By Valentine Sargent
Thisbe Nissen, the Chatham MFA Program 2021 Melanie Brown Lecturer, is the author of three novels, Our Lady of the Prairie (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018), Osprey Island (Knopf, 2004), The Good People of New York (Knopf, 2001), and two story collections, Out of the Girls' Room and into the Night (University of Iowa Press, 1999, winner of the John Simmons Short Fiction Award) and How Other People Make Love (Wayne State University Press, 2021). She has been the recipient of fellowships from the James Michener-Copernicus Society, The University of Iowa, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the MacDowell Colony. She currently teaches undergrad, MFA, and PhD students at Western Michigan University.
I spoke with Thisbe Nissen in September of 2021 to discuss How Other People Make Love and her writing process which she compared to quilting, collaging and yoga.
The Fourth River: What is your process as you arrange real events and characters into fiction?
Thisbe Nissen: Very interesting…what is my process there? I feel like it’s always different, you know? I have often worked this way, starting with real things and then building them into other things and I think earlier on I was closer to the real events. I think over time I started to forget what actually happened and what was fiction that I added on to it. So I don’t actually really remember anymore what I’ve made up and what I haven’t.
It's funny because right now I’m in the process of doing that backwards. I’m taking these family stories or observations of my parents that I wrote as fiction. I took an event and used it as the seed. The very first piece of flash fiction I ever wrote I actually wrote as a poem and then I realized that if I took out all the weird line breaks I’d imposed on it, it was just a short story and not a poem at all. It turned into the first piece of flash fiction I ever wrote or published which is called “At the No. 1 Phoenix Garden.” It was a story rooted in a dinner at a Chinese restaurant in New York with my parents when my dad was in the earlier stages of the Parkinson’s that he had. It was observing how my mother had orchestrated the placement of this dinner, like where people were sitting, where my father was, who could help him and his struggles through the meal, her flirting with some other man at the table. This complex arrangement going on and me observing it. I think at the time my fears were like, “Oh I’m really going to piss my mother off.” I changed a few things. I made the man a professor of Chinese history so he was giving a subject-appropriate monologue that my mother could be commenting on….Things like that, shifting things for the sake of the cohesion of the story as opposed to any allegiance to the truth. I have very little allegiance to the truth.
Everything always comes back to my mother, it’s inevitable. My mother was an actress in her youth. She was very dramatic, and she very much enjoyed telling dramatic stories and she had absolutely no allegiance to the truth, at all. She’d be telling stories that were mortifying to me and I’d be on the side like, “Mommy it didn’t happen like that!” And she’d be saying, “Shh, shh. It makes a better story this way!”
But I remember that story, it was accepted for publication, and I was excited but also afraid that it was going to be really insulting to my mom. With great trepidation I showed it to her, and she adopted this idea that if it’s flattering to her, it’s nonfiction and if it isn’t, it’s fiction. Her response was very surprising to me, and it’s stuck with me – I mean, we’re talking about 25 years ago – she said, “I’m so moved that you think about us this deeply. That we are a part of your consciousness in this way.” That was very surprising to me, because I was like, what do you think I spend all of my time doing? But to a nonwriter, to see themselves distilled or turned into something else, it was touching in a way that they were on my mind. That I spent time trying to figure out how they felt about things and what they thought.
TFR: That’s really interesting, and of course those observations were going to make it into your fiction.
TN: Yeah, and I think she came to see that and understand that over time. Something that I talk about a lot is that process of taking real life and changing it into fiction – which I think is where your original question started – I think about writing very similarly to the way I think about collaging or quilting. Which is that I’m going around and observing things in the world, and then collecting them. I keep them tucked away. I’m collecting ideas that kind of cohere, or I have little images and I’m playing with them. Like what happens if I stick this anecdote with this anecdote and see what they do together?
I’ve got a story percolating somewhere about deer in Michigan. I’m collecting all these deer stories and then it starts to be like, ‘okay, how do all of these stick together?’ Is it the same character who hit the deer here who also shot a deer here? What can I draw out of these pieces that connect them in some sort of way that they speak to one another or form a larger picture? Quilt. Collage. Whatever it is. So, I think in that way, there is where the morphing happens. Here is an anecdote someone told me. Then as I start to merge it with another anecdote or an image or a conversation, it inevitably has to change. I have to cut it to fit together with this other thing or shape it to fit together with the other piece or overlap it or fold it over, whatever it is that has to happen. I can’t not talk about quilting.
TFR: Talking about this type of collaging, I want to focus on How Other People Make Love. Beautiful cover by the way. I love it.
TN: Would you like the story behind it?
TFR: I’d love to hear it.
TN: When the book was accepted for publication and they were asking about ideas for cover art, my wonderful friend, this incredible photographer, Sonya Naumann, who I know from Iowa – I lived in Iowa City for many years – Sonya had done a project after she was married. I had been to her wedding, and she was so appalled that she had spent a thousand dollars for a dress and was figuring out a way to make peace with that. Her idea as a photographer was to see if she could take pictures of as many people as possible wearing her dress. She’d gotten married but had a lot of really complicated questions and ideas on what that meant. What marriage was about, and what she was entering into, and how that related to the reasons other people entered the institution of marriage.
So, she has been photographing people everywhere wearing her wedding dress. And it's not always wearing it. Sometimes it’ll be some giant football player who will strap it over one arm or something. Because that’s all it fits on. But I think it enabled her to engage in conversations about what marriage and commitment and love and partnership mean to lots of different people. I think it’s been a doorway opening.
When I knew the book was going to be published, I immediately was like, “Maybe we could put one of Sonya’s pictures on the cover?” So we pulled up different images and there were different limitations on what kind of photo it could be. In the end, totally by chance, the three photos they ended up doing mock covers for were all close friends of mine from Iowa City. There were photos of people from all over the world and the one they ended up choosing was my dear friend Laurel Synder who is a brilliant writer. It was taken years and years ago when she was young and single in Iowa City, and it makes me incredibly happy. They did such a beautiful job with the design. The wall wasn’t actually green behind her, it was a white wall in the original photo. They made it green which is perfect, I think. There’s something that feels so right about it. And such a joy to have a cover that means so much to me.
TFR: A lot of MFA students, me included, are figuring out what they are writing, what topics or characters draw them to a blank page. You mentioned in previous interviews you focus on intimate relationships – this is obvious in your collection – and that you constantly write about your mother as a character. So my question for you is how and when did you realize these patterns in your writing and how do you embrace them to keep writing new stories?
TN: It's funny because partly, you don’t realize the patterns until much later. It’s like “God damnit I wrote another book about my mother. I didn’t mean to!” I swear at this point, I could write a story about aliens, and one would clearly become my mother. You know, it’s interesting, the author Kevin Canty of the collection Honeymoon, that I read from [in the craft talk] yesterday, he wrote an essay about coming to write those stories and says something like, “I got this collection of stories and it looks like I’m obsessed with monster movies.” There’s something about taking a collection and saying, ‘huh, what am I obsessed with?’ I didn’t realize I was obsessed with that until it all comes together.
Early on when I was an MFA student or in college when I was starting to be really serious about writing fiction, there were writers who I discovered that gave me permission to be the kind of writer I wanted to be. It was late in college that I was introduced to Laurie Colwin. Who has become one of my all-time favorite writers. That feeling of like, oh, you’re allowed to write stories about things that interest you? Who knew! I don’t have to be an alcoholic, middle aged man writing about his infidelities to be a writer. I’m allowed to be the person that I am. I can write about what interests me.
I went to my MFA really early. I went when I was right out of college. I was like, “I can’t stand the real world! Get me back into school!” So I was 23 and it was my second year in grad school and I was in a workshop with Frank Conroy. I always talk about his workshop. It was a terrible experience. I hated almost every minute of it. He made me angry. Yet I quote him in every class I teach. He’s probably the most inspirational teacher I’ve had. I had turned in a story about girls and it was three unrelated vignettes about teenage lesbians…I put it up for workshop and Frank’s response to it - which would be Frank’s response to almost everything I wrote - was, “Really nice writing in here, but who cares about little girls kissing?” It was one of those moments you come into yourself, and I was like, “You know what? I care about all these little girls kissing!”
TFR: I love this defiance of knowing what’s interesting to you and what you are going to keep on writing rather than caring what other people want to read or being too involved in your audience.
TN: Yeah, caring doesn’t lead to writing. That just leads to anxiety. I don’t know what other people want to read or if I could possibly think about how to provide that. The only thing I can imagine following is what interests me. If you’re really committing to an artistic practice, whatever that may be, it can’t be in service of something out there. I think we’re lucky in that regard…there’s a place for you and a place for your writing.
TFR: In How Other People Make Love, I’m really interested in how you create these characters and resist this dichotomy of good or bad. These characters are genuine. How do you do that? Even the electrician in “Win’s Girl” who is supposed to be a villain.
TN: He’s so fucked up, like everybody! He’s trying to make his way too, like everybody. That’s the great project of life. Trying to figure out why people might do the things they do. Like things I wouldn’t normally understand or have sympathy for, and trying to figure out how does that come about? I think it’s part of spending enough time with your characters – the old creative writing adage “you have to find something to love, even in your villains.” I don’t know if I go about it in that way. But if you spend time with a person or character, even if they do things that you can’t fathom in the abstract….
TFR: The understanding that people can’t be all bad.
TN: I think that’s one of the hardest parts for me is trying to understand how people come to beliefs that I find really offensive. I certainly can’t find my way around to understanding all of them but some of them I can, a little bit, maybe. That’s instructive, helpful. Makes me feel a little bit more peace and not hate humanity as much as sometimes fear I do….I don’t have to love humanity as a whole but I can try to understand little pieces of it to make my way in the world.
TFR: Definitely. In the stories of How Other People Make Love you don’t just focus on these romantic relationships, but any intimate relationship involving love. In “Win’s Girl” Doreen chooses to stand up for herself and that’s an act of self-love. I’m curious, did you write these stories and see how they linked together, or did you have this idea and begin to write toward it?
TN: I never start with the big idea. The big ideas are worth nothing. It’s all about starting with the little scraps and see what they add up to. I spent my 20s and 30s going to weddings constantly which is what people do, because most people you know get married. So I had all of these wedding stories that wanted to be told. There are some stories in the collection that aren’t wedding stories exactly. I think of Sonya’s thousand-dollar dress project. It wasn’t asking people to tell me about your wedding or wedding dress. It’s about how do you approach intimacies or commitments? So a story like “Win’s Girl” that has nothing to do with weddings still touches on the things Doreen yearns for in her life…. Even those stories that didn’t explicitly have to do with weddings were still about the type of choices that lead people to get married or not get married.
TFR: You mentioned you write of places, evoking the feeling of each place, but what about writing a place you are currently in. Does that happen or do you tend to need space from that place to write about it?
TN: I can’t call to mind a time I wrote about a place I am in. Writing notes for later, maybe…. I can’t be in that place in order to access it enough – like internally access it enough. Like you can be in the world paying attention to the things around you but that’s not writing. That for me doesn’t translate to writing. I can’t go from experiencing to writing. Those observations, those anecdotes, those collage pieces, need to go inside and marinate and do whatever they need to do before they turn into something that I can write about. There is an element of time.
Okay, ready? I’m going to go into my yoga metaphors. So I discovered yin yoga. It’s the kind of yoga that you can do when you have no energy. You basically just have to get yourself into one position and let gravity do the work. When they talk about the principles of yin yoga, one of those principles is you go to your edge and maybe push a little bit against that edge and then time. You have to let time happen. Let time pass. That feels like a big breath of air for me. There is nothing you can do or act upon. You’ll defeat the purpose of the yoga you are trying to do if you try to push past that edge – the only thing that is going to get you where you need to go is if you are still and let time pass. I feel like that has so many applications in writing.
For me, I can’t take things in and immediately distill them into something literary. I need to take them in and then time needs to pass. I need to let time pass. I need to let the things that are going to happen to those observations happen without forcing them or manipulating them into something. That’s not going to yield what I want. There’s a patience about it, a learned patience. Sometimes you just have to let time do what it does.