An Interview With Melinda Misuraca: Weaver of Words and Mystic Delight

A traveling and writing machine, Melinda Misuraca ties together whip smart anecdotes and vividly detailed prose for stories that readers want to step inside of. With her words appearing in such publications as Natural Bridge, The Best Travel Writing 2006, The Portland Review, Salon.com , Misuraca taught creative writing at New College of California and is currently working on a memoir while balancing a novel on the back burner. Living and dreaming in a universe of writing, it would seem to some that she’d clothe herself in words if it were at all possible. She lives in Sonoma County, CA and tells her tales of wanderlust here. Petals and Bones is excited about sharing the talent and inspiration of our lovely local writer for this installment of our Rad Person of the Week series. – D.B.

1. Can you give some background on your life as a writer? How did you come to choose this career? What kinds of projects have you completed? Did you get a degree creative writing?

I wrote my first book when I was nine. It was bound in red felt, the title HYSTERICAL POEMS spelled out in yellow yarn glued to the cover. I still have it. At age thirteen I discovered a box of dirty magazines in the woods, and not long after I wrote “Summer of the Albino,” an illustrated piece of erotica that I hid under my mattress. Set during Prohibition, it was the story of a love affair between a flapper and a dwarf albino bootlegger. In my twenties I wrote poems and gave them to boys I liked, or read them aloud at poetry readings held in cafes and bars in San Francisco, where in order to be a poet you had to be a junkie or a stripper or homeless and for sure had to have a banged-up heart. I started writing for money in my late twenties– personal essays, travel pieces, newspaper articles. Back then you could make some decent money doing this. Not so easy these days.

I was always restless, always on the search for that dopamine rush of the new, whether in the form of lovers, jobs, foreign countries and various reckless pursuits. I’d throw myself in and sink to the gills, but inevitably I’d lose interest and swim away. It took me many years to understand that a large part of my unsettledness was due to my brain chemistry.

Through my thirties I continued to write, but had yet to fully realize that my writing could be a way to focus my restless energy without laying waste in the process. After completing BA degrees in english and anthropology, in my late thirties I decided to write in earnest. I earned an MFA in creative writing and soon was teaching writing classes at New College in San Francisco and Santa Rosa. I had a literary  agent and was close to completing a short story collection, lived with my children on a mountaintop in Sonoma County. I wrote every day. Writing had become my temple, my lover, my foreign country. For a couple of years things were swimming along. Then I fell ill with what was later diagnosed as a mitochondrial disorder. I would be teaching a class when all of a sudden I had to run out into the hall, my heart beating wildly and my limbs shaking. Soon I became so sick I couldn’t read, write, drive, even wash a dish. For a year I spent most of my waking hours doing absolutely nothing. It was an enforced spiritual retreat, a kind of prison sentence.  Eventually I began to recover somewhat. I felt like Persephone returning from the underworld, cloaked in the black veil of darkness.  In the past my writing had always been threaded with a subtle melancholy, but when I returned to writing that thread had a heft to it, and smelled like death. Death’s lurking odor is not a bad thing, really. In contrast, life takes on a sweeter fragrance.

Living with an illness sometimes feels like wearing a chastity belt. I can’t be too reckless or I’ll pay. Writing saves me. I can indulge my current obsessions, spending weeks hanging out in a strip club, at a demolition derby, a Buddhist monastery, a psych ward, the history stacks at UC Berkeley– and use my writing to, as Victor Jones says, “trap Heaven and Earth in the cage of form.” Writing encourages the overlap of self and other, that mysterious third entity. Writing is the one dominion over which I have ultimate power, and yet to access that power I have to submit myself. The story knows what it wants. I am just its vehicle.

2. How do you stay motivated to be creative? Where do your ideas come from?

Ideas wash over me all day. They might be related to whatever writing project I’m working on, or they might be other story ideas, or ideas related to something I want to make, sew, cook, see, know. I write them down in a red notebook or on scraps of paper that are scattered around the house, and now and then I gather them up and organize them. For some of us, creativity can be both a gift and a curse. Benign quotidian rituals are important just to anchor ourselves, to temper the fire, to allow the explosive rush of ideas to develop form and depth.

3. What advice do you have to someone who wants to be more creative or bring more creativity into their work?

Go to where you feel lit up, cracked open, unhinged. Find the poetic thread and follow it: you may end up with a story. Keep an ongoing list of the things you love, that turn you on (and not just sexually). Develop your own manifesto, your ars poetica. This will feed you when you are depleted.

As far as staying the course with a writing practice, beyond the usual advice to write every day and read constantly (both essential, in my opinion), I’d suggest  training your brain to crave writing.  A large part of creativity has to do with brain chemistry, and there are ways to to seduce the muse, to cultivate what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow,” that state of total absorption when your sense of time disappears and you feel as though you are a conduit for a divine fire. This is the alpha brain wave state. One way to access this is with the repetition of cues. It sounds esoteric, but it’s really quite scientific. Find things that have meaning for you and repeat them every time you write, and eventually your mind will associate them with that rush you feel when your writing is hot. It could be as simple as placing a copy of your favorite novel next to the computer, or writing in the same place or at the same time every day, or wearing a certain article of clothing, or listening to a particular album (perhaps give each of your stories its own soundtrack) or drinking from certain coffee cup.

If you’ve been working on something for a long time and are having trouble seeing it with fresh eyes, you might try reformatting it in giant geriatric 30-point type or in the New Yorker-style three column format, and print it out on the back of old manuscript pages. Or read your work aloud to yourself or have someone read it to you. If you always type, write longhand. You’d be surprised what you’ll notice when you change things up.

Writing can be hard, lonely work, and it helps to have other writers to commune with. Join or start a writer’s group, or go to writer’s conferences if that rings your bell. Above all, trust yourself. What’s around the corner for you is a mystery, a vast realm of possibility, but if you are committed, your work will find its place in the world.

4. How important is discipline to your creative output? How important is idle time/relaxation?

Discipline is vital to me. Bondage is good. I don’t do well with blank pages, too many choices or easy exits. Idle time? Due to my illness, my activity level is much lower than it used to be, but inactivity feels alien. My mind needs something to focus on or it won’t shut up. Relaxation for me is doing something stimulating and engaging but that doesn’t require anything of me. Like watching a baseball game, or looking at art in a museum, or listening to music or a friend tell a story over a beer on the back porch or in a parked car. I love stories, about anything: the outrages and tragedies and twists of fate, the enigmas of love and hatred, the inherent suffering and exquisite luck in being human. I can never just sit there and gaze at the sunset, my mind emptied of thought.

5. What does a typical day look like for you?

Lately I’ve been taking a break from a half-completed novel and am working on a memoir. I started it after interest from an editor based on a blog I’ve been keeping sporadically (www.javasugar.wordpress.com) about the years I spent living in West Java, Indonesia. Originally I hadn’t planned a book-length work, but the idea took hold and for now it’s keeping me busy. Writing a novel is flippin’ hard for a brain like mine. There’s too much room, and I gallop all over the place. The memoir genre is easier, barbed as it is by the boundary of truth. Short stories are also easier for me, so tight and contained, each with its own set of rules, its own aesthetic language. I could write short stories for the rest of my life and be happy. Would anybody read them? Hmm.
I write in the afternoon or early evening, when my mind is the most obedient. But during other times I think about my writing, like when I am taking a walk, sitting in my car, or just before falling asleep. In this way I feed the dream, keeping it alive until the next time I sit down to write. Thinking about my work uses up a lot of potentially troublesome energy. This is not to say that my old reckless ways have died. I’m just keeping an eye on them.