In October 2023, Dantiel W. Moniz had a year and half's worth of distance from the debut of her story collection, Milk Blood Heat. Critics had wasted little time lauding the merits of Moniz's writing and storytelling, both within the collection and in individually published works featured in The Paris Review, McSweeney's, and Harper's Bazaar. If anything, her own website bio sells her short, neglecting to mention that Milk Blood Heat was named a book of the year by at least twelve publications, was selected as a book of the month by Roxane Gay, and was featured in must-read lists from outlets like The Rumpus, Book Riot, Electric Literature, and many more. This fact in and of itself reflects how Moniz prefers to discuss her works—not by digging into qualitative reception, but rather by focusing on the ways she seeks to engage a reader with her material.
While visiting Butler University as a Vivian S. Delbrook visiting writer, Moniz agreed to chat about where that eighteen-month span had led her. She gives the sense of having crossed some noteworthy bridges since the collection's release: in that time, she became an assistant professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison's MFA program, from which she herself graduated in 2018. Her time in workshops there generated many of the stories that she honed in on for the collection, developing them into the final forms that all her readers now know. She spoke about all of this as well as her current projects and the wisdom she's been developing via her process of creating, with the ease of having followed these stories for so long and having grown reflexively familiar with their essential parts. But our conversation also exhibited a kind of propulsion, leaving the wake of the statement debut and surging past it, forging ahead toward whatever unknowns and unknowables come next.
Jeff Marvel (JM): In your collection Milk Blood Heat, you work with different elements, almost as if you're working with a color palette. Did you have that palette set in your mind before writing, and how did you find all these different ways of weaving them together?
Dantiel Moniz (DM): For a lot of people who end up writing short story collections, or, at least for me, I didn't know I was writing a short story collection. It started with individual stories over however much time it was. But I had maybe, I don't know, three or four of the stories, and I got to this point where I was like, “Oh, you are writing the same story over and over, and you are just changing character names, you are a completely unoriginal writer.” But then I had my friend—who is still my first reader and was with me in the MFA—I had her look at some of them, and she was like, “I don't think that they're the same story. I think that they’re concerned with the same themes or questions, but isn't that what collections do?”
So when I'm creating a story, I have a question about something. I'm curious about something. Whatever that question is, I'm basically creating this three-dimensional world out of a two-dimensional medium, right? And in order to explore that question, and maybe it's not always the same question—it might be an adjacent question—but it's working toward answers to a similar set of questions, turning them at different angles from different perspectives and looking at them in this multifaceted way. Once I understood that that was what I was doing, I could do it more consciously as I was building the rest of the stories. So, for me, the stories in the collection are linked. You know, people are like, “Oh, these are unlinked stories,” and to that, I'm like, “Yeah, they're not the same characters.” But there's more than just character that constitutes a link, right? There are themes, there are words, there's geography, there's whatever it is. And so, I do think of the whole collection as being in conversation. Echoes and mirrors are kind of what I started thinking about, and there are certain words that do repeat from story to story that I think of as, like, totems. Hopefully each time you see that word, it's gained resonance from whatever came before it. But that wasn't something that I consciously set out to do, because I didn't know at that point…I had never written a story collection.
JM: But once you stepped back or, or had that other reader’s perspective...
DM: Yeah, after that, it was kind of like, “OK, so what am I? What have I been doing unconsciously that can be elevated, or what feels like I need to pull back a little bit?” And then, you know, constructing after that. Each story obviously has its own arc. And when you’re building a collection, the collection itself has to have an arc through all of the stories.
JM: OK, that makes a lot of sense because when I was reading it, I didn’t feel like these stories were simple iterations. It's not like the third story felt like a redraft of the second story, but that there was more of an abstract link between them. I almost found the rhythm of reading through the collection was kind of like listening to a record, and there are eleven stories here, just like how ten or eleven tracks is a common album length. I wondered if you were trying to fashion the collection in that way once you were stitching things together. The pace picks up and there's a longer story sort of towards the end, right before “Exotics,” which, itself, is this three- or four-pager that smacks you in the face.
DM: Yeah, somebody else has made that music comparison too. There are things about my process that are a little bit more unconscious to me or mysterious to me. There's a part of me that thinks it's good to get really intentional about your craft, but there are some things about it where, like, I kind of want the magic to prevail. If you illuminate everything…You know, if it's working, that's fine.
But it's really interesting, when somebody else brought up this record format to me, because with “Exotics” they talked about how a lot of times in albums you'll have like a song that acts as a kind of turn, you know? And that turn was that story to me. But because sound and rhythm are so important in the construction of my sentences, that makes sense even though I wasn't consciously like, “I'm going to put together a kind of playlist of a collection.”
JM: That makes sense, sure. I just had a ton of fun reading it, too, and I feel like that's not necessarily something that comes up with literary writing, literary fiction. The capture of energy in these small, condensed pieces, it's kind of like a ride. And so I wanted to return to that idea of the question. Once you were looking back and trying to put these together, what do you think was the big question that you were writing into, or spiraling out from, or spinning off of with this collection? Or did that question change over time?
DM: After I had a first draft of at least all the stories, and I had them all together in front of me, I realized there was this other secret question that I had no idea I was writing toward. The first thing was getting to the point where I was like, “OK, these are different stories, with these themes...” But the thing that started it for me was, I always used to ask myself a base question: Am I a good person? And so that would be the question that came to my head most often…My self-talk is a lot better now, but back then I would tap into the negative, so it wasn't really, “Am I a good person,” it was, “Am I a bad person?”
It really started with me thinking of those two definitions in my head, good and bad, and then thinking about the subjective nature of them. We're taught that terms like “right”, “wrong”, “good”, “evil” are absolute, that they're objective. But they're not. They require somebody to be define them. And someone's definition of what is right or wrong is going to be so different based on their experiences, that it could be vastly different from this other person over here, right? And then you have to think about what the power dynamics are, and of somebody being able to define a word versus who gets defined by it. I was thinking a lot about these things that we are taught, as if there’s this right way to be a person. About how subjective that really is and how conditioned that really is. So I was thinking about that because I also wanted to ask myself, “What does goodness mean?” Don't I have to know what its opposite is? Because we live on this physical plane where something like “good” cannot have any meaning at all if it's not positioned next to its opposite, if it's not in relation to something. You have to know both to figure that out. For example, in the story “Tongues,” you would never in your real life have a person tell you that story and be like, “You did the right thing assaulting that child!” I mean, you would never be rooting for that! But I wondered, is there a situation where you could understand that in that character’s mind, that was the exact right way to handle that situation, and what she did was good because she was protecting someone she loved? Another example is “Hearts of our Enemies,” where the character feeds this person's pet snails to them. Out of context, you wouldn’t be like, “Yeah, you did it, good job, gold star!” But in that story, you can be like, “Okay, yeah, I can see why she did that.” So that was the conscious thing. I was trying to think of the conditional nature of good and evil, right and wrong. I was also thinking about the nature of God as an idea, what that idea actually means. But then the secret thing that I didn't know I was writing toward… I feel like each story, no matter if it deals with it directly or not, is also kind of circling around these questions of motherhood and daughterhood. What does it mean to be a mother? I'm not a mother, but I am a daughter because I have a mother. Even if you're not a mother yourself, you had one. And what is that relation like?
JM: Another dichotomy that you can examine…
DM: Yeah, and just thinking about how, in a world where goodness and badness are subjective and morality can be conditional, what does it mean to bring new life into a world like that? And what does it mean to be living in that world? So I don't know. That was the secret thing I had to discover, where it felt like everything was also revolving around the question of if I should have kids. Ultimately those are the two questions that I found myself exploring.
JM: And that’s such a classic thing about being a parent, you know; you now have this person who you're trying to impart the rules of the game. That would all get screwed up if the rules aren’t set in stone, or if there are no rules, or…
DM: And depending on where you're playing the game, or where you're viewing it from, the rules are different. They are! And what does that look like in real-time? We have a really hard time looking at ourselves. And I think that's because we're taught these absolutes. You're not supposed to do that. You're supposed to be humble. You're supposed to just accept that this is what it is and not really question anything. But I think because we have that mindset, we have such a hard time understanding that. We live on a plane of dualities, right? Lightness and darkness exist beside each other. You cannot have light without darkness, and vice versa. So if we were taught to be able to better accept that anger, jealousy, shame, that those things are human things, we would probably be able to process them a lot better without doing so much harm to ourselves and the people around us. Like, if you've been taught that it’s bad to feel a certain emotion, obviously you're gonna have a really hard time when that feeling comes up and you’re stuck thinking that something is wrong with you for feeling that way.
JM: I think where that classically runs into problems, too, is, again, if you're sort of brought up or you're conditioned into this negative spin of self-talk and self-examination, if you're always looking at yourself as wrong, or as not-right in some way…
DM: As not-right, yeah…
JM: That stops you in your tracks. You can't grow past that.
DM: Right. Or the growth is going to be so much more labored. And I realized at some point, thank God, that nothing happens in a vacuum. So, like, if I'm thinking about this thing…sometimes something would come to me and I'd be like, “Can I write this? Is this something that I can do? I might get canceled.” And then I was like, “Well, if it's coming to me, that means somebody somewhere has also felt this, or has this same question.”
JM: I like that as a concept, too. Like, of course there are things that occur to us that, wherever they came from, we can identify they came from some sort of moral judgment—something comes from a bad place, a place of fear or trauma. But is there any benefit to keeping that inside? Like, if some character or situation occurs to you that you don't know if you should write into a story because it could be dangerous or harmful. But does the idea really end if you don’t write it out? How does the act of writing transform those kinds of ideas?
DM: I don't know. Because yeah, you don't have to be writing to have other people read it and acknowledge or assess it. I guess acknowledgment is the thing that would make that thing go away.
I mean, obviously I go a step further, making a fictional story out of these ideas so that I can have the room to explore them, but I think about that in these terms: in writing this thing, is it producing more harm? Or, is it producing some sort of acknowledgment or healing that somebody else could use? And I think there's a very big difference between discomfort and harm, and lately, those two things are getting really conflated. People now are like, “I'm harmed because I feel discomfort. I'm uncomfortable about how to feel this thing.” But again, being uncomfortable is necessary for growth.
So am I harming you, or are you just uncomfortable with having to acknowledge someone else's reality in yourself? And as a writer, I'm asking you to be uncomfortable with me for a minute, and let's see what happens.
JM: I think that's key, not trying to transfer this discomfort off your shoulders onto someone else’s. You're like, join me in it.
DM: I’m creating worlds that I'm inviting you into, right? And you don't have to do this. I'm inviting you to come into this space and sit here and look at what this experience is doing with this character and look at it honestly. But then also reflect on your own stuff, which is something that is very hard for us to do, and I get all the reasons why it's hard to do and why most people don't do it. It's so much easier to just go about living and reacting in unconscious ways. And I think I see a lot of that in our world right now. Poorly processed, very human darkness. Humanness. It's synonymous, right? It's like, to be human is both glorious and messy.
JM: It’s funny, another thing that I was noticing in these stories is all kinds of juxtapositions of what would classically be opposite elements. The goodness of people and the…again, I'm reverting to these moralistic, very clear-cut judgment terms, and it's so much more complex than that, but it's so hard to get out of talking that way and seeing things that way. That, in itself, takes work.
DM: Yeah, and so hopefully doing that can allow us to consider goodness and badness differently. Like Fred for example, the character whose wife has cancer. In the beginning, you don't necessarily have to like him; he’s not exactly likable. But I hope by the end of the story [“The Loss of Heaven”] you can at least feel for him, have that empathy, and not just be like, “Yeah, I'm glad you got robbed.” Instead, you can say, “You really are heading for a bottom that you cannot stop.”
And what does that look like for you, the human character? There are certain situations like that in your life, too, although you can always see other people a little bit more clearly than you can see your own self. Like, if you ever have a friend or family member where you know they’re going in a direction you don’t like, sometimes you just have to let the person go there. They have to want to go there or take the exit, but they have to be able to see it on their own. And you can offer support, but sometimes you just say, “OK. Yeah, you're gonna do that thing. But I'll be here when you do the thing, or when you come back…hopefully…”
JM: I’m glad you brought up “The Loss of Heaven,” because I remember that story hitting on another one of these recurring themes. Many of these stories put your protagonists on journeys of losing control, or changing their perception of the control that they have, or things like that. And that’s a whole other can of worms of, you know, what do we actually control about our situations and our identities beyond how we look at things, beyond how we take things in?
So where do you think you stand now with all those questions that you were trying to ask? Do you think you understand things better now, or is it that this question just keeps developing and developing and spiraling out in different directions? Now that you've finished it and you've published it and it's out there, how does that change your own inner world?
DM: I think, in general, I'm never truly trying to get to answers in my work. I mean, sometimes revelations will happen, and that's a different thing. But I have this starting question and by the end of it, I’m getting into deeper questions. So it's not just, “Am I a bad person?” anymore, that develops into, “Why did I think this in the first place?”
We can think about literally the two of us sitting in this room. Right now, we are a link in time connecting to the very first humans that ever existed somewhere. Somebody survived until we're sitting in this room. That's how this can even happen. We are literally that. So everything goes back and back and back and back and back beyond that. That's kind of how these questions operate for me.
I get to a space of just being able to fully watch a character embody, in motion and action, these questions that I have. Even if it's not answering the question, I feel satisfied that this is a question where I can sometimes pinpoint its origin. But sometimes there’s just other unfolding questions, and that's OK. There's not always an answer, a neat little nice answer for something, which is how life works, right? That's something else that's really uncomfortable about life and living. We have to live in this unknown. And then after we live, we're like, “And then what's next?” Nobody can come back and tell us. And we obviously have our theories, but you don't know until you get there. And so I think for me, the exploration of not knowing has made me more comfortable with not knowing.
In my own creative process, in the first draft of something, I'm telling the story to myself and I'm just trying to figure out, like, how to make sense of it. And then in in subsequent drafts, I’m like, “OK, how do I tell this story to someone who lives outside of my head?”
I don't know if that really answered the question, but that's kind of the point, too, right?
JM: Maybe this isn't something that you can pinpoint, but in the stories that you've written since this collection came out, how have your questions changed or evolved or gone deeper? Do you feel like you have a different set of questions that you're asking now?
DM: So, I was writing this collection at the same time that I was writing a novel. That was intended to be the first book, but novels are just…
JM: I can't even imagine.
DM: But the novel came first and then the collection, or the first stories of the collection. So I think that they are kind of bouncing similar questions. But there’s more focus in the novel specifically on motherhood and daughterhood, but not just that. Those are the characters, but I'm thinking about the question of inheritance in families—not just physical inheritance, not money, but I mean, what do we inherit from being in a lineage with somebody else? And who do we owe, if anyone? And for what? Sometimes my mom would say stuff like, “I feed and shelter you and X, Y, and Z,” and I’m like, “I didn’t ask you to do that! I didn't ask to be born!” So I owe you for something that I didn't ask you for in the first place? I am a decision that you made.
JM: So you start life in debt, basically.
DM: I mean, from that perspective, yeah. But even beyond that kind of stuff, when you think about intergenerational trauma and how that lives in the body. People wonder how someone can pass their trauma on. Well, if you don't process it, it informs how you interact with the world and have relationships, so it goes on and on and on.
It's a novel, right? So you're spending so much more sustained time with the character, or possibly a longer scope of time: months, weeks, whatever, but also space and capacity. I think the questions have to go deeper. I hope they do.
That's all I ever hope. I guess this will only be my second book, but I hope that with each new project, it's apparent to myself, even if not anybody else, that I grow in craft and experience.
JM: Do you find that the actual raw material itself is related at all? Like, these characters who are in this novel are similar to ones that are in the story collection, or they inhabit sort of the same world? Or are they growing distinct as you write?
DM: Yeah, I think they're their own people. I think no matter what I'm doing, I'm always thinking relationally in that way because we're never not in relation to something. Whether that's individual people or the whole world. Again, us sitting here in this room, we can think we’re each our own individual person, but that's kind of an illusion. Everything is always connected. One thing that's happening over here, you might be able to not look at it because you're like, that's very far away from my life, but it's gonna come back at some point because everything is a web. If you just think about the process of energy, equal and opposite reactions, everything's always trying to come into balance. Maybe we understand that, maybe not.
JM: You were talking about the time breadth of the novel, too, which makes me think of how you didn’t necessarily use narrative time, plot time, as the scale of these stories. In a novel, like you said, that narrative usually takes place in a meaningful or important span of time, whether it's an experimental 300-page novel that takes place in a day, like Ulysses, or something that spans years and generations of a family. And I feel like that was not necessarily the underpinning for these stories. Like, these stories don’t scale so much with time duration or spatial distance as they do with characters going into themselves. How do you ground yourself in the work if not in a narrative timeline?
DM: I mean, obviously short stories and novels are different, entirely. And so, for those stories, it isn’t necessarily a matter of the action happening in a day or across a couple of days or a couple of weeks. This is happening in the moment of a decision. The characters are all coming out of the point where they learn new knowledge about themselves, and either you're going to watch this character turn toward that knowledge or turn away from it. But you can never un-know something, right? You can never un-know something once you know it. So even if you don't act in deference to that knowledge, it's still like, well, you know now. You make a choice.
The novel does have to occupy…I mean, I guess it can do whatever it wants to do, but it definitely occupies a longer passage of time. But that internal space for me is still super important. Because how often do you get to be inside somebody else's internal space, rather than your own? The true answer to that is never. Even when people are sitting and talking to you and letting you in on it, you're only being let in on the part that they are allowing you to see. Everything else, you make an implication based on action, gesture, behavior, whatever it is.
Time is… I don't know. Time is so hard. Like when people have those literal sagas where it spans forty years or whatever it is, I'm like…
JM: Yeah. Because I mean, unless you're a sixty-year-old writer and you've actually experienced what it means to spend forty years as a living, adult person, there must be an element of projecting. What the development of the outside world does to characters in their situations as they age, all these huge situations that aren’t your own.
But these stories, too, have such a distinct way of charting the distance a character is covering, literally going into their brain and doing the processing, doing the equations of what all has happened to them and how they've taken it in.
DM: Yeah, I'm thinking about specifically “Necessary Bodies,” which happens over the course of a weekend of planning this character’s mother's birthday party. That's what’s happening in time. But the main thing that's happening in the story is the protagonist being like, “Oh my gosh, I have this pregnancy that I have to figure out.”
So, it's moving through time, yes. But really, it's moving through this person, this person’s body in time.
JM: It sets up this more pronounced tension, I think, between the physical world of locations and daily cycles of these characters and, also, this interior world of this woman.
DM: And time is of the essence for her, right? Because she has this decision about whether to have this being growing inside of her at this instant, and whether she’s going to follow through with that or not.
JM: So you grew up in Florida, in Jacksonville, and now you've moved to the extreme north of the country. Very different place, very different environment…
DM: Different culture and environment, yeah…
JM: What’s been the impact of that, would you say?
DM: Leaving home definitely allows you to look at it differently. If you stay in the same place and you're around the same familiar things, it's so easy to take that environment for granted. But then you leave that space, and when you come back, you're back inside it, but you’ve seen its outside as well.
But I've always had a really complicated relationship to home. I wanted to leave, and now that I’ve left, that was a great decision to make for me, but it's always going to be home. It’s always going to inform my voice. Where I grew up informs everything that I am, going forward. Again, nothing is disconnected. Nothing is happening in a vacuum.
I was writing before I had ever…. I mean, I had left a couple of times. I lived in Washington State for a little while. I lived in a couple different places, and I think leaving helped me know why I was writing about that space, too.
For example, if I was going to write a character that's the age that I am now, in their early thirties, I know what that's like ‘cause I've been doing it for a couple of years. But it's not just having experience, it's also having enough distance to translate that experience on the page in a way that feels visceral.
And so I do feel like leaving helped me write about home better. But now whenever I go home, I'm always reminded. I'm like, “Oh yeah, this is what the air feels like,” so it's both distance and closeness. My leaving allowed me to understand the experiences I had, and continue to have, when I'm back there. I haven't really started writing about any Midwestern stuff yet, and I wonder if it's just going to need more time, you know? This is only my third year living there. I went to grad school there too, so I had two years, but it’s very different living in a place that you know is temporary, semester to semester, versus living there full-time.
But I imagine it'll seep in at some point. It takes time to process what that all actually feels like. It's like looking at something super close up, and you can see colors and sensation, and then stepping back, you're like, “Oh, that's a flower! I can see the whole thing now.” It's harder to see something when you’re in close-up. It's the same relationally. Let's say you're like in a super toxic, turbulent situation. When you're in it, you're just so in it that you can't see anything clearly. And then starting from the minute that you actually are out of it, you can get some distance, and then you can reflect on how you couldn't see it for what it was before because you were too close to it.
JM: I feel like thinking of things in that way goes all the way back to what you were talking about with shaping questions in your stories and the upgrade from like a two-dimensional thing to a three-dimensional thing, something that you can rotate and manipulate. You can zoom in and out, you can…
DM: You can literally walk in and look and interact inside. Yeah, exactly.
All my answers are just about this duality, but that’s kind of what my brain is on right now. I'm like, yeah, I think that there are other planes of existence where black doesn’t mean nothing in the absence of its opposite of white, or light versus darkness, or whatever it is. But this is where we live. This is what it is.
And yes, there is nuance between those things, but those oppositional things don't mean anything if they have nothing else to rub up against.
JM: You need friction.
DM: Yeah, friction, exactly. Tension, friction, however you want to say it—that’s the thing that's pulling through the story, this thing that you feel bodily. And that’s another way that I want my stories to exist. It's one thing for people to interact with my stories intellectually. That's beautiful. That's great. I love that, obviously. But I also think that I want them to exist physically in your body.
If you think about your emotions right, they're not projections of your mind. We don’t get angry in our heads, we get angry physically in our bodies. We feel that, just the same way we can feel grief and joy. Those are physical intelligences happening in our bodies. So it's like, how do I also get a story to do that to somebody's body?
JM: Totally. It's funny, actually, just last night, and for reasons I can't even remember, I found myself on the Wikipedia page about the concept of the mind-body problem. Not reading in any sort of depth or looking further out than that, but just kind of thinking about that idea of how the head is its own thing and it can do things that the body can't, but the question remains: can it do things away from your body? And a lot of these storied philosophers or thinkers have said, “Not really, not necessarily.” There is some strange link between the two at all times.
DM: There is. And you can intellectualize your emotions, sure. In terms of how I write and how my brain thinks about things, sometimes I've been like, “Am I feeling this feeling, or am I just thinking about it? And what's the difference?” And for some people, it's obvious that there's a difference between thinking about something and feeling it. But for me, how do I know? But also, if I'm having to question it like that, I'm probably not feeling it, you know what I mean? Because it's physical when you're feeling it; it's up here at your throat.
JM: So bringing that back to your writing, when you're writing, how do you do that kind of litmus testing?
DM: I have to give it to somebody else to read. It's really great to hear from so many people who have reached out and been like, “Oh, I really felt this,” or “This made me feel like this.” And their question for me is usually, “Did you feel like that when you were writing it?”
And it's like, no, I can't do that. I have to distance emotionally, too, in order to make something whole on the page. You know what I mean? If I'm in it and feeling it, I'm so focused and right there, I'm so tight on it that I'm going to only be able to show you a small amount of it. I have to be further back so that I'm not feeling the emotion that I'm putting down. I'm rendering it, and then I give it to somebody else and ask them, “What did you feel when you read this?”
It’s the same as I was just saying about being in the relationship. It’s like if you're in a fight with somebody, you're looking at your own perspective and this person's perspective, and you're in that fight. But let's say I was a person watching two people having a fight. I'm looking. I can see everything, and in order for me, as a writer, to be able to make a fully dimensional human on the page who’s capable of nuance, of holding paradoxes in their body at one time, I have to be over here, cool, observing. In order to actually watch it and render it in its full capacity, I can't be attached to the outcome of what is happening.
You can have characters in your stories that judge each other. Your readers can judge your characters. You, as the creator of it, cannot be in judgment of them, or else you're already rendering them flattened in some sort of way because you have some judgment of, or attachment to, the actions that they're taking.
So I'm writing from a cooler place of trying to see everything from this distance. But when a person is reading it, I hope they're able to do both, right? See what's going on, and then, also be in the moment of what those feelings are, and it seems like so far, that's what's happened.
JM: So, in hearing people's emotional response to a particular story, do you feel like you've succeeded if they feel the thing that you felt in that first draft? Again, this continuum of success and failure, but is that where you feel like you've accomplished what you set out to do?
DM: I just get happy that people are engaging with it at all. So this is a way to answer that question that's not really what you asked…
JM: That's okay, go for it.
DM: When the book first came out, I wanted to know what people were saying about it. Like, “Oh my God, Goodreads is like this, and oh my God…” And obviously, as time goes by, you have less attachment. Now I’m more like, “Yeah, OK, cool.” People are allowed to have whatever thoughts.
But there was this one particular woman who, every single place she could review the book, she was like, “This book is awful. Hated this book so much. It starts with people, like, drinking cereal and blood at the same time…” which is not even what happens in that first story! But, fine, I mean, this is a person who literally…she did it on Amazon, she did it on Goodreads, she did it on Barnes & Noble—everywhere she could let people know how much she truly thought this book was vile.
And I thought about it for a minute, and I thought about how love and hate are not opposites. As much as we want to say that, they're not. The opposite of love or hate is apathy because it takes an immense amount of energy to hate something, as well as to love it. So you know, at the end of the day, she read this and she was so fuckin’ bothered by it that she just needed to tell everybody how bothered she was, because it did something to her. It affected her. It knocked her off-center, somehow. She wasn't just sitting there in apathy, it shook her a little bit, even if she didn't like the shaking.
And you know what? That’s fine, that’s cool. People are going to like it and people are not going to like it. I can't control that.
JM: I could see how publishing your debut story collection, and then seeing that no one has said anything about it, would be soul-crushing.
DM: Yeah, after you spent all this time and energy and…for me, I'm like, good or bad, it moved somebody. And because, most of the time, something's like “whatever” for me, too, and then I move on and I don't even review it or anything. But as long as it's creating actions and it's creating engagement, and people are literally having discussions about a thing that I wrote, that's cool. Even if the book club is like, “We hate it so much!” but they still chose it, and they’re gonna talk about how much they hate it for an hour.
JM: Right, yeah. And even in that sense, I think that oftentimes, if you get a group of people together to talk about how much they hate something, as long as they're talking in good faith about it, they can flip at some point and start finding little glimmers. Just like in workshop or whatever, you're all talking about the things that you think are missing from a piece or things that are there but falling flat. What you're sort of indicating is how those elements could become successful, how they could grow and shine.
DM: Yeah, even if you're pushing up against something, that's still you engaging with it, which is better than not. And the whole project of writing is engaging with things in yourself that you might not necessarily like or feel comfortable with, and what does that do for you?
JM: So what happens when you arrive at a question that you don’t feel ready to explore on the page? Not like a writer's block kind of thing, but when it feels like something about the material is pushing against you. Does that make sense?
DM: Yeah. To be honest, I think there’s value in understanding that a creative process is just like anything else—it moves and it's fluid, and it’s good to give yourself fallow periods. I think we get so caught up in this capitalist kind of idea that we’ve got to put out a book every year. “That person is doing it every year, getting up and writing every morning, and if you don't keep up the pace…” And if that works for you, fine.
But I think that cottoning onto anything as a rule instead of a convention is going to be detrimental to everybody's creative process. For me, if I'm really stuck, or if I feel like I'm just not sure of a way forward, usually that's an indication that I need to step back for a second. Maybe I need to read, maybe I need to go and interact with other art, you know? Watch a movie, do something to refill the well, so to speak, to put less pressure on myself.
But if you're sitting there like, “I have to, I have to, I have to!” then your brain's already stuck. You gotta know that it's fine to tap out for the day, take a walk, wash the dishes, or watch something, because other people do that. Just making it less pressurized, sometimes that allows me to get around the block. Sometimes it's time. Sometimes I haven't grown enough to convey the thing that I'm trying to convey in the way that I want to convey it. I’m not ready.
JM: And you can pile pressure on yourself and be like, “I have to make this thing that I'm trying to make, and it has to come from within me.” But again, even getting all the way back to the top of the conversation, we were talking about how things come into you from somewhere. So taking a roadblock as a sign that you need something to come to you because you just haven't gotten it yet…
DM: Yeah, even if that is as simple as, like, you need to go hydrate.
That’s the thing about it, it's so easy to think your creative process is happening up in your brain. That it's all intellectual. But your entire body functioning the way that it needs to be functioning is also a part of that process. It also hinders or helps you in that process. Everything is literally connected.
So, over the pandemic, something that I realized was that I was really terrible at hydrating. I would have a full cup of water next to me and feel so thirsty, and I would look at the cup of water, but then I would go eat something instead of drinking. But I knew I wasn’t hungry, I was thirsty. So why was I eating? What's going on there?
And I just started thinking about my creativity as a whole-body process, too, because if I'm not moving or stretching my body, I'm just sitting here stressing myself out mentally. I'm so much different sitting at my desk after I’ve stretched because this stuff is the same stuff, and I need to take care of both of them. Sometimes it's practical stuff, like you maybe need to read a book or go to the museum or take a walk and stop putting so much pressure on sitting at that desk. And sometimes it's more like, did you eat? Are you stretched? Are you thirsty? What do you need to do for yourself so that you can allow that flow to happen versus forcing it?
There's always something to address. We can't always just be up here creating, as much as we would love for that to be the case. Sometimes your body needs to be replenished for a while.
Something that gets forgotten a lot, especially once you get to a point in your life where you expect your writing to do something, it becomes very pressurized. You’re writing because you can finish this book and somebody will pay you for it, and then you can finish the job and you can feed yourself and that'll be fine. I think one of the things that's most important to keep in mind, about any kind of creative practice you might keep, is that you should enjoy doing it. It becomes so easy to forget that it's play, it can just become my work, my work, my work. Remember that you like doing it. Whatever way you discovered that you like to write or read or whatever it is, is because you enjoyed doing it first. Nobody was forcing you…well, not most of the time.
I used to write stories for fun. I would come home and be like, “This is what I'm doing after homework.” And I think the moment that I understood that I could get things with my writing, whether that's reputation or money or whatever it is, then I started thinking about the external circumstances of that, which is not helpful for you when you're in the drafting stage.
I try to make it so that my primary audience while I'm drafting is myself. Does this make me pleased? Am I enjoying myself as I'm writing this? Am I playing? When I get really strict and tight about it, that's when I tend to get the most blocked—when I'm rigid. So I have to remember that I like it. That's the reason that I came to writing in the first place. To get the book deals is obviously nice. Getting the tenure track job, that's nice—obviously, we’re not gonna pretend that it's not. But that's not why you came to it, right? It's not the core of it. And if it is the core, then that's going to set you up for so much dysfunction in your creative process.