have you given yourself permission?
Please join me to discuss the elephant in every creative's room.
Last night in Boston, I was in conversation with the lovely Joanna Rakoff for my publication-day Permission event. I was in a city I love and know intimately, having gone to university there. I was in a store I frequented all the time as a student, and have returned to for the publication of each of my books. Joanna is an amazing interlocuter, I had good friends and family in the audience, and a wonderful longtime masterclass student I’ve never met in person. My tiny cousins stopped by pre-bedtime with their dad to help re-arrange the chairs and hug me, which my nerves very much appreciated.
One of the first questions that Joanna asked was: how did you get to this place of writing a book about Permission. She asked me to take her through the events leading up to my thinking about writing it, before I even put pen to paper. Very few people know the story in full; it still rattles me to my core to speak it, and no amount of EMDR could save me from it. (And I won’t tell it here — the story is in the introduction of the book.) But what propelled Permission into being is, simply, loss. Excision, biblical isolation. Visceral grief. The knowledge that telling a truth within a narrative can result in many things, not the least of which are transcendence, compassion, and also, trauma.
Everyone in the audience, it seemed, had a story to tell and questions to unravel.
So I told the story; my voice broke. After a decade and a book, it still isn’t easy. I do not and will not call myself the victim of an extreme reaction to telling an intergenerational truth, but I will call myself the outlier, the inadvertent rule-breaker, the person who, in telling this truth, was searching in the dark for the corners and edges of my family’s foundation, the way you would a jigsaw puzzle.
Joanna’s questions were so smart and direct, but also deeply sensitive, which is what makes her such a great conversation partner. And when it came time for the question and answer part of the evening, we had to cut things short because so many people — all of us, I think — struggle with the question of permission and story ownership everywhere from the page to interpersonal relationships. Everyone in the audience, it seemed, had a story to tell and questions to unravel.
And what happens if we don’t ask permission — if we just claim ownership of the stories that make us Us, like DNA?
What stories are ours to tell? What stories are not? Is a secret actually still a secret if no one has bothered to tell you it is? Do we have to ask permission from someone or something — clergy, parents, spouses, siblings, whole cultures — to tell the stories that we are bound to by experience and history? And what happens if we don’t ask permission — if we just claim ownership of the stories that make us Us, like DNA?
We all could have kept talking long after the store closed.
Permission is one part memoir and one part craft guide, and the latter is important because it’s easy to get lost in the sticky personal story of What Happened When. It should also be said that one could park a truck in the difference between therapeutic writing and crafting memoir. The latter may result in the former, but the former, on its own, is a practice that was first identified, almost thirty years ago, as scriptotherapy (ugh—a terrible word). Where does therapeutic writing take place? In a therapeutic setting. Or in a journal. Or as part of a 12-step practice. Still, it is imperative that those of us who have experienced threats of (or actual) isolation or loss as a result of writing a story be connected to each other. It is also imperative to understand that crafting memoir — the work of it, the practice and art of it — can take years, requires multitudinous fuck-ups and the shitty first drafts that Anne Lamott talks about, and months/years of polishing and honing. They do overlap in the murky center of the Venn Diagram, but they are different. And yet, the conversation surrounding storytelling and its implications knows no bounds, whoever we are, because humans are, to quote Robert Macfarlane, the storytelling species, and storytelling is crucial for understanding our place in the world.
In the coming weeks, I will be leading workshops focused on permission and story ownership, and doing Permission-related book events.
I would love to see you, and to continue our conversation.
TOMORROW NIGHT: March 13: Anne Lamott and Elissa Altman in conversation, Facebook Live, 8 pm EST/5 pm PT. For link and sign-up, go here.
March 15: Washington, DC - Politics & Prose - in conversation with Brittany Kerfoot.
March 23: Bethel, CT - Byrd’s Books, 4 pm EST
March 27: Green Mountain Academy/Southern Vermont Writer’s Conference, in conversation with Caren McVicker
*Workshop* March 28-30th: Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health: Permission: The New Memoirist and the Courage to Create - 3 days of writing and storytelling. Register here.
April 8 - NYC, Bookclub Bar - in conversation with Sari Botton, 8-9 pm
April 14 - Kingston, NY, Rough Draft - in conversation with Sari Botton, 6-7 pm
April 17 - NYC, SYMPHONY SPACE evening with Debbie Millman, Roxane Gay, Suleika Jouad, Dr Chelsea Clinton, Ashley C. Ford, Krista Tippett, Jacqueline Woodson, and others in celebration of the 20th anniversary of Design Matters. Purchase tickets here.
*Workshop* April 23: Live/ZOOM MASTERCLASS, The Porch, Permission and the Story You Must Tell. Register here.
April 25 - Rhinebeck, NY, Oblong Books (time TK)
*Workshop* April 26: Live/ZOOM Sprint Seminar, with Fine Arts Work Center: Do I Have the Right to Tell My Story? 12-3pm EST Register here.
April 30 - Cambridge, MA, Porter Square Books, in conversation with Laura Zigman, 7 pm Register here
May 8 - Portland, Maine, Print Bookstore/Mechanics Hall, in conversation with Gibson Fay-LeBlanc
*Workshop* August 4- 8th: Permission to Write the Story You Must Tell, Castle Hill/Truro Center for the Arts Register here
August 7 - Provincetown, MA, East End Books
Stay tuned for more events on the West Coast, and in Midcoast Maine.
Ah, yes--the elephant. My elephant shows up for my grandkid's and children's birthdays not as an abuser but as a loving grandfather. Of course, the kids don't want me to write about the elephant. Is the elephant transformed? I neither forgive nor unforgive the elephant, and I continue to write. I am heartened by Anne Lamott's ideas, as I have for years as a writing teacher, too. Many thanks.
Love your writing and am looking forward to reading Permission. Canada on your list? With what is happening with DT and the tariffs , many of us Canadians are staying away from the US. No matter, i will continue to read you from our nation’s capital. Elbows up! PS, I have also left FB. If by chance, this is a recorded event, perhaps I will be able to watch two amazing women. If not, I will offer my unconditional support via positive energy waves.