this weekend, i went down to indianapolis with my writer friends, elizabeth ellen and barrie miskin, for a reading at dream palace books. we went to see two west virginia-based writers, juliet escoria and mesha maren, read from their new books, you are the snake and shae (respectively). another writer, taylor lewandowski, opened up dream palace books with his dad and grandfather less than a year ago, in the old northside neighborhood of indianapolis. the store is sunny and spacious, and a lovely place to while away an early summer afternoon with one of their to-die-for iced chais. i’ve been to many an indie bookstore in my day, but never one with such a highly curated selection of alt lit, art books, and classics. taylor had the kind of books on the shelf that i love to read but can never find in most bookstores. small press books whose authors exist on the nicher fringes of publishing.
juliet and mesha’s books are up next on my to-read list, and i can’t wait to start them both. mesha’s reading sent chills down my spine and left me with a million questions for her about working as a stripper. the passage she read from at dream palace takes place in the strip club locker room on a slow december night. the girls are together backstage, all watching the office. not enough dudes in the building to make it worth it to go out and dance.
in her reading, which leaned more towards performance art than straight reading, mesha paints a gorgeous picture of west virginia. she plays a recording of the trains that rip through the book’s rural town, all coming from and headed to bigger cities. as mesha spoke over the sound of the trains rushing by, she passed around a red velvet sack of flattened pennies she’d set down on those same railroad tracks for each of us in the audience to take. a token of west virginia. i played with mine, smooth under my thumb, as she read. after the reading, i bought a copy and had mesha sign it. “any sense you make of it has to happen in the blade,” she wrote.
i turned the phrase over in my mind, trying to do exactly that — make some sense of it. without having read the book, i couldn’t exactly, but i found myself already caught up in the world whose picture mesha painted. she describes west virginia as a corner of the world so ignored it doesn’t even qualify as flyover country. it’s somehow more overlooked than that. more forgotten. it sounded so romantic, to hear her tell it. like the state is some lush secret garden, tucked away from the rest of society. the world of shae is dark — colored by opioid addiction and strip clubs, unexpected pregnancy and chronic pain — but it’s a darkness i want to get lost in, at least for the length of her book.
after mesha, juliet read from her short story collection, which couldn’t be coming into my life at a better time. elizabeth introduced me to juliet’s writing this winter when she lent me her copy of juliet the maniac. in her 2019 (autofiction) novel, juliet tells the funny, dark, sometimes tragic, story of a high school aged juliet dealing with her own bipolar diagnosis and years-long battle for stability. throughout the book, she includes real clinic notes from her own treatment centers and therapeutic boarding school, charting the trajectory of her mental illness throughout her adolescence. much like the writers i mentioned in my last post, juliet deals with clinician after clinician, drug after drug, as she traces the winding path toward recovery.
just a few months ago, i read her autofiction not-quite-memoir as i made notes for my own potential future memoir. still in the throes of hypomania, i furiously typed up my diary entries from treatment, making sure to capture every snippet of dialog and character detail exactly as i’d transcribed it when i was locked up in ohio. the google doc would be a living, breathing primary source for me to refer back to if and when i decide to write something of my own, aspirationally in the vein of juliet the maniac. juliet’s book inspired me to chart the course of my own treatment in detail. keep good documentation of my story, just like she saved all the admission, discharge, and progress summary notes from her own course of treatment, years ago. it occurs to me now, writing this, that maybe i could even take juliet’s lead and eventually mold my story into a work of autofiction, if memoir feels too restrictive, as it sometimes does.
all that to say, i’m really excited to start her short story collection, which picks up in her adolescence, right where juliet the maniac leaves off. juliet’s work has not only kept me company on this sometimes lonely road of healing mental illness, but also helped me as a writer by showing me how i might take some of this painful experience and turn it into art.
it feels motivating to be surrounded by writers. both writers whose work i’ve read and loved and then gotten to actually meet in real life, and writers who i’ve gotten to meet in real life whose work i now plan to read. my conversations this weekend have reinvigorated me to take a look back at some old work of mine with a fresh perspective, to start something new, and to reconsider the memoir. maybe not all three things at once (or i’ll never get any of them done), but one at a time, for sure.
back at our airbnb, i was sharing my fears around too much self-revelation in putting out something non-fiction about my own life, and elizabeth and barrie gave me some sound advice: write for an audience of one. write directly to someone. a single person. if you think about anyone else ever reading it, it gets difficult to be honest and open on the page. and what would be the point of putting any work out there at all, if not openness and honesty? neither of the books i picked up this weekend would mean nearly as much as they do if they didn’t cut right to the bone. good writing goes hard, like that. the books i can’t put down never shy away from the painful, sometimes uncomfy, thorny truth. it doesn’t matter if the cover says memoir or novel. if it’s going to hold my attention, it’s because it touches something raw. something real and tender and alive.
Beautiful essay 😍