t know how to fully realize a fictional character.
The moment I began my first memoir, however, I felt as if I’d literally fallen inside this deep, sacred vessel of truth, of emotional authenticity. I physically felt it. I was Home.
R: I imagine most readers of this interview are like you and love literature. How did you come to love literature? What about it do you love specifically? What has it meant to you in the past and what does it mean to you now as a prolific author?
S: Initially, I’m sure I loved it because it was an escape from the confusion and trauma of my childhood. I entered other worlds and, voila, I was in that world, a distant place from my own.
At the same time, I felt a sense of truth and honesty (regardless that I was reading fiction), that, I intuited, was lacking in my own life. I mean, my father mis-loved me, but I couldn’t tell anyone. I didn’t even understand what it meant. He told me he loved me; I believed, back then, that he loved me. Yet, yet, surely I sensed that wasn’t love. So, as I say, this literary world offered me emotional truths that I experienced nowhere else.
And now? I’m simply dazzled by language, by all the forms of creative nonfiction, by the elasticity of the genre. I love to encounter all the varied aesthetic visions. Plus, I absolutely love how creative nonfiction has given traditionally underrepresented voices a platform to speak.
R: I love that you wrote your essay collection How To Survive Death And Other Inconveniences like a “road trip.” Readers who know me know I love cars and driving. Naturally, I noticed that you mentioned several cars in this craft book by make, model and color. For someone who doesn’t know “anything about cars,” as you’ve told me in the past, you make connections to them, or at least you infer something about them. You mentioned your gold Plymouth from Death, and in this craft book you mention both your husband’s Honda Civic, and your green VW Beetle. What do these signify or symbolize? Is it socio-economic? Prosopon, or persona? Specificity of detail?
S: That’s an interesting insight that I hadn’t previously considered. Well, my first car was a green VW Beetle. I bought it second-hand for about a thousand dollars. And I loved it, even though it had no heating system and the engine, over its lifetime, needed to be rebuilt twice. Anyway, when I bought it, I felt so, well, adult! I owned a car! I could go anywhere. So, yes, that car, in particular, was/is a prosopon (or mask) for the me who wanted to feel a sense of freedom, of control: I could go anywhere I wanted.
R: Twice in the book, you emphasize you don’t consult with friends or family to verify details or memories, that you trust the truth in your own story. Are there any occasions that you are curious about someone else’s assessment of a shared memory, or that their discordant view might create an unexpected and interesting perspective you hadn’t considered? Does it matter? If you did ask, would you write about it?
S: This is probably completely shallow of me, but I honestly don’t want to know someone else’s assessment of a shared experience—at least in terms of my writing. As a friend or a sister or an ex-wife I might be curious. But, when it comes to writing, I need to stay in my own lane, remain in my own vision.
That said, I see your point that it could create an unexpected perspective. Yet, here’s the problem: My sister (I hope she doesn’t read this) never thinks about the past. She pretends it doesn’t exist. She has zero introspection. Ditto for my two ex-husbands. OK, that sounds mean-spirited, but, I swear, they don’t reflect on anything too personal. In short, I don’t think any of these theoretically significant people could deepen my perspective.
I did, however, not too long ago, have the opportunity to see my high-school boyfriend, Jamie, whom I write about a lot. I had to ask him if he’d loved me way back then. Or if I was significant to him. He said “yes.” And that made me feel good. But that’s kind of an anecdote and not really something I’d write about.
R: In your chapter, “Behind The Mask,” you suggest that once you write about something that haunts you, it tends to stop haunting you and you can let it go, move on to the next obsession. You write, “What to do after one face you wear [story] gets worn out, which typically happens after you finish writing one book or essay? As a writer of creative non-fiction, you change it. You explore a new face. You don a different mask.” What happens if the face you once wore, the book or essay you wish to tell, has already worn out, is no longer an obsession—before being written?
S: I’m thinking that, in a deeper sense, it hasn’t really worn out, that the obsession remains, albeit “hidden.” I’m guessing that the writer simply hasn’t found the “right” portal into the experience, hasn’t found the “right” metaphor. There are times when I’m writing and think to myself “so what?” Well, what I really know to be true (for me) is that I’m skidding on the surface of experience. I haven’t yet plunged down to the depths. So I need to find the portal in, and mine those metaphors as far as they’ll take me. Then, that obsession, maybe once perceived as dried up, blooms with life.
R: In the chapter “Come Together,” you guide readers on how to assemble a collection of essays. You write, “An essay collection is a comprehensive and sustained inquiry—composed of many different actions—revolving around one common theme or variations on a theme.” If you’ve read Burning Questions, an essay collection by Margaret Atwood, she missed the memo on this. A lot of her collections are separated by the time or era she wrote them. Do you feel that there are any exceptions to the rule about thematically linked essay collections?
S: Yes, there are exemptions! And, to be honest, the main exception is for those writers who are very famous. They absolutely get those disconnected essay collections published. In other words, someone named Margaret Atwood could pretty much publish anything. Which isn’t to say that a collection of unconnected essays is bad or not worth reading. They can be brilliant!
But, in terms of publishing (unless you’re Margaret Atwood or someone of her ilk), virtually all presses want a collection of thematically congruent essays. Let me hasten to add, however, that is not the only reason to write one in this vein by any stretch of the imagination. Frankly, to me at least, it’s more interesting to write (and read) a congruent essay collection! It gives you the opportunity to fully explore a theme from many different angles. With each essay, you turn the camera’s eye, or the lens, a bit, and examine (re-examine) this theme, this subject, using different actions, different metaphors. This process makes for a more interesting book.
R: In the chapter, “Respect,” you go full tilt memoir-writer-as-activist, saying that writing memoir is an act of resistance, that it’s political. I love this. A few of your sentences read: “Through our words we say not just #metoo. We also say #stop. We say: if you do this to me, I will write about it. #I will speak up and speak out. #I will resist… #Metoo means you’re not alone, we’re in this together… you already survived… So, as white male power structures erode, as women and others in the resistance break the glass ceilings, even more will change.” Sue, your hippie is showing. Tell me more about how writing is an act of resistance, of change. What is the power of the written word? Define yourself as a hippie.
S: Yes, I’m totally, in my heart of hearts, still a hippie flower child. Which is probably why I still miss my green VW Beetle. (Dang, I now drive a Toyota RAV 4, which my hippie self hates.) Anyway, I think, after being raised in a patriarchal home, full of silence and/or lies, once I began to write, I couldn’t, well, STFU. I’m a peaceful person, so I’m not going to become a gun-toting revolutionary. But I believe in the power of language, of voice. I believe personal narrative matters. I truly believe that the #MeToo movement would not have happened if it weren’t for the explosion of memoir, which started around the mid-1990s.
These memoirs, it’s important to note, were written mainly by women and others who had been traditionally silenced. If I see an injustice, I feel compelled to right/write it. Or “plead” that someone else write it: thus, a reason I wrote Acetylene Torch Songs. I want everyone to write their narratives! Injustices can be rectified through the power of the written word; in “Acetylene,” I encourage you, and you, and you to write your true stories to ignite the soul.
R: In the chapter entitled, “You Don’t Own Me,” you gently touch on the idea of cancel culture, calling it censorship. You write, “From my perspective, a particularly insidious form of censorship is silence. We’ll ignore this book or piece of art because it doesn’t mesh with our own view of the world.” You are referring to critics of memoir, both professional and amateur. How do you think identity politics have morphed into such “insidious” authoritarianism even amongst the liberal left? I’d love to read a whole essay on this alone (that’s an assignment), but a brief answer here is acceptable.
S: Right: Ultimately, all we can do is tell our truths. What else do we have? Some people absolutely do not want to hear these truths. Well, too bad. We speak/write them anyway. For example, I got a lot of backlash for Love Sick among male members of the media who were generally angry that the book didn’t have more sex in it! I mean, they wanted to read the sex acts of a sex addict. Of course the book is about recovering from an addiction.
Anyway, on live radio, I was asked completely inappropriate (humiliating) questions like, Sue, where’s the kinkiest place you’ve ever had sex? I kid you not. On live radio. Well, that was tough. So much so that I subsequently wrote my first poetry collection; I knew no one would interview me about a poetry collection!
In short, they wanted me to have written a completely different book! Anyway, I’ve probably gone off topic here. Just write what you need to write, what your soul tells you to write, and don’t worry about the rest. Or call me, and I’ll talk you through it.
R: In this chapter, you also bring up the important point that not everyone is going to like your work and that you will, no matter what, no matter who you are, receive backlash. It’s so important that you included this, particularly for a “how-to” book because, while we talk about rejection a lot, rejection from lit mags, editors, agents, etc., we don’t talk about it much from readers. Thank you for pointing this out and acknowledging that while it can be difficult, it’s part of the job as a writer and to not let it get in your way of writing.
S: Here’s an example: I was giving a presentation to a Jewish organization, with my first book, about growing up in my Jewish incestuous family. A couple of rabbis in the audience stood up and claimed that incest doesn’t happen in Jewish families. Well… Whew. I tried to calmly point out that incest happens within families of every religion, culture, socio-economic group. Let me hasten to emphasize, though, that I was invited to this Jewish organization by women who know incest happens in Jewish families. So overall I received a lot of support.
Oh, during question-and-answer sessions at other readings, I’m sometimes asked: why dwell on unpleasant past events! Really?! So there I am explaining that the idea isn’t about dwelling. The idea is to make sense of the past, understand it, claim the narrative and the power that goes with it. Ironically, by doing so, by getting the story out of you, offers the opportunity to not dwell. Once I make sense of an experience, once I write about it, then I’m better able to let it go.
Here’s the key: While you are writing, I strongly encourage you to not think about the outside world or how your book might be perceived. First and foremost, it’s crucial simply to get the words down on paper. Tell your narrative in the way that’s right for you. Only think about the outside world after you’ve finished writing.
Or don’t worry about the outside world! By now, I no longer worry about outside reactions. I know what I have to do to emotionally survive: Write!
R: In “Do You Want To Know A Secret,” you further discuss the criticism of “confessional writing,” or naval gazing. Why do you think literary fiction gets a pass, when it’s literally fiction but to write about the human condition from the perspective of a real, living, breathing human is problematic among the supposed literary elite?
S: Because these misguided critics (part of the patriarchy that, sadly, includes some women who support it) simply do not, do not, do not want to hear truth. If I say how traumatic it was to be sexually molested by my father, and let’s say you were molested by your father, but you don’t want to admit it, or don’t want to admit to the damage it caused, then you will try to ignore/deny my truth.
Or, if you are a man who engaged in domestic violence or sexual assault (the Harvey Weinsteins and Donald Trumps of the world), then you have a lot of emotion invested in denying the creative nonfiction/truthteller writers of the world.
Sadly, the truth scares many people. All the more reason for us to write it.
R: I think it’s “for fuck’s sake.” Did you ever get confirmation on this?
S: HaHa, no confirmation. But you must be right!
R: Thank you for writing this book and joining me for this interview. I love Acetylene Torch Songs and I love you!
S: Aww, you’re such a sweetheart. I felt as if we were having an in-person conversation. Great questions. Thank you. And I love you, too!
