Author Q&A

Q&A with Jeanne Marie Laskas

By Laurie Snow Turner, WIW member

Jeanne Marie Laskas, is the author of five books and writes the Significant Others column inThe Washington Post Magazine. She also writes for GQ, Readers Digest and Ladies’ Home Journal and is a professor of writing at The University of Pittsburg. 

Q:  I read that you love a Washington, D.C., audience when you’re promoting a book. Why do you prefer a D.C. audience? 

I have a built-in readership there, and they’ve been following my story for a number of years. They’re familiar with my family so it’s a really open, intimate audience even though it’s only on the page. People remember more about my family than I do!  In general, what I love about Washington is that there are enthusiastic readers and writers. It’s such a book-friendly culture.  

Q:  How did you get into writing?  I read that you fell in love with it in graduate school.

I’m one of those people that figured out early on that I didn’t know how to do anything else. It was like a default decision really. I was an English major in college. I was a dreamer. I took art, philosophy, theater and just the stuff I loved and ended up with basically nothing, no direction. The only thing I knew was that all the courses I took in college had one thing in common. I only took courses that had papers you had to write. I couldn’t bear to take tests. A lot of my interest in writing was born out of test anxiety and learning what my skill set was, which was telling stories. I ended up bumbling around until I decided to make a go of this writing thing. So I decided to get myself into graduate school at the University of Pittsburg. When I got into grad school, everything changed. I got into nonfiction classes and started writing essays and practicing the form and learning what was possible in a profile, and I just became ignited. Then I became quite focused.  

So I did the grad school thing, and then I got a job at a city magazine writing features. A city magazine is a great launch pad for anybody because you can do all kinds of stories for a local audience and just practice your craft.  

You need to figure out who you are as a writer. I didn’t know that’s what I was doing but that is what I was doing. I was discovering my voice and my goals and what I wanted to communicate. I was bitten by the urge to communicate and tell stories. Within 2 years I outgrew that magazine, and I wanted to break into a national market. The conventional wisdom at that time was that you had to move to New York but I did not want to move there. I knew that wouldn’t be a productive environment for me. I liked this little town of Pittsburg. It’s cozy. I did a lot of soul-searching about what I could do from here.  

Q:  So how did you move into those markets?  

I didn’t even bother with query letters. I just thought, “Why would someone put their money on me just because of an idea?  If they’re going to put their money on me, they’re going to put their money on me.”  So truly I was marketing myself. I was marketing my voice, my take, my look at the world. That’s more than an idea. Anyone can say no to an idea. They can say they did that story two months ago. So what I did was I took the stuff I really believed in that I had written for the city magazine – some essays, profiles and character studies about people you’d never heard of but should have heard of just because they had interesting stories to tell. I put it together in a package and basically said, “Here’s who I am. I’m writing to introduce myself to you and this is what I do and I have lots of ideas for your magazine. If you like what I do, let’s meet.”  It was carefully packaged to show what I do, not just everything I ever wrote but just the things I really believed in. I started defining myself a little bit. I just realized this is who I am as a writer and this is all I have. I sent these out and I got so many responses, I couldn’t even keep up. It really worked. Then I panicked to come up with ideas.  

Q:  Who responded? 

One of the places I hit was the Washington Post Magazine because I figured since they were publishing once a week they must need stories and ideas. That was one of the places that responded. I remember sitting there with my little folder. They told me that didn’t do the kinds of stories I was offering. At the time, they were doing much more political work. I said I didn’t know about politics but what about other people?  What about the vacuum cleaner salesman and the junkyard dealer and the residents that aren’t part of the political scene?  I don’t think they believed me but they gave me one shot. It was 2,000 words and I think it was on spec. I went door to door with the vacuum cleaner salesman and it just came together beautifully. He had a lovely story to offer and it was a big hit so they let me do a series. I did that for quite awhile and I still lived in Pittsburg.  

Q:  How did you manage to do the D.C. stories from Pittsburg? 

I planned a monthly trip to D.C., and I would drive around in my car and go to the little outskirts of the city and look at local papers and read about people who had been written about for a tiny market. Then I would follow up on them. For example, I saw a story on identical twins that lived in identical houses next door to each other and were married to identical twins. But the point of the story was about how they collected dolls. The rest of it was buried way down into the story. To me, the real story was about these twins. That was a beauty.  

Q: Did you have any journalism training? 

No I just knew what I liked to read. I was just writing about my interests. 

Q:  I wonder if sending out a folder of your writing would work today instead of writing queries. 

I tell my grad students to do this all the time, and I tell them to go ahead and send queries. There’s a whole business built up to support that method but that’s not the only way to break into a new market. I should say I also got some work for Life magazine through that method. Life was really big at the time and I ended up going from the Post to Life, and they sent me around the world to do those kinds of stories. From there, I went to GQ, then Esquire and back to GQ. So over a number of years, the whole thing kicked in. I’ve kept my relationship going with the Washington Post all these years. 

Q:  I noticed you said you loved Joan Didion. She said the hardest thing for her in her writing career was getting over “outing” her friends and family. You talk about everyone in your writing, how do you overcome that?  Are people afraid to talk to you?

You should be afraid of that. The minute you stop being afraid of violating someone’s trust on the page, you should just slap yourself upside the head. I have such an obligation not to violate the trust of the people in my personal life. So when you see me writing about people, I’m telling you the stuff they don’t want you to know. There’s a ton I’m not writing and would never write and I’m not even tempted to. There’s a ton in just the everyday moment. There’s plenty of story in the everyday moment with these people. I think of them more as characters living out a drama that everybody lives out. I wrote a lot about my Mom when she was very sick and all of that we talked about in detail before I ever went there. Like my friend Kay and her breast cancer. 

Good writing comes from the truth you have to offer – you!  If you’re not offering that, you’re just doing somebody else’s work. It sounds so Pollyanna but I do believe the best thing anybody in the arts has to offer is themselves. The line to that can get so circuitous you kind of lose yourself because you have pressure with time and needing money. The ‘You” part of it is so hard to get back to. Believe me, it’s not like you get it once and then you got it. It’s a constant struggle, always trying to get me back into an essay or a story I’m trying to write about somebody else. That is a lasting battle. Everything is against you. To me, that’s the strength of any writer. It’s really hard when you’re starting out. My grad students never believe me. They believe me for a minute and then they’re saying, “but, but, my editor wants me to give her 3,000 words on this policy decision and I don’t even care about this decision.” 

Q: You were brave enough to put yourself out there.  

It was survival, not bravery. If I wasn’t going to do this truthfully most of the time, I couldn’t get the energy to do it. When you’re writing something you really believe in, it’s not hard anymore. You’re just on fire with it. I need that kind of fuel to keep me going, as opposed to the fire of an editor I don’t even believe in. I couldn’t sustain that. 

Q: Sometimes, to me, your writing reads like polished automatic writing. You start on something and then it just goes. Do you aim for that?  It’s like you analyze it until you find some nugget to hang it all on. Is that a correct observation? 

I think that’s a correct observation although the process is probably less linear than that. Sometimes I have a lot of ideas and sometimes I have none but I always go back to the same question, which is what made me laugh or cry, or what point did I have some big emotion? You normally have something. 

Q: It’s like you take something very personal and in your writing you somehow make that personal experience very universal. 

For me that’s how I know it’s probably going to be a story. If I had a reaction to it, I have to think about what caused that to happen. I’m just a normal, regular old person. A lot of other people would have a similar reaction. So how do I go back and recapture that. That’s where I find the narrative. It comes out of the bit of emotion. That’s what gives me the signal that this is something good to write about. I don’t go: this is a good story. I go: this is a good emotion. What is the story around it?  Then I start wondering why I was in tears about my daughter’s swim. We’re all recognizing something. I think and think and write and write. I’m always aiming for the universal “what is it about?” 

Q:  A lot of writers are interested in getting published and want to know more about the dynamics between writers and editors. Do you have any advice on working with editors? 

One thing I discovered is that it’s like dating. You need to find an editor who gets you and an editor you get. If you don’t find that, it’s boring, tense or unsatisfying. Imagine dating someone that doesn’t get you. Do you know how false that feels?  Once in a while you find one that does get you. I tell my students you only need one that really gets you.  

First, you have to have a you to get. Then you have to get someone to work with, someone who has the same goals as you. I had one editor at the Washington Post that I followed everywhere because we got each other. We understood each other.  

Q:  How do you get to that point? 

You drift away from the ones that don’t get you. I had one editor who edited me so hard on a big important story to me that she ruined my story. She said, “Don’t you understand I sound so much more like you than you do.”  That’s when you know this is messed up. If you can’t afford to walk away, you do so at least emotionally, and when you can afford to, you move away. I approach it in a personal way more than a business way.  

Q: How do you balance everything?  You have your family, a farm, several writing gigs, your new book and teaching. How do you do it all?  Do you have a staff, a nanny or other help? 

I’m doing way too much. I’m trying to find a way to cut back. I’m starting to feel like a factory, producing a product, and I can see that the quality could suffer. I fear it going. That to me says pull up. No matter how many people help me, it’s still just me and the words on the page. I have an assistant who helps me part time and handles the administrative things that I’m bad at. If I could get better at delegating, she could do more. I have a nanny that comes into the house. You have to understand that living in the middle of nowhere, she’s a neighbor who is like the grandmother to my kids. She’s an integral part of my family and I’m an integral part of hers. That’s been an amazing blessing because without that I probably would have quit a lot of stuff. It’s like having my mother in her. I work from home so I am able to be with the kids. When I’m working, I’m still part of their lives. 

Q: How do you do that?  Do you have a structure or a schedule?   

In my situation, I have so many deadlines that I have a structure forced on me. I’m carving a schedule out on an as-needed basis. 

Q: How many classes do you teach and what kind of classes? 

They’re all writing classes, mostly with grad students who are pretty sophisticated and mature. I teach a class called Senior Seminar that is a workshop for seniors. Sometimes I teach lower levels. I like an intro class, like creative nonfiction. That’s one of my favorites because you have all these people who have never heard of it and they try and they just get on fire in front of you, and that’s really fun.  

I never really sought an academic career. It just fell in my lap. Just about 5 years ago, I was just out here on the farm like the little old lady going crazy in the attic – going a little stir crazy. What I like about being part of the university is that I am part of a writing community. 

I’ve never had that. I didn’t move to New York because I was afraid of a writing community but then I realized how much I needed it. So, I do fundamentally love teaching. 

Q:  Would you teach something here like a guest workshop? 

That would be fun. I love reading new writers and seeing what they’re doing out there. I love looking at things, reading a draft and asking three questions that suddenly has everybody looking at it differently. 

Q:  What are some of the challenges you’ve faced in your career or what are the things that have helped you learn?   

It all falls into the same category of stuff I took on that I didn’t believe in but I took it on anyway. I found myself depressed, having to slog through a project feeling like I was just wasting what I thought I was supposed to be doing with this writing thing. Whenever I’m in that writing position, I learn. We learn more from our mistakes than our successes, right?  Learning to say no was another lesson because if you reach a place where your work’s out there and people want to offer you an assignment and at some point you’re taking everything because you’re so thrilled and honored that anybody wants to read you at all. Then you suddenly go, “Wait a minute, I’m really straying far from where I was headed.” 

Q:  One thread through this whole interview has been that you have such a commitment to your authentic self, trying to protect who you are and what you do. You seem to keep your arms closely wrapped around it so that your life is about laying into your gift. 

I think it’s the only thing any of us really have. If you’re not staying true to that, you’re wasting it. Not that it’s so great; it’s just what you have. I never have thought of it this way but I think that is a theme. I’m probably getting more that way because I’m doing a new book and taking a right turn with it.  

Q:  What is the book you’re working on now? 

I’ve done all this memoir work, and I’m not trying to say you have to write about yourself to tell your truth. I’ve written too much about myself and I’m losing touch a little bit. I am so sick of myself. I really am. I even have that in my book proposal. I’m just so sick of myself, and if I have to write one more thing about what this means I’m like Ugh!  The book I’m doing comes out of a story I did in GQ writing about these miners in Ohio. It took me back to my roots and telling stories I love, telling stories about a culture you thought you knew about and found out you didn’t understand it at all. I ended up getting this book contract to do a whole bunch of them. The coal miner story will be a chapter of it. It will be called Hidden America. I’m going to do all these little bits of America you think you know about but you don’t. They’re stories about things you’re really dependent on and the people behind them. It’s taking me away from thinking about myself. 

Everything goes back to Mr. Rogers. “You are so special.”  He was a big influence in my life.