What are more beautiful seven words than: You have to read this book? I was sent Chelsey Johnson's incredible Indie Next Pick, STRAY CITY and fell in love with it, so of course I had to host her on the blog. And I'm not the only one who loves her book about Portland, queer culture, rebels, and the families we make--and remake. Look at this praise:
Stray City has it all. As funny as it is moving; as joyful, as radically communal, as it is lonesome, the novel covers the varied complications of place, home, sex, city—but mostly it's about the necessary and unexpected revolutions of the self, and about how queerly we make our way through this world. Honestly, one of the most absorbing, finely-tuned books I’ve had the pleasure of falling down into. Chelsey Johnson is a wonder.
—Justin Torres, bestselling author of We the Animals
Written with wit and sensitivity and exquisite emotional intelligence, Stray City is an absolute pleasure to read. Chelsey Johnson is one of the most refreshing new voices in literature.
—Jami Attenberg, New York Times bestselling author of The Middlesteins and All Grown Up
A winsome novel about love and belonging—and the possibility of discovering both in the most unlikely of places, and among the most unexpected people. Tender and smart, Stray City is a fantastic debut from a huge talent.
—Cristina Henríquez, bestselling author of The Book of Unknown Americans
A love letter to Portland and to the youthful effort of world-making that created its important queer culture in the '90s, Stray City is a gorgeous, funny, sharply spot-on tale of growing up and making family again and again and again.
—Michelle Tea, award-winning author of Valencia and Black Wave
Insightful and brilliant, Stray City explores the stickiness of doing what’s expected and the strange freedom born of contradiction. I tore through this novel like an orphaned reader seeking a home in the ragtag yet shimmering world that Chelsey Johnson so wondrously brings to life.
—Carrie Brownstein, New York Times-bestselling author of Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl
Here's the impressive bio: Chelsey received an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was a Teaching Writing Fellow, and a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford. Her debut novel Stray City is forthcoming from Custom House/ HarperCollins in 2018, and her stories and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, One Story, Ninth Letter, The Rumpus, and NPR's Selected Shorts, among others. She has received fellowships to the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and Signal Fire Arts. She is an assistant professor of English at the College of William & Mary, and is currently in Los Angeles working on a television project for Hulu.
Thank you Chelsey!
I always want to know
what haunted a writer (or propelled them) to write a specific novel. What was
it for you?
So many things. I was driven from the outset by
homesickness, by thinking about home
and where you end up and why. The book actually originated from Ryan’s story,
so I was writing about Bemidji, the town in northern Minnesota where my mom’s
family is from, an hour from where I grew up. I feel deeply tied to northern
Minnesota and yet I don’t know if I could ever return there to live, so I wrote my way through that
tortured love and curiosity. Then I left Portland, and I didn’t mean to—it was
supposed to be a one-year teaching gig that then turned into another and
another—so I turned to Andrea’s perspective and wrote frantically, furiously
trying to render the world I missed so much, trying to capture what it was,
both so I could reinhabit it and also because I started to suspect I might not
be able to go back to it, and I didn’t want to forget what it had been like.
I’d never known a community or a city-love like that. But I also didn’t want
the writing to be sentimental or nostalgic—I wanted to capture the contradictions
and frustrations of that life. Queer people love each other and we hurt each
other and we drive each other crazy. Just like any other family.
What I especially
loved about Stray City, besides the whip-smart writing and Andrea, herself, was
the whole notion of just what is conventional, what isn’t, and how we make up
our own worlds and families. What does this all mean in terms of motherhood,
relationships, and locale? (Whew, long
question.)
This is where living in Portland, among my particular
community, had such an enormous influence on my thinking. It really is a city
of strays, and although I came from an intact nuclear family, that was quite
rare among people I knew. Nearly all of my dear friends (queer and straight
alike!) came from families that had been ruptured in significant ways. We all
carried some form of family damage, either directly from our own families of
origin, or from the culture’s dominant lie of what counts as family, and which
families deserve protection and exaltation and which are legally worthless. And
we formed these deep, equally honorable familial and communal bonds among
friends. So I wanted to write about how we form our own ad hoc families, and how we try to recreate family
through actually having kids.
Just as with gender norms, I think that great American lie
of what The Family is hurts everyone,
not just queer and trans people. I think its ironclad expectations of
marry-reproduce-repeat suit some people perfectly—queer and straight!—and serve
many people, of all orientations, very poorly. There are so many options of how
to make your way and make your family, and I wanted Stray City to explore that.
So much of Stray City
feels like a love letter to Portland—and to our youth. Please, would you talk
about this?
It really is a love letter to my friends and to Portland
itself, a flawed beautiful place that I love helplessly on some like, cellular
level. The city has changed so much—it’s gotten very upscale and Instagram-y
and in my shabby little North Portland neighborhood many of the shacks have
been wiped out and replaced with obstreperous posh houses totally out of
scale—but the homey jankiness and diveyness I love stubbornly hangs on, and the
verdant greenery and moody weather will always be there. Until recently it was
the perfect city for broke youth because even though you’d make no money, you
could live cheaply and have plenty of time to play music, make art, volunteer
at the rock camp, whatever. You could have a life. One thing I loved about Portland is that people never asked
about your education or your job. It didn’t matter where you’d gone to college
or if you’d gone to college, and what you did for money wasn’t really what you did. Thinking back, with many of my
friends, I could not even tell you for sure what their day job was. What
mattered was what you were making, what you wanted to do. We were old enough to have some life
experience and keep ourselves afloat, but young enough to still have that
energizing hubris and a low enough standard of living that we were fine with
whatever dilapidated roof was over our heads. I loved that age where you could
follow some wild urge and overturn your life, and pull it off by the skin of
your teeth, responsible only for yourself and maybe a pet.
The sad coda is that Portland’s soaring popularity and new
affluence has started to kill off that DIY culture that made it special. Many
of my friends have left, and many of those who remain are under constant
financial stress and anxiety. The precarity that felt manageable ten years ago
feels soul-crushing now, and it’s not just about youth.
What kind of writer
are you, and did anything change while you were writing this book? How does it
feel to be a debut author getting such major praise? Does it make writing your
next book harder or easier?
I started teaching creative writing while I was writing the
book, and that more than anything changed my writing—for the better. Teaching
fiction was a crash course in spotting predictable narrative patterns and
cliched language, and when I turned that eagle eye on my own work I instantly
saw all the ways I’d unconsciously tripped into the same grooves my students
did. I became a more impatient reader, eager for something fresh, eager for story, and that motivated me to make
things happen on the page. But also
my students made me up my game because many of them are so talented. I’m in awe
of what they’re doing, how inventive and funny and dark they can go, and when
they hit their stride, really inhabit their voices, I get to work with renewed
pleasure and urgency.
I’ve gone from being a very quick writer, dashing off shiny
sentences that pleased me and never looking back, to being a much slower
writer, layering and plotting, not just doing
but thinking about what I’m doing. I
also care much more about humor. Humor amplifies sadness and anger like nothing
else. I want to read it, so I want to write it.
Press praise is wonderful, and I’m so grateful for it,
though I’m always terrified that a hatchet job is just around the corner so I
try not to put too much stock in what any particular critic thinks. The warm
feedback that’s meant the most to me isn’t what shows up in magazines or
listicles or online reviews, but from friends, from writers whose work I love,
and from my former students. Those have real impact. And they’re what motivate
me to want to write the next book.
What’s obsessing you
now and why?
I’m obsessed with public lands: their troubled histories and
the violence of Indian removal that created them, their complex and precarious ecologies,
recent tussles over their use, and their endangerment under the current
administration. I’m also obsessed with the queer history of Los Angeles. I keep
returning to the ONE Archives, this incredible LBGTQ archive housed at USC. I
can lose myself for hours in that stuff. The 1970s in particular have seized my
imagination—so much art and activism and community-building was going on. If
you want to know queer history, you have to seek it out, it’s probably not
going to get taught to you or passed down through your family. And when you do,
you’re richly rewarded. There’s this treasure trove of publications and images
and stories and ephemera and elders—a whole universe of which you are in some
small way a legacy. It’s thrilling and very moving. Not surprisingly, both of
these obsessions are making their way into my current writing projects.
What question didn't I ask that I should have.
Hm, maybe you could ask what is one piece of writing advice
I give my students. And my answer would be: Estimate how much time you think
you need to write this story. Write it down. Now multiply that by three. That’s how long it will actually take.
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