Good Life Project - T Kira Madden | Making Work That's Felt in the Spine

Episode Date: July 16, 2020

T Kira Madden is a writer, photographer, amateur magician, and a powerful voice and editor, earning fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Hedgebrook, Tin House, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo. She is the founding Editor-in-chief of No Tokens, a journal celebrating work that is "felt in the spine, run entirely by women and non-binary individuals, dedicated to featuring the words and artwork of all voices of the past, present, and future, here to keep stories alive and to make a physical object to hold in your hands." Madden's 2019 memoir, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, dropping you into a wildly colorful and character-filled childhood. She also teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and we explore all of this in today’s conversation.You can find T Kira Madden at:Website: http://www.tkiramadden.com/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tkiramadden/-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The first thing that many people want to ask my guest, T'Kira Madden, about when they meet her is her famous last name. Yes, that Madden. But it's also understandably the last thing she wants to talk about so much so that for the first few years as an up-and-coming writer in the literary world, and as a person in her 20s looking to really carve out her own identity, she wrote entirely under a pen name, before finally emerging into a place where she was comfortable standing in her work, her story, and her craft. Since then, she has established herself as a powerful voice and editor,

earning fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Hedgebrook Tin House, the McDowell Colony, Anyado, serving as the founding editor-in-chief of No Tokens, which T'Kira described as a journal celebrating work that is felt in the spine, run entirely by women and non-binary individuals, dedicated to featuring the words and artwork of all voices of the past, present, and future, here to keep stories alive and to make a physical object

to hold in your hands. And she ends the No Tokens mission statement by reminding us all, we are paying attention. She's also the author of the really moving 2019 New York Times Editor's Choice memoir, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. And it drops you into this wildly colorful and character-filled childhood. And she teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. We explore all of this in today's really fun, wide-ranging conversation. So excited to share it with you.

I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes.

The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how

to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die. Don't shoot if we need him! Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk. You and I share a common fascination. So when I was a young kid, a close family friend was a puppeteer and a magician. Really? And he brought me one day into his basement where he had all of his illusions, all of these like big things, like, you know, guillotines that, you know, like would magically not cut off people's heads when

they invited them out from the audience. And it became an obsession of mine. And I ended up sort of going into the city and trying to explore it. And you have a completely different introduction to magic than I do, but it is a meaningful part of your life. Yeah, it is. So my father was a compulsive gambler growing up. He was a blackjack and poker player. We spent a lot of time in Las Vegas. He would kind of drag my mother and I with him across the country to gamble.

And he would try to sneak me into the casinos and, you know, with not a lot of success, but he was a using alcoholic at the time and very reckless person. And so my mom's solution to this time we spent in Las Vegas was to take me to the magic shops around Las Vegas in all the different hotels and magic shows. So my father would have his whole days in the casino. And then at night, we would go see Siegfried and Roy like eight times. We'd see David Copperfield. And I would spend the days in these little shops in the malls inside of the hotels. And my mom would usually leave me with the assistant or whoever was helping out with the tricks, doing the demos. And my mom would usually leave me with the assistant or whoever was helping out with the tricks, doing the demos. And I would come back to the hotel room and just spend days with these foam bunnies and these rings. And when we would go back to Florida, I found a local magic

shop in Plantation, Florida in a strip mall. And I started taking lessons there. So it's kind of stayed with me. Once a child magician, always a child magician.. So it's, it's kind of stayed with me once a child magician, always a child magician. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's so interesting, right? And it sounds like a large part of it for you is also sort of a fascination with the process, with the craft behind it and really deconstructing how and why it works, which in a weird way, I almost wonder if I wonder about the overlap between that and writing. Yeah. I think about the process in a really similar way. I'm obsessed with process in general. I'm never as obsessed with the final product. I'm obsessed with process and I'm obsessed with the

moment that the thing is shared. And I cook a lot too. And it's the same moment of like the first bite, seeing somebody's face and with a magic trick, just that moment of awe is I live for that moment. And in writing too, finding the surprises, you know, I'm a teacher and I've always pushed back against Western plot structure a little bit at first, because it was something I wasn't very good at. And later, because I realized this is just one way to tell a story. There are so many ways to tell a story. And there are so many ways to talk about stories and talk about writing and art. And I realized what's more interesting for me and my students, I think,

is to track how many surprises can be packed into a piece and how do those surprises take shape and how do they happen and where do they happen? And I think I get that from magic. I think I literally think of construction and structure of a story of these terms like defamiliarization and surprise and patter, these are all tools that I learned from magic tricks of distracting somebody in order to pull off the surprise. Yeah, it's sort of like, how can you craft something behind the scenes where it's intentional, there's structure to it, but the experience of the quote end user or reader or viewer is awe. It's just something has happened that shifts you emotionally and psychologically where you could care less about what happened, but you just know that something magical has happened. It's cool to think about that in the context of writing as well. And both require one to suspend your disbelief and to just, it's not necessarily showing you something in order to fool you or showing something you didn't know.

It might be pointing to something you already know, but you can appreciate that thing so much more. If you have a hat, there's an expectation something is going to appear from that hat, right? And the same for a story but how it's done the presentation the pattern that particular way that hat is presented to you and what it means for you in that moment in your life I love that yeah it's amazing and and if our listeners could see the smile it just came on your. It's like a full body smile there. It's completely invested. You know, what's interesting also occurs to me as you're sharing that is if somebody's sitting in a magic show of any age and they see this, you don't have to be a

magician to sort of say the first response is awe. The second response is how did they do that? They immediately want to deconstruct it. But if you're reading something and you get that same experience of just kind of a magical moment, my guess is that if you're a writer who's in love with the craft, you're probably want to trace it back and try and figure out how did that just happen? But the average person just doesn't go there in a way that they would actually almost always go there in the context of, quote, capital M magic. Is that true? I don't know. Yeah. I mean, I'm a writer also, but very different than you.

But as a reader, and I read a ton also, and so many people, I don't think, want to deconstruct the craft behind the emotion when they're reading. Whereas when you're an audience sitting in a room, everybody just walks out and says, and everyone's like, the conversation is, how did they do that? And so it's interesting how you just accept one as it is what it is, and I felt a certain way, and the other one, you have to know how it just happened. That's really interesting. I can't imagine reading a book or watching a movie and not wondering how things happened at every turn. But maybe that's because I was a child magician, because I'm obsessed with construction and deconstruction. And I think maybe for some people, they just believe that the words appeared there, that it poured from this romantic idea that I can't stand, that story just pours into the typewriter. One bleeds, you know, the moments that I love in writing where

a sentence or a turn, like you feel it in your body. It's a, it's a corporeal surprise reaction of like, whoa, how did we arrive there? And how did, how did this writer have me remember this moment from earlier in the story, but the moment or the line just came back in a way that has this whole new weight to it or a whole new color to it because of what they did in between. But maybe, you know, I'm a nerd and I don't know. That's interesting. beneath it and how to make what you create land in a certain way that really moves somebody is so powerful. When you think about it in the context of your life also, I mean, you ended up eventually at Sarah Lawrence studying fiction, but there's so much foreshadowing beyond magic earlier in your life. I mean, you grew up in Boca, the kid of two, what seems to be a fiercely chaotic and frantic household with two parents who are in and out of all sorts of different things, addicted to various different things at various different moments in your life.

There are all of these incredible characters who are moving in and out of your life. And at the same time, you seem to have this inner life where you're creating your own characters and your own worlds that touches down at a really young age. Yeah. And I think that's there, you know, there's this American life episode about magic. And I think they may have touched on this idea, or maybe it was somewhere else that child magicians are often children who are abused or children who have a really tumultuous home life. And I think in thinking about it through that lens, I do think that's true. And I think that's true for many storytellers as children, writers, creators, outcasts, that we have to create these realities for ourselves. We have to create characters and

worlds and closets through which to escape, whatever it is. And that was definitely true for me. I was always a writer. When people say, have you been writing your whole life? I say, no, I was a writer when I was a kid. And then I wasn't until I was an adult because I dropped it. But when I was a kid, I had my electric typewriter and my grandma taught me to use it. And I had my magic tricks and they were very closely related. They were both these steps into a new world. And my first stories were about a girl named Joni Bologna who was loosely based on me, but she actually ran away from home and joined a freak show. And she kind of banded with a crew of magicians and went to Coney Island and did all these fun things. So,

and I think I'm still writing that same story all these years later. I think I still write about outsiders who maybe take a chance and find their, their crew of outsiders. I think I still write about lonely people and yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's fun to sort of like track back the through lines it's reading about and hearing about, um, your early life, especially it's a little bit rattling, you a little bit rattling. And it's interesting to sort of feel that way, hearing somebody retell about their early years and then also wondering, well, if it feels rattling or unnerving or frantic from the outside looking in, how must that have actually felt from the inside looking out, you know, like actually living that early life.

I mean, you shared some a bit. Your dad also, and I guess uncles, worked at a place which became legendary, Stratton Oakmont, run by a guy named Jordan Belfort. Wolf of Wall Street became sort of like legendary in a movie, which also was known for pumping and dumping and massive white collar crime. And your dad and your uncles, it's like your family was kind of spinning around in that whole universe. I'm curious when, you know, eventually over time, all sorts of things come

to light. Did you have a sense for that energy at a really young age? Yes. I think I like the way you put it with energy, because when you say you were rattled, and I get that a lot with people reading my book or having conversations with me, I think for many of us who have had these kinds of childhoods, it takes a long time to figure out that maybe something was a little bit off. And I still have those moments, you know, just last week to telling a story about my school, for example, which was, in my opinion, a pretty problematic place to go to school. But we still have these moments of understanding and becoming as we as we grow up, and we tell the stories, and we see the

looks on people's faces. And that's usually how I know that something was off. And for me, it was really through writing this book and having conversations. I felt for so long, I didn't really have a story. I didn't have anything to say. I was told as a teenager, when I accidentally enrolled in a memoir class, someone said, you know, you're 18, you don't have a story to go live your life. And then you'll have a story to tell. And I believed that I thought, okay, I'm young. Everybody probably had their own screwy childhoods. There's no story here. And then through communicating and having a really, I think, stable and beautiful life now and having these conversations, I realized, oh, maybe that was a little bit off, but energy

is what I felt. There was always this really rocky and wild energy. And there was always this, there was always a secrecy energetically, like nothing that happened within the house or the family unit or nothing that happened in the car or in these late night drives could be shared with the outside world. I couldn't bring that into the school. I couldn't bring that to any friends if I made friends. It was just what happened. And yeah, I did feel as if every day was an adventure with these strangers in my house and people breaking tables and drinking goldfish or whatever was going on in my living room. And I knew that the people I knew at school and my friends also weren't

jumping in the car late at night to go to strip clubs with their mother or going to these Vegas casinos and getting their first drink at six years old. I gathered as much from conversations as I wrote in my book, Drew Barrymore's ghostwritten memoir, Little Girl Lost, was really important to me at that age, because this was the first glimpse of someone else who had a life that referenced alcoholism and her father trying to drink the fuel of something because of his alcoholism and partying. And I was like, oh, me and Drew Barrymore share this secret. We're the only two people who share the secret. If only I could find her, or if only we could meet, then somebody would understand what's going on here or help make sense to me of what's going on in my house. So I knew it was not necessarily like

my friends at school, but I didn't really know how strange things were until later. Yeah. I know at one point you also recount a story about a voracious reader of Tiger Beat magazine. And I guess in the back of that for, you know, like in, in, at a different time, there was a pen pal section where people would literally post photos and addresses and say, you know, like accept people mailing things to them. And you started getting hundreds of different things. But then there was one guy named jet or quote J daddy who you're, I guess you were nine or 10 years old and he was in his forties and fifties. And this turns into a really fraught thing. But it clearly was serving, there was a job. It was like serving a purpose for you in that moment of time. Yes. One could read my book and know this about me. And there are so many stories

that didn't make the book. I was always seeking pen pals or people through the internet. I was at the strange cusp of the AOL chat room boom at that age. And I really feel like I always ask my students to think about not the big tome literary book that made you a writer, but what's your earliest storytelling kind of DNA? What made you interested in telling stories or listening to stories? And for me, it was my earliest writing was AOL chat rooms. It was making up these identities. And the Tiger Beat ad was my real identity

and my real picture and address all about me, which is another example of something only later did I realize how problematic it is to have this whole backend glossary of children's pictures and addresses. And if you Google it, you can still see some examples that people have posted because some people were like, that didn't happen. That wasn't in Tiger Beat. You can still look it up. So that ad was true. But then I got to create stories and create desire and hope through these letters with these pen pals and give them different versions of

different stories every day. And then through AOL chat rooms is when I started taking on new identities as I think many children and teens did at that time. They wanted to be prettier. For me, I wanted to be white. So my name was Ashley Flowers, and that's how I would meet people in these chat rooms and make up. I had a beautiful day at school. I got straight A's, and this is when I'm maybe 10 years old when I started. So there was always this desire to reach out and create narrative of a life that wasn't mine. And I think, yeah, again,

construction and deconstruction, but. Yeah. I mean, the, definitely sort of like the idea of being able to try on roles, I think is pretty universal to so many people. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. so many people. The Apple Watch Series X is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever,

making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary.

One of the other sort of sustained things in your life was a passion for horses, which I thought was really fascinating too. I have a handful of friends who grew up riding and just absolutely loved it and have shared with me over the years how there's something kind of mystical about these animals. And that when, especially as they move through the sort of adolescent years and they're feeling so much, it was like the one place where they could go and they felt like the horse could feel their emotions. And there was something, there's such a fierce connection

and i mean yeah the word described was sort of mystical in the quality of the relationship that they had with these animals yeah i did grow up again a stereotypical bocadillo privileged girl with a literal pony and then several but but I do, I have so much respect for the equestrian sport. I did then, and I still do now. And at the time, yeah, I mean, it's, it's hard for me to talk about horses and I'm currently on contract to write about horses, to write a piece about horses. And it's tough because horse and pony are these huge symbols. And I think it's exactly what you're talking about. They're symbols of mysticism. They're symbols of just the horse, the white horse, the black stallion. They're all these symbols. They're symbols of privilege. They're symbols of magic. They're symbols of great intuition, but also it's an incredible and deeply problematic sport.

And I was involved in that at a very young age. And then I started training to be a jockey at a very young age as well. So I did equestrian show jumping and jockeying as well. And these are not things, and I might get some hate for this, but these are not things that are really normal for a child to be breezing racehorses on open ground and to have access to all of these ponies in a show jumping world that still kind of infamously dopes their horses and poisons them. So this is stuff that I, again, a slow understanding of an industry that I find really scary. And I think now as an adult returning to horses,

it's really important for me to be really aware of those practices, really aware of the communities of people who have access to horses and ponies and the misconceptions about people who have those access and the programs that are literally set up for people who can't afford equestrian show jumping gear and to own or lease a horse. And there are these programs now, which is I think a really special thing. And there are rescue programs now. And I returned to horses through working in a homeless shelter and bringing my crew of students to a stable, which is how I met my wife, actually. And so I'm trying to do it differently now is what I'm saying,

I guess, which is taking it all a little bit dark, but it's hard for me to think about horses in a way that doesn't veer that way. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting to sort of have that reframe later in life also about something that was such an intimate part of your life earlier on. And it's really be able to look back and say, huh, okay. This is, it meant something to me, but it also, when you have a different lens, but then also it's fascinating to me that you're sort of saying, okay, so how do I play a part now in re-imagining how we interact with these animals and understand what's actually going on, the truth of the whole world of my answer is somebody asked me and my wife at a party last year. I think usually the reaction is the same of like, oh, you're horse people. That's great. And then somebody launches into their horse story every single time of the time

they fell off or a horse was crazy and took them somewhere, or they just really love horses and horses love them. But this one woman at a party looked at us and said, do you feel embarrassed about that? How do you feel about being horse people? And we felt so like both offended and like, yeah, nobody ever really goes there of like, yeah, that with horses come this capital P privilege and this really problematic industry that people I think don't really know too much about. And again, it took me a really long time to figure that out. I got out of the horse business before I sort of came into the higher shows where I could understand doping and steroids and the abuse. But my wife

continued on. We were in the same show circuit when we were children, like nine years old. She continued on and, you know, went to college on full scholarship on an equestrian team. So she was really able to see firsthand what goes on. And I was just this kid who kind of dumbly was in show jumping and started training to be a jockey and then was told I got too tall and too fat. I didn't really think much of it until later when I returned to it and returned to it through her lens, who really understood as someone who worked. We come from very different families and different backgrounds.

And my wife actually came up through the show circuit as a groom. So she would be grooming the horses for work and then also breezing all these other horses and then showing the same time. And I was just kind of the spoiled showgirl who didn't really understand these hierarchies. So it is nice now, again, to really be conscious of that, to put our efforts into these programs to make horsemanship accessible to people. And my mother-in-law always has rescue horses on her property. So we take a lot of care with those horses and yeah, doing it differently. We still have our horses. They don't go anywhere. So we exercise them, but we will not show ever again. We just ride when we want to ride, how we want to ride. And that is a misconception about horses. Sometimes people think if you really love them,

shouldn't they be free? But horses really like to be worked. Horses like exercise. It keeps their brain engaged in a way that makes them much happier in some cases, not always. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. You referenced a number of times describing them, the word privilege, and you also shared that word about your upbringing, about a certain class, a certain amount of opportunity coming up in Boca, which is known as a very, very white and very privileged neighborhood. And yet at the same time, you also grow up parents of different race, eventually realizing that from a sexuality standpoint, you're queer. So I'm fascinated by this sort of how people navigate where they feel a sense of profound

privilege in certain parts of their lives, and also a sense of otherness in other parts of their lives. And those things and lack of, if anything, the exact opposite. And those things and lack of, you know, if anything, the exact opposite. And those things sort of coexist within a single person. And you're sort of constantly navigating these dueling feelings. Yeah, thank you for saying that. I've been thinking about this so much in this particular political moment. And it's also something I've really had to learn. And it's something that I reassess and reevaluate every day, because I think I was taught that privilege is more of a binary.

It's something you have or something you don't have. And I think that's still how people feel sometimes when I have conversations with people who say, you know, I don't have white privilege because of X or I, I do have privilege because of Y, but then they're not. So I, I'm interested in this idea that it has to be a binary yes or no. And then how to break that down exactly how you're talking about for me to say, like, yes, I'm a lesbian. Yes. I'm biracial. I'm Asian. I grew up as an outsider in my community, but also I can pass to certain

people and that's a privilege. I can pass as a straight person. I mean, depending on who you ask, I can pass as straight in a way that I am gender conforming in my presentation. And in a way that my wife as a butch lesbian cannot. When we're traveling the country on road trips, there are certain places she can't get out of the car. When there are Confederate flags and people are circling the car, I have the privilege that I can probably use the bathroom and nine times out of 10, there won't be an issue,

but she can't get out of the car. And so that's a privilege. And because I was an outsider, and this is something I felt like I had to be really careful about publishing my book about being biracial and queer, I can't not acknowledge that I grew up with extreme economic privilege and educational privileges. And this is something I really learned as well, teaching in the prison system, working with incarcerated people, and then working with

formerly incarcerated people in the homeless shelters of New York City. I learned in training immediately that you must always own your privilege when walking into those spaces, which felt counterintuitive to me as a 21-year-old kid who was learning to teach. I'm like, no, I want to relate to these people. I'm here because I also have a relationship with people with substance abuse. And I want to say, you know, my parents struggled in the same ways. And they said, no, you're coming from Sarah Lawrence College. You're in graduate school. These people, they don't want you to try to relate to them. And that was a real lesson for me. I started working within these communities and realizing that's exactly what makes things more comfortable and more fair is to say,

yes, I'm coming from Sarah Lawrence College and you're in here and I can go home tonight and you can't and that's not fair. So what can we do today? So I always try to be conscious of saying, yes, I have a book too. It's because I have educational privileges. I was able to go to college. Um, some other people might not have access to those tools and that's, that's not because I'm more talented. That's because of privilege. That's because of skill. That's because we're sorry. It's not because of skill. It's because of privilege that I was able to get an education. And, you know, I think teaching in the communities where I teach, including Sarah Lawrence College graduate program, it's important for me to keep

these things in check. Yeah. I think it's just, I think, I feel like the conversation is starting to get more nuanced, you know, and this is me sitting here talking as, middle-aged, white, cis-gen male who I think has been awakened to a lot in the last handful of years and still very much in the early part of the journey. But yeah, it's been interesting just to see the conversation evolve and to talk to many different friends with many different backgrounds and just ask them what the experience has been and what their evolutionary thought process is around it too. It's a, as much as things are, have been shaken up a lot, I think the emergence of a conversation and the willingness for people to actually sit down and have it has been a good thing. I like that you said, I think you said awakening and there's this, this line by Mira Jacob,

a writer I really admire. Yeah. And she says, there is no woke, there are only awakenings. And I think that's really helpful that that's also this binary of like, you're woke or you're not, you get it or you don't. That's not the truth. I mean, the things I said five years ago, or even one year ago, it's every day we're evolving, we have to learn, we have to read, we have to listen to other people. And that makes me feel hopeful though. Yeah. I remember Mira actually writing slash illustrating this conversation between her and her husband

in her graphic memoir about this very exact thing where he's kind of like, I'm the woke guy, like I'm the white guy who's married to somebody. And it devolves into this whole thing where you're like, oh, it is not. Everything is more complicated than that. And it is always an evolutionary process, I think, for all of us. You do end up at Sarah Lawrence really focusing on fiction. But before that, there's a stop at Parsons studying design, I guess, and literature, which I'm curious about because it seems like a bit of like a left turn. Well, I almost flunked out of high school. So that is part of the story. And I thought about where could I possibly go to college because my parents really wanted me to go. And I became a

pretty troubled teenager. My father had moved to New York since then. My uncle, Steve Madden, was incarcerated for the Wolf of Wall Street crimes we already mentioned. So my father moved to New York to work for the company. I was alone with my mother. And as written in the book, my mother really struggled in her addiction at that time and went into treatment. And that was around, I was 16. And then I just kind of lost my mind a little bit as teenagers do. And I just wanted to party and get high and skip school and drink. And it wasn't until my senior year when, you know, I had let all my grades completely drop. They were threatening to kick me out constantly. Almost failed out of English of all things. I couldn't pass English.

And, you know, I started to get my act together at the end of my junior year. I think I met my first boyfriend who was a really, really good guy. And he felt like I had more potential. And not to say I'm the person whose story is saved by this man, but he really did. He's still a friend and he's a really good person. And I started to meet people who are a better influence on my life. I started to believe in myself a little bit. But that said, with bad grades, I thought maybe I could use art.

Maybe I could get into art school. And I built a portfolio in photography first. And then I, then I thought maybe this design and management degree that Parsons offers, which is still a business degree might be more helpful. And it was really just doing what I what I knew, because my family was in the shoe business my whole life. And I thought, okay, this makes sense. It's something I know. I've been around it my entire life. I've always felt artistic. So I made this portfolio that was really corny. It was called Swings. And it was portraits of just random people on swing sets. My whole family posed for me, which was very generous. And I got into, I got into Parsons

as the only school I got into. And I got there and I felt I immediately had a little bit of a target on my back because Steve Madden's niece is in fashion school. Of course she cheated her way in, which is a paranoia that still follows me with everything I do, that I didn't earn this thing. I have to prove it in a new way. So I started going by a new name in college, and I was just really bored in college. I realized just because I'm good at this thing, and just because I know it, it doesn't mean that's the thing I should do with my life. And so I think it was my first year of college when I was 18, 17, 18, I started taking these classes at night at Gotham Writers Workshop in New York City. Which for those who are not familiar, which is probably most of our

listeners, it's this sort of legendary institution in New York, which just offers this kind of a stunning catalog of writing courses for the general public. There are these, you call them the, on every street corner, the big yellow. Right, the little cubicles where you pull out the little, the thing and yeah. Yes. And I think I literally pulled out one of the pamphlets off on a street corner and it's like 1-800-WRITERS, something like that, or writers.com. And I signed up for these classes and I, they really, I mean, it's the corniest tale as old as time, but they changed my life. I started going to these classes and something clicked and something returned me to that moment of being a kid and writing these first stories on a typewriter of, oh my God, I can build these whole worlds and these worlds of stories exist outside the canon that I was taught in high school. My first teacher is this writer, Annie Wood, who's still my favorite writer and favorite teacher in the

world. And she introduced me to the work I still read, but she introduced me to the short story form, which is something I never read before. I had only read the novels assigned in school. And she read me, she introduced me to queer writers and writers of color and experimental writers. And I just didn't know this existed. And everything changed for me. And I enrolled in every class I could at Gotham, finally told my parents like, hey, I'm really into this. Hey, I'm going to not do this thing in the family business that could make me a huge sum of money. But I want to be a writer instead, maybe an author. So they took that really well. And I went to my school and I said, I don't want to study dresses anymore. I want to

study literature. And I had to write a petition about why I wanted to study literature. And they allowed me to double major at Eugene Lang and Parsons, which are both under the new school umbrella. And that allowed me to not reapply to college, but I could attend both design classes at Parsons. And I started taking Russian literature classes at Eugene Lang College. And the Russians, that's really where I found, like where I felt like I found my people and I found my stories. And the Russians, that's really where I found, like where I felt like I found my people and I found my stories. And I graduated as a literature and design double major. Yeah. Did you feel any less, I mean, in the name of fashion, in the world of fashion, the world of design, yes, there's sort of like the immediate question about your last name.

In the world of writing, did you feel that that kind of question went away? Or do you feel like it's still dug to you? Yes, so Jordan Belfort was, I think he had just published The Wolf of Wall Street. And there was always this kind of buzzing expectation that maybe somebody would write a rebuttal or somebody would have a response. And I was really just, I was really scared to be associated with my family at that time. And I think I don't, I don't say that to be, to be rude to my family, but I think being at Parsons, I really wanted to make that, that strong. I didn't want to make shoes. I really was interested in clothing and apparel. And I just didn't want the association. And the association then was still about crime and him

coming back to the business. And I was also just a kid. I could be my own person. I don't have to just be a man. And so with the writing, that was my biggest fear. I didn't want anyone to ever feel like I was going to be writing about that. I was a fiction writer interested in writing these kind of gothic, weird, really kind of silly stories at that time. But I didn't want to write about my family ever. I didn't want to write about Steve Madden. I didn't always want to be the person who was Steve Madden's niece. And still, if you were to meet me outside of this interview, that's the last thing I'll ever tell a person about myself. People always find out, well, now that the book's out, people know. But before that point,

people would be friends with me for a long time before hearing it from somebody else. And I always feel a little bit bashful and embarrassed about it, truly. But I was scared that that would follow me into this new thing I wanted to do that felt so much like mine. And so I used this fake name that I came up with as a teenager. It was Vesper T. Woods. And my first stories for maybe five years after that point were all published under this name. So my earliest, I shouldn't have even told you the name because now people can find my early writing.

But I only published under this name, even the school literary magazine, which is my first publication. It's called 12th Street Journal from the new school. I published under this fake name. So the people I literally went to school with didn't know that I had written this piece. And because I wanted that writer identity to be completely severed from my family. Yeah. What made you decide it was time to step back into your true name? Was it just a gradual shift and time had passed or did something happen? It was a friend of mine named Daniel Long, who's a very talented writer. And at some point, he just said, I think it's time you wear your own hat or something like that. And I don't know,

I really trusted him. He was an editor and writer I really believed in at the time I met him in graduate school. And in the moment he said that, I was already thinking about it. What would it feel like to just write as me? What would it feel like to stop trying to balance these two little presences on the internet and publishing under this one? And do I show my family? It's too much. I've had too many identities in my life, too many secrets already. So why not just try to be me and see if me is enough associated to the shoe family or not? I think people can read my work and feel like it has nothing to do with it. It really doesn't. And, you know, there's a reason that my uncle's name doesn't

appear in my book. And that was a hard line to when I found an agent and a publisher that I wasn't going to write that story. Yeah, because I'm sure they would want to try and leverage that in the marketing and all sorts of like that, because it's sort of like it's a media hook. Mm-hmm. The Apple Watch Series X is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch,

getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman.

I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him.

Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk. What was it like the first time that you're out, you've already been writing for years, the very first time something is about to come out under your name? And you're like, okay, so this is now, this is me. This is T, Kira, Madden, all mine. Like this is my writing. This is all associated with me.

And the world is about to see that associated just with me and this one true identity. I think it felt really vulnerable. It still does. It still does. And names are something I think about all the time. My name is really confusing to a lot of people. They don't know what to call me. And I just got married in January. So there were so many conversations about what does the name

really mean? And do you want to take my name? Do I want to take yours? What about our children, our hypothetical children? So I've been thinking about this a lot and what it means and what it means is my pen name now, if I change my name in the future. And I don't know, but it feels vulnerable and it feels scary, but it feels good, I think, to own my stories. Yeah. And I mean, also just like the psychic energy

of being able to show up as one identity. I mean, yes, we're all complex and we all have multiple facets, but just to kind of know, like everything points to this one thing now. So when I go out into public, like this is it. I wonder if there's just even a bit more lightness to that or is it more heaviness because now it truly is sort of like you as you referenced that there's

the vulnerability where people like and it really is associated with your it's really true identity vulnerability is something that feels good to me i would say because that's not the way I was raised. And, you know, my father was this like, really larger than life figure with a major temper. And my mother, you know, my book opens with my mother literally shooting somebody out of our window. She's just both of them were these kind of no bullshit people. And vulnerability is not something either one of them taught me. They've taught me many beautiful things. That's not one of them. And so to really feel like myself and not shadowed by anything else, that feels good to me. That feels like an act of service and rebellion against this, the way I could have been perhaps.

Yeah. If that makes any sense. No, absolutely. So you end up in Sarah Lawrence. You come out. You're writing. 27 is a big year for you. Your dad passes.

Your childhood house burns to the ground. This is a lot of struggle. You find yourself in a writing residency, and I guess ostensibly to work on a novel, to work on fiction, because that's what you do. You're a quote fiction writer. That's what you've studied. That's what you've been doing. And somehow in this residency, the fiction's not coming, but short pieces, essays, nonfiction about your family do come, which is that surprising for you? Yes. Because of that early memoir class that I referenced, which is a Gotham class,

and that was just because fiction classes were full or something, I ended up in this class. And I was told that the instructor was wonderful, but the students, they were, they were largely older students writing about parents who had passed and parents with Alzheimer's. And again, there was just this, this kind of scolding of what are you doing here? You don't know anything. And then when I was at, when I was at Eugene Lang and I studied literature, I also wrote, there was a class I took with a super successful writer and it was kind of an auto fiction class. So we were supposed to write things that were based on our lives in a way or influenced or I don't know, that's a term I still struggle with a little bit. And I wrote a piece that was really memoir, and I called it fiction, as many people do. And it was about visiting my mother in rehab for the first time. And the teacher, who I will not name, she wrote back, nobody would ever believe this. Nobody thinks this way, and this would never

happen. And these were the comments and all the marginalia. And again, for the second time, I just felt so embarrassed. Like, okay, my fiction really needs to take place in outer space or like other places. And they did. My fiction stories were really, they still are really out there. There's usually some magical element and it's just exaggerated everything, exploded ideas. And so I got to this residency to work on this queer novel I'm still writing. And yeah, all of a sudden my dad starts kind of showing up in the pages in ways that really surprised me.

And it felt like, I think it's a Maggie Nelson saying that there's sometimes a boulder in front of the things that you want to write, but you have to write the boulder first. And it felt like my boulder that he just kept appearing. And I just finally, you know, there's a lot of time in residency. So I finally just allowed myself to do it, to just see what happened. And I think I was under contract to write a piece with the theme of Valentine because Valentine's Day was coming up or something. And I was thinking about my first Valentine and I thought, oh yeah, I used to have this mannequin living in my house as a stand-in for my father. That's kind of interesting. So I wrote about this mannequin. I started writing about grief. I started writing about,

I think, collected dates with my father was one of the earliest pieces, which is now part of the book, which are just these fragments of these dates that we had. We were supposed to have Sunday dates where my father was asked to be sober on Sundays, but he wasn't. And so for example, one Sunday, he takes me literally to a bar and we watch football and I ended up having a drink and it made him take me home. So I wrote these vignettes about these dates that we had up until the point of his death, because he did eventually get sober and we did you know forge this really beautiful adult relationship with each other with a much deeper understanding of one another so i tried to track that through time and at the same time at that

residency um the a person who had sexually assaulted me as a child had reached out to me in the same moment. And so as I'm kind of dipping a toe into nonfiction, I thought, let me record this, whatever is happening here too. And so I left that residency after a month or two with, I think it was about 85 pages of nonfiction that I didn't know what to do with, but it was just something that happened in this weird kind of dreamscape of grief. So very unexpected. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting hearing, we had Stephanie Dantler on the podcast recently, who had a really remarkably similar experience. She writes Sweet Bitter. She considers herself a fiction writer, a novelist. She's under contract with Knopf for her second book. She goes back to California and she starts doing is writing about her upbringing, writing about her mom, writing about her dad,

and writing about a really tough relationship. And that ends up, at some point she realizes, okay, so this second book actually is not going to be a novel. This is going to be the book which just released, right? Which is a series of sort of essays that she first tested as a long form essay about her dad a couple of years earlier, actually, that appeared in Vogue. And then the response was so powerful that eventually turns out stringing all these different pieces of writing together into a book, which is a memoir, which there's some really remarkable similarities in

sort of like what happened with both of you. Yeah. Yeah. I can't wait to read that book. I love her writing. Yeah. Same here. Really beautiful. Those eventually end up turning into a book, Long Live the Tribe of Fodderless Girls, which goes out into the world. Beautifully received, beautiful writing, amazing storytelling. And it's interesting too, because I feel like you can see, even though this is quote memoir, you know, and slash under the nonfiction category, it feels like your passion for and your craft for fiction so informed this that even though the stories that are told are so outrageous very often that it really, you almost feel like this is fiction. of novel storytelling, of flash fiction and like fast, energetic writing to memoir makes it feel almost like it's not memoir, that there's in the beginning of my teaching, I would tell people, like, don't tell anybody if something is based on your life, or don't, don't talk about it.

Because then if you say, no, this really happened, people will feel like, oh, I can't critique the thing. And now, you know, I take a different approach. Now, I think the process of genre of saying I'm writing, I'm committing to a memoir, that's really important because it opens up a completely different dialogue and a really different interaction with the world. fiction, they all, they all come from the same toolbox to me. And I think, I think students, especially are at a disservice when they're told, you know, nonfiction looks this way and fiction looks this way. And, you know, nonfiction must sound more like reporting or journalism in this, you know, there's this preconception that that can be kind of dry, and it's just this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened, when really, that's not true. And I, again, I didn't, I didn't find my canon until later. And that goes for memoir as well. And I started reading these memoirs. And I was like, oh,

they don't traditional, they don't, what is tradition? They don't look the way that I thought a memoir had to look. They don't necessarily span a life because there and they don't have to have an ABC plot. They can be fragmented. They can be out of order. They can be broken. And in fact, fragmentation is really helpful for writing about trauma. So I started learning through reading all of these books of, oh, I can do anything. I don't, because I never thought I had a memoir on my hands. I thought I had maybe an essay collection, maybe, but I was still querying agents with my novel, not this other thing. When I did find my agent, she had two stacks on her desk.

She had my novel and she had these essays and she's like, this is the book. This is the book that has energy and charge. And I don't think it's an essay collection. I think it's a memoir. But again, I didn't know a memoir could look that way. So in a way, it's kind of a roundabout way of saying I'm happy I came from a fiction background before writing that book. And I'm happy I didn't really know what I was doing. And it felt so accidental because I applied everything I knew about fiction

writing in terms of world building and dialogue and character and pacing to this other book of this other genre. Whereas if I said, I'm going to write a memoir today, it would probably be this really false kind of saran wrapped, really traditionally structured thing that I thought at that moment in time, a memoir should be. And so I always want people to push into what they know what their interests are, when in terms of reading and writing. For me, I was, I'm obsessed with the plays of Samuel Beckett. So for me, my book takes on a similar form as Crap's Last Tape, which is a Beckett play. I'm obsessed with Hawaiian mythology. The last third of it uses Hawaiian myths, and it weaves in a way that feels structurally similar

to the myths of my books that I grew up with. So I use these things that I love. And I just tried to use those frameworks as models rather than, you know, plugging, plugging myself into what I thought memoir capital M should be. I love this sort of, I feel like there's this evolution of writing and the blending of everything. And, and the rules are sort of, you know, I feel like for almost a couple of generations, there were certain rules that you just followed where like, it's this type of thing, it's this type of writing, it's this type of thing. Here are the four different types of structure you can choose from now fill in the gaps. And I feel like that's all being blown up really in the last five or 10 years. It's just complete. Everyone's trying everything, which on the one hand, I'm

super excited by. I think it's, you know, the constraints and the limitations have been lifted in so many different ways. On the other hand, I'm also fascinated by why those structures were put in place to begin with. And a lot of it has to do with the fact that, you know, human psychology wants to hear a certain set of circumstances told in a certain way for the brain to translate that as, okay, I have everything I need for me to feel complete, for me to feel I've gone through the narrative arc of whatever has to happen and I feel good. And it's kind of interesting to me because on the one hand, if you follow those structures,

you know, you can kind of check the boxes and know that everything that has to be there is there. But on the other hand, the magic of being able to create that same experience in a reader or a viewer, whatever it is, by completely blowing up all the rules and still landing in the same place as a creative person, as a person who loves to sort of explore boundaries, that's much more interesting and exciting to me, but also more risky. Well, not everybody loves my book. You know, I do read all the reviews and the Goodreads feedback, things that I'm not supposed to read. And some people say like, I can't, I can't follow this, you know, it jumps around in time too much. And for me, this was after restructuring that book into something that feels really easy for me, because I would prefer everything to be out of order and more fragmented. But I really tried to stick to the three act structure. I thought a lot about

Beckett again, and with Crabb's Last Tape, like what does it mean to have a central conflict be between past, present, and future version of the self rather than necessarily antagonists coming from everywhere? And so I thought about that structurally of the three, past, present, future, how those things could be at odds in terms of tense, something as simple as tense in the book, because there is no central conflict in the way that some memoirs have the central major dramatic question. So it is, I think, risky. And I think there's nothing wrong with a reader or a viewer of movies to want the comfort of the familiar plot. I think there's nothing wrong with that. I think it is

comforting to know what you're in for and to kind of settle into what we know, the rising action, the climactic moment, bad guys coming in, and then we fail or we prevail. That's a beautiful plot. Does it make sense for my life? No. I think it doesn't make sense for many people's lives who are writing nonfiction. So why jam it into the hero's journey? That doesn't make sense to me. And I think we can recalibrate our desires when we approach a new piece of

work, when we see, Oh, this isn't going to give me that, like I can see from page two, that this is, you know, the sequencing is different, the language is different, whatever it is, the spacing on the page looks different. So let me think about what this is trying to achieve. And maybe even if I don't like it, whatever that means, it can still teach me or inform something about myself and what I want out of story or what I don't want or what confrontations of self I want

or don't want. Yeah. I mean, I feel like you almost have to recalibrate the notion of the payoff. You know, is it this thing that you're setting up the whole time to finally get to this point where you're like, oh, that's it. I'm so glad I've invested all of this energy because it was worth it. Versus, well, what if it drips out and little bits along the way? What if the payoff is actually the feeling that you get when you're present to each little vignette along the way? And when you're done, it's not necessarily this big awakening or this big aha, but you're kind of like, that felt good. And I think it's a rewiring. I think for a Western mind, it's a weird

thing. That's so beautifully said. Yeah. I think about setup and payoff a lot in terms of this alternate, I don't want to say alternate structure, but a new way of thinking about it, especially in terms of I'm obsessed with really short pieces, like what they call flash, which I think is kind of silly, but you know, you don't have room for that, that plot structure. You have room for setup and payoff, which can happen within a sentence. So I'm trying to identify that thing always, but I like the idea that the payoff could be the consistent thing, the current through the whole piece, like hardwicked sleepless nights. That's something that's just an experience that you settle into and the payoff is in every moment

rather than the end, whatever that looks like. Yeah. I mean, I'm, I'm increasingly, I'm seeing that structure showing up also in, in, uh, in TV also a little bit more these days too, and a little bit in film and I'm fascinated by it. One of the things that's been a through line that you seem to return to also beyond writing and your sort of a devotion to the, the culture and the ideas around magic is photography. And I know if you look on your website, you know, that was something where you said you started out in the early days with your beautiful portfolio for Parsons of your family on swings. It seems like that's still a part of you. And I'm curious, actually, I was looking at some of the stuff that you have available. It looks like you shoot film.

Yeah, I only shoot film. It's something I actually haven't been taking pictures in quite a while now, which makes me feel sad. But that's just because the writing has taken off a little bit. And I've been really committed to that. And if I'm not home and I'm not able to develop film and kind of work with the film, it's just not something I can take with me on the road as much. I've always loved film photography and I've always really loved double exposures and multiple exposure work for the same reason.

I think I love writing and magic. It feels like a magic trick again, when you have these multiple images overlapping and I love distressed films and again the surprise always interested in the surprise I've always loved portraiture so that's that's really what I try to do is these multiple exposure portraits of people and trying to trying to convey different different angles of personality within the same frame is always the goal for me, which is, I would say, the same goal for my writing. How much, if you zoom the lens out and you look at these various different passions and crafts that you've played with over a period of decades now, do you have a sense for whether the larger driver is the creative, expressive side of it or the way it makes people feel when they interact with it?

That's a great question. answer is very sincerely both because I think I'm someone who wasn't able to and I'm still not able to communicate in the ways I wish I could sometimes and as a kid especially a kid in that kind of family you're not you know your your version of the story or your version of the truth or the feeling is always second guessed. I think people who grow up in households of substance abuse disorders are often gaslit in a way that I felt like I was. If I have a version of what happened last night, the next day, it's like, that didn't really happen because you can do that with kids, but you can't because I knew it happened. And so writing, especially as a shy person, writing was the first time I was

able to articulate the stories I had lived, the stories I wanted to tell. And only later in life, you know, as an adult in the past few years, being able to have that message received and believed, more importantly believed. And then to have the other side of the art that has shaped my life. And it sounds like it also meshes really beautifully with one other thing, which is an outgrowth of you, the No Tokens Journal, which is this thing that you co-founded and editor-in-chief. The mission statement for that resonates so powerfully. I'm going to read it, actually. When you go to the website, it says, felt in the spine. We are run entirely by women and non-binary individuals dedicated to featuring the words and artwork of all voices of the past, present, and future. We're here to keep the story. We're here to keep stories alive. We're here to make a physical object to hold in your hands.

We are paying attention. That sounds like you. Thank you. Yeah, all of those things mattered. And people tease mission statements of literary magazines a lot because we're always trying to come up with new ways of like, we want work that'll rock our world, that'll rattle us. And the language can get a little bit ridiculous, but I was always moved by the Nabokov idea of, you know, what, what's the telltale tingle of the spine? What's the chill that you can't understand. And that's, you know, circling back to our conversation about how does it happen?

How did that work? How is it done? That's the thing for me that I'm always trying to, to dig out, to push on is that moment of chill that sneaks up on you. That doesn't feel obvious. It's not the plot turn. That's an obvious move, but the thing in a sentence or the image that just makes you go, ah. And so that's, that was our way of trying to word that that's what we're looking for.

The things that pack that surprise, that chill. And yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, it's- I wrote that a long time ago. I know, but it's amazing because that, what was that 10 years ago or something like that? Yeah. Right?

And it seems so still resonant with just the way you bring yourself to the world now and what your value set is and what your lens is on creativity and expression and impact it's paying attention yeah and all of it really it's really powerful to be able to say okay so 10 years ago this was that created and it is still it's almost like it was a leading indicator of where you would land yeah yeah that's a nice idea yeah paying. Paying attention is really important to me. I think artists are noticers above all else.

It's not understanding punctuation as much as what do you notice in your daily life? Do you notice somebody's hands? Do you notice the way people speak? How can you amplify that to be the thing that you bring to the page. And I think the chill we feel when we read the work that moves us is seeing how we're being reminded that other people notice the same things we notice. And that is the thing that feels like an inside joke through space and time, through literature, through art. That's what I love. That's the magic.

Yeah, that's the magic. Feels like a good place for us to come full circle as well. So hanging out here in this container of the good life project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? to live a good life is to be, to be open, to, to be tuned into the small noticings of the world, to be open to the world,

to, and to be open to the surprise. I know that's a lot of what I already said, but that's how I try to live my life. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening. And thanks also to our fantastic sponsors who help make this show possible. You can check them out in the links we have included in today's show notes. And while you're at it, if you've ever asked yourself, what should I do with my life? We have created a really cool online assessment that will help you discover the source code

for the work that you're here to do. You can find it at sparkotype.com. That's S-P-A-R-K-E-T-Y-P-E dot com. Or just click the link in the show notes. And of course, if you haven't already done so, be sure to click on the subscribe button in your listening app so you never miss an episode. And then share, share the love.

If there's something that you've heard in this episode that you would love to turn into a conversation, share it with people and have that conversation. Because when ideas become conversations that lead to action, that's when real change takes hold. See you next time. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever.

It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required.

Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg.

You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk.