practical tips and embracing the weird: an interview with scholar and writer Kate Vieira
Back to Writing week 8
Today, for the last Monday of the Back to Writing series, I’ve got an interview with writer, writing teacher, and scholar and researcher Kate Vieira. Her research spans the United States, Latin American, and Europe, and she examines the consequences of literacy in the lives of ordinary people. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses, and she also does community writing workshop in Wisconsin and around the world. She’s the author of American by Paper and Writing for Love and Money, and an actual ton of beautiful articles. She’s also a creative writer, and her nonfiction has appeared in Tin House, The Sun, and Writing on the Edge, where it was awarded the 2018 Donald Murray Prize. She’s Susan J. Cellmer Distinguished Chair in Literacy in the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
I first knew Kate when she was a new-ish professor at Wisconsin, and I was in my PhD and trying to figure out what kind of a writer and thinker I wanted to be. Kate’s writing and research and generosity in working with graduate students was an incredibly powerful example for me. She also writes some really knockout sentences. Like, sentences in actual scholarly articles that you want to re-read for the beauty of it, and if you spend really any amount of time reading scholarly work you know how rare that is.
We talked about the different energies involved in producing creative and scholarly work, how living in a body matters for writing practice, how writing process changes across a lifespan, and why Kate’s embracing the weird more in her writing during the pandemic. Kate also shared all her practical tips for maintaining a writing life. You’ll want to read just for those.
Nancy
Okay, so I love to talk to you in general, but especially for this series, because I feel like you're someone who manages this really multifaceted writing life. You have your research and your scholarly agenda, you also have your own creative work. You teach at the university, and you're also doing all of this community work. And it's so hard to do all of that and have those pieces come together, so I partially just want to learn more about how you do that.
So I wonder if you could just start by talking about what your writing life is like.
Kate
So I need to preface everything by saying that once I got vaccinated in May, when I was fully vaccinated, I kind of took a break from all of my routines and just went out and hung out with people all the time. So what I'm going to tell you is about what my routines have been like for my entire career, except for the last three months, where I just lost my mind.
Actually, can I just talk about what you said about balancing everything? Yeah, let me just start there because I just find that actually all of those different parts are in a lot of tension for me. So one of the things that I've been working on is trying to integrate them a bit more. Because I think in the past I've really separated them completely. I wrote an academic monograph and then I was working on the memoir version of that, and they were just like completely different things, and so my experience has been and that when I'm writing creatively, I always feel like I should be doing something else, and when I'm writing academically I'm always feeling the creative pull.
So one of the beautiful things about the community engaged work, which is work that I've done in Colombia with poets and educators, is that for that, for the Colombian intellectuals and educators and artists and young people and teachers that I was working with, all of those things seems to kind of live together in a bit more harmony. I was there on a Fulbright in 2018 and I continue to work with folks virtually on a number of different projects, and my feeling was that the artists, that their experiences as artists was integral to their teaching, which was integral to their thinking and theorizing, which was integral to their community engaged work, like everything felt like of a piece. And I guess I feel like I'm not there, but it's a model that I aspire to, in some ways.
Nancy
I have so much to say about that. There are so many institutional pressures to publish certain kinds of things that define you in a particular way, that make you legible to different kinds of audiences. And also, to get tenure and get promoted, there's a lot of pressures, I think, built into our systems to be a certain kind of writer or, you know, to follow a particular path.
Kate
Yeah, can we talk about money, too? It's really important to me that I'm a single parent. I value all of the kinds of writing that I do, I think they’re all valuable in different ways to different audiences, so I don't do anything just for the money--and yet the money is super important and has motivated a lot of my my choices in relation to writing because we all have to support ourselves. It's a blessing if you can support yourself through any kind of writing. It's a huge privilege to be able to use any kind of writing to make a living so definitely that has shaped a lot of my choices.
Nancy
Could you talk about your vision of how your creative and your scholarly work fit together? It sounds like, you’ve worked with these people in Colombia for whom those things are more naturally tied together. So do you have some place that you see like you can go, like what I want to do is this kind of writing or this kind of project or I want a writing practice that allows me to work more fluidly between genres or something else?
Kate
I'm going to be really honest. Like, I appreciate it when people are trying to work between genres and doing experimental things. I think it's cool but, honestly, in my head it's two different energies. It's like there's the creative energy and because I write creative nonfiction, you go into this very personal zone where you're thinking about words and language and you're kind of in this dreamlike state.
And on the other hand, the energy of academic writing is much more--I think of myself as super caffeinated and I'm trying to make connections. In my academic writing, I write about migration a lot and about justice and peace building and the way that people use writing to empower themselves and their communities, so in that writing, I have that kind of, I have to say something important and useful kind of energy and that's the goal. So I don't really think the actual practice of it is combined, but one informs the other.
Because creative writing is so important to me and it's such a such a piece of who I am, I think, then, in my work with Colombian poets and young people who are writing to build peace, I feel like, I enter that work in those relationships from a deep place of experience.
Nancy
I hope this will resonate with you. I remember really clearly a moment when I was working on my dissertation and you were supervising diss club. [Ed. note: this is a kind of writing group for grad students that my program ran, and at each meeting a faculty member would check in with us and lead discussion.] We were all sharing our progress and our goals, and one of the other students had this long involved story about why they hadn't done it and why they hadn't made any progress on their dissertation. And I remember you just kind of sitting there and looking at them and being like pay yourself first, like you have to do your own writing. And that made a big impact on me that, like that we have to value our own writing, sometimes above other kinds of demands. The demands for us to do our own writing are not as consistent and regular as the demands to answer emails and grade student papers, but doing our own work is still important.
And I guess I'm curious, first of all because that was many years ago and it obviously really stuck with me and it's helped me, but I’m curious if that's still something that you espouse or kind of would tell people, and if it is something that’s part of your life, how do you do that?
Kate
Yeah I think, I feel like gosh, I was super hardcore back then. I feel like I might be a little bit more sympathetic to, like, the demands on people's lives. I think maybe I’ve softened a little bit, but at the same time, we have to pay attention to our inner lives and that takes time.
And so yeah, I stand by that, I do still think that's right. I think it is like paying yourself first.
But the other thing about writing, as you know, is that it's not necessarily immediately gratifying. Like it can be really painful, and you can sit down at your computer and that page and feel like a total failure and wonder like why you're doing that. Or, alternately, you feel like a genius, and then you feel like a failure, or maybe that's just me. But so, you know, when you answer an email, or teaching is so gratifying immediately, so I think there's a lot of reasons why it's hard to pay yourself first.
But I want to just say: here's practical stuff. I have a lot of practical things that keep me writing.
So there has been a group of women, academics, who have, during the pandemic, under the leadership of Stephanie Kerschbaum, gotten together and wrote in the mornings on zoom. And they continue to do that, but like I said I got vaccinated and dropped out. And so that's been really great because you just see each other--you know, like people with their bathrobes on and their coffee and their kids and whatever, you're just all there together.
And there's a local artists and writers community here, the Arts and Literature Laboratory, that also has write-ins. It was every week or every other week during the pandemic. That was really important to me because everybody was working on something creative, too, and so I felt, like somebody has been working on the same poem for months and, like I'm like I'm there, that's great.
I also have groups, primarily groups of women, that I've met through different writers workshops. There's one group that I met at a writers workshop that I was lucky to attend in Provincetown, and we continue to share work with each other. And then I have a writers group that's local with women who are just so brilliant and smart, and we share writing. Writing is social for me.
I'm just going to tell you all my tricks. When my daughter was really little, and I used to write in the morning, and I knew she was going to wake up and interrupt me because anytime you wake up at like 4:30 in the morning to write, your kid’s going to be up at 4:45 right? So I would set stuff up beforehand, when I woke up, I would make a little plate for her with a fruit face. I would make little faces out of fruit and I would set the iPad so that she would know I was thinking of her and she would have something to do so she could stay out of my way for an hour or so.
Nancy
What are the other parts of your life that you feel like either fuel your writing, or just make it possible for you to be a person and also be a writer?
Kate
I super love dancing. I just feel like dancing and writing are connected, I don’t know how. This summer I started training jiu jitsu, which is really funny, like learning how to choke people. And now I stopped because of the delta variant, but I think the appeal of that was just after the pandemic, it was like you're literally sweating on top of somebody else, it's just so physical.
Nancy
It sounds like it’s about being in a body, in addition to having a mind.
Kate
Yeah I'm a very physical person, I love to move. So if I'm on sabbatical and I have a lot of time to write, it’s always punctuated with lots of walks or something. I mean, everybody's different, there are people who can just sit down and go at it. Anything embodied is good for me. And also travel, when I used to travel.
Sometimes I feel like I’ve organized my whole life just so that I can have that hour for writing. You know, like, I’m going to need to have some form of physical exercise, some form of socialization, I need to know that my kid’s taken care of. And if I do all those things, then I can have that hour or those two hours or whatever I have to devote to the writing.
I also want to say that I feel like this changes at different points in your life, depending on your family obligations, the rhythms of your body change as you age. I’m 44 now, and I'm sure this will change as I get older, but when I was in my early 30s I was so hardcore, I would just like sit and work and now I can't do that. Now I’ll have an hour and a half of writing and then I have to do something else.
Nancy
And you can still get really good work that way, right?
Kate
I think I don't push things as much as I used to. I used to push and push and push and, you know, probably past the point of being productive. Everybody has their own rhythm. I'm still learning about my own writing process.
Nancy
What do you feel like you've learned about your writing process? What do you think you've learned recently about your writing process and what works for you?
Kate
So I've always been you know, like, a shitty first drafter. I think that's always been kind of my way. Not everybody's like that, either, like some people just write it really beautifully the first time, but really suffer. So I suffer on the back end when I’m editing. I think I've embraced that a lot more.
And I’ve also embraced the weird a little bit more, like I've let things get more dark and associative because there was no other place to go, like metaphorically and also literally. I’m just following the metaphors and following the images. I’m letting them take me where they want to go a little bit more than I used to.
Nancy
I’m always interested in what people learn from their teaching and then how you take what you've learned from your own writing into your teaching. So are there things that you've learned through your community writing work that you've taken into your classroom or that you've taken into your own writing practice?
Kate
So my colleagues and I Colombia, and I should say that they are called Encantapalabra, which is literally enchanting words and chanted words, they're an NGO that works with communities impacted by Colombia's civil war and they do poetry workshops to build peace. So we came up with these principles for writing for peace building. Writing is a process of communication is one, and also, that many of us feel like we're not writers, that writing is only for the elite. But, in fact, we are writers, and so there are certain principles that guide the workshops that we do together.
And I also bring that into my undergraduate and graduate teaching as well, because even people who are writers, like even published writers, they don't think of themselves necessarily as writers. And that's such a powerful identity for anybody to have no matter how they make their living or no matter how they live their lives.
Nancy
Do you find, in your research, that writer is a hard identity for people to pick up? Like, for people to feel confident saying, I am a writer?
Kate
I think it's hard, maybe, I think for young people it's a little bit easier. I haven't done any research on this, but, in my experience when I'm working with young people and we are creating invitations for people to write, then they are writers, they become writers. And you know, I'm sure, the truth is, the same would be true of adults, too, if there were opportunities to create invitations for people to write.
You know, but yeah I think there's if there's like so much baggage to it. You think of some dude in an attic, with the candle all by himself, and like the first draft is perfect and gets published. The stereotypes are still around.
The best feedback I used to ever get was from when I was working on my dissertation from my advisor Deb Brandt. It wasn't easy, she was honest, but she would tell you honestly what you were doing that was really brilliant or good or could be important or was impactful in some way. And as a teacher, I take that, and when I respond to students' writing, I'm always looking actively for the thing that is uniquely theirs to share with the world, because we all have that.
I think it's actually hard for us to see as teachers, because we also have the pressure that we need to make people into “good writers,” whatever that is. But what makes somebody a good writer is really thinking of themselves as a writer and wanting to write. That's really in the end what the definition is.
three tasks for today:
Set your intention for your writing for the week. This could be a milestone on an ongoing project, a deadline for a submission or an application, or a target for word count or time.
How can you make sure that, in terms of your writing, you’re paying yourself first this week? I’m a big fan of Write First, which I know I’ve talked about a lot here. You can also think about accountability systems that will help you keep track of the work you’re putting in so you can really see your hard work in terms of time or word count.
Most of Kate’s tips connected to what Helen Sword would call social habits—sharing writing with others and actively considering the audience for whom you’re writing. (Bronwen Tate talked about Helen Sword’s four habits in our interview a few weeks ago.) Consider how changing your social habits with respect to writing could enhance your writing practice. Do you have a friend you could share your writing with, or check in about the progress you’re making?
How is your writing going? I’d love to hear from you. You can always reply to this email, comment below, or find me on twitter (@nancy_reddy) and instagram (@nancy.o.reddy).