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Growing up, Leigh Newman lived her summers in Alaska, hunting caribou and trekking glaciers with her Great Alaskan Dad. The school year was spent with her silk-blouse-buttoned-up mother in Baltimore. With Dad, she’d gut salmon; with Mom, she’d be dropped off at a private girls’ school to study Latin poetry. To survive in either environment, she learned how to adapt. Constantly braced for massive change, she grew skilled at adjusting on the fly.

Yet the survival skills she developed in childhood did not always serve her well as an adult. Guarded and detached, her defense mechanisms often got in the way of having successful relationships. She runs away, flounders, is aimless, meets a patient man, marries him, then leaves him due to a restlessness she can’t quite name.

How does independence morph into exile? How does surviving—literally—become a way of life? These are the central questions which Newman eventually asks herself and tries to answer in Still Points North, her terrific new memoir.  A blend of sharp humor and gorgeous prose, Newman’s journey back home sets itself apart from the flood of books that have recently hit the market by including the reader on the ride.

I recently spoke with her at a Brooklyn café over buttery quiches and hoppy beer.

(You can catch Newman reading this evening at Tin House’s WORLD BOOK NIGHT kick-off party in Portland.)

Aspen Matis: I am always curious about the process a writer goes through transitioning from writing fiction to memoir. Was it a difficult leap for you?

Leigh Newman: I feel like when I was writing fiction, it was harder for me, because I think so much about all the other books I’ve read and whether this sentence was original enough. Or where I was going, or what this was supposed to be like. In many ways, it was crippling for me. But with nonfiction, I didn’t feel like an editor. I felt like I was in a movie. You know, a movie I’d been watching for a very long time, quietly, with nobody else. But now there was a piece of paper with me. So I was writing down the movie.

When I finished, after about two years, and I was due to turn in my whole manuscript – again – I knocked over a cup of coffee, and shorted my computer out. I had woken up early in the morning, and I’d put the cup of coffee here, and I didn’t have one of those tops, and my husband got me this idiotic chair from Staples with wheels, and I pushed it out, and I got up and the chair came back and knocked over the coffee, all over my computer. That was unfortunate, and a dark day. I don’t have any sense of humor about it to this day. But you’re supposed to.

AM: That’s every writer’s worst nightmare. How did you recover from that? Were you able to get the bulk of the manuscript back?

LN: I memorize every sentence I have ever written. I can see even the slightest alteration to them. So if I go back I can go, “Umm. Something happened with that there.” So I could go back and redo it. It was just painstaking, time consuming, exhausting, and it all felt so pitch-dark and futile.

I’m not one of those writers that called up their editor to chat, or like their publicist to see how they’re doing. I never talk to anybody. I would just, like, go, write, write, write, and be like, “Here.”

AM: When did you know you had a real story to tell?

LN: How you tell the story involves basically what you don’t tell. There’s whole angles of stuff that you leave behind. So, what’s the thru-line of what you’re talking about? I wrote a lot that didn’t apply and had to cut it out. I had to cut out a hundred and twenty pages from the center of the book. I was bitter about it. But I also was relieved. The book was sagging. Cutting the middle created two structures. Out of two – one was about the year my parents’ marriage fell apart. And the other one was about the year I met my husband and left him three months later. So it was like two divorces. Next to each other. A divorce buffet.

Then I made the decision I didn’t want to do a lot of explaining. I was just going to lay these two dead fish on the table and let people make their own assumptions about them. But that did not come until I’d already written just about everything that ever happened, ever, and then cut out anything that wasn’t making the book move forward. So that was my one rule. If the reader wasn’t engaged, we’d have to cut and then make it work some other way.

AM: Was there a great deal of back and worth with your editor about what to keep in and take out. Was there a fear of her cutting your voice out of the manuscript?

LN: No. She recognized it. There was no giant earthquake. I didn’t become addicted to drugs and neither did anybody else. I don’t think you need to have roman candles of tragedy going off for a memoir. But when I was talking to the editors and we were selling the book, there were like four editors I was talking to on the phone, they recognized this was going to be a tone-poem based on voice. Jen Smith is my editor and a humongous, giant horseshoe of golden gravy was poured on my head when I got connected with her.

AM: I was amazed at how quickly you immersed us in the world of Alaska. I loved your descriptions of the landscape. The foothills across the shore from your house are “sheathed in fireweed purples and alder greens,” and you describe a section of the wilderness you deemed your secret spot as “almost tropical, overgrown with lush, jewel-green alders and small, wet patches of darker green moss. The water is slow and deep, the silence total, except for the occasional ripple or splash of jumping fish…” How did you capture your childhood so vividly? Did you study old photos?

LN: No, we didn’t have any photos of that time. My mom was a big picture taker, and she compulsively photographed everything, which is a weird kind of addiction. She was ahead of the curve on that one. But at the time it was weird, back then. My dad wasn’t going around taking pictures of our depressing lives. Usually you take photographs when things are going well. But how did I remember without pictures? You spend so much time not remembering that it’s exhausting. I don’t even think you realize that you’re being exhausted by it.

No, I didn’t look at anything. This is my native habitat. When you’re a child and you grow up in a natural environment, that natural environment impresses itself. Your presence is very flush against that past.

AM: Where does the cover photo come from?

LN: This was taken in the yard that I describe of the house where the roof – where the railroad ties are falling in. That was our yard, the extent of our yard. Because we bought that property before we he had a house. It’s just a mudslide that we bought. The plane was not discussed in the book actually. I have memories of vomiting in that plane. That dog was named Jasmine. That was not a typical dog, and it is a weird dog that is in this picture. It was wrong for the world. It was not meant to live in Alaska.

AM: Do you have a favorite story from your childhood?

LN: My dad and I were flying home, and we got picked up by this air current which is called an updraft, and we got carried up twenty thousand feet. You can’t survive in that level of oxygen. An unpressurized airplane isn’t even supposed to be able to fly up there. It’s supposed to fall out of the sky. I’m not sure exactly why it didn’t. And my dad’s solution was to take the plane and point it straight down towards the earth, hoping that we’d start crashing toward the earth, but that didn’t happen either. Instead, the same wind that took us up took us down really slowly. Though we were pointed directly at the earth, we didn’t go straight down. Because when you reach that point there was only one thing you can do which was hope that we’d crash to the earth. But we didn’t. We went down very slowly.

The interesting thing to me about that was that, even as that was happening, I wasn’t fully aware of the danger because A) I was oxygen deprived and giggling and laughing with my dad the whole time and nothing made any sense and my lips were blue and my hands were blue. And, B) I really had such faith in my father that, even though he was saying, “We’re in a bad situation,” which I don’t think he’d ever said to me before, he was like, “We’re in a bad situation.” It was like, you know, comedy hour. But, um, I trusted him so implicitly – and there is that level of trust that happens when you grow up in that survival climate with the people that are expected to keep you alive.

AM: Have you taken your kids flying?

LN: Yes, I do take my kids flying. I went to Alaska; I took my kids into the bush. It was intense because the younger one was only eighteen months. My dad no longer flies because he has a serious heart condition and had to give up his license. We went up with friends. And that friend had some hearing troubles. I didn’t realize. So the plane ride was a little hairier than I would have liked. I was scared out there, it was exhausting.

AM: Your dad took you on frightening excursions, putting you in situations where you both could have died. What did your dad think of the book? Was he amazed to read how perceptive you were as a kid?

LN: No, I think he was horrified. I think he was upset and really horrified.

AM: But he does seem sweet and loving, too. Like when he pretends the lumpy fish you’ve caught is a state record, and you write, “I smile. It isn’t a real lie that we’re telling each other. It’s a fairytale lie, a fish-tale lie, the kind Great Old Alaskans tell each other…”

LN: I was writing in the tradition of Alaskan storytellers. People get around, have a drink, or a coffee or whatever, and all they do is tell stories. Like around the campfire, in the car. Almost always these stories are about somebody almost dying or in fact dying. So it’s like, “Oh, did ya hear about him. He ran into a moose. He got trampled, yeah?” Or, “Did you hear about Bob?” I’m telling a true one. “He was driving his three-wheeler down the mud and he got stuck and the tide rolled in, and that was the end of Bob.” You know. So that’s what people do. They usually have elaborate, crowd-pleasing stories with lots of details. So I was just writing in the voice that I’d heard all these years.

AM: I have to ask about the fish. Your descriptions of them are some of the funniest passages in the book. Like, “a humpy, the lowest species of salmon in the salmon family, a fish mocked statewide for its swamp-creature looks and lack of intelligence.” The idea that a fish would be mocked, that people would care so much about a fish to mock it, it’s foreign to most of us.

LN: I’m a terrible snob about fish. I got kicked out of a fish shop in Brooklyn. I went in and I said, it was like twenty-five dollars for organic salmon and I said, “Can I smell it?” And the guy’s like, “All of our fish is fridge-fresh,” and I was like, “I would really like to smell it.” He asked me to leave. You should know, Aspen, if someone doesn’t let you smell their fish that means their fish is old. And by the way it’s on Court Street.

AM: Can you speak a little about your publishing company, Black Balloon Books? I know from the “About Us” page that you “believe in: good manners, vintage whiskey, and human names for dogs.”

LN: I founded Black Balloon with my friend Elizabeth Koch as I was writing my book. She does most of the operations now. She’s the publisher, and we now have a managing editor who works there full-time. We founded the company because we wanted to publish books that we felt were interesting. We wanted to publish books that fall between the genre lines. The memoir Louise: Amended was about a girl who lost the use of her body, and one chapter would be from her perspective, and the other one would be a fictionalized imagining from the perspective of people looking at her, like her mother watching her put on makeup. Then we’d go back to what was going on in her head, and it would be, like, her boyfriend trying to have sex with her. We just did Maverick Jetpants
 in the City of Quality, that book did well, got in The New York Times Book Review. That’s a book I spent two years editing. It’s by a young guy named Bill Peters who invented his own language of jokes.

AM: Finally, do you have any advice for people who are writing their first book?

LN: Quit your job man, and go work in a café, work in a restaurant. You have to make that writing time for yourself and it can’t be after a ten-hour day at work. You have to organize your life so that you are given a two-hour period each day where you are not exhausted. Clear the time. Arrange it so that you do carpentry, something that you like so you have a livable wage. Go somewhere more affordable, Portland, Baltimore. My cousin lives in Portland, now. Move to St. Louis. Can’t lives on Won’t Street.

Leigh Newman’s memoir Still Points North: One Alaskan Childhood, One Grown-up World, One Long Journey Home came out with Dial Press in March 2013. Her fiction, essays and book reviews have appeared in One Story, Tin House, The New York Times, Fiction, New York Tyrant, and Vogue. She currently serves as Deputy Editor of Oprah.com and as an editor-at-large for the indie press Black Balloon Publishing.

Aspen Matis is a Riggio Honors student at The New School in Greenwich Village, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Times, Tin House, Psychology Today, and elsewhere. She is the author of the forthcoming memoir Knapsacked: A Life Redirected North.

If you’re in the Bay Area tonight, go see Matthew Specktor in conversation with Glen David Gold at the Lone Palm. 7:00 pm, hosted by LitQuake.

Tin House Books: American Dream Machine is set strongly in Los Angeles. It portrays the city in a way that’s incredibly vivid–it looks like LA, it feels like LA, a city that is famously hostile to writers. What role does place play in your writing?

Matthew Specktor: LA seems to have suffered over the years as the object of satire, derision, and hostility. In fact, with the possible exception of Chandler, it’s hard to think of a great writer who’s treated Los Angeles without pronounced ambivalence. Less Than Zero, The Day of the Locust, Play it As It Lays, The Player, What Makes Sammy Run. These books all organize themselves around a pretty jaundiced view of LA, or certainly of Hollywood. That’s fair: they’re all great books, and I think literature isn’t where you go for false optimism. At the same time, I wanted to treat Los Angeles very differently. I grew up here, and I wanted to shower as much thoughtful affection upon it as I could, the way that Philip Roth did upon Newark or Saul Bellow did upon Chicago, etc. I wanted to paint a more comprehensive picture of this place in its warmer, and more human, dimensions. To address not just glamor and disillusion, but also the more homely aspects of the movie business, which in so many respects isn’t much different from any other.

THB: The book is about a talent agency, and the movies. To what extent did the movies influence the book?

MS: I went to the movies a lot when I was a kid. I went to screenings and saw films when they weren’t especially appropriate, for instance I remember a Woody Allen double bill of Bananas and Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Sex taken in when I was seven or eight years old, and I think I saw A Clockwork Orange when I was eleven. I grew up on, in, and around the Los Angeles of Robert Altman and Hal Ashby. There was always a sense of intimate relation, because of my parents’ work, the people who made the movies were always around. I worked in the mailroom of Creative Artists Agency when I was thirteen (I was the second person to join what would become a tradition—the “Summer Campers”), and I did coverage for their story department when I was in high school. The industry infiltrated me from a very young age. And as it is for any writer, I think, the challenge was what to do with it, with what was ultimately a very ordinary experience—the regular human stuff of adolescence. Feeling awkward and overmatched within the adult world. Feeling bored. The intermittent apparitions of glamor that appeared—coming back from a movie theater where I’d snuck off to see Risky Business and immediately stepping into an elevator with Rebecca DeMornay—didn’t really change any of that. It was still just . . . teenage life, with its standard distresses.

THB: Is Beau Rosenwald, your protagonist, based on anyone in particular? He’s someone who might strike readers as not necessarily “likeable,” even though—for them as for so many characters inside the book—he might also prove weirdly irresistible.

MS: I’m not sure that’s a paradox. I think literature is good for this: for generating a strong bond between the reader and personalities he or she might resist in real life. I also think Beau is a special case. I was interested in creating someone who was . . . ample, who might encompass the very best as well as the worst things in human nature. He’s not really based on anybody. Like all the major characters in the book he’s something of a composite: a little bit of this, a little bit of that. But he’s also his own man. I found him pretty lovable, as I worked on him. Most of the memorable figures in books aren’t “likeable,” from Achilles and Hamlet on down. Cormac McCarthy fills his books with people who are terrifying, even when they’re not repugnant. (Contemporary television reflects this too, incidentally: Breaking Bad, Dexter, The Sopranos. Whatever turns us on these days, it ain’t conventional charm.) We love our monsters. Beau belongs to a tradition.

THB: Speaking of traditions, this seems to be a very masculine book. While there are strong female characters, the dominant voices in the book are male. Were you conscious of that?

MS: Somewhat. When I wrote the book, I was aware of telling a story about fathers and sons. A story that ties very deliberately to feelings I have about my own father, even if those feelings are exaggerated or distorted and the character is invented. (Beau is certainly not my father.) I was also conscious that a female perspective gets louder as the story progresses. Beau becomes a dinosaur in a world that’s largely led by women. In part, this was me being historically accurate. The Hollywood of the 1970s was a very masculine place, and the agency business was too. A great agent like Sue Mengers of ICM really stood out. But it was also a chance to draw the veil a little bit, with both generations of men in the book. To represent what men can be like when they’re alone.

THB: You’ve referred to Beau as a “singularly American character.” He does seem to be. But I wonder if or how you conceived him as such?

MS: I think of Beau as indeed representing something that’s very American, or at least, something that was. He’s what used to be called a “self-made man,” although one never hears that expression anymore. He’s not educated. He’s not particularly talented or gifted, but he’s driven. He’s absolutely relentless in pursuit of what he wants. In a sense, this is the most American idea there is, going back through Willy Loman and Horatio Alger. One succeeds simply through determination and hard work. (I’m not sure anyone believes this nowadays, nor am I sure anyone should.) But Beau’s story in effect is what happens when this sort of person, the embodiment of American individualism, runs up against the advancing tide of global corporate capitalism, which is largely the negation of that idea. It’s a drama that’s played out in different spheres over the last half century or so. The movie business is just one arena in which that’s taken place.

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Matt Bell’s visionary debut novel In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and Woods is one of the most singularly strange and beautiful and wondrous books to come along in a long time. I picked it up one afternoon just to read the opening paragraph—

“Before our first encounter with the bear I had already finished building the house, or nearly so.”

—and finished the book before going to sleep that night. It took over my life for any number of hours and it’s one I continue to go back to from time to time, surfing the pages for the many passages I underlined. I drew checkmarks and more checkmarks in the margins. Consider yourself warned: do not pick up this novel if you have other commitments that day.

In the House is impossible to categorize. It’s impossible that anyone else could have written such a thing. It’s a novel that—as Borges wrote of Kafka—invents its own precursors. Of course, there’s a tremendous amount of fabulist fiction in our midst these days; in fact, there’s so much of it right now that fabulism is beginning to taste a bit like the flavor of the month, a fad resulting from a natural and reasonable distrust of realism and a desire to return to pre-commercial methods of telling stories. But what Bell accomplishes here is something that doesn’t happen very often: he has invented an entirely new rhetoric of fiction and marked unique territory of his own.

No plot summary can do this novel justice, so please let it suffice to say that a man and woman build a remote house where they plan to raise a family. Their efforts are complicated by a series of biological occurrences that make even the noisiest scenes in Eraserhead feel like an episode of Sesame Street. There’s also a bear that talks, sort of, and something menacing in the lake. You just have to read it.

Bell is the also the author of a novella and a collection of stories. We met a few years ago at the Winter Wheat Literary Festival in Bowling Green, Ohio, where we were late to an event because we stopped in a dive bar for a drink with Kyle Minor. I ran into Bell again a year or so later outside of a hotel room during the MLA conference, where we were both applying for the same job. Neither of us got it. I’ve followed his career with awe and jealousy and more jealousy—he’s an amazing writer—and absolute respect. He answered these questions via email in March.

Andrew Ervin: What impresses me the most about In the House is the immersive experience you’ve created. The first-person voice carries a mythic or timeless quality, and it’s sustained beautifully for hundreds of pages. Tell me how you found that and how you pulled it off so well.

Matt Bell: There’s a glib answer possible here, where I just say, “Slowly,” and then leave it at that—but of course I’ll go on. I suppose it really did take a long time to flesh it all out, but I had a kind of sketch of the voice early on—I can’t usually get very far into a story without having the story’s way of speaking at least partially in hand. Before I was finished, a lot of other influences had been mixed in: there’s a little bit of King James Version, some Greek myth, a little bit of Old Norwegian, a smattering of unusual words lifted from nineteenth-century dictionaries, some Cormac McCarthy and Brian Evenson and Hiromi Itō and Christine Schutt, all these writers who work so well at the sentence level, who write so wonderfully about the body. I’m sure there are plenty of other influences on the voice, ways of speaking I’d never be able to untangle from the novel’s, some of them there for the beginning, some folded in later.

One thing that I’m sure helped me: I was constantly reading aloud from the book, from the first day of drafting to the last day of revision, years later. I’ve read the book out loud cover to cover multiple times, at the end of every major draft, and there was never a day when I worked on the book in silence.

I think that there was also some want on my part to prove wrong a truism I’d heard too often in grad school and in other places: When I was in school, it seemed to be a given that an intense focus on language and acoustics couldn’t be carried over an entire novel, that this kind of voice was the province of the story, the poem, that it was too difficult for the writer, too exhausting for the reader. From the first time I heard someone say that, I didn’t believe it—there are plenty of books out there that prove otherwise—and I think I wanted to find out for myself what I could do at this length, with the kind of voices I’m drawn to.

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