Natalie Kusz, author of Road Song, teaches at Eastern Washington University, where she is known for using her bra as a purse, loading it with phone, keys, reading glasses, cigarettes and lighter, and the occasional spill-proof coffee cup. She has also taught at Bethel and Goddard colleges and Harvard and Queens universities, where she didn’t reveal the bra secret and was merely known as lumpy.
1. What writer do you want to be when you grow up?
Do I have to be just one?! I want to be Joan Didion for her voice, Vivian Gornick for her searing insight, Lillian Hellman for her wicked ways with the flash-forward.
2. What’s your favorite thing you’ve ever written?
My favorite is usually the most recent thing I’ve written, as long as it included one of those gratifying moments where you find the unpredictably right word or phrase, the moment where you get to think it was brilliance and not grace that led you there. I suppose that makes my first and only book, Road Song, my favorite overall work, because it went on long enough to make for many such moments.
3. Who do you trust with your drafts and why?
I’ll have to confess that I don’t show anyone my drafts before they reach an editor’s desk. At my teaching job, I agonize over asking a colleague to do the classroom observation I’m required to have periodically, and I feel exactly the same about asking for a critical reading. It seems like an unthinkable favor to ask, when eventually it will go, anyway, to an editor who is paid to read it.
4. What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever gotten?
Poets in general, the ones I’ve observed through the process of one or more poems, have taught me everything about the superpowers of language. If I had to put the “advice” into statement form, I might say, “Don’t settle.” The word or word order that first occurs to you is almost never the best one, the one with the greatest number of implications. Or that might be the phrasing of the advice: “Write for implications, not for dictionary definitions.”
5. What’s your go to recommendation to read when somebody says “I’m not sure about this whole nonfiction thing?” Why? What do you hope it shows them? What about it excites you?
This is a smart question, because it almost predicts how my recommendations usually come with some verbal instructions on how to read; I try to pick something that the reader will be drawn to and then give her a little leg up on how to be drawn. Often I’ll suggest Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, telling my friend that this book has both self-based and other-based essays, so it can cater to many tastes. In both types of essays, it tends to start with the larger environment around its subject—the horrific weather patterns among which a crime took place, the life circumstances around a personal decision to relocate—so that we see right off how context is sometimes cause, or is at least part of the explanation for many things in the world.
Keep Reading
Annie Penfield, “Moving Towards What is Alive: The Power of the Sentence to Transform,” Assay 4.2
John Proctor, “Nothing Out of Something: Diagramming Sentences of Oppression,” Assay 5.1
Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies 