Don't Censor Yourself. Write What You Want to Write: An Interview with Lee Zacharias

Lee Zacharias and I met in Greensboro, North Carolina, too many years ago to specify. We were part of a group of women writers dubbed “Ladies Lit” that convened on a regular basis for drinks, dessert and invaluable rough and tumble criticism of early drafts of our work. I count Lee the person who nudged me toward proper grammar (among other stylistic improvements). An accomplished photographer as well as author, Lee’s books include the short story collection Helping Muriel Make It Through the Night, the essay collection The Only Sounds We Make and four novels, the most recent What a Wonderful World This Could Be (Madville Publishing, 2021). In the post-COVID era, with luck, Lee and I will again hoist drinks across from each other and continue the conversation started here.

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Kat Meads: At what age did you define yourself as a writer? How did that self-identification come about?

Lee Zacharias: I knew I wanted to write even before I could read. I loved books, and when I was in first or second grade I would always put my hand up for "show and tell"—do they still do that?—and make up a story on the spot. I got a lot of encouragement from other students, mainly because the longer I could make my story the less time we would have for arithmetic. I began to write around the time I was in sixth grade. I was reading a lot of girl detective and boarding school novels at the time, so the "novels" I began in the steno books we used for class notes were imitations of those, none of which I finished, likely because I wasn't a good enough detective to solve the plot. And the one my mother found made her so angry I didn't dare put anything on paper again until I left home for college. I applied to a graduate program but married a grad student instead, and so for the next few years I worked full time and wrote sporadically. I didn't start writing in earnest until I was 25, when my first husband finished his exams and we moved to Richmond, Virginia. But even after I began to publish, I never identified myself as a writer. During the years I taught, I would say I was a teacher, because everyone who's ever told the inquisitive stranger that he or she was a writer, knows what follows: "Have you published anything?" And then, "Anything I would have read?" Now that I'm retired from full-time teaching, I'm more comfortable saying I'm a writer, because I've always got a camera, so people want to know if I'm a photographer. Part of not wanting to identify myself comes of having had a mother who was forever defining herself for me, though her definitions were always expressed in adjectives instead of nouns: she was smart, independent, resourceful; I was resentful. I suppose it sounds passive—to let others define you— but I prefer to think of it as an active way of being. Gertrude Stein once said, in her essay "On Poetry and Grammar," that poetry was about the noun and prose about the verb. There are a lot of issues one could take with that statement, of course, but I like the distinction between noun and verb. I write.

Meads: Are there any writing "rituals"—superstitious or otherwise—that you swear by?

Zacharias: I have to work my way into writing. I don't get up at 5 a.m and start scribbling. I tend to write better in the afternoon. I don't write by hand, except for notes, and haven't since I was inventing girl detectives in the steno books of junior high. Before word processing came along, I wrote on a typewriter, so it's natural for me to sit at a keyboard. My hand cramps, I can't always read my own handwriting, and paragraphs and dialogue don't look right to me unless they're typed. But I'm old enough to want to see what I've written on paper, so I print a lot and mark up those drafts with pencil, though at a certain point I switch back to editing onscreen. But that's a ritual of revision. My preparatory rituals are more like stalling: I read the newspaper, check my email, take a shower, nothing in particular, just daily life. The actual rituals are technical: getting my computer to boot up and let me use it instead of telling me it has no internet connection or needs to clean the cache (whatever that is) or blocking out the screen with endless reports of threats it's saved me from, or insisting that the document I am writing has been saved by another user as "read only." Nothing like Samuel Clemens warming up with a game of billiards in his attic or Herman Melville filling inkpots and sharpening his quill pens. No spinning around five times or placing a lucky token on my desk. But eventually there I am in front of a functioning machine, and a few words in, I'm no longer there but wherever those words take me.  

Meads: When you get stuck on a project, what is your go-to activity to help unblock the blockage?

Zacharias: Oh, anything! I take a walk with one of my cameras. Make jewelry. If I'm really desperate, organize a closet, though I've never gone so far as to clean the stove. Right now I'm working on a memoir focused on my mother's life that includes scans of letters from my father written in 1941 and photographs I consider part of the text. I can spend an entire day processing a single image because you have no idea until you blow them up onscreen how full of dust, pinholes, scratches, and cracked emulsions those old photos are. Many are of people I know about but never met, others people I knew in much older incarnations. It's very mechanical work—something you can do even when you're blocked—but it begets an odd intimacy, like picking eyelashes out of strangers' eyes, that leads me back to the writing. I haven't had to process photographs for fiction, but I've often left a troublesome chapter of a novel to look at pictures or read more about the relevant time or place. It's a way of working myself back into the necessary atmosphere.

Meads: How has being a photographer affected your writing?

Zacharias: I used to think of photography and writing as completely separate. I wanted to compartmentalize them, to make photography a break from writing. But they're not nearly as separate as I pretended. Photography is about light in the way writing is about words, and over time I've realized how much attention my writing pays to light and weather. I love old snapshots in which the shadow of the photographer stretches toward the subject. You don't see the photographer, but you're very aware of the presence. To me, that is the story, the shadow the narrator casts. I never write from an omniscient point of view. Photography also teaches you a lot about framing—what goes into a picture, what is left out—and in a much more subconscious way I think that affects the way I construct units—paragraphs, longer passages, or chapters. Rhythm is important to me, so I am very conscious of the music of the language, but I had to learn the auditory part. From the beginning writing has been very visual to me.

Meads: You have a deep connection to North Carolina's Ocracoke Island. How did that attachment begin and how does that particular place contribute to your artistic life?

Zacharias: I first visited Ocracoke in 1971, before the water system was in place, while residents were still using cisterns. Certainly there was a tourist trade, but nothing like the industry that took off once the water treatment plant was built. It was still a fishing village. By the time I started visiting on a regular basis in 1990 a great deal had changed, and each year I would note other changes: the disappearance of the red and white wooden skiffs from the harbor, the paving of the roads in Jackson Dunes, new street signs, a narrow sidewalk, the trail to Springers Point, the bike path, the historical markers. I couldn't go last year because the island was closed to visitors in May for covid, which means I haven't been back since Dorian devastated the community in September of 2019. I have a lot of friends in the village and know something of what's changed, but knowing is not seeing, and when you visit an island every year, that island gets in your blood, becomes necessary to your life. I rarely write when I'm there. I'm outdoors, riding my bike, kayaking, reading or walking on the beach, always taking photographs. I go off season, so it's not as crowded as it gets come summer. There are sixteen miles of beach from which you cannot see a single building, and when I am riding my bike out South Point or Grass Roads, it's just me and the birds, the same when I am paddling up the back side of the island. I stay in a house where I can kayak from my front yard into the Sound. I'm also very isolated. I disappear into nature. I live entirely in the moment and entirely without ego. There is nowhere else I can divest myself so completely of myself, which is to say that it is the restorative part of writing that doesn't show but is everywhere.  

Meads: As a writer of both fiction and nonfiction, what are some of the factors that determine whether you deal with a subject as truth or fiction.

Zacharias: That's never a question for me. I'm writing about myself or my family or something I experienced, or I'm not, and when I'm not it's fiction. My fiction isn't autobiographical—oh, I might steal a detail here or there, a line of dialogue I've overheard, a rug, a sofa, the whoosh of a door's weather stripping because I know how to describe them—but not at all in terms of character and event. Because I've written personal essays, I don't bring any desire to write about myself to fiction. On other hand, my fiction sometimes goes places I wish I had been. In Across the Great Lake Fern and I mourned the town of Frankfort, Michigan, together, she because it was hers and she lost it, me because I wanted it and it had never been mine. In What a Wonderful World This Could Be I wanted to experience the youth politics of the 1960s from the inside because I was married and working office jobs during those years, and I often felt that instead of living it I watched the story of my generation unfold each night on the Huntley-Brinkley Report. That doesn't mean my novels are wishful thinking, though I did imagine, the first time I saw Frankfort, when I was eleven or twelve, that if I only lived there instead of in the industrial wasteland of Hammond, Indiana, I would have a perfect life. But the first thing any writer learns is that a novel is no place for a perfect life. I made Alex a photographer in What A Wonderful World This Could Be because I knew cameras. And at one time I did, very briefly, work as a darkroom technician for a TV tuner plant and for a newspaper, but I wasn't writing about myself. I simply gave her a profession I knew something about.

Meads: As a professor at UNC-Greensboro and instructor at the Wildacres Writing Workshop, what writing question from students a) is most frequently asked and b) the hardest to answer?

Zacharias:  You have written and taught both nonfiction and fiction, so you've heard this. Students always want to know how to write about their lives or what someone might interpret as their lives without damaging their relationships. How do I write about Mom without making her mad at me? I think my answer is the same one most teachers give. Don't censor yourself. Write what you want to write, what you remember, what you imagine, what you feel. You can decide later whether or not to publish. But that's not what students want to hear, because they hope to publish, and they want a formula for writing about others without risk. But there is no formula. Oh, there are the strategies memoirists suggest: changing names or genders, creating composite characters, finding a different setting. But the truth is that writing is a risky business. Others will read themselves into your fiction even if they aren't there—and nonfiction, well…no one's story happens in a vacuum. So some people will be angry about the way they think you've portrayed them or secrets you've revealed. Others may be angry because you didn't think them important enough to write about. It's impossible to predict every response. Some writers show their work to family or friends and invite them to object. I don't. I edit to improve the work, not to spare feelings. But there are also things I choose not to write about. Every writer has to decide what they value most. Writing is hard work, and students want some part of it made easy. But this is the most uncomfortable part, which is why the question always comes up, and why the answer rarely satisfies.

Meads: Do any of your fictional characters continue to nag at you, post-publication? If so, in what ways to they nag, and (best guess) why do they hang about and nag.

Zacharias: No. Someone asked if I intended to write a sequel to Across the Great Lake, and I was floored. A sequel? Fern is eighty-five years old. She dies, or experiences a vision of her death, on the last page. Where in the world would I go from there? Do I still care about her, about Alex, or other characters I've invented? Absolutely. But even though I suppose I could write a book about what Alex would be doing in 2021, I feel no reason or desire to. That may be where the photographer's sense of framing comes in. I framed the part of her life that interested me. What haunts me more than characters are the worlds I leave behind. My first novel was about a classical clarinetist. That is a profession I knew nothing about, and I immersed myself so completely that it was a shock to finish the book, to get up from the table where I'd often lunched with musicians from the Eastern Music Festival who graciously answered my questions and realize I had no reason to come back. I can't sing; I don't play. I've never lived in Michigan or in a collective. To write a novel is to create a world that you will someday leave with the homesick backward glance of an exile.

Meads: Your most recent novel, What a Wonderful World This Could Be, wonderfully interweaves the personal and the political. Was that mix a conscious goal at the onset? What are some of the challenges of that approach and how did you go about narratively solving those challenges?

Zacharis: Oh, yes, that interweaving of the personal and the political was very much a conscious intent. To me, that's really what the book is about, the tension between the two. As a photographer Alex is committed to the individual vision of the artist, to the singular, whereas her husband, the civil rights and antiwar activist is committed to the masses. She is initially attracted to him because she wants—needs—to get outside herself, but ultimately she recognizes the danger in putting ideology above all else. As she sees it, her husband multiplies and strings zeroes, whereas she reserves the right to count on her fingers one by one. I think the biggest challenge came in what happens to her when her husband disappears. She withdraws. I'm quite certain that if I were writing about her in 2020, for instance, she would have been making her voice heard, because there are some things in politics you simply can't ignore. But that's not where I left her. I left her in 1982, when she still bears the emotional scars of her husband's and her own—but especially her husband's—political involvement in the 1960s and wants to think of herself as apolitical. I'm sure a lot of readers will fault her for that. But they are reading in a different time than the one in which she is acting.