Turning Your Past into Narrative w. ELISSA WASHUTA

Welcome to WMFA, a podcast about why and how we write. I'm Courtney Ballastier, and this week I'm speaking with Alyssa Wishuda, whose new essay collection, "White Magic" is out April 27th from Ten House. Alyssa is a member of the Caliots Indian tribe and a nonfiction writer. She is the author of "Starvation Mode" and my body is a book of rules, named a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. With Teresa Warburton, she is co-editor of the anthology "Shapes of Native Nonfiction," and she has collected essays by contemporary writers. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at the Ohio State University. This book, I think, was the first thing I ever created that really made me feel that even if it never got published, I will still be actually really satisfied with what I've done. Is it too obvious to say that there's something in Cantertory about "White Magic"? I told Alyssa that I felt as if I had dreamed her essays. This is perhaps in part because of the themes of spirituality and mysticism embedded in the collection. Each of the books, "Three Acts" is assigned to trio of tarot cards, in which craft and astrology appear throughout these labyrinthine works. These topics are in a vocative lens through which to examine the more visceral issues Alyssa confronts, colonization, sexual assault, PTSD, addiction, and heartbreak, especially one canonical heartbreak that she can't let go of. Driven by Alyssa's insightful seeking and questioning, "White Magic opens trap doors and makes openings appear out of nowhere." Alyssa writes, "I can't shake the need to task myself with the work of controlling destiny." And I was drawn to the way that she grappled with our human attraction to mystery and our desire for certainty. Because of all this, I was intrigued when Alyssa said in our conversation that she felt the narrative, which touches on everything from dare drug education to Fleetwood Mac, Oregon Trail, had a fairly linear shape. We talk more about that shape here in the lines of inquiry that drive the book. We also talk about the unreliability of memory and how Alyssa kept the concept of "White Magic" from feeling too overwhelming to finish. And we discuss one of mine and the book's favorite subjects, Twin Peaks. At WMFA's Patreon page, Alyssa, who has received fellowships and awards from numerous institutions, including Creative Capital and the National Endowment for the Arts, shares some great advice on successfully applying for grants and other funding. You can hear this and other bonus segments by visiting patreon.com/wmfapodcast and pledging just $2 a month. First of all, I kind of feel like I dreamed of this book. I don't know if like, I don't know, I just, I have this like really fascinating kind of experience with it where like, there, I think, I think the structure is so fascinating and kind of creates this very singular experience with the text and I'm excited to talk to you more about that. But I kept thinking, you know, last summer I did this, I did a Tin House Workshop with Christian Arnett and the first thing that she had us think about was what is the shape of this text. And so I kept trying to like, put a shape on your book on White Magic and I wondered before I kind of start yipping if that brings up anything for you what you kind of feel like the shape of the book is. Yeah, I actually have a little blackboard next to me here at my office at home where I drew, I guess, how I would lay out the plot arc or, you know, how I imagine the dramatic structure looking and how I could, I don't know, plot out the book as, you know, something that both employs dramatic structure and is working with a different sort of structure. I plotted it out for my students a few weeks ago and if you can imagine the dramatic structure kind of typical diagram that's a sort of like off center triangle peak, I have that sort of peak drawn and then I also have this zigzaggy line that intersects with the various points that is representative of how I imagine the focus of the events. So most surprising to me after my years of really resisting the idea of plot, I think of this ultimately as having a pretty standard narrative arc, it's just that the events that happen are all over the place and time and really the plot follows my mind trying to make sense of all of these things that I experienced over the last few years and, you know, in my childhood. So that was eventually how I needed to conceive of the shape in order to make this thing a whole cohesive book is think about what was the rising action, what was the climax, what was the falling action, you know, how does this thing get resolved? Right, right. And I guess I'm curious like what you, what you saw as sort of like that primary narrative thread, you know, are you, are you thinking of it as just your life drawn out or do you think like there's like a central relationship that's kind of building that arc for you? Yeah, so for years I was working on this book and I had no idea where it was going. I drafted all sorts of things that I threw out. It didn't have any central line of inquiry. It was just a bunch of stuff and failed attempts. I really began to understand what the line of inquiry was and what was going to form this, you know, movement of mind along the process of answering a question. I really figured that out initially in 2017 when I was writing some of the first essays that appear in the book. I really eventually settled on a line of inquiry as being why can I not stop thinking about my ex-boyfriend? Because you know, I think I was trying to, before that, take up these huge questions of colonization that felt both personal and impersonal. I guess I could see how they were personal, but I didn't viscerally feel what my investigation was individually of some of the questions I was asking about treaties and the federal government and the documents of colonization. Ultimately, I realized my real stakes were in the fact that my ex-boyfriend wouldn't text me back and I wanted to get back together with him. I knew that wasn't going to happen, but I really felt like more than I was interested in actually getting back together with this person. I was interested in investigating what kept pulling me back to him. That's how I see the book progressing is first taking up that question, however long it was like a year after he broke up with me and I was still texting him. As the essays continue, I go into some backstory before that relationship of the relationships that immediately preceded it and then further back into the past. As I was asking these questions about why I was behaving the way I was behaving, it didn't come out of nowhere. Ultimately, I think it was a narrative movement toward just figuring out what those patterns were. Right. First of all, I think everything about all of the sort of more, or maybe less personal, lines of inquiry about colonization and sexual assault and colonization and the co-opting of women, especially native women, by white men. I think all of that is fascinating. When you're saying that, I'm thinking about when you talk about will these patterns didn't start here, it's also like, where does your personal history start and stop? I think a lot about generational memory and I'm really fascinated by this idea of what is carried down on a cellular level. I think those questions definitely have a place there. I really like how they are woven together in this process of thinking this through is a very fascinating place to be as a reader. Thank you. I think I just needed a way into those big questions. There's so much research that went into this book and everything that I was compiling, all of these journal articles and old books. The book is all over the place and it's sourcing and I just had all that stuff and I didn't know at first what I was going to do with it or what my way into it was. The relationship is mostly important as it's very narrow way into all of those big questions. What happened to me before I was born, what happened to me long before my mother and her mother were born. What does all of that have to do with me right now and the way I'm acting and the way I'm thinking and feeling? And I think that just makes me think that of I don't know how easy it is for women and especially women of color for their narratives to kind of be written off as really self-indulgent or like you know when they're trying to really interrogate these ideas this like you know this sort of like ghettoizing of of those female experiences. And so I think placing it in that larger historical context brings up some really some really interesting parallels. Yeah you know my first book I'm not super surprised when people talk about it as being let's like a diary or having diary like elements because I did quote from my diary in that one um you know I thought that that was not going to happen with this book because it is so thoroughly researched but of course you know already you know in a couple reviews and comments here and there talking about parts of it being like a diary and I don't know you know I I think the the work of writing about myself is always going to be seen like you say as self-indulgent as diary like is just a spewing of my feelings no matter how controlled it is as it is in this case. I'm not know with the the diary kind of idea I did have this like real moment of panic when I saw that you had transcribed a g chat or that you included g chat I was like oh my god if I would look at any of my g chats like I just was like you brave brave soul. It's it's very painful I did a lot of it for my first book and it was excruciating I think I am a little bit numbed to my self at this point you know I mean I've I've done a lot of digging into the old things I've said and I hate it but you know it's it's who I was and it's who I am and I think you know in that section where I brought an entire g chat conversation once I felt ready to look at that I mean I knew it was there I knew that all my old g chats were there in my inbox somewhere and so you know I knew how I remembered that ex-boyfriend and our conversations and I was you know I was concerned that maybe I was misremembering maybe he wasn't that bad maybe he didn't really treat me badly I was drunk a lot at the time you know this was years ago and then I looked at the g chats and I was like oh my god this is actually worse than I remember he was really bad to me. Right you know that's something that resonates so much with me and like you know my personal shit which of course shows up in my writing because that's what writing is whether whatever you're working on really but that idea of like can I trust my memory of what I believe I've experienced I don't know I'm constantly wondering about that myself in in ways that probably are not quite as brave as you were doing in this book of just like why am I not trusting myself and what is leading to that and and you know how do you get out of that loop and I you you talk a lot in the book about sort of these moments of recognition that like these certain kind of pain impulses feel comfortable and so there is this sense of perverse safety with like the sort of lived pain that you've gone through and I think that that's a really a really precise but very universal idea that I really responded to of just like why do you keep hitting your head against the wall kind of thing. Yeah I mean it was really interesting to think more about memory in the process of writing this book you know in writing my body is a book of rules I was becoming aware of how unreliable memory is generally you know you know our senses are not a security camera or something our mind is not a hard drive but while writing this book I learned that I have a severe working memory deficit and so I've really been paying a lot of attention to my memory just day to day the things that you know I fail to enter into my memory um and after getting sober I realized just how huge some of the gaps are in my memory probably because of how much I was drinking and so you know I mean I have a lot of shame around memory problems um you know like the idea of not remembering somebody's name or you know not remembering having a conversation with someone is bad it doesn't feel good um and so I've really just had to just keep telling myself that it's not it's not bad it's certainly not good but it's it's just a fact that my memory is not good but nobody's really is it's just that I'm extremely aware of it um part of the practice that I've been building up and writing about myself over the last few years is to just look at G chats old emails my calendar um I have all these sources that I know can back me up and I save things because I know I'm gonna I don't know what I'm gonna write about in the future but I know how often I've gone back into that stuff I thought was meaningless and I was really glad that I kept it on that same line there was a line in the book that I really was really intrigued by um in terms of of craft and was really excited to talk to you about um and it's at the beginning of act two and you write um this book is a narrative it has an arc but the tension is not in what happened when I lived it it's in what happened when I wrote it um and you talk about how you know you're trying to make something happen um and record the process and results and you say and then this is about the scientific method um can you talk a little bit more about that approach yeah you know it's it's like it's not an approach I can really recommend um because I I mean I noticed and a friend noticed partway through my process of really writing this in earnest I think it was in 2018 we were all beginning to notice that I was doing things so that I would have things to write about ah you know it's not it's not ideal it's great for me I love it you know I mean I don't I don't know you know I guess I don't I don't really do it anymore so much um but you know I know that part of why I was keeping in touch with this ex boyfriend who I said out to write about was because something interesting felt like it was happening in narrative um I felt that I was getting into the process of answering this question and it was something that I you know hadn't fully figured out in years of therapy I just needed to turn some people into characters myself included and um right pull in history and pop culture and um create lines of inquiry and and kind of fold events into them as they were happening I don't think I always consciously you know totally knew the extent of you know how much I was doing things for the purpose of writing about them I think most of the time I thought that that wasn't happening but you know I look back and I see that probably it was in some way I think that's probably such a familiar impulse to so many writers like and even if you're not doing it you know consciously on purpose I think there is always this kind of just like level of sort of um I don't know scavenging or like opportunism that we do that that is just kind of inherent I feel like so much about like being a writer being you know any any kind of artist is like being sort of like inside and outside at the same time um like there is this like observer self of you that is like constantly clocking like well what is how I don't know and I think like you know everybody tries to make narrative and make things make sense maybe we're just more attuned to like those those mental processes but but that certainly sounds very familiar to me and and I can't find it um I was flipping back through the the book while you were talking but where you say um something happens in your life with secretly I was pleased about this because it gave me an ending oh yeah well there were a few times I remember thinking that you know one of them was when I was in Seattle and I was gonna go visit the Laura Palmer House from Twin Peaks um which is in Everett and I told Carl that I was going and he said he wanted to go with me and that was great that was great because that was gonna be a good plot point and I think another time was when we were um we went to karaoke around the same time and he was singing in the air tonight by Phil Collins which comes up at the beginning of the book and that was great too uh but you know neither of those ended up being the end of the book right right um I would love to talk a little bit about - You know, just kind of the living experience of like sitting down and making work out of these experiences, which are quite painful and quite difficult, I would imagine to sit with and revisit in the sort of, you know, with the depth that you do. And you know, you mentioned, you mentioned Heneef. I assume you might, I assume it's Heneef, I'm just your both in Columbus and sometimes I'm not sensitive, but when he was on the show, he talked a lot about like kind of totems and like this idea that he kind of keeps things on his desk that like sort of can bring him back to the world and out of where he has been. And I don't know maybe just because of all the symbology and spirituality going on in the book, I kept thinking about that too, of like I hope you had like an anchoring sort of like force with you while you were doing this. I, you know, no, not in that way, but I do feel very anchored. You know, I, I got sober in 2015, which of course is a big subject in the book. And not immediately and not in the first year, maybe you know a couple years after, I felt like my sense of self stabilized and eventually my moods stabilized big time. I think that was, you know, that happened after I actually did end those patterns of, you know, seeking the wrong man, you know, at the point when I end the book, like that was, that was really the end of the cycles. And my anxiety decreased dramatically. And I finally had a stable sense of, you know, what my mind was like I guess and what I felt. So I feel very firmly anchored now, day to day in, you know, what I'm feeling and what's real and, you know, I don't have the same spinning out and anxiety that I used to. So I think of that as my anchor. And I know, you know, a lot of the process of writing, of initially drafting these essays, I don't necessarily remember in detail with all of them. But I do remember the revision process of, you know, my last revision before submitting the full finished manuscript to editors before my agent did that. I did a big revision and it took a few months and it was really hard. I don't know why, but it felt much more difficult than the initial writing process. I did have to push harder into some memories in a way. And just getting that last, you know, few percent of the writing done was so hard and so painful. And I noticed my anxiety coming back. I noticed my irrational fears coming back and you know, paranoia and distrust of people. And so it's really that, you know, the sense of self-day to day that is my anchor. And, you know, part of it is now my partner lives here with me. He didn't at the time, actually, but you know, we talked constantly. When we were in a long distance relationship. And so I think, you know, having that person to reflect my self back to me and, you know, not that he was telling me I was acting weird, but I saw my, I could just, you know, in interactions I could see myself worrying. And that wasn't me. So I think it's just like, I mean, I have a lot of stuff around here. I have items. I have my little cauldron on my desk right now. But I think it's all just part of this really stable world I've created at this point. I mean, that's tremendous. And it reminds me of, I've brought this up so many times in different episodes since this first conversation happened because it resonated so strongly with me. But when Lisa Coe was on the show a couple of years ago, she said that one of the kind of most impactful pieces of advice that she'd ever gotten from one of her writing mentors was that to write, you have to become the person you have to be to write the book you want to write. - Oh yeah. - That it's really this process of like, how can you get to, you know, I don't know, I mean, there are a million ways to interpret that. But I'm thinking, I was thinking about that a lot as you were answering that question just now 'cause it makes sense to me in a funny way that like those end moments would have been more difficult because, you know, new phases are starting and old phases are ending and you kind of maybe feel in a very different place. - Yeah, for sure. That idea makes me think of, you know, going into a big project like this, for a while once the idea begins to take shape of what I'm envisioning on a large scale, it feels impossible. I'll never, I'll never get there. It's just too big. And this book definitely felt like that. And especially the 100 page essay with the, you know, the G-Chat conversation and the overlapping timelines, I knew what I wanted it to be, but I didn't think I would ever pull it off. I'm very pleased with how it turned out. It's what I wanted. And I do think, you know, the only way to be able to pull it off is to pull it off. And you just have to do it. And, you know, of course we can't hold a whole book in our minds at once, you know. We just have to work on all the different parts of it. And I think that the thing about that big vision and, you know, my answer to your last question is, I think there's something about finalizing that vision, putting the last glaze on or whatever, you know, unifying everything, figuring out exactly what the, I don't know, exactly, you know, how deep the wound is and where it stops. And all of that, like that is the final work that I am absolutely not ready for when I start out. Because, especially because I always start out thinking that I'm onto something way simpler than I actually am. - Right. (laughing) - Right, yeah, that's real too. Yeah, you know, I was thinking, as I was preparing to talk to you, I, the novel project that I've been working on for the past couple of years, I have kind of, you know, like off the page really mostly, I have in my head this sort of like lunar cycle organizing framework, 'cause I think that it does, like, I think if you're thinking about the phases of the moon, there is a really natural, nice narrative arc in there. - Mm-hmm. - And I was, as I was doing research about that, I came across this idea of longitudinal epiphanies, and it's these things that we just kind of, like, these huge, like, rings that we just move through these concentric circles of, like, getting closer and closer to, like, the epiphanies. And I was thinking about that so much with just, like, all of the themes in here of, like, the doppelgangers and seeing your past selves and seeing your future self and just this, like, which I definitely wanna talk more about that stuff was so good. But, yeah, I love this, like, I do feel like there is very much this sense of circling something, or kind of maybe circling isn't even the right word because that's certainly not in line with the structure of the book, but then, but, you know, sort of, what are all of the entry points? How can I get at this idea, and as many different ways as possible, or which way is gonna unlock it for me? - I think that circling is a part of it. And I mean, you know, I have my way of envisioning what the shape of the book is, but, you know, now it's done, it's not, you know, it's, everybody else gets to decide as well what shapes they see at this point. But I do think of circles and loops, especially as being really central to the way the book works. You know, I got on this idea when I was, you know, I had written my first book. I didn't really know what I had made. I was quite young and pretty new at nonfiction. And I'm not saying I knew nothing, but now that I've been teaching in an MFA program, and I have to talk about what I know and how I know it, and, you know, what I think about writing all the time, I have more language for it than I used to. And so I initially started thinking way after the book was done, I think. I initially started thinking of that book as being a series of essays that were unified in that they were creating this sort of like looping failure cycle. I would think of it like, how do I describe this line? Like just a sort of line that's, oh, you know, when you're learning to write cursive, and you are just making this long line of loops, that might be a Catholic school thing, but, you know, just making the long line of ease and else over and over, that's how I envisioned the structure of that book happening. You know, I would advance, and then I would feel like I was fixing my. brain and my heart and whatever and then I would somehow end up pretty close to where I started but a little bit advanced on from that and so I was really interested in in loops already and I started to see how crucial the idea of time loops was in you know and all of this stuff that I was watching and reading about twin peaks being an example all of the the cycles that that people are caught up in in that show of you know relationships cycles and the way that I felt like I kept making the same mistakes over and over so there is a sense of of circling happening and maybe a sort of sense of circling you've getting closer to the center of an answer I don't know but I do think that there's there are different kinds of shapes in the book yeah yeah it's funny even though they're effectively the same thing when you said loop I was like oh yeah for sure but like circle felt a little too like I don't know like meat or like precise or so I don't know but yeah loop loop feels right to me and yeah I would love to talk a little bit more specifically about the as a the spirit cabinet good which I loved and and I am also a big fan of twin peaks so like I was very here for all of that just to kind of be in that world but also to like really see the way that you played with the themes but also like the work that that David Lynch is doing with like the way he's kind of manipulating that that storytelling do you want to kind of just start talking about how that how you started putting that together I imagine that was a very very individual process yeah I guess started on that in the summer of 2018 I believe when I went out to Washington state I guess first for a writing thing and then for a wedding I went out twice and in that summer of 2018 and I saw Carl the ex-boyfriend the book is so concerned with I saw him both times and both times we noticed that we were doing things on those days that we had done on or around the same day the previous year these are things I noticed because I'm very obsessed with time and always have been the more I thought about it the more I noticed of course like you know that's how it works but some of these things were really weird like being at the same restaurant I think on the same day in 2017 and 2018 a restaurant I had never been to any other times those things started to feel really weird and I wondered what else is here so I got back to Ohio I got out some index cards and I just started writing events and dates and I had already been working on a timeline of the relationship and my sobriety and just the way I had sort of been coming into believing in magic I'd already been doing that in part because I need to in order to keep track of everything when everything happens so I already had a lot of stuff written down on a timeline and I decided to just put it into index cards it could be movable and just see how they would stack up and so you know I have this stack of index cards some of them with events some of them with lines and moments from Twin Peaks and the book here is Real Magic by Nate Staniforth a wonderful awesome magician I think so close from Carl Jung and Mark Twain's the mystery stranger David Blaine's book mysterious stranger there's just this whole universe of sources that I was using that had connections in some way and it felt like there were just these reverberations almost like in Twin Peaks the return when there's that sound in the lodge and they can't find it that's really what it was I had not thought about that till now but you know that's what it was there was some kind of sounds I'm kind of ringing that I I couldn't figure out where it was coming from so I just wrote all these things on these cards and then I arranged them eventually after everything was out of my calendar and my email and my memory and you know wherever I could find notes or on when things had happened once I had all the index cards I just lined the data to ones up January 1st through December 31st and you know within a single day 2016-17-18 those were the years in which I knew Carl and then I just saw you know like what okay is there anything here and there absolutely was something there that was more than I expected and it was really wild and even you know the more I the more I folded in beyond those three years the more it really you know I think that was part of the difficulty was that the book is also concerned with an abusive relationship from years several years earlier and that was something I had not really written about before and that was really really hard but I realized that was part of all of that too that essay was by far the biggest risk of the book and you know the biggest risk I've ever taken in writing because I by the time I was done I thought it was great but I thought everybody else was gonna hate it and think it was a mess I let it's my favorite I love it thank you so that counts for anything it really does absolutely it does I also just love like anytime writing can be kind of more tangible like that like with the cards and like the re- reorganizing like I feel like my brain often like really needs like the tactile break and and one thing I want to make sure we talk about because it's it's such a kind of powerful presence in the book and and seems very in line with this conversation is you know the each act it's the book is organized into three acts and they're sort of three tarot cards associated with each act and and so that's the the various sort of spiritual practices and symbologies that are present in the book I kind of am a slight dappler in like I like tarot a lot I like astrology so like this book was kind of like custom-built for me in a lot of ways I guess but what I think is so interesting about all of these concepts like you know for me personally and then I would love to hear if this like means anything to you and especially in the process of writing the book is like I think I often do go to them I mean I think like I understand sort of rationally that like my attraction to them is very much about you know you're you're seeing what you're looking for in a sense and that is a piece of self-knowledge I think that's very important and so so I think a lot of times I am using it as like how can I understand more of what I want and need which are ideas that historically have felt very opaque to me but then I think you know when you talk about especially stuff like I mean Twin Peaks like and the magicians like there is this constant refrain of like I can't remember if you quote David Lynch specifically in the book is saying this but I know a magician says it and I know David Lynch has said it that like you think you want to know but you don't really want to know yeah um and this idea that like there's the opacity but also the desire like you're attracted to the opacity and the mystery but you're also attracted for the desire to the desire of like certainty and kind of control so I just I don't know I find I find that duality very very interesting and I think the way it shows up in the book is um it really works really well but I would love to talk about I know that's like not a question that's just me talking but like maybe um how you know where what you see the tarot cards the specific tarot cards that are attached to each act um kind of what they serve for you yeah I mean you know I want to like respond to the first part of that first though you know the idea of certainty and mystery I think like ultimately I feel like the way that this book was working for me and the writing process was I really had to give up control I was so used to revising my sentences as I went along in writing and getting you know how I always had the source.com open as I was drafting which hasn't totally changed I still do that a lot but I was always you know gem polishing as I progressed I had to give up control and just see what was going to come out of the research what connections you know across time what connections in the research and in the movies and video games and TV shows that I was consulting and I think that ultimately possibly why I kept you know pushing into all these experiences that were like not great for me was that the the more I insisted on trying to know what was happening you know in the mind of Carl the ex boyfriend like it was not interesting you know like not to say that like what goes on in his mind is not interesting but like what I was looking for, you know, was not interesting. It has a very easy answer like he doesn't want to be with you, Alyssa, like book over. But you know, like when I when I pushed into that question and did not allow myself to see this easy answer that was in front of me, that's when something else was happening that was you know felt like this mystery opening itself up to me. I started reading tarot in 2015 that that was in the months before I quit drinking. In the first time my cards were were read to me. The devil came up and it just really struck me as being an image that was very recognizable and scary not because of the idea of the devil but because of the accuracy of the reading and you know the idea of being people being changed to one another through desire was I think something that that I thought was really at the heart of the initial investigation. Right and of course like the chains in the devil part of the part of the thing is how loose they are right. Yeah yeah and death of course you know I love that card and I kept getting it just knew that something some tremendous change was happening and that's really the occasion of this book. It's like like who cares about my ex-boyfriend? What's interesting to me is that I changed completely as a person into that you know over this over these years. Four of cups begins the second act so that that person sitting under a tree their arms are crossed. There's a hand reaching out with that cup that we saw in the Ace of Cups. The person doesn't want that cup. I kept getting it and I was like what does it mean and eventually I realized it means I should stop drinking like it's time to refuse the cup because it's not it's not happening anymore. This is not good. Around that time I also was getting the 10 of swords a lot. I was like this yes that's how it feels that I'm lying face down on the ground with 10 swords in my back and I'm bleeding but there's there's the sun on the horizon like at least there's that. I mean that's how it felt and then the tower is major disruption. People being thrown out of that tower it's on fire and and of course the tower became really relevant in the essay that ends that act to because I was literally in a bridge tower doing a writing residency. Which is such a cool residency that's awesome. It was really great. It was really great. What's in act three? What begins that? I can't find it but you've got the magician the emperors and the emperors. Which I love because they're all majors and it's like just big like self empowerment energy. Yeah I think by the you know I identified all these cards after the long after the whole thing was done. So the magician I mean I felt like I was pulling off a magic trick after I had finished writing a lot of this and just using the tools like the magician has these this basic table of tools like that's you know where I'm sitting. Am I a little ikea workbench with my rainbow keyboard and my you know coffee warmer in my mouth these are my tools. And you know the emperors to me represented this just this person who was poised and comfortable with the idea of indulging in something. And I mean this book is it feels very indulgent to me it is very long and has all of my favorite things in it and I did you know all the things I wanted to do. And then the world you know is really the completion of that that cycle and that circle as the end of the major arcana that person sort of like floating surrounded by symbols that's that's how I felt at the end of the process you know I was floating surrounded by my all my little symbols my rabbits and my towers. That's awesome well I could talk about that with you all day but um I did to keep an eye in the clock and start to wrap us up that actually is a wonderful um transition to the question that I always like to ask at the end of these conversations which is what does creative satisfaction look like for you. Oh I um that's a good question. I like feeling like my work is sort of overstuffed and maximalist. I like feeling like I've created a little cabinet of curiosities of all my things I'm interested in. I'm satisfied with um you know like I was talking about earlier with that big vision that I start out with I don't think I'll pull off you know I I really recognize when I have pulled it off and I impress myself you know I I always doubt myself a little bit at the beginning um you know with my terrible memory and my scattered attention and my fatigue I always think I'll never do this on this is never gonna get finished I'm gonna run out of time I'm gonna run out of interest and this all just fail and when it doesn't that feels great. This book I think was the first thing I ever created that really made me feel that even if it never got published I will still be actually really satisfied with what I've done and found a way to collect all of these things that are not just in one constellation of the things I care about but all these different constellations to make this universe that was my world during the time I wrote it and during a lot of my life you know I feel really really satisfied with that um but now you know I I'm also there's also these phases of satisfaction I um I'm really pleased that people are liking the book um it makes me super happy to know that it's meaningful to other people and just to be able to you know I have I got the hard cover copies uh over the weekend and I mean it's so satisfying to hold a hard cover book that I wrote you know like that's that's new um it's shiny as a gold spine I mean I you know I love objects and to have the book as an object is that's especially such a beautiful object like that's really satisfying oh well that that's wonderful that's so inspiring and heartwarming and I'm very I'm very happy that you that you have the book and that experience and I love that answer. Well thank you so much it was wonderful talking with you today congratulations again on the book thank you so much this has been such a good conversation oh I'm glad to hear it you'll find links to some of the things we talked about today at wmfapodcast.com if you enjoyed this episode leave a review on iTunes to help new listeners find the show have a question or author recommendation email me at [email protected] find me on twitter and instagram at cfbalistier or leave a voicemail at 347 685 4836 today's episode was edited by Andy Cubus the wmfa logo was created by unsolved studio and our theme music is jazz dancer by double winter find them at doublewinter.bandcamp.com wffa is part of the lit hub radio network and is made in Pittsburgh by Courtney Ballastier LLC all rights reserved