The Soil We Were In

Experimental Practice – Episode 3
27 November, 2023

Transcript

Siloh: Hello and welcome to episode three of Experimental Practice. In this podcast, we talk about cross-genre and innovative creative work and practice. I’m your host, Siloh Radovsky, joined today by Alissa Hattman. Alissa Hattman is the author of the novel Sift and the zine Post. Her writing has appeared in Carve, The Rumpus, the Gravity of the Thing, Propeller, Big Other, Surely Magazine and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in fiction from Pacific University and an MA in English literature from Portland State University. Alissa has worked as a fiction editor, book reviewer, zine, librarian, writing group facilitator, and teacher. She writes short essays for her monthly newsletter Murmur, which also features a small press spotlight with a book giveaway and other literary updates, which I highly recommend you subscribe to. Originally from North Dakota, she now lives and teaches in the Pacific Northwest. You can find more at her website, AlissaHattman.com, which will be linked in the show notes. Alissa, I’m so happy and excited to talk with you today, and thanks so much for making the time, especially with all of the activities surrounding the entrance of your novel Sift into the world.

Alissa: Thank you for having me. It’s nice to be here with you.

Siloh: So, to start out, I wanted to talk a little bit about your background as a writer and artist. Sift is so many things at once. It’s very poetic and finely grained in its language. It’s intellectually and ethically grounded and expansive. It’s imaginative, and it’s also a post-apocalyptic story with a very strong narrative drive and so much character development. We’re gonna be definitely talking a lot about Sift and to frame that discussion with at least what I perceive as that multiplicity in mind. I wanted to just start out by asking you about your path as a writer. Maybe not necessarily like the arc, but how your writing practice has been informed by modalities beyond just putting words on a page. Or to put it more simply, what experiences do you bring with you into this chapter of your writing life?

Alissa: Yeah, I think, , my writing, even from a very young age has always been socially engaged. When I was younger, I did a neighborhood newsletter with a friend and we would go around and interview people in the neighborhood and put out this monthly newsletter that we, you know, included illustrations and worked on editing together. And even then, it to me felt like the reason I was doing this was connection, wanting to build these connections in the neighborhood. I was a very sort of shy young person. And so I found comfort in the written word, whether it was reading or, you know, just trying to work out a sentence and spend some time making it clear or beautiful.

So I spent a lot of time with books and with writing, and I used it as a way of connecting with others. To have this sort of neighborhood newsletter was a good project that I could use to connect and so that I think, you know, progressed as I got older. In high school, I started getting into zines. And during that time, I really found that like personal zines or Riot grrrl zines were a form that I really connected with. It was one of the first times where I was reading about experiences that I could really, I think, relate to. It was through zines, but also I think, some poetry, too, during, during this time in high school.

I can even kind of chart the progression from, you know, reading these zines to writing–being inspired to write the work that I felt could be more socially engaged. I wrote zines, I shared them, and then very quickly got kind of this sense of connection with the zine community at the time, which also meant that I was doing maybe more social activism and more protests and these kinds of things that were more like, you know, on the ground engaged. And so I sort of saw that progression now, like sort of looking back to writing that I was doing early on, which always had that socially engaged element.

When I went on to study at Evergreen, it was more of this interdisciplinary education. I started to see how literature for social change was active in the world. It wasn’t just in the classes. It wasn’t just the books, it was also thinking about how the concepts that are a part of these books–how do they motivate the conversations and ways in which we can engage with the world? So I would just say broadly speaking, this is sort of what I’ve carried with me even into Sift as well. And even before Sift, a lot of the short stories I was working on were an attempt to, you know, create a space that could contain the bigness of something–like climate change or any kind of social injustice while also inviting these intersections and multiple versions of truth.

Within the story, within that container, my hope is that you can locate your own agency. So for me, that’s what literature has always been. And my attempt when I go to the page is how can I make it a space that is expansive enough for others to see all of these aspects, these large aspects of society in a way that is absorbable, and perhaps a catalyst for new ideas and new ways of engaging with the world.

Siloh: That was very clarifying for me of something about my own experiences with zine writing, which we share in our backgrounds, and the ways that that sort of cross-genre form of a zine, it’s not just that you’re pulling in multiple literary or visual modes, but also, that it has a social life attached to it.

Alissa: Mm-Hmm.

Siloh: And I think that, yeah, what you just shared is such an elegant description of what kind of container a literary form can be. And that sort of generosity and inviting in, I think is just an ethics that I really admire about your work. But I think it’s interesting because, based on our past conversations and what I know about Sift, it [Sift] also came out of a time in which social life shut down, you know, it was begun during the first part of the pandemic. So I’m wondering if you might be willing to speak to that seed of the project and maybe why other kinds of writing that you were doing at that time were no longer sort of–whatever projects you had on the table prior to the pandemic were no longer relevant or actionable in the same way that this project became.

Alissa: Yeah, that’s a good question. I suspect the reason I couldn’t access those pieces before the pandemic was because there was such a dramatic shift in how I was in the world. So, as you said, you know, this was a time of being shut off from the world. And I think I had felt that whatever I could create in this time had to just be made out of the soil that we were in in that moment. It was strange because–this was just sort of me trying to puzzle out what was happening, because really it was mostly an emotional thing. I just couldn’t enter into those old stories. I wasn’t able to fully have access to it.

And so instead I felt like what I needed to do was really face some of the fears that I was having. Sometimes when I, you know, have a block with my writing–I’ve learned to, over the years, recognize when that block is because I have too much going on in my head or there’s something that’s emotionally heavy that I just need to accept and deal with. So I kind of clear away all of my writing projects and just spend time writing to whatever is blocking me or whatever is on my mind. So really, Sift began there. I thought of it at the time as one of these therapeutic exercises that I’ve done over the years where I just write out all of, you know, my fears or self-doubts, insecurities, all of like the things that are kind of clouding my head and my heart about the world.

It’s a type of purge though. Sometimes there have been, you know, little, little parts of those writing exercises that I’ve been able to recycle into something more formal. But mostly I’ve thought of it as just, you take 15 minutes and let your mind wander, sort of open your soul to the page and allow for that. And so that’s kind of where Sift started. It was my fears at the time of loved ones dying, and specifically my mother dying of Covid. I think it was at the, like, the early stages, I had these letters that I was writing to this fear of my mother dying, which turned into letters writing to a dead mother, which turned into this larger story. I kind of followed that into a space that I didn’t realize was very present in the moment, but it was a space of this anticipatory grief for humanity, something a lot larger than just one individual that I didn’t–I don’t know if before Sift, I realized that I was carrying this around with me. So once that started happening, I felt like this is the only thing I can write now. <Laughs.> There was that real energetic sort of push to continue.

Siloh: Yeah. That portal from individual grief or fear, or even just the global catastrophe of the pandemic itself already so huge in its scale being a portal then to thinking about the global catastrophe that is the climate crisis.

Alissa: Right.

Siloh: Yeah, and sort of those doorways that we walk through, following a little trace of a feeling or a dilemma that might be personal and emotional. There’s so much wisdom in that permissiveness to just tend to what’s active and troubling in the moment. So thank you for sharing that origin story of Sift. I am so excited to ask you this question. So we start with these seeds of a project, and then they shapeshift and take form as we like, try to wrangle them into something–like a novel. And it’s, it’s interesting because shape shifting is a phenomenon that plays out in the characters a little bit or, or at least in this vehicle that they travel through. And so, I’m really curious to hear a little bit about your process of bringing form to Sift from that seed or from–I mean, you’re already speaking to that, about writing these letters that then became sort of the seed of the novel. But how did you create the structure of the book? And maybe does–were you thinking about shape shifting, or how did those themes interplay?

Alissa: Yeah. So what I ended up doing in sort of the generative stages of Sift was opening the door to all of it. I just allowed everything in. So it was sort of messy, like a collection of fragments. So there were letters to a dead mother. There were long passages that just described a quality of feeling. There were these passages that were the research I was doing about moss at the time, and, and reading Gathering Moss by Robin Wall Kimmerer. There were notes from lectures I’d been listening to online. Some of Anne Carson’s lecture on corners is in there. And, you know, looking to other writers who have created art during times of chaos and despair. So reading, you know, a number like in Sift–there’s one in particular, there’s the Toni Morrison essay No Place for Self Pity, No Room For Fear in the Nation. All of that I was collecting, basically–I was just gathering anything that I thought had to do with the idea of grief and the fragmenting of memory and trauma and the climate crisis and intergenerational relationships. So there’s some of my great-grandmother’s journal entries that make it into the book as well. The generative stage was just about gathering, and I allowed myself to gather it all. Luckily with this project, there was one day where an ending presented itself to me, and I don’t–this doesn’t ever happen to me <laugh>. I usually really struggle with endings, but I was sort of gifted this one day. It just organically came. And once I saw that I knew how to kind of go back and work on rewriting and shaping the narrative. I really think about this with every project I do as just, it’s just material at the very beginning. You know, you gather all of that material, you open the door. And then from that material, I really try to think about how do I want to…what are the questions or choices that I need to make now? And so I approach revision with this sense of: I have somewhat of a philosophy, some idea of what I want to do with it.

I knew with Sift that it was going to be a fragmented narrative. I knew that I didn’t want a narrative that just is playing out the shape of the hero’s journey. Again, I wanted a narrative that really, instead, troubles that–what I think of as sort of an inherited narrative, that is very easy to fall into: the individual journey that the character sort of enters into that mostly is driven by this sense of conflict. Rising action, climax, resolution–you know, this kind of shape. I knew that I wanted this to be a story that isn’t just about the individual. And so that really guided some of my choices about how the characters are on the page.

For example, Lamellae is a character that is many. Contains histories and contains, you know–there’s a section in the book that describes how she is ideas and dreams and these many, many things. So I started thinking about character as not so much a simulation of a human, but instead what Milan Kundera calls an “experimental self.” Thinking more about, how, you know, these characters and concepts can be somewhat recognizably human to us, but also be so much more than that on the page. So that, you know, really influenced my thinking about characterization. The sections where there are–throughout the book, there are these short fragments that are gesturing toward the non-human elements of the story. I knew that those needed to have a very different sound quality than the, the, the sort of human driven story. And that they can operate in a couple different ways is a way of thinking about what’s going on outside of these characters’ consciousness, or the main character’s consciousness. But also, they can sort of provide a rhythmic quality, a sort of pause in between as well.

And so a lot of these choices were me just looking through the material and then like, what are some more theoretical concepts that can help me in shaping this? And then once I had that idea, you know, I guess one other thing I’ll say about, you know, some of the theoretical concepts is that there was a sense that I really wanted to, even at the sentence level, trouble binary opposition. So really being conscious about how any time there is a word that really often is paired with its binary, trying to really trouble that. Like, you know, heaven, earth; male, female; culture, nature; white, black–all of these things that are ways in which we often…I guess how language can be so, so complicated in this way of: as soon as we hear one word we think about its binary. So anytime, anytime, you know, like nature and culture is set up, I tried to like, bring in the ways in which they’re enmeshed, the ways in which there are these gradations in between these binaries that are really important and nuanced. So I tried to do that on the sentence level as well as on the story level.

Siloh: Such an elegant description of your process that I feel like just relayed so much information. I feel like you answered a couple sub-questions I had related to this already, because I was thinking about allegory and maybe where that came in. And I feel like perhaps that is the ethic of allowing the characters to be penetrated by the world, you know, or to see that penetration is intrinsic. And perhaps also–I think I perceive as a reader that one of the premises of the novel is that the self and the world are not separate, right? And that the crises of the world cannot be separated from sort of the self. Thank you for that elegant answer. Can I ask you a little bit about where time fit into that shaping? Like the time of the novel and where the axis of time and events fit into these questions about, I guess, the philosophies that you were drawing on, or that element of the revision or the shaping process. How did you work with time and story?

Alissa: Mm-Hmm. Yeah. so, the book has really, I think, three temporalities. So there’s the forward moving narrative of the characters just trying to survive. And then there’s sort of this backward moving narrative where, you know, we get some of these moments of memory, from, primarily from the main character Tortula. And then there are, there are the short fragments threaded throughout of the non-human, which are, I think of as sort of atemporal maybe. A little bit like existing in time, but a little outside of a linear time idea. I think that the choices with that–probably there’s a couple things that come to mind. I think that first, the sort of the, the traumas that both characters go through, but before they start their journey, and end up kind of invading their present day, like how this happens with, with, you know, anyone who’s gone through trauma. There are these moments where you’re going about your everyday life and just trying to get by, and then suddenly a memory or a feeling or something intrudes on your present. And it, you know, sometimes it can be very clear–“Oh, this is something that is from my past”—or sometimes it can be really ambiguous and you don’t know where it’s coming from. And I think that this is what both characters are experiencing as they’re trying to survive. There’s still these moments of intrusion. And so with Tortula it looks more like, you know, this sort of mourning for her mother and her conversations that she has in her head with her mother. Sometimes calling up memory as a type of medicine–just as an appreciation for the life that she lived at one point in time. Although I think she can sometimes escape too far into her imagination so that she’s not as present in the moment. This is something that is sort of a challenge for her.

With Lamellae, it’s definitely a more sort of ambiguous and far greater type of trauma or grief in the sense that it’s not so located to one person. Like with Tortula she has these specific memories about things that she lived (with her mother, in some cases). And those are the things that are kind of intruding. With Lamellae, we’re a little outside of her perspective, so we don’t fully know. But we do know that she grieves or that she expresses pain in these ways that are described in this fantastical way in the book. I think to me it was a way of trying to get to the ambiguous grief that many of us carry around with us that has to do with not only our ancestry or with humans, but with animals and the land and the planet and all of that. How she grieves ends up being more environmental. It’s sort of this cloud that is extracted from her body or this pond that she ends up kind of vomiting onto the pavement. It’s like these moments of where she’s–trying to let it come loose from her body in some way…I’m trying to remember your original question at this point. <Laughs.>

Siloh: How you worked with time in the narrative and like maybe some of the challenges of that. Because you have this really elegant, nuanced philosophical approach to time as it plays out, and I was also thinking of this with respect to trauma and your research that you were doing around trauma and memory. So I would love any insights you might share about your experiences working with that and making that sort of present in the writing. Because I just feel like the technology of time is so challenging in experimental work. I mean, just, I think, in general, but in particular, when you’re not moving sequentially, and when there isn’t this clear narrative arc that might be predictable or familiar. So I guess, yeah, just your process rendering time or working time in the writing itself.

Alissa: Yeah, I mean, I think that this shows up in the shape and how the sort of the fracturing of memory and how there will be moments–this happens, I think, a lot in the sections where the two characters are in a helicopter–but there are these moments where Tortula, the main character is sort of reeling around in her memories and trying to be present, but really struggling to. And I think a lot of that had to do with like trying to set up a rhythm early on that is locatable for the reader. And so when it gets into that swirling kind of space where time is, you know, it’s happening where we’re in the past and the present of one character all at once, it becomes a space that the reader can actually enter into because they’ve been given a little hint, you know, earlier on. And so it’s about, I think, developing somewhat of rhythms or you could even say, like lexicon around that and helping maybe the, like, I guess, you know, teaching the reader how to read those moments so that when they come, they come up, it, it doesn’t, maybe feel as confusing as it is, if you didn’t have those little, I guess, hints or signposts earlier. But a lot of this, you know, was, I think, in the editing stages to these, this I remember early on with the The 3rd Thing.

The first round of edits that I got from Alison Bailey had to do with–there were some notes, but then there was also a timeline that she sent to me that she wrote out of the backstory of the character as well as sort of the forward moving–I think it was primarily the backstory in what she was seeing. And that made me realize that there were a lot of things that I actually did need to sort of fill in and help the reader along with. So sometimes it’s a matter of getting that outside perspective. But yeah, I think there were a lot of other writers that helped me with this, too–this idea of time, and the fracturing of memory as well. I think I was reading Parable of the Sower at this time, and there are some examples in there. And in that book, I was also reading Donika Kelly’s Renunciations. It’s a collection of poetry and how she engages with trauma in that book I really respect because it’s kind of around being able to say the–speak about the wounds very simply and kind of plainly, not trying to hide it in metaphor, but to just speak it. But then also to choose to have the agency of when not to say the thing. So in that book, she has some sections where there are these brackets and there’s just a space in between the brackets. And so there’s the silence that is almost this sort of kindness. Like these are the things I will say and this is what I will not say. And that was something I guess I was also thinking about with Sift: when to, you know, when to speak and just plainly say the things that happened. Like this comes up with Tortula and some of the violence she’s experienced–to be able to say the things that she remembers, but then to also be okay with–there’s going to be some maybe ambiguous trauma that she can’t access because of what happens when we experience something that is a violence. There is the moment of the fracturing of memory. You don’t always remember these moments because you’re in sort of this survival, other space. And so that was something else I was thinking about. How can I convey that on the page in a way that felt authentically like a way that felt true to the emotion, and Donika Kelly’s book I think really gave me a lot of permission in how to approach that.

Siloh: And that maybe is like a part of the rhythm or sort of like musical structure that readers have been taught to expect where there are these gaps, you know. That time isn’t necessarily filled in or created by presence, but also absence.

Alissa: Right. Yes.

Siloh: But I think that’s such a helpful–a really insightful and helpful description of working with time, you know, both sort of the fiction devices, where we have story and the events are externalizing those concepts, like you described with a helicopter, but then also the the porosity or sort of the poetics where the–yeah, the musical structure, the rhythm is also creating a sort of predictable lexicon. That’s a really fabulous word for that. And you just spoke a little bit about the editing or end revision process with The 3rd Thing Press–Alison Bailey, one of the editors there. I wanted to ask about…So certainly you have a background in poetry and this might be part of what you bring to this sparseness and sort of working with the sentence as a unit of the prose that, you know, sometimes a paragraph is a sentence. So there’s like the sparseness there. But then also the just the things that you’re writing about are so big and there isn’t a resolution. Like we don’t get–we don’t have a resolution around the climate crisis and the present, you know, as readers and you as the writer. And I’m just curious about your thoughts around leaving things undone, and whether you feel like that is something that’s easy to do as a writer or whether one might need to sort of get feedback to know what is too much emptiness or unknown.

Alissa: Yeah, I think that I had some ideas when I was working on revision. But I also do what I call parallel writing and that’s sort of asking the book questions. Parallel writing I think of as–it can be many things, you know, like maybe it’s interviewing one of the characters or maybe it is, you know, writing like creating a map of the world. And for me, and maybe I was kind of guided by some of what I’ve been seeing in, I don’t know, some more interdisciplinary or multimedia works, like collections of writing that actually include a lot of questions about the writing. So I’m thinking of, right now, Susan Briantes’ Defacing the Monument, and certainly a lot of the work that Fred Moten puts out as well, where they just include some questions to writers. They engage with the idea of, what does it mean for us to have a poetics, and how do you want to be socially engaged with your work, basically. At this time, when I was working on Sift, I took a lot of the questions that Susan Briante poses in defacing the monument and I answered all of them. And some of the questions that came up, or some of the answers, I guess, that came up helped me figure out my poetics or my aesthetics with this project. So it was this combination of having the poetry background and loving the sort of lyricism of the line, but then also recognizing that part of this project is to have some sort of slipperiness. And there was something about the sentences, the characters, the whole–the story as a whole, I mean, the idea of time–I wanted it all to be somewhat slippery. And so it took some extra, certainly some work when I was going back and crafting it, sentence by sentence, to be able to find some of that cadence, the slippery cadence that I needed. But yeah, I think it was helpful to think about the aesthetics and how it does connect sort of to the ethics and what I really wanted for, you know, sort of this grand hope for the project, I guess.

Siloh: Yeah, the collaborative element that comes in also in leaving that opening. So the gaps that we just discussed around trauma, it’s like there’s also the ways that leaving that opening becomes an invitation for the reader to participate in the process. And I think that maybe it’s not just the ways that others enter into the process in an editorial sense but the ways that others enter into the process in grounding sort of the purpose or–yeah, the aesthetics and politics of the work.

Alissa: Yeah, yeah and I think you know there were so many good conversations that I had with Anne de Marcken at The 3rd Thing, the other editor, around you know the choices with the aesthetic and how to sequence. I did have, you know, the great fortune to go to The 3rd Thing in Olympia and we printed out all the pages and put them on the floor and spent the entire day talking about the sort of the sequencing and I feel like those conversations, you know, not only taught me more about what I was wanting to do with this particular project, but also what I’m wanting to do as a writer and artist in the world. And I just, they’re incredibly, I don’t know, meaningful to me, that The 3rd Thing would be willing to have those long conversations to talk through the choices and to help me understand the project better, to help me understand what I’m wanting to do with other work, too.

Siloh: There was something–so we had a chance to read together at Browsers books in Olympia, celebrating the release of Sift and there was a really lovely comment that somebody shared at the end in the Q&A portion about their experiences hearing you read from Sift and I was wondering–I mean, this feels related in the sense that you had said something around creating room through the book, which is also what you said at the beginning of our conversation today. But there is this, one of the guiding goals was to create the sort of ability to grieve and sort of breathe through the work. And I know this would be…there’s so many directions that we could go in to talk about sort of breathing and the ways that that can be metaphorical for the work: taking things in and letting things out. But I’m just wondering if you might be willing to speak to a little bit about this idea of breathing room in your work.

Alissa: Mm-hmm. Yeah, so this worked its way into the draft early on, and it really was because I was at the time writing as a type of therapy and it was something I needed to do for myself and so it just worked its way into the text, the moments of breath that the characters take–it was because I needed a breath in that moment. And I also loved, you know, that comment at Browsers because, you know, the person also said that when I was reading it aloud, it was a moment they took in a breath. And so it was something that we were not only sharing words in that moment, but also breath. And so, yeah, I think the breath shows up in different ways in the text. So there’s those moments where the characters actually breathe and sip the air. So one of, you know–they call sipping the air “sifting,” and so there are those moments. But then there are also the moments of pause in between: these very short chapters. There are the short fragments of the non-human that I think of as almost a breath, like recognizing this, you know…it’s sort of a pause from the human-centered narrative and recognizing the shared existence. And I think of, you know, I think of that sort of like a breath. What else do I want to say about this?

I think there’s more–oh! There’s, you know, when I was working, when I was thinking about shape with Sift, I was really wanting to draw on the natural world, and it seemed to make sense to think of moss. And since moss is non-vascular, it draws its nutrients from the air. And so I wanted the–when I’ve envisioned Sift and just thinking about the text visually, I thought about it as patches of moss that is connected in these like white space, or the air connects them. So, that’s, I think, another aspect of sort of the breath and how it is, you know, or at least air, how that is sort of played out in the choices with shaping in the book.

Siloh: And that editorial or collaborative process of reshaping, it seems like that’s also a place where the air, or the breath comes in, too, and those gaps. And yeah, I think that’s just, I was so–I loved the acknowledgements and the way that you arranged them at the end and sort of divided by element and the ways that air, the air element was sort of where the editorial and collaborative side of the process came in. So I was thinking about that.

Alissa: That’s right.

Siloh: I definitely want to make sure to ask you about your approach to literary community or creative community, sort of with that in mind. And I just feel like you embody clearly in your work this strong ethics of generosity and collaboration and commitment to community. And also in your–just the things that you put out there in the world that are about writing and this generosity to the community in that way. And I’m wondering if you might have any advice for those of us who might be struggling to sort of put our oar in the stream, so to speak, of finding our place in creative community and approaching that in a way that feels non-competitive or not like keeping abreast of what’s going on. Yeah, so just any advice around creative community or things you might be willing to share about your approach to that.

Alissa: Yes, I really–thank you for that question. I’m glad to be in this literary ecosystem with you, and all of the others. I think the number one thing that would help is to read more literary journals and read more zines. I think there’s so much emphasis, you know, put on the–and maybe it’s just because it’s what we’re seeing, it’s being marketed to us, but, you know, the best sellers in trying to maybe connect with an MFA, you know, or all of all of these things, which I have done, and I did find value. But I think that for me, what has been most fruitful has been the connections that I’ve made with editors at literary journals, and reaching out to writers early in their career. So if they’re doing a zine or doing–you read something in a literary journal that you love, to just reach out to that writer and say a couple words. They are going to be so thankful for that. And I do see that there are some really exciting journals, you know, like the Gravity of the Thing and Surely Magazine, that are doing such exciting vibrant good work for our literary ecosystem, you know, really inventive writing. And so I just, I want to see, you know, maybe to see more support of those spaces. And I honestly feel like it’s been those kind of connections for me, have continued on into my adulthood and I’m just really sort of grateful for the writers and editors of literary journals and zines.

So that I think was one. I think being involved in community and being in the world with people as much as you can. Going to readings and, you know, if you don’t see–if you’re not connecting with people at readings, actually making the step to create a group on your own, and I think that there are ways of doing this. One thing that I did years ago, and that was a big success for a long time was I put out a call for writers through Meetup, actually, and it was to do a writing group.

But I had some very specific, you know, intentions with the group. I knew that I wanted to, you know, write with people who we’re doing mostly short fiction and who were doing more like–who were interested in experimenting with form. And so I had a couple questions through Meetup about, what do you read? and just like the small, you know–having these clear intentions written out, and then a couple questions that were specific to the writing and the group, helped me sort of window down a group that was really amazing and that went on for about three years and we met every other week and exchanged writing. And I think that a lot of times I hear from people, “how do I find other writers, how do I find a group?” And a lot of times it is actually about, you know, creating, writing out some of your intentions for what you want out of a writing group and then going from there. And sometimes what you’ll notice is (or at least what I noticed was) I’m not seeing in the world where I am, you know, a group that’s this specific–but maybe if I put a call out there will be other people. And sure enough, there were. So I think sometimes you’ll be able to find a group that works, but oftentimes it’s a matter of, you know, kind of designing it on your own, too.

I think in terms of the, you know, competitiveness, even in, you know, in an MFA program, like I was at the Pacific University, it was, you know, well over 10 years ago that I got my MFA, but I didn’t, in that environment, feel a sense of competition. I was lucky enough to be in workshops that felt very nourishing. And, you know, I think part of this was, know, some of the people who are facilitating were very thoughtful and how they facilitated. And I know even with Pacific, the program has grown so much and it’s very exciting to see that on their website, they include the instructors’ bios along with their approach to workshop, their philosophy to the writing workshop–which is amazing and it would helped out so much when I was in the MFA program. I’m so glad they’re doing it now. But yeah, I think that if you’re lucky enough to get in a group where everyone is kind of guided by a facilitator who recognizes that we’re here for a shared cause, which is to embrace writing and literature and recognize that we all sort of struggle with this, but these are not finished drafts. So we’re all kind of collaborating in this moment. I think once that is–that kind of space is cultivated, it can be really exciting to see because everybody is invested.

I think that when I’ve had the experiences where it’s just obvious that there’s some competition, maybe even a healthy competition…I don’t know, like, it’s not somewhere that I stay for very long. I think it’s natural to come up. Imean, I think that’s going to happen, but I don’t know. I usually, at those times, sort of, just because of my tendency, kind of distance myself. But that’s all just to say that, you know, there’s so many–we all do this so differently, and I can see healthy competition is being okay, too. It’s just when it gets to that place of, you know, it being the only thing that I think it can be a struggle.

Siloh: Yeah, that’s so helpful. Thank you so much, Alissa. What are you–is there anything that you’re working on now that you’ve released Sift?

Alissa: Yes, so I am working on a collaborative project called Delisted, which is creative engagement with endangered species. It’s something that’s being organized by the writer of Jennifer Calkins, who’s also another 3rd Thing writer. She wrote Fugitive Assemblage, and she’s also an evolutionary biologist and lawyer. And she has spearheaded this project, invited writers and artists to do this creative engagement with endangered or extinct species and assigned each person a species. And so I have the great pleasure of getting to know this bird, the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō bird, from Kauaʻi, and so I have been spending a lot of time listening to audio of this bird, the bird’s song, and writing alongside the audio, and also doing this log where I record every new fact that I learned about the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō, but also every time I share a conversation about the bird. So I will include our conversation in that log. <Laughs.> And I’m just excited, I’m going to be able to see some of what the other writers and artists have done with this project here, I think it’s December is when it culminates–although I feel like this is now something I’m going to–I’m going to always sort of carry this bird with me. It’s been a really, I don’t know, powerful and moving project to think about this extinct bird and what it means to our planet, and to grieve in this way, for a species that I didn’t even really know existed until I started doing this project. So that’s been meaningful. And I’m also doing some writing consultations. So I am working with people on their books and helping with their drafting process. I’m also a writing group facilitator and have been loving that experience of, you know, just helping guide a group. Being sort of the–relieving people of the duties that no one really wants to do for a writing group, primarily. <Laughs.> So, you know, helping move the conversation along or redirect it, or getting, you know, holding people accountable, these kind of things that are sometimes hard to do, especially when people are used to like having a formal writing group or an MFA setting. So that’s been lovely to be sort of welcomed into some of those groups and to help out with that. And I have started a new novel as well, and it’s early in its stages. So I can’t really talk too much about it but I’m glad that it started.

Siloh: I love all of that and love kind of seeing the ways that that think commitment to collaboration and community and being awake with the world is showing up in your next endeavors. So thank you so much for meeting with me, talking with me. I feel like I learned so much from our discussion about writing and about those commitments. So thank you for being here. And before we fully close out, would you be willing to share ways that listeners might be able to find Sift, your novel, and stay connected with what you’re doing?

Alissa: I’d be happy to. So people can find Sift through The 3rd Thing website or at their favorite independent bookstores. And they can contact me through my website AlissaHattman.com. And there’s more information about the projects that I’ve worked on as well as writing consultation and other things there as well. I’d love to hear from anyone.

Siloh: Yeah, definitely reach out and don’t forget to sign up for Alissa’s newsletter, Murmur. It’s truly a joy and always very substantive. So, highly recommend. And thank you so much, Alissa.

Alissa: Thank you, Siloh. These were wonderful questions. Thank you for helping me think through my work in new ways.

Siloh: It’s been a pleasure.