Interview: Penny Guisinger
Penny Guisinger and I met when we each served on the board of the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance in the early 2010s, and I became a fan of her nonfiction soon after. Her work captured complex realities of life in rural Maine from perspectives that were meaningful to me: queer rights, addiction recovery, and close examination of the natural world. During our interview, which took place about ten years since we’d last met, I was struck by the gaps between a writer’s process and intent for a piece and a reader’s experience and interpretation of the final version. How magical it is that literature can exist beyond its creator and beyond a single reality, revealing new and unexpected meanings with each reading. In Penny’s memoir Shift: A Memoir of Identity and Other Illusions, she employs nonlinear time in the context of coming out as lesbian. Set in part during Maine’s on-again, off-again voter (dis)approval of same-sex marriage rights in Maine, the book exudes a haunting relevance in this election year, when individual rights across the United States are under attack. One of the book’s central aesthetic concerns is alternative timelines, which Penny develops through a series of overlapping metaphors and excursions into physics and mathematics. In the interview below, Penny and I discuss connections between these powerful ways of interpreting reality.
—Michele Sharpe
Michele Sharpe: With the sort of decisiveness that patriarchal systems fear, you left your cis-hetero marriage when you fell in love with Kara, a woman. I’m one of those writers who can spend an indecisive day adding and deleting words, so I’m curious about whether (and if so, how) the quality of decisiveness you experienced in your personal life influenced any choices you made when writing the book.
Penny Guisinger: When I read this question, I had to laugh because decisive is not a word anybody would use to describe me, and I would not use it to describe myself. It was a transformative decision, but there was a lot of hemming and hawing and a lot of self-doubt and agonizing about divorce because I had young kids, not because I was entering a same-sex relationship. As I was trying to figure out what the hell I should do, a very good friend said, “Do you want to do this now, or do you want to do it when they’re fourteen and sixteen? Because you’re not going to stay in this marriage.”
That was a helpful conversation, but nothing that felt clear, and the writing of the book was similar. There was nothing that felt clear. I desperately wanted to write a linear, chronological book, but I couldn’t write that book. I was dragged unwillingly into this nonlinear structure because it was the only way I could tell the story. Once I finally accepted that structure, then I certainly had a better idea of what to do, but there were long years of resisting what this book wanted to be. And the way that I work, which reflects how I think, how I experience the world, and how I remember people, places, and events, is sort of getting into your second question.
MS: Your book’s chapters are quite short, often in the form of a vignette that juxtaposes a past event with an element of physics or a mathematic or geometric idea. How have these juxtapositions evolved in your writing?
PG: I have pretty ferocious ADHD, and maybe that’s the reason why I write the way I do, but my particular process is also a result of time constraints. I’ve always had a big day job in the background of my writing life. I get an hour at a time to work, and in that hour I tend to write a thing with a beginning, middle, and end, and then it’s a little piece with its own agency, and it sort of wants to stay that way.
Physics or mathematics become unexpected places for infusing metaphors into the writing, especially in my braided writing. This book was a love story that was unfolding, and it was also a divorce story that was unfolding at the same time, and it was a parenting story and a political story. Picture an Excel table. It was hard for me to pull a single meaning out of any one place across all those timelines in the spreadsheet.
All these stories sometimes contradicted each other. There were moments as a parent when I was a mess. But in the love story, I was extremely content. And how is all that true at the same time? These competing truths and timelines that felt separate but were not. Somehow, quantum physics showed up at the door. I’m not a quantum physicist, but I learned just a little bit. Some quantum physicists will tell you that there is no time, and I don’t know what that means, but it was a hell-on-wheels metaphor. Or sometimes I’d be writing something and realize it needed a lift. It wasn’t coming off the page. How could I inject some broader meaning, so it wasn’t just an anecdote?
MS: Perhaps many readers of CRAFT ask themselves that same question. What does elevate an anecdote into something more meaningful?
PG: I was writing a sequence of events for my new project, a memoir about sailing and my father’s death, and I realized, “This draft is a series of ‘and then and then and then,’” and it was time to find something else to say that wasn’t about me taking a sailing class in the nineties. Maybe the history of women in sailing. Maybe the history of the sailing program, or maybe something about salt water. I needed to give the reader more than the next event that happened. That’s a very gut-level, instinct-driven moment for me: it is time to put something else in here. And likely that process of stepping away from the story will kick open some other door.
In this case, I pivoted to writing about my childhood obsession with horses because that’s what showed up. This pivot opened up a new part of this project about how horses and boats hold a similar place in my thinking. If I hadn’t stopped for a minute, I wouldn’t have found this new thread. It was a gift.
MS: You’ve been instrumental in establishing and organizing Iota, the short forms conference. How did being an organizer of a conference affect your writing? And what are some of the benefits and challenges of writing in very short forms?
PG: I started Iota when I was an MFA student. I was profoundly grateful to be in a low-residency MFA program, and I didn’t want my first residency to ever be over. I was among all these people who cared about writing, and I had been craving that community for so long. When it came time to do a third-semester project, I started Iota because it was a way to keep some of that immersive, community-building experience going. The ongoing joke is I’m still just trying to get an A on that project.
Iota intersects with my writing because I built it for myself. But of course, I can’t have a community just by myself, for myself, right? I knew that if I needed it, other people needed it, too. It’s been delicious, and once a year I get that four-day experience of being around people who love to write.
Short is a relative term, right? At the conference, we let people define it for themselves. Even long things are made up of short things. However, once you look at publishing short work, the length of a piece takes on a more rigid definition. That’s the difference between writing and publishing, which are two different processes. So, flash nonfiction? Brevity set the standard at 750 words, but I think anything under 1,000 is considered flash.
People ask for lists of who publishes flash nonfiction, and now the answer is, “Everybody does.” It’s not a niche area anymore. Shorter work seems to be better or easier to publish now than longer pieces, and the benefits of writing short are the same as the challenges: A shorter piece requires a lot of compression, which is good practice for all writers. Writers really have to turn the screws on a piece and squeeze out every word that isn’t needed. It’s hard to tell a big story in a small space, so a short format can also drive what story you’re going to tell. Some stories you can’t tell in 750 to 1,000 words. All this compression generally results in beautiful writing.
MS: As a person who grew up in New England and lived for several years in Maine, I found your understated, satirical humor both familiar and hilarious. For example, describing a potentially high-stakes conversation with Kara before the two of you came out as a couple, you write: “I had a beer bottle wedged into a mesh cup holder hanging below the arm of my chair. I got right to work peeling the label from the exposed section of glass. I stayed on task throughout the conversation.” The similar structure of the three sentences, the focus on physical detail, and the deadpan, workaday tone of the final sentence all contribute to the hilarity for me. Do you incorporate humor intentionally? And if so, can you talk about strategies for incorporating authentic humor into a scene?
PG: I would have loved being a stand-up comic. I love making people laugh. I love finding the ridiculousness in a situation. I love irony. When that’s coming through in my writing, it’s just an expression of my actual voice. I have this huge, heavy day job, and I make people laugh at work as often as I possibly can. It’s a very natural thing for me to do on the page.
Regarding the sort of micro-level techniques that you’re commenting upon in those three sentences, I was certainly not conscious of the similar structure. I see it now that you’ve pointed it out. I don’t think that structural choice was consciously made, but by the time I got to, “I stayed on task,” I was aware of the humor.
I use humor as a coping strategy. And I think it’s serving that purpose in this passage as an offering to the reader: “Here’s something you can smile at while this is unfolding.”
MS: As a reader, I also sensed a paradox about coming out in a small community: it’s difficult to hide one’s identity, and it’s difficult to disrespect the identity of others, at least to their face. In my experience of living in small towns, everybody’s so in each other’s face that the way to survive is to simply face everybody, and that involves a certain amount of mutual respect. Do you have any thoughts about how self-revelation strategies in memoir can be related to a writer’s rural or urban location?
PG: I’m just going to start talking. I don’t know exactly how to answer, so maybe somewhere in what I’m about to say there’ll be an answer. I was coming out in a small town in the middle of a political campaign when people were publicly taking sides by sticking a sign on their lawn, right? I could drive through this town today and still tell you who had which signs on their lawn. Particularly the signs that were on the wrong side.
MS: And just to clarify for people who weren’t there, which side was that?
PG: The wrong side would be the anti-same-sex marriage side.
There’s a guy who I think considers himself pretty friendly with us, or at least we were at the time, and he had a sign on his lawn against same-sex marriage. I don’t know if he ever made the connection between his lawn sign and us because there is this weird disconnect for people: “Oh, that’s politics. It’s not about you. We like you. We just don’t like this policy idea. It’s not personal.”
You know, it’s actually really personal. It’s actually our life, right? It’s less of an issue now because no one’s got lawn signs out anymore, but if you look at the numbers in our county, the majority voted against our right to exist as a family. And I haven’t forgotten that. The only place we won was on the Native-American reservations, among people who know oppression.
Some people found it very easy to disrespect our identity and to do it publicly, and I don’t know what to make of that.
So here comes this book. I got asked a lot of questions like, “How can you put that really personal material out into the world?” I don’t know. There’s a little magic trick. Maybe not magic. Maybe it’s just pathology. I feel very disconnected from the book now. The book is done. The book is published. The book is not me. I wrote the book. It’s an artifice. It’s an art object. Maybe that’s delusional.
I’m not a private person. At all. And I don’t feel precious about my story—I don’t think anything happened to me that hasn’t happened to a lot of different people, by which I mean, the bigger human experience of figuring out who you are and/or falling in love or being scared about how what you’re doing affects your children. Pieces of that story have happened to everybody. Self-revelation in a rural area is certainly trickier than if I still lived in Brooklyn, right? But the only place that really hits the ground is when I’m giving a reading here. I’m careful about what I decide to read out loud just because of the people who might be in the room.
If ten people in my town have read my book, I’m going to see one of them today if I leave the house. Also, I am likely to see people who appear in the book because of the small-town situation, right? And people who know people who appear in the book, right? I had to be extremely aware and intentional about how I included other people in this story. In one section, I describe telling people about falling in love with Kara and getting divorced from my husband, and I follow that passage with a list of people’s reactions. One person said, “I don’t believe in that.” And one person said, “I don’t care.” And one person said, “I’m worried about your kids.” But I didn’t attribute those quotes to anyone. I was pleased when I came up with that strategy. That list was how I cut people a break while still holding true to my experience.
MS: Maine has a weird, whiplash history with marriage rights. Freedom to Marry was signed into law in April 2009, and then repealed by referendum in November of that year. Then, a new measure got on the 2012 ballot and passed, securing marriage rights in the state again. How did these political shifts relate to the personal shifts that are the subject of your memoir? Do you see any lessons there for queer activists today?
PG: One minute I had all the rights of marriage in the world. And then I started a new relationship and had none of them. As a straight married person, I had no idea what it might feel like to check those rights at the door because it’s not just marriage rights. It’s the ability to walk down the street holding hands, to live as a couple.
I don’t think same-sex marriage rights are going anywhere. There were two strategies that made the difference in Maine, one for each side. The first was a major get-out-the-vote effort by conservatives in the 2009 referendum. Then in 2012, people braver than I am went door-to-door and told their stories to total strangers. This second strategy worked because, as we’ve been saying, the disconnect is harder to maintain when you’re looking somebody in the face.
It can be dangerous, physically and emotionally, for queer people to be the ones to do all the work. Straight allies also need to get involved and talk, straight person to straight person, have those conversations. Progress will be made politically the same way it’s always been made, by voting and telling stories.
MICHELE SHARPE, a poet and essayist, is also a high school dropout, adopted person, and former trial attorney. Her essays appear in venues including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Poets & Writers, and she’s published poems in journals including Sweet, Poet Lore, Rogue Agent, and Salamander. She lives in North Florida. Find her on Facebook @michele.sharpe20.
PENNY GUISINGER is the author of the memoir Shift: A Memoir of Identity and Other Illusions and Postcards from Here. Her work has appeared in Fourth Genre, River Teeth, Guernica, Solstice, and others. Pushcart-nominated, a Maine Literary Award winner, and a three-time notable in Best American Essays, she is a codirector of Iota Short Forms and a former assistant editor at Brevity. Penny is a graduate of the Stonecoast MFA program. Find her on Facebook @penny.guisinger.
