The Storyteller: An Interview with Nina MacLaughlin

Hi and welcome to Issue #4 of The Storyteller!

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You may notice that the newsletter did not go out on the 5th of the month, as the previous 3 have. It was a conscious decision to give space to Black creators with everything that's happened here in the States recently. I started this newsletter in order to share diverse stories, facilitate in-depth conversations, and create a community, and I'm excited to continue doing that, to give space to all the voices that have a story to tell, especially in the wake of everything going on.

As it so perfectly worked out, I get to release issue #4 on the actual summer solstice, the subject of Nina's latest published work, an extended essay about the essence of summer, about what this season has meant in our pasts and what it might mean in our lives ahead. It's a wonderful piece and one that I know I'm going to keep returning to.

Here's a little peek:

"What is summer made of? The smell of cut grass behind the gasoline of a lawnmower. Ponds, lakes, and oceans. The first swim. A sunburn. A crown you’ve made of flowers. Blackberry bush prickers. Fat red tomatoes sliced thin and salted. First hot dog off the grill. Stargazing, spooning, and sleeping with the windows open. Two bodies, naked and entwined. Throbbing light from fireflies."

My guest today is Nina MacLaughlin, a writer very local to Boston and Cambridge, currently a book columnist for the Boston Globe. We connected after the "In Conversation With" Harvard Bookstore event she had with Emily St. John Mandel, one of the earliest virtual events the store's famed and long-running event series had. I'm so glad she agreed to chat with me and gave me so much of her time.

Let's jump right into it then.

AN: Has the pandemic affected your writing in terms of the motivation?

NM: It's up and down on a week to week and a day to day basis–“Oh this is normal life (as someone already working from home and used to spending long hours by herself) but at the same time this complete abnormality”. The other day, I went to a local coffee shop for the first time since everything started, just to buy strawberries and bananas– “it was so nice but also so sad at the same time because I’d missed it.”

It’s not that I feel less motivated. I find that my ability to sustain my attention and my focus and my ability to follow through in the depths of thought that I would want to get to is much harder. I’m working on this series of essays for The Paris Review right now about the sky. I’ve been so grateful to have a place to pour my attention to, but as I was saying to someone recently, the writing process has felt as though, "okay, run a mile but don’t use any of the muscles that you would normally use to run". The writing, in that way, feels like it’s coming from a very different place, so it’s just been slower, I would say. I feel like I’m finally getting my feet back under me, but, again, that could change tomorrow where I’d be like, wait, how do I do this?

AN: How did those essay series for The Paris Review, four now, start?

NM: Nadja Spiegelman had written a memoir that I’d reviewed for the Boston Globe and she was the web editor for The Paris Review. Some years ago I’d written a book about November. I had thought a lot about the month and since it was close to fall, I reached out to her to ask if she’d want to run an excerpt from it for their Daily and she was like “how about five (essays)?” My agent, when I told her, said, “that’s great, just don’t use any of the stuff from the book!” I’d obviously thought a lot about it when I wrote the book, so I borrowed a little bit from there and came up with these essays. It was really beautiful working with Nadja and that’s how it started.

With Summer Solstice, I came to her with it, with Dawn she came to me and it’s been a nice back and forth. With the Sky series, she had reached out at the start of the pandemic to ask what I was working on because she wanted my voice out there related, even peripherally, to what was going on. Like with November, I’d spent a lot of time with this Sky project. It was this loose thing to keep my writing muscles flexed. Now, with everything going on, it’s been a nice place to aim my attention.

AN: What do you think draws you to write the kind of things that you do?

NM: That’s a great question! I guess I’m finding that I’m always writing the same thing. I think I’m drawn to the same thing and I think that what it is is that it’s grappling with questions that I don’t quite think will ever be answered. A lot of times it has to do with change, metamorphosis, and ultimately what I’m trying to make sense of is that all of this ends, you know? We die…and [I'm] trying to write my way into making sense of that. It’s like trying to wade into mystery in some way. And because these circumstances are sort of unsolvable, the challenge never goes away, it continuously feels fresh.

There’s something really comforting in that, though I understand the impulse of maybe this isn’t the right time with everything going on, but this is absolutely an ideal time to dig in and excavate that. I think that there’s a shared impulse of wanting to excavate those impulses. That’s where many of our brains are and they will hopefully guide us through this completely singular and bizarre situation in our lifetimes. I think that the things that have been in us for a long time, those are the things you’ll return to, those are the things that are going to be the most potent, and of course, in a way they are the scariest to uncover but also the richest?

AN: What would you say have been some of the most unexpected or surprising revelations at the end of a piece or a series that you’ve worked on?

NM: I think it’s not so much a case of finishing up an essay series and being like "aha, I now have this new wisdom or understanding," but about the process of working on these things and paying very close attention to what I’m writing about. It’s more that I’ve opened up my attention to something, I’ve aimed my attention at a particular thing.

For example, dawn, was a time of day I had little familiarity with. It puts me in touch with the world and its shifts around me. I mean, I’m basically just walking around the neighbourhood looking at the sky and thinking about the sky, but in that it’s like I’m offered a much more expansive experience of, not to sound cliché, but being alive, you know? So, again, not necessarily an aha but an attunement to the specifics of a moment. And I’ve found it really helpful, because during this pandemic, the moments and times I find myself most undone are when I’m thinking of the future. Even just two weeks ahead feels like I can’t do it. That’s where the focusing helps. What’s happening at this instant? What does the air feel like? What flowers are coming out this morning? What’s happening around me? Basically dialling my attention to just what’s in front of me.

AN: Let’s talk a bit about your journey to the written word.

NM: Sure. I really wanted to be a writer since I was a kid and there’s actually a very specific moment. I was in third grade and we all had to write these little books and the story that I wrote was about a giant and I kept using the word ‘big’ and my teacher, my beloved third grade teacher was like, “Oh, Nina, listen, there’s a thing called a thesaurus…let’s try and figure out another word for ‘big’…for example, look, ‘immense’” and it was like my mind exploded. ‘Immense’ – you mean I can use this other word that means the same thing?

I loved to read. Our parents read to us. We were always reading as kids. I mean, it really was the thing I most wanted to do in my life. I studied English and Classics in college. I got a job at the Boston Phoenix after college which is an alternative news weekly, which was an amazing place to work. The thing with the alt weeklies which aren’t around as much anymore is that it was journalism with a specific point of view and the writers are really encouraged to find a voice. I felt lucky to have a journalism background and this place where like I could have my personality come through a bit more. It does feel like something that was in me from the very beginning and I feel really lucky to have been able to do it as much as I’ve been able to.

AN: And then for quite a few years in between you worked as a carpenter. Let’s talk about that!

NM: (laughs) I worked at the Boston Phoenix for all of my twenties and towards the end, I was one of the web editors. It was scrolling and clicking all day and I just got bored. I needed to be away from the screen and I quit my job in 2008 which was not the most ideal timing. I was lucky that I had savings, I had basically saved money to buy myself time. About six months later, I was like what have I done? Then, I saw this ad on Craigslist saying "carpenter’s assistant sought, women strongly encouraged to apply". I knew that was it, it was what I wanted, even though I had no experience in carpentry!

But I applied and I ended up getting the job. It was working with this woman carpenter named Mary who worked in Somerville. We worked together for nine years and she taught me everything, I mean, really, from scratch, from how to read a tape measure and I was just thrown into it.

I remember the first day, when we were tiling a bathroom floor. She brought up all this equipment and said "you cut and I’ll lay." I mean, what? (laughs) She said I was allowed to use the tile saw and also allowed to make mistakes. It was amazing!

It was a different part of my brain, I loved the physicality of the work—I mean just all these skills I never thought I would have. The main thing I didn’t like about it…we used to do these big renovation projects in these old homes in Cambridge and Somerville–kitchens and bathrooms and we were breathing in a lot of terrible stuff, surrounded by a lot of toxic stuff.

I’m not doing the renovation work anymore, but I’m currently carving spoons. I would recommend it to everyone. You don’t need a lot of equipment, you need just two blades and some wood, and there’s a certain satisfaction and a certain putting your brain into your hands. It’s such a nice balance to the language life that I lead so much, you know?

Why spoons? Well, someone for my birthday a couple of years ago had given me as a present, a wooden spoon carving workshop, a three-hour workshop and I loved it. It was amazing. You start and then in three hours you’re holding something resembling a spoon, you’ve made this tool that’s useful but also quite beautiful. The other night I was carving one from a birch that had come down in my neighbour’s yard that I just grabbed a branch off and brought home. Or you know the big sycamores by the Charles all the way down Memorial Drive? I’ve made spoons from fallen branches there. All of this, for me, is again fuelling a connection to a place. There’s also this intimate touch with the wood and [you’re] creating this thing. I really love it.

AN: Has your writing changed at all through your experiences of being a carpenter?

NM: One of the things that carpentry taught me was about patience and my boss, Mary is one of the most patient humans ever to exist. For me, it was really frustrating when some dumb screw was not cooperating. And it was learning how to be smarter than the tools. That was something that Mary used to say to me all the time. "Take a deep breath and be smarter than the tools." I think it really taught me the ability to step back but also really stick with something that was frustrating, which is something you can say about writing in a lot of ways! The discipline and patience to say that I’m going to keep going and that, somehow, I’m going to get to where I need to be. That for sure helped me as a writer – just being able to sit with the discomfort.

Also, carpentry is all about structure. I don’t think it was a conscious thing where I was like "now I’m going to apply how to build a wall structurally to how to write an essay" but I think that I did become more aware of the shape things need to take and how one thing needs to lead to the next thing in a logical way. If one thing isn’t there before another, the whole thing will collapse and I think that’s true for both carpentry and writing.

AN: Do you have favourite parts about the writing and creative process, and have they changed over the years?

NM: I was talking to someone the other day and he was saying, "I hate writing, the only thing I like about it is having done it." (laughs). That’s way different from me. I really love doing it. I love the act of sitting there and putting the sentences and words together. This doesn’t happen all the time but I’m sure you feel it too–there’s moments when you’re just so dialled in and it’s just coming and it’s almost as if you just exit yourself? Those moments are one of the best parts of being alive for me. Again, it doesn’t happen every time I sit down, but knowing that it could happen is sort of enough to keep me going, and I mean like months can go by without that, but it’s that moment of really feeling that sort of transcendent magic.

AN: I’m yet to read Hammer Head and Wake, Siren, but I think that one of the things I’ve noticed in even just your essays is the blend of myth/legends and the physical surroundings, particularly local references. Is this a deliberate choice?

NM: I’ve loved mythology since I was a kid, and in sort of thinking and talking about Wake, Siren over the past month, I’ve come to realise that there stories live inside of us and I think that no matter where you’re from, there are these fundamental stories regardless of who the gods are–the same hungers and flaws and situations and violence and desires come up again and again. So it’s being grounded, here I am in my neighbourhood in Cambridge, but also that we’re all part of this human scene and the stories that make up who we are. For me, it’s a natural combination.

I love these stories. I love the Metamorphosis. It’s the book I pick up every now and then to go through and reread and at this particular time, I needed to flex my writing muscles and I thought, maybe I could try to rewrite some of these stories from the female point of view. And it just came pouring out, and in three months, it was a book. It was this extended almost trance state, this feeling of being taken over, that I didn’t expect at all, but it happened really quickly.

Again, it drew on all the readings I had done and what I’d studied in college and my own experiences and interests. It, still in some way, feels unreal because it happened so quickly–did all of that really come from me? I mean I did a spellcheck and sent it to my agent and it was sold. When I got the first edits back was when I read it over for the first time. It was actually quite uncomfortable. I had no recollection of having done it and being how dark and violent as it was, it was also me being exposed to my own imagination and it was rather unsettling. (laughs) I hope to have that sort of experience again, but I doubt that will ever happen. I hope it does, but we’ll see.

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Thank you so much, Nina, for that wonderful chat!

I hope you enjoyed reading that as much as I enjoyed talking to Nina and that you'll check out her work. Go to the bottom for all relevant buying and social media links.

Also, if you aren't following me on social media yet but want to, the links to my Instagram and Twitter are in the email footer. Hope everyone's holding up okay. Please take care and stay safe.

Thank you and until next time!

Anu

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Website
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Summer Solstice
Wake, Siren
Hammer Head
Sky essay series
Summer essay series
November essay series
Senses of Dawn essay series