Tenaya Darlington

Tenaya Darlington has worked as an x-ray librarian, a knife seller, a food critic, and a visiting writer since she received her MFA from Indiana University in 1997. Her first book, Madame Deluxe (Coffee House, 2000), a collection of poetry inspired by drag queens, won the National Poetry Series and the GLCA New Writer’s Award. Her novel, Maybe Baby, was released by Back Bay Books (Little, Brown & Co.) in 2004. She currently works for Isthmus Newspaper, the alternative weekly in Madison, Wisconsin, where she writes a biweekly culture column about the bizarre, called “On the Loose.”  

Interviewed by Erin Bittman

EB:  How did you get started writing?  What is your earliest recollection of wanting to write?  When did you begin to think of yourself as a 'serious' writer?
TD:  From the time I was a very little girl, my mother took me to readingsDiane Glancy, John Ashbery, Robert Bly -- and she often read to our family at the dinner table by candlelight after supper. From those nights, I learned to love language.  I thought the stories in the New Yorker were more alive than anything on TV, though I had a sick affection for "Fantasy Island" and still do.  As for being a "serious writer," I don't ever think of myself in those terms.  I am a serious liver, that's the best I can do.

EB:  Who are some writers who have influenced you, and who are some who influence you currently?  If you had to make up a reading list on the spot for a young writer, what would be the top five books on your list?
TD:  I have always loved the Southern Queens, Eudora Welty and Flannery O.  They are the voices I go back to whenever my ear feels off.  Over my lunch break, I read John Cheever.  Last night, before bed, Denis Johnson. I tend to snack constantly, to read whatever is on the floor at my feet or resting on the arm of the chair.  My house looks like a library after an explosion.  I also love to read newspapers and magazines, and I love to peruse stuffy old bookstores and read moldy, forgotten stuff -- lately, anything to do with taxidermy.  As for a prescription, the doctor is in.  To understand plot, Edith Wharton's House of Mirth. To make yourself purr, Elizabeth Smart's By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept.  For sheer delight and despair in one fell swoop, David Berman's Actual Air. To be amazed, Orlando. For guts, Audre Lorde.

EB:  How does reading inform your writing?
TD:  No one who wants to write seriously -- ach, there is that buggery word -- ever stops reading.  The library is to the writer what the pool is to the swimmer.

EB:  What other art forms have influenced your writing?
TD:  Music, painting, sculpture, cooking...they all trickle down.

EB:  Do you have any odd rituals that get you to start writing?   In other words, what ignites your imagination to get you to write?
TD:  I do lots of odd things you might call ritual, but mostly I try to come to the page with a kind of gentleness.  Sometimes I listen to music, especially music that has a sort of humming quality about it -- most recently, Low, although I also like the crashy drums of Scout Niblett.  My best poems are usually written while walking, which is why I carry scrap paper in all my jackets. Sometimes, I'll begin by memorizing a little something as I walk a trail, and I say the words to myself, and pretty soon it feels like I'm wearing special goggles, so that everything seems supremely vibrant.  Then I jot away -- either as I walk to work, which I do every day, or as I walk in the forest, which is something I try to do at least once a week. Walking always helps me write.  A good dry log is the best desk.

EB:  What is your writing schedule like?
TD:  My writing life is a shambles.  I work at a newspaper, so I am usually working on several stories for work -- maybe a food review, a column about an upcoming drag pageant, and let's say a profile of some women hunters.  When I get home, my head is literally humming with conversations.  I'll eat a little dinner, maybe have a rum tonic, then if I'm lucky and my head is still humming and the night is clear, I'll go upstairs and put a little something on paper.  My husband is a musician, and if he is working on a song, that's perfect timing.  Then he strums away in the basement, and I scribble away at my desk.

EB:  What has been one of the most important experiences that have impacted your writing life?

TD:  Discovering a hermitage, yes, yes, a little cabin run by some Franciscan nuns up near Black River Falls, Wisconsin.  I rent it about four times a year, usually for a week or two at a time, and I try to live as much like a hermit as possible.  I toss out all the clocks, cut myself off from as much human contact as possible, and just give myself room to think.  After the first day or so, I really hit my stride, and I write for hours, and it's just heavenly.  I used to think I needed constant stimulation to feed my writing.  Now, I realize I need solitude -- deep quiet and lots of open space. The busier I get in my workaday life, the more I dream about a cloistered life.

EB:  How has working as an editor influenced your writing?
TD:  More than working as an editor, just being at a newspaper has influenced my writing. For one thing, in a newsroom, there's no such thing as writer's block.  I write on deadline, and it's made me very disciplined.  Working as a journalist, I have cured myself totally of writing block.

EB:  Do you do a lot of teaching?  Workshops, universities?  If so, how has teaching informed your writing?
TD:  I teach for fun.  Doesn't that sound ridiculous?!  I love teaching, and I miss it.  Whenever I get a chance to fill in for someone, I do.  And I visit a lot of classrooms to talk about being a journalist or about working as a writer.  It's always a great joy to be in an environment where people are full of nerves and creativity.  I try to bring them a taste of my world and to siphon off a bit of their youthful essence.

EB:  What is one piece of advice that you would give to a young writer?
TD:  Stay out of debt. Unless you are independently wealthy, the key to making it as a writer is buying yourself time.  I wrote a novel on three vacation days -- during my first year as a journalist, that's all I got.  I stocked away all the money I could so I could take a month of unpaid leave, and that's how I managed to write a first draft of Maybe Baby.  Yes, I drive a rusty '87 Volvo. Yes, I live in a drafty little house.  Yes, I wear second-hand clothes from St. Vinny's.  I wouldn't have it any other way.  I've published two books in four years while working a full time job, plus teaching on the side.  So I'm a bit of a maniac, I'm a happy maniac.

EB:  You have written poetry and fiction.  Do you write non-fiction, also?  If so, what have you written?
TD:  Most of my nonfiction has been in the way of journalistic pieces -- but the work I do has an essayistic quality to it, whether I'm writing about the Slow Food movement or Christian metal or polyamorous couples.  Newspapers pay people like me -- people who are trained in the creative realm of writing -- for a perspective. I am always working with a lens.  That, to me, is what's so lovely about working for a newspaper. I get paid to look around and to write about what I see and how I feel about what I see.  I've also written a few essays -- I have a short piece called "Dream Houses" that appeared in an anthology of short essays called In Brief (Norton) a few years ago.

EB:  Do you prefer one genre over another?  Do you feel you express yourself better in one genre over another?  
TD:  I am always crossing genres. It's the drag queen in me, I think.

EB:  What are you currently working on?
TD:  I am fidgeting over a new collection of poems and nipping at another novel--or two or three.  My biggest problem is stopping the rush of ideas, or at least coping with the bramble. I love starting novels.  It's a sickness. I could wake up and start a novel every morning and be perfectly happy.  I love beginnings and the dreamy layers of potential that accompany them.

EB:  How is your process of writing poetry similar to writing fiction?  How is it different?
TD:  You've heard of an amuse buche? That's what it feels like to write a poem, like sucking on a little piece of pickled radish. Writing fiction, to me, feels like cooking a 12-course meal for which you have to first skin the chickens.

EB:  How does revision work for you in poetry?  How many drafts of a poem do you write?  What is the process?  How does revision work for you in fiction? How many drafts do you go through?  Do you have others critique and give comments on your work in process?
TD:  Every piece of writing is different.  My best work tends to require some drafting, but not major de-boning.  I have boxes of wreckage.  Eighty percent of what I do is pure practice -- it's not for publication.  It's just to loosen my joints and bring blood to the brain.  I think writers have this misconception that every story, every poem must be improved and eventually put in the mail for publication.  I just don't work that way.  For every twenty poems I write, maybe two make it into being.  The others get sloughed off in the dark.

EB:  How do ideas for stories come to you?  Do ideas for poems come differently?
TD:  Tonight I flipped through The New York Times Magazine and, over the course of eating a bowl of edamame, thought of about five possible short stories.  I'll have these ideas in my head for the next two or three days, and if I'm lucky I'll jot one of them down and maybe finish it in December when I take a month off to work.  My head is always this kind of highway.  Poems tend to come from a mood or sound or color, though not always.  I get a lot of ideas for poems and stories every day, which is partially because that's how I move through the world...as a kind of hovering body.  If I start to hear a voice, though...if I start to hear the lines, that's when I know I've really got something.

EB:  What drew you to the idea of writing a novel that combines gender issues and child rearing?  Did you have any pressing cultural concerns ruminating and had to express themselves in the form of a novel?  Is this where Maybe Baby began?  
TD:  Maybe Baby started with a question: What would happen if a couple brought a baby into the world, then refused to tell people whether it was a boy or a girl. I have a fascination with babies, probably because I'm ambivalent about having them  myself. I love to watch parents interact with their children, and I'm often amazed just how motorized the family realm has become. The toys are motorized. The people are motorized.  Every response seems so programmed. I wanted to get in there and twist some wires.

EB:  What drew you to the idea of Madame Deluxe?  How was Madame Deluxe created?  Is this where the book began?  What did the creation of Madame Deluxe reveal to you about yourself?
TD:  I wanted to create a theatrical environment inside of poetry. I have always loved costumes and staging and outlandish characters, and when started going to drag shows, I was immediately smitten by the verve.  (Most of the songs, though, were disposable.)  Then I went to poetry readings, which often lacked zest, even when the poems were gorgeous. I got the idea to cross-pollinate the drag world and the poetry world, and I have been happy ever since.

EB:  How did you know when Maybe Baby was finished?  Why did you end the novel the way you did?
TD:  At some point, I realized that book was about tolerance, and when I felt the characters embrace this, I knew it was safe to land.  Secretly, I wanted to end another book on a scene involving lipstick.

EB:  Character development seems to play an important role in your writing.  Maybe Baby has a lot of quirky characters. Where did the characters for Maybe Baby come from?
TD:  Oh honey, they're just an amalgam of all the weird people in my life.  The funny thing is that I don't think they are that weird, but they do.

EB:  Maybe Baby has a very cinematic quality.  Explain how film has influenced your work.  What films were you watching when you wrote Maybe Baby?  Did film influence any of the writing in Madame Deluxe?
TD:  I loved “The Royal Tenenbaums.” I wrote the first chapter of Maybe Baby after seeing that movie. Something about those characters and the compassion they developed for one another -- in a very desperate, sweet way -- felt like the right tone for me. I had been working on another book in first person, which I found to be really claustrophobic, so I just let myself rove around third person for awhile. When I got stuck, I shifted the lens.

EB:  What was your biggest challenge writing Maybe Baby?  Your biggest challenge writing Madame Deluxe?
TD:  Like any project, the biggest challenge is staying motivated until the very end. There always comes a point where you want to bag the whole notion. As my friend Jesse Lee Kercheval says, 'Writing a novel is like walking a tightrope. Never look down.'

EB:  If you had one question for your readers about Maybe Baby, what would you ask them?
TD:  No questions asked. That's the pleasure of being the reader.