A Conversation with Steffanie Sampson

I am very excited to share with you an upcoming book release. Steffanie Sampson, a longtime member of the Unlocking Your Story workshop, has co-authored her husband Gary Busey's self-help memoir, Buseyisms. In the interview below, we chat about how the book came to be and her first experience through the traditional publishing process at Macmillan. I will be attending the LA book launch next Friday, September 7th and would love to see you there!

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Steffanie Sampson is the co-author of the self-help memoir,Buseyisms, Gary Busey’s Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth (St. Martin's Press, September 2018). She is also an actress, stand-up comedian, hypnotherapist, and co-founder of the Busey Foundation For Children’s Kawasaki Disease. She recently won the So You Think You Can Roast competition held at the world famous Friar’s Club in New York City.

“Who am I, a genius, a crazy madman, to give advice? This is not advice. I am sharing the life lessons I learned while surviving the ups and downs of almost 50 years in Hollywood, a near fatal motorcycle accident, a drug overdose, two divorces, bankruptcy and cancer in the middle of my face. I may turn concepts you usually believe in upside down with my bizarre stories, but that comes with the dinner.

These are my life lessons, my B.I.B.L.E.—Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth.”

— Gary Busey

Karin Gutman: Oh my, it is almost here! How do you feel about your upcoming book release? 
 
Steffanie Sampson: It is surreal. I remember when Gary and I met with Macmillan for the first time my editor said, ‘If we do this book, it will most probably be released in two years.’ I thought to myself, TWO YEARS?! Why so long? ... That day seems like yesterday.
 
KG: Can you share about the book and how it came to be?
 
SS: For years, Gary has been constructing Buseyisms. Those are unique word-phrases he makes to create a deeper, more dimensional meaning for words using the letters that spell them.

For example, FART (a fan favorite): Feeling A Rectal Transmission.

Another popular one (and one of his longest) is for the word RELATIONSHIP: Really Exciting Love Affair Turns Into Overwhelming Nightmare Sobriety Hangs In Peril.

For some time, Gary and I wanted to release a book of his Buseyisms, but we weren’t sure how to formulate it. At first we thought of a coffee table book with just illustrations, but no one seemed interested in publishing that. I brought the idea to you, my amazing writing coach Karin Gutman, and together we brainstormed and finally figured out the perfect hook: to tell the stories of Gary’s colorful life through his Buseyisms, sharing the life lessons he has learned along the way.

Once we figured out the format, everything happened to fall into place as if it was divinely guided. One morning we were in the green room at Good Day New York promoting a play that Gary was in, and we ran into an acquaintance of ours, Hayes Grier, who was also doing Good Day New York to promote a new book he wrote. When he introduced us to his publicist, I told her that we were writing a book and asked whom I could contact at Macmillan. I sent an email and got a response within a day asking for a proposal. Since it was just an idea formulating in my mind, I spent the next few days writing a proposal, and consulting with you again, which helped me immensely. After I sent the material to Macmillan, we had a meeting with them, and they offered us a book deal. At the meeting, I told our future editor we were open to all possibilities regarding a ghostwriter, but he wanted me to write it. And now two years later, our book is in the physical form.
 
KG: As the ghostwriter of your husband’s story, what was your process in getting the story out on the page?
 
SS: I really wanted the book to be very readable and fun. I wanted each chapter to be a complete story that could stand alone and be read at any time, similar to the book, Chicken Soup For The Soul. I put myself in the place of the reader and dissected Gary’s life to help me select 50 of his most interesting stories. Then I asked Gary to talk about each story in detail while I recorded him. After a lot of editing, because Gary likes to talk, I made each story roughly 4-5 pages long. We were also required to include 35-50 pictures in the book, so while I was writing the stories, I was also working with various photographers and studios licensing pictures that were cohesive to each story.
 
KG: What was the most challenging aspect of writing this book?
 
SS: The most challenging aspect of writing the book was getting Gary to go deep. There were some things in his life that he didn’t like to talk about, and I really had to explain to him the value of getting everything out on the page. Gary tends to have a real positive outlook and doesn’t like to wallow in the past. I explained that telling stories about what happened in his life was not wallowing in the past and could be very inspirational for people. I mean, Gary survived physical abuse by his father, substance abuse, a near fatal motorcycle accident, cancer in the middle of his face, a drug overdose, bankruptcy, and so much more… there’s a lot that people can relate to. It took me a while to get him on board, but once he understood that telling his stories could help other people, then the writing really flowed.
 
KG: What is the most rewarding aspect?
 
SS: It’s hard to choose the most rewarding aspect. I think having a finished product in hardcover and people getting to know the real Gary - and not the Gary that the media has portrayed - is the most rewarding thing for me. In the ten years I’ve been with Gary, it's been frustrating to see people assume he’s a certain way that he isn’t. Most people assume he’s a crazy nut-bag, but really he’s a very deep, spiritual person. I’m very excited for people to learn the truth about Gary.
 
KG: How the heck did you finish by your deadline, as a mother of a young child to boot!? What was your writing process like?
 
SS: I really have no idea how I did it. It’s almost as if the book wrote itself and I was just a channel. During the ten months that I wrote the book, I was pulled in so many different directions by Gary, our son Luke, and everyday life, but I kept my focus strong. I knew I had a deadline and I wrote every minute I could to make the deadline. I wrote and shared many of the early chapter drafts in your Unlocking Your Story workshop. I would take Luke to school, then lock myself in a room all day long until it was time to pick Luke up from school. I divided up the ten months by chapter and made sure I kept on schedule.
 
KG: I remember speaking to you early on about all the UNKNOWNS working with a publisher and editor. Can you describe the process and share some details, now that you’re on the other side?
 
SS: After we signed the book deal, I spoke to our editor about his vision, then I told him mine, and then strangely enough, I was left alone pretty much until the deadline. At one point about four months into it, my editor wanted to see some chapters to make sure I was on the right path. I sent him what I had completed, and surprisingly he sent me a simple note saying he liked what he saw and that he didn’t need to see anymore until the book was due. Once I turned the book in, he read it, wrote minimal notes, cut two chapters (I ended up writing 52 chapters), and that was that.
 
KG: I know you considered having an agent represent the book. Why did you choose NOT to have an agent and do you think that served you?
 
I considered having an agent in the beginning because I wanted to make sure we had a good deal. After negotiating with Macmillan, and speaking to some people in the industry, I realized that Macmillan’s deal wasn’t going to change whether I had an agent or not. They were pretty definite. I’d already done the bulk of the work getting the deal, and at that point having an agent wasn’t going to be beneficial at all, so I opted out. My experience with Macmillan has been positive thus far, and everything we’ve asked for we’ve gotten, so I think I made the right decision.
 
KG: What kind of support are you getting from the publisher on the promotion of it? Are they relying on Gary’s celebrity and personal publicist to generate promotional opportunities?
 
SS: At the moment Gary does not have a personal publicist, so we are completely relying on publicity provided by Macmillan. It may be too early to comment on publicity, but it seems like they are presenting us with some good opportunities.
 
KG: As the ghostwriter, what is your role now that the book is out? Will you continue to be behind the scenes?
 
SS: I’d like to say that it was very important for me to have my name on the book as a co-author. I was really instrumental getting the book deal, and putting it together with Gary, so I wanted to be recognized. That said, I really don’t know what my role will be. I will make myself available to the publishers, and to Gary, if they need me for anything. 
 
KG: Does this book make you want to write your own story one day?
 
SS: I think someday I will definitely write my own book. It doesn’t feel like it will be any time in the near future. I would be open to ghostwriting another book if the price is right and the subject is pleasing to me.
 
KG: What does Gary think of the book? Is he happy with it?
 
SS: Gary is thrilled with how the book turned out, thank God!
 

Meet Gary Busey + Steffanie Sampson

~ Upcoming Readings & Signings ~

Tuesday, Sept. 4th @ 6 PM EST
Bookends
East Ridgewood Avenue Center, 211 E Ridgewood Ave, Ridgewood, NJ 07450

Wednesday, Sept. 5th  @ 7 PM
The Book Revue
313 New York Ave, Huntington, NY 11743

Thursday, Sept. 6th@ 6 PM - 8 PM EST
FRIARS CLUB BOOK WARMING
with James “Murr” Murray from Impractical Jokers
3205, 57 E 55th St, 2nd Floor, NYC 10022

Friday, Sept. 7th  @ 7 PM PST  
Barnes & Noble @ The Grove
189 The Grove Drive Suite K30
Los Angeles 90036
Event link

Buy Buseyisms on Amazon

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A Conversation with Michael J. Lazzara

On my flight to Costa Rica in March, I had the fortunate opportunity to be seated next to Michael J. Lazzara, a professor of Latin American literature at the University of California, Davis. Michael shared about his fascinating new book, Civil Obedience, which investigates a taboo subject—civilian complicity and complacency under Chile's Pinochet regime. It's a timely theme that highlights a “crisis of truth“ using personal testimonials as the raw material for his study. Scroll down to read my complete interview with Michael!

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Michael J. Lazzara is a professor of Latin American literature and cultural studies at the University of California, Davis. His several books include Chile in Transition: The Poetics and Politics of Memory and Luz Arce and Pinochet's Chile: Testimony in the Aftermath of State Violence.

His new book, Civil Obedience: Complicity and Complacency in Chile since Pinochet, dives into a taboo subject: the role that civilians played in supporting General Augusto Pinochet's regime and its imposition of unbridled neoliberalism. Since the fall of Pinochet's dictatorship in 1990, Chilean society has shied away from the subject of civilian complicity, preferring to pursue convictions of military perpetrators. But the torture, murders, deportations, and disappearances of tens of thousands of people in Chile were not carried out by the military alone; they required a vast civilian network. Lazzara boldly argues that today's Chile is a product of both complicity and complacency.

How did you first become interested in Latin American literature? You evidently had enough passion to devote your life to the study and teaching of it!
 
Before I went to high school, I didn’t know a word of Spanish. But wonderful teachers attuned my ear to the beauty of the Spanish language and showed me that learning languages expands our worlds! It broadens our communities. It fosters intercultural understanding and empathy. It allows us to see the world from the perspective of another. And most of all, it opens possibilities for deep, meaningful friendships with people from around the globe.
 
Learning Spanish, however, was just the beginning. When I was a sophomore in college, I traveled to Chile for the first time and fell in love with the country. I quickly came to learn how tumultuous and traumatic the country’s recent history had been. I had been studying Latin American literature as a student at the University of Notre Dame, but really solidified my passion for exploring the deep connections between Latin American literature and politics during my time abroad. After college, I knew I wanted to purse a Ph.D. in Latin American Literature and Cultural Studies, so I set out on the journey to become a teacher, a researcher, and a student for life. That journey led me first to Princeton and later to UC Davis. Here I am, more than twenty years later, still passionate about introducing new generations of students and scholars to the beauty and pain of Latin America.
 
What brought you to focus in on the human rights abuses of the Pinochet regime in Chile?
 
On my first trip to Chile, in 1995, I lived something of a schizophrenic experience. Chile’s transition to democracy was only five years young. My Chilean host family had staunchly supported Pinochet and believed that his regime had brought “order” to the country and eliminated a “Marxist cancer” from the body politic. During that same trip, I did an internship in a poor, urban neighborhood of Santiago that introduced me to radically different perspectives: many of the people with whom I worked back then had believed fervently in Salvador Allende’s “Peaceful Road to Socialism” (1970-1973). Listening to their stories was formative! Allende’s nationalization of important industries and expansion of the social safety net brought hope and empowerment to millions of Chileans whose voices had long been excluded from politics. Pinochet’s September 11, 1973, coup, backed by the United States, put an end to Allende’s project and unleashed seventeen years of rampant human rights abuses: torture, forced disappearances, exile, and censorship. As a result, memories of the 1970s and 1980s vary radically depending on who is doing the remembering. Siding with the victims of history, I have spent more than twenty years working through the complexities of Chile’s memory battles and those of other countries in the region that also suffered at the hands of dictators or that were immersed in civil conflicts derived from the Cold War.
 
Informed by these personal experiences, my new book, Civil Obedience: Complicity and Complacency in Chile since Pinochet, dives into a taboo subject: the role that civilians played in supporting the Pinochet regime and its imposition of unbridled neoliberalism. We know that military dictatorships are always supported by a wide cast of characters that aids and abets the regime’s dirty work behind the scenes or that simply turns a “knowing blind eye” to the human rights violations that are happening. Fear and weakness breed silence, as does tacit or active ideological support.  My book dissects this vast array of complicities and unpacks the contrived memories of myriad figures including artists, intellectuals, economists, journalists, politicians, bystanders, and even some former revolutionaries who underwent radical ideological shifts and wound up embracing the regime’s legacy. All of these civilian figures have become “obedient” either to Pinochet, his economic legacy, or both.
 
How did you go about culling the research?
 
I have been studying Chile’s recent history and cultural production for a long time. My previous books focused mainly on the victims’ construction of posttraumatic narratives in art, literature, and testimony. They required extensive interviewing and on-the-ground research over many years.
 
Civil Obedience looks at the flip-side of the story: the voices of those who allied themselves with the perpetrators. Because these people would likely have been reluctant to speak to me, I decided not to do any interviews and to focus instead on their published self-renderings. Perhaps not so surprisingly, people, no matter what their beliefs, like to talk about themselves, so there was plenty of published material for me to dissect critically. Complicit figures are essentially storytellers who engage in complex narrative rationalizations of their experiences and actions hoping to emerge intact as ethical subjects in their readers’ eyes. Everyone wants to believe they are good, so they’ll spin their stories in whatever way is necessary to make themselves appear magnanimous and altruistic. But something breaks down in that process when the “I” who speaks his or her truth fails to recognize that saying “I” is always also an act of responsibility toward another: a responsibility toward truth, justice, the ethics of speech, and the social good. I scoured libraries, watched documentaries, dug through newspapers, and did anything I could to find certain emblematic and representative voices that, when juxtaposed in the pages of my book, would self-incriminate through the meanderings of their ethically-flawed speech acts.
 
What was your writing practice like, especially with a full-time career and family? How long did it take you to write the book from start to finish?
 
Balancing the academic life with family life is challenging! My kids are now 8 and 11 years old, and this book took me almost 8 years to gestate from first concept to publication. So, I guess you could say that the book grew up right alongside the kids. I certainly couldn’t have written it without the daily support of my amazing wife, Julia, and my wonderful kids, Ana and James, who remind me every day that the world is a beautiful place despite the dark themes that undergird my writing. I am grateful to them for putting up with me when, on family weekends away, I would distractedly grab a hotel room pad of paper and jot down my latest ideas for the “Table of Contents” or a chapter outline. The book was always on my mind, and they accepted that lovingly as part of who I am.
 
What was the biggest challenge for you in the process?
 
My biggest challenge was figuring out how to talk about complicity responsibly. Complicity is a thorny subject because the spectrum of complicity is vast. One can be criminally complicit to an extent that warrants legal prosecution—though most accomplices, I would add, have not been prosecuted in Chile—or one can be morally complicit with a criminal regime simply by speaking out in favor of it or by keeping silent about its crimes.
 
After the dictatorship, many Chileans were happy with their socioeconomic situation. They saw their lives as materially “better” because Pinochet and his Chicago-schooled economists had set the country on the right path toward “progress.” These complacent subjects, as I call them in the book, are happy to maintain the status quo and embrace the General’s legacy even if, in another breath, they affirm that human rights violations are wrong. But the fact is that the neoliberalization of the economy, which benefitted some, only occurred as it did because thousands of people were killed and tortured! Violence was the means through which the economy was changed, and that economy has continued to do violence to many others who live precariously and in debt. This is undeniable.
 
The question then becomes: To what extent are complacent people also complicit? It’s a tough question to answer. It was therefore challenging to write a book that treats such a vast spectrum of positionalities. One kind of complicity, I acknowledge wholeheartedly, is not the same as the next; but all forms of complicity (active or passive) can be situated on a matrix that fuels the status quo, continues to stoke violence against society’s “undesirables” and perpetuates endemic socioeconomic inequality.
 
What strikes me is that you are using personal narrative as the raw material for your study; however, the testimonials you include are not reliable. So how do you know where to find the “truth,” so to speak. Or is the “truth” even what you’re after?
 
Instead of fishing for truths in accomplices’ contrived words, my book “outs” the fictions of mastery they invent to assuage their troubled consciences. Accomplices speak publicly hoping their voices will convince people of their moral rectitude and of their interest in the common good. But complicit and complacent memoirists’ stories are full of rationalizations, half-truths, and vital lies that they must tell themselves to survive. This is, in fact, what makes them so complicated to read! For those of us interested in debunking their accounts, it would be easier if everything that accomplices said were patently false. But unreliable narratives can also contain certain reliable utterances. Those versions of the “facts” are then spun to put forth a particular vision of the self and the world that the narrators hope others will believe.
 
You are in fact the only voice who is reliable! We (the readers) are relying on you to connect the dots for us and to land us somewhere solid and satisfying. Can you share a bit of your process and approach as a storyteller?
 
I like your idea that academic writing can also be viewed as a form of storytelling. Lots of academic writing shies away from the first-person. I embrace it!
 
First and foremost, my main job as author was to sketch the landscape of complicity for my readers. I therefore carefully chose a cast of characters that, I thought, could speak metonymically to some of the different forms of complicity that arise under dictatorship. These characters—many of them publicly well-known, others not—are simply examples that allow us to start thinking about a phenomenon that is crucial to understanding how power works. My goal, in that sense, is to illuminate the gray zones that authoritarian regimes inevitably generate and to show how they breed a crisis of truth.
 
I do all of this, of course, recognizing that I am also implicated in my own narrative. Every author speaks from a particular place. He or she is situated in space and time and sees the world through lenses of race, gender, ethnicity, ideology, education, family, community, etcetera. To speak about Chile as an American when the U.S. was deeply complicit in the coup is indeed an act of responsibility. I obviate my speaking position in the book and recognize the intersubjective dimension that my own writing entails: I see my book as act of responsibility toward the victims of history and toward those against whom the neoliberal order discriminates daily. My own biographical trajectory situates me “in between” two worlds: my life in the U.S and my life living and working in Chile for significant periods of time over the past twenty-plus years. Being of these two places—Chile and the U.S.—allows me to tell the story with a certain degree of complexity but also demands that I acknowledge my own complicities as a writer.
 
William Faulkner said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” As you are writing about history, do you agree with him?
 
I agree with Faulkner! The past continually haunts the present. If one goes to Chile today, it barely takes a few minutes for the dictatorship or its consequences to surface in everyday conversations. Writers and filmmakers continue to address the past in their works. The Constitution that Pinochet ratified in 1980 still rules the country, despite many amendments and attempts to change that fact. The families of the disappeared still fight for truth and justice, even in the face of political impediments and lack of will. In short, all it takes is a word, a phrase, or a chance event to cause the past to come rushing back and for old wounds to start bleeding again.
 
For memoirists, there is often a risk in sharing our personal stories and a potential backlash. So even though you are not sharing your personal life story, you are exposing others - many of whom are still alive. Was this a concern?
 
I am certain that no one I write about will like what I say about them very much. But I guess that’s the very nature of speaking truth to power.
 
I made a conscious decision not to interview any accomplices directly so that none of them could later accuse me of twisting their words. Instead, I simply evaluate critically the configurations of their published, public narratives. In other words, I let the accomplices self-incriminate through their own acts of self-representation. Consequently, at most, the figures I discuss (if they are alive) could accuse me of misinterpreting their words. But those accusations would likely devolve into further fictions of mastery that any keen reader would be able to debunk.
 
Do you have a sense of how the book is being received so far in your academic community? In Chile?
 
So far the book has generated excitement among colleagues, but it is really just finding its way now into readers’ hands because it was just published. People seem to agree that the moment is ripe for talking about complicity because the theme is timely and relevant not only in Chile, but also in the United States and other parts of the world. I think that that’s why they are so excited!
 
My biggest hope is that this book will fuel debate in Chile (and beyond) on a subject that hasn’t been thought through systematically, particularly from a literary and cultural studies perspective. It’s a book that will definitely not leave readers indifferent and that is likely to turn heads among Chileans—some in a good way, and some perhaps not in such a good way. But speaking truth is important, and the truths that most need to be spoken are perhaps those that hurt the most. The book will likely find more readers and become better known in Chile once the Spanish translation is finished. Editorial Cuarto Propio, my Chilean publisher, is working on that now, and we hope to launch the book in Santiago next year.
 
What connection do you see in the United States currently?
 
We are living in tumultuous political times in which the polarization between left and right is as palpable as it has been at any point in my lifetime. Signs of authoritarianism are all around us, as is the proliferation of discourse about society’s “undesirables”—just as occurred in the early 1970s and 1980s in Chile. In Latin America, too, we are seeing a resurgence of right-wing regimes that are challenging the worldviews of leftist governments engaged in anti-capitalist political projects (which in certain cases have also become staunchly authoritarian). Just about everywhere, truth is under fire, and lots of people continually prove themselves unwilling to think beyond the self in the interest of the community, which is probably one of the most toxic symptoms of the neoliberal era. So, yes, my book is primarily about Chile, but it’s also a book about the times in which we’re living, times in which the matrix of complicities grows ever-more complex and thus requires diligent thought and resistance. 
 
You suggested earlier that the victims, their families and other concerned citizens have to “fight for memory.” I find this phrase fascinating, as this is essentially the work of memoir - to capture our memories on the page and what matters most to us. Can you elaborate on this point?
 
The Argentine sociologist Elizabeth Jelin, one of the pioneering thinkers about memory in South America, once said that after dictatorships societies become battlefields on which different versions of the truth vie for power in the public sphere. To make these truths heard requires capturing the imaginations of readers and listeners. The voices that speak most loudly are the ones that usually wind up shaping the “collective memory.” To ensure that the victors’ history doesn’t always win the day, common citizens must fight arduously to be heard. They do it in court, they do it in the press, and they do it in books; they do it in every breath and action of their lives. When these voices form a critical mass, they can win the fight!
 
Curiously, it’s sometimes a voice that gets overlooked at first or that gets lost somewhere deep in the archive that can ultimately change the historical narrative if it manages to surface in just the right place and at just the right time to break through the noise and contradict the naysayers. Memory and societal battles adhere to temporalities. Timing matters a lot—as much as to whom and how one tells one’s story. An audience has to be ready to hear a message, and the person who bears witness to the truth has to find just the right form in which to say it.

If this perfect constellation of factors comes together, a voice in the wilderness can become the voice that changes history.
 

To buy the book, visit the University of Wisconsin Press site

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A Conversation with Nina Lorez Collins

A couple months ago I was invited to join a private Facebook group called “What Would Virginia Woolf Do?” I didn't know anything about it at the time, but was immediately struck by the candid conversations happening among the other members -- and so I took a closer look.

As it turns out, this closed online forum for women over 40 was created in 2015 by Nina Lorez Collins in response to her aging body and a craving to talk about it with her closest friends--without apology. It quickly attracted more people, and to date, has grown to nearly 16K members with a companion book just published by Grand Central Publishing.

In the interview below, Nina brings the same intimate, candid, and witty talk to our conversation. You might even decide to become a Woolfer yourself!

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In 2015, at 46 and out of the blue, Nina Lorez Collins started waking up drenched in sweat every morning at 4am. She soon discovered that she was entering peri-menopause, that netherworld state which will take her from relatively young to relatively old, and that realization jolted her into creating a closed Facebook group for her girlfriends so that she could ask some questions, commiserate, and get advice. She called it “What Would Virginia Woolf Do?” in what she thought was a funny nod to a brilliant feminist she admired, a woman who chose to end it all in her late 50s.

Her goal was to create a haven where she could talk about aging without feeling ashamed, and where she could get information and support that would help her on this rocky road to crone-hood or aged bliss. What started as a small network among her closest friends has since blossomed to nearly 16K members and counting, along with the release of a companion book by the same name.

To order the book, visit:
Amazon

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Karin Gutman: Oh my, what a phenomenon you’ve created… Is this what you imagined would unfold when you first set out to create the original “What Would Virginia Woolf Do” Facebook group back in 2015?
 
Nina Lorez Collins: Not in a million years—this was intended to just be a place for me and my closest girlfriends.
 
How do you think Virginia Woolf would have responded to all of this?
 
(Laughs) Hard to say. I do think she would applaud our feminism and study of our internal lives.
 
Who is the WWVWD group for and how does one join?
 
One has to be a woman over 40, ideally smart and funny and willing to be open and supportive. Just search on Facebook for “What Would Virginia Woolf Do?” and answer the three questions that pop up.
 
Totally off topic perhaps, but I loved learning that you received a Master’s degree in Narrative Medicine from Columbia University. I have been circling around it for some time. How does that inform who you are and what you do in the world?
 
Hugely. My mother died of breast cancer when I was 19 and she'd had cancer for years and kept it a secret from everyone including her children. I'm very interested in ideas around loss, transition, how we live in our bodies.

I am the kind of person who gets a little wary when online communities take on an aggressive edge. I know there have been some heated banters and conversations in the WWVWD Facebook group. What is your take on that, beyond “it's par for the course.” Is it constructive?
 
Of course it can be upsetting when things get ugly, but generally you can see that it's someone who has been triggered in some way—there's some pain underneath the reaction. We try really hard to soothe people, but sometimes it's just not a good fit and people have to leave.
 
Where will all of this go from here? Do you have a vision for the Woolfers? Also, what’s next for you, within or outside of this community?
 
I'm really not sure yet… I absolutely love the women and the conversation and take great pride in the fact that it's been so meaningful for so many women. I'm hoping we can turn it into an identity brand for women over 40 with a website, blog, podcast, etc.
 
I recently read about the recent break up of your marriage. How do you manage everything that’s going on personally and professionally?
 
It's been really hard, harder than I expected given that it had only been a four-year relationship. I'm wondering if these things just get harder as we get older? The feeling of failure, the missing him; it's all been pretty awful. I suppose I'm grateful that WWVWD has kept me so busy and been such a distraction and a delight. Also, I really have incredible support from so many women!
 
What I just asked feels like such a personal question, but you seem to be comfortable with self-exposure - is that true? If so, where does that come from?
 
Yes, totally comfortable. I'm much less comfortable when people aren't saying what’s really going on. I think our pain is what's real and it should be discussed; how else can we grow?
 
I work with memoir writers, largely women, who are looking to discover and write their truths on the page… and out loud. What advice would you give them?
 
Write every day. It's a craft and it's hard as hell.
 
It seems to me that there is a movement happening - women gathering with women - empowering each other to live out loud and speak their truths. I have been experiencing it in my ongoing memoir groups for the last 8 years and it feels increasingly like it’s part of a growing historical movement. What do you think?
 
I think it's certainly happening now but I'm not sure if it hasn't always been true in different forms. The consciousness raising groups of the 70s etc. 
 
How did you land your book deal? I imagine having a background as a literary agent helped.
 
One of my oldest friends is my agent and we worked closely together and got lucky getting a deal.
 
With your background as an agent, what are your candid thoughts regarding traditional versus self-publishing?
 
It's all hard and sort of awful, but I'd say it's always better to go the traditional route if you can.
 
What does your writing process look like?
 
Way too erratic. I don't write nearly enough. When I'm working on a project I spend a ton of time in bed with my laptop, often crying.
 
What do you know and trust about your creative process?
 
It's new and I've barely scratched the surface. I need to work harder at it.
 
Tell me THREE WORDS you live by.
 
Honesty, bravery, love.

~ Meet Nina ~

Writers Bloc presents:

Nina Lorez Collins in Conversation
with
Annabelle Gurwitch and Sandra Tsing Loh

Friday, May 4th, 7:30pm

Temple Emanuel
Beverly Hills

Buy tickets

See other WWVWD events happening around the country

To learn more about Nina Lorez Collins, visit: www.thewoolfer.com

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