Rebecca Solnit & Alexander Chee
By: Bookable Podcast
Tags: Feminism, Gardening, Writing, Authors, Podcast

Bookable

Rebecca Solnit & Alexander Chee

Alexander Chee and Rebecca Solnit explore the topics of writing and activism to seeds and gardening in Bookable’s first bonus episode Bookable Podcast Dec 23, 2020·21 min read

Photo courtesy of Bookable

Listen in on authors Alexander Chee and Rebecca Solnit as they explore the topics of writing and activism to seeds and gardening in Bookable’s first bonus episode.

The authors of Bookable have the most amazing friends. We wondered what would happen if we asked a former Bookable guest to choose an author they admire and interview them. In our first bonus episode, Alexander Chee talks to Rebecca Solnit. Writer, historian, and activist Solnit is the author of more than twenty books on feminism, western and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and disaster, including her latest book, just out, entitled Recollections of My Nonexistence.

I’m Amanda stern and this is Bookable.

On today’s show, you are getting a bonus. We’re excited to bring you the first of several planned bonus episodes. Each one will feature a Bookable guest talking to a writer they admire.

We’re kicking off these episodes with two beloved writers, Alexander Chee and Rebecca Solnit in conversation from their respective homes during the first of likely many stay-at-home orders. They discuss Rebecca’s groundbreaking essays, and her eagerly anticipated new book entitled, “Recollections of My Non-existence.”

I’ve listened to this conversation three times now, and I’m fairly confident you’ll love it just as much as I do. So without further ado, I give you Alexander Chee in conversation with Rebecca Solnit.

Alexander:

Hello?

Rebecca:

Hello.

Alexander:

This is Alexander Chee, author of most recently, ‘“How to Write an Autobiographical Novel,” and I am speaking to Rebecca Solnit for the Bookable podcast and this sort of very special episode. Rebecca, do you want to introduce yourself?

Rebecca:

Yeah, this is Rebecca Solnit. Thrilled to be talking with Alexander Chee and we’ll be talking in part about my newest book, “Recollections of My Non-existence,” a memoir quite different, particularly in skill level, because I can’t do the things Alexander did in his.

Rebecca:

Somebody once asked me whether I was going to write fiction, and novels are always sort of held up to me as like the apex of the pyramid I’m surely scaling. And I said, well, given that I don’t really do plot, characters, and dialogue, which seems like you could do a novel without those things, but generally they have those things, and your memoir had wonderful dialogue, and the chapters really kind of read like short stories and wonderful suspense and revelation and all this stuff that felt skillful in ways that are very different than an essayist’s memoir.

Alexander:

Hmm. Thank you. I really appreciate that. I think you’re selling yourself a little short. But I think it is true that if you are a fiction writer, it’s interesting to think of how scenes in nonfiction are a little forbidden, or at least not the obvious tool for the essayist, for the memoirist in the same way it might be for fiction writer. I wonder if you want to talk about any of your own struggles with this book?

Rebecca:

I’ve always felt for an essayist ideas are the characters and in the same way that plot is how you explore who a character is. There’s something more introspective and speculative where you take your idea on a walk and put it through its paces and you draw on history and examples of things. Although of course, what immediately comes to mind is Ocean Vuong, saying earlier this year in conversation with Tommy Orange, that plot is a wood chipper into which we throw characters. Which I found very bracing in its own way.

Rebecca:

But I think there is a sense, in really good ways, with your memoir and some memoirs in which some of the devices of fiction are used to kind of evoke and set scenes and reconstruct dialogue and things like that. I think there is a slippery slope where people think stuff has to read like fiction and then end up fictionalizing the finite amount of what we can know and remember from what happened to us and around us to create things that will read like novels.

Rebecca:

And I’ve always been interested in, so what do you do when you’re writing? and you’re not totally sure what happened or there’s conflicting versions. What do you do about something that can’t be recounted in following, et cetera? And of course, I think in the more interior way, I write where it’s just narrative of what I remember what happened. You don’t face those things quite at the same way as people who want dialogue and things like that. So though I stand by all the things I said happened in my book, I’m also a historian.

Alexander:

I love that idea of ideas as the characters in essays. Ideas, I think, are also the plot of essays in that sense. That’s how you came to the idea, how the idea may or may not have changed you or how you may have changed the idea. I remember someone saying to me that the plot of most essays is, “I used to think this, and now I think this.”

Rebecca:

I think it could also be that an idea’s like our young hero, sort of forward into the dangerous world and being tested in the ways that fairy tale and novel characters are tested. One of the things I did in a pandemic is for four weeks, I told fairytales on Facebook live because they felt like the right kind of story. And there are these young, relatively powerless characters who face these intents or deals and have to climb the glass mountain or retrieve a feather from the tail of the firebird or sift a mountain full of grain, or to gold before morning. And in a sense that you take an idea and it’s like, does this idea survive this encounter with fascism and does it survive this encounter with this philosophical analysis? Does it survive this encounter? Or what does it do in this encounter with difficult personal experience?

Rebecca:

So it’s kind of does idea work in these varied circumstances you explored in some ways. But also I think less often the idea evolves with you. You’re tested together because ideas you, and one of the really interesting things for “Recollections of My Non-existence,” is when I wrote the essay and explain things to me in 2008, I said credibility as a basic survival tool, which came to feel for a long time, like the crucial sentence in that essay. And then I realized, wow, it’s not a tool because you hold a tool in your own hands. And credibility is something people give her withhold from you often categorically. We know who’s most likely to believed in courtrooms around race, gender, sexual orientation class, immigrant status, et cetera, that some people have more credibility than others. And so, as we’ve seen with the Weinstein case and so many others can override other people’s voices. And it was really interesting realizing, coming to understand the nature of credibility a little better, and what was wrong with that sentence from 2008, as I wrote this book for 2020.

Alexander:

Would you describe that essay as like a turning point for you?

Rebecca:

Not really. I mean, it was externally and I had been talking about violence against women as a rights issue since I did a cover story for the Punk magazine Maximum Rock and Roll in 1985 about violence against women when I was really young. Half of which I could write now, and half of which is messy. And I felt like it was the same stuff I’d been talking about all along, but I shifted. And maybe in that was what was significant. I shifted from talking about physical violence to psychic violence, the discrediting silencing excluding of some voices and how consequential that is for physical violence. And I believe that the physical violence we see against women in particular could not exist without violence against voices.

Rebecca:

Probably to take him as an example, Harvey Weinstein would not have assaulted any woman in a world in which he knew they had as much credibility and audibility as him and the very first woman he assaulted could go to the authorities, be treated with respect, believe to the extent of having her story investigated corroborated and him being sent to jail for committing a felony crime.

Rebecca:

But he counted on a grotesque anti-gay quality of voices to perpetrate his things. So it might’ve been shifting from physical to metaphysical violence. But it felt consistent with what I’d been doing. Like my book Wanderlust, my history of walking, where I talked about lack of women’s access to public space as a issue of equality, democracy, freedom, and the freedom to have imaginative space for writers, thinkers, seekers, and et cetera. But the response to the course was intense. And it did definitely give me a lot of visibility and a position in feminism to keep saying stuff about feminism and gender and violence and voices for which I’m grateful.

Rebecca:

But you must know happens where like the world changes in response to you in some way, but you don’t feel like you’ve become a different person or that you’ve done anything different. You’re like, “Hi, I’ve been here for a while. Nice to see you.

Alexander:

Well, I think that’s exactly what I was going to probably ask you next. So you sort of have saved me from asking you about it, But the title alone is one of those moments that made me think of Laurie Anderson’s language as a virus statement. The way in which the piece, but also the idea. It’s so succinctly described a certain kind of toxic masculinity and the relationship to it. Before you even get into the essay itself and what the essay does. It was a really incredibly powerful arrow that flew out into the culture and seem to summon a great response that I think we’re still in, in a sense. I wonder if you have any thoughts about?

Rebecca:

One of the thing that’s so interesting to me is that the language we have in English and in this culture so much in the language of individualism, I personally and alone wrote that essay in 2008. But it resonated because people were ready to hear it. Something I’ve written about recently is that the wonderful and amazing gratitude Berg is by far from the first young climate activists to speak up about the issue. Why was it that two years or so ago the world was so much more ready to hear from an impassioned in idealistic young person than they were when dozens of other young people came forward. What are the mysteries that elevate and amplify a speaker, a voice, an essay, a statement, an idea. It’s something that’s so interesting to me. For example, I did a lot of work investigating the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in new Orleans, 15 years ago. The term mutual aid at that point felt like something really used by anarchists and people very involved in social theory and political organizing.

Rebecca:

Now there’s probably a thousand mutual aid groups in the UK. Well over that in the U S and the word mutual aid is in the mainstream. How did that word or that phrase, since it’s two words, how did that phrase migrate? Why was Gretta the right one at the right time? And that goes back to why was my essay? Why did it get so much response then I think it did talk about something that hadn’t been talked about before, the kind of verbal violence of constantly being discredited and treated as incompetent to speak whether about your field of expertise or the dangerous thing that just happened or is happening to you on an ongoing basis, like your husband trying to kill you.

Rebecca:

So it always feels that it’s systemic when something like that happens to me and it’s interesting just how, I think we’re going to talk about gardening soon, how some seeds fall on fallow ground and some on fertile ground. And it’s partly the ground. And that’s always part of what’s so interesting to me about how ideas move through the world. That it is mysterious and unpredictable, and sometimes they have an impact right away, but sometimes not although the impact is indirect but matters anyway. And which is funny, cause I’m always trying to value indirect consequence because so much it is, but here’s a piece I did that had very direct consequence, including the coining of the term mansplaining by some lovely anonymous person online who I wish would step forward and take her credit.

Alexander:

So I guess the next question I have for you is then in terms of ground and gardening and the like, does this memoir, “Recollections of My Non-existence,” in some way, come out of this newfound, or it’s not so new anymore, but this visibility that you have now, like a way of meditating on what came before this?

Rebecca:

It felt like it was a good time for it. One thing is because of the feminist work, a lot of young woman pay attention to my work, and I just feel for them. They’re still undergoing these terrible struggles to be treated as full human beings, possessed of the right to self-determination and the right to an opinion, the right to pursue their own wellbeing rather than pander to every random males who comes along and et cetera. But a huge influence for me came about 20 years ago when Barry Lopez wrote a very powerful piece that was about being raped over a long period by a family friend posing as a doctor. But it was more than that. It was also what saved him in that terrible passage of his childhood, the wide open space, the freedom, the passenger pigeons he would chase on his bicycle as they flew back to the coop. He kept them in. Or not passenger pigeons, homing pigeons, passenger pigeons are extinct.

Rebecca:

And there was a generosity of spirit about that essay. Often, I feel that memoirs are written in the spirit of something exceptionally terrible happened to me and that gives me the grounds to tell a story. And part of what Barry did was to acknowledge that actually the kind of suffering he endured is not unusual. It’s widespread, it’s almost common. And also to talk about how he survived and it felt because he’s such an amazing and important writer to me and many others to hear it from somebody who actually at that point was mature and whose life had not stopped. Because we also often talk about when something terrible and traumatic happens to you, you’re like a broken vessel limping along. That you will never be good again in any way.

Rebecca:

And you can still suffer terribly and be damaged and not be who you would have been otherwise. But also write a book like “Arctic Dreams,” is buried dead. So that essay was also a huge impact on how I thought about these things, but also another fact. So I wanted to reach out to young woman and say, yeah, this shit happens. But I also felt we’re at a point in the discussion about violence against women, where we were still talking as though either something exceptionally terrible happens to you or it doesn’t and what nobody was talking about. And I hadn’t talked about adequate, so I was writing much more kind of objective political essays. Is the way, even if you’re not the target of some exceptionally gruesome violence, just to live in a world as gay men do as black people do as so many people do where you’re targeted, where even if it hasn’t happened, horrific life ending violence could happen to you because of your category has a huge impact on you.

Rebecca:

And I wanted to write up particularly about that period, where I was trying to become someone, trying to become a writer, trying to have a voice well facing, in my case, this constant harassment and menace on the street in an atmosphere of the intense violence of that period of the early eighties against women in generally. But facing violence that felt like it could annihilate me at any point in a world that didn’t want to have a conversation about violence against women, beyond the feminist circles that were out of range for me. So I really wanted to talk about how it gets into your psyche and what that does to you in a way that I didn’t see it talked about. And it felt like it was time to try and move the discussion towards that in some way.

Alexander:

I’m curious if there was a specific moment for you that triggered this book, or that brought about, like where did it come from?

Rebecca:

I had the title first and I just wanted to write about coexisting with the looming threat of your own annihilation as the norm for, I think, young woman in particular. And to describe the very specific task, I set myself to become a writer to become a professional public voice in a context of something ubiquitous for women all over the world, which are the forces that want you to be silent, to be nothing, to be subservient, to be literally incredible and to really just convey the impact of that. But also to convey, because I think, in a way I succeeded in that, like I have not yet been murdered and I have become a public voice to speak up for women’s rights since that was success for me, isn’t so much that I’m having a pretty nice life as a writer, but that a feminist movement arose around us to have that conversation I so desperately wanted and couldn’t find her instigate in the eighties, the nineties, or the first decade of this millennium.

Rebecca:

A conversation that really began, I believe in 2012 in earnest. And has really changed things a lot. We’re acknowledging things we didn’t acknowledge and it’s resulting in change. Laws, changed policies, changed consciousness, changed nature of reporting and so much more. And so I think it is a significant cultural shift that actually addresses this pandemic problem for women. But I wanted to write it in such a way that I acknowledge that this impacts all women, but women is not the only category of people who suffer people who are marginalized, people who face violence. It’s also a book about what I learned living in a black neighborhood, a short walk from the Castro district, a gay neighborhood that’s still a huge part of what I love about San Francisco still spend time in. And how much I also learned from gay men about refusing your gender role, how much I learned the native American land rights, struggle, and native American conversations. I was so lucky to become part of in the 1990s.

Rebecca:

So I really also wanted to talk about how we liberate each other and how important these liberation struggles can be for people beyond the official category addressed. And I’ve learned so much from black lives matter for example. And we were talking about a clear nation sticker. Maybe we should pick it up. It’s the greatest sticker ever made. Should we digress back to it?

Alexander:

Absolutely.

Rebecca:

Shall I just jump in?

Alexander:

Yeah. Just describe seeing the sticker.

Rebecca:

I think we were talking about that metaphor of some seeds falling on fertile ground and some on fallow ground, about gardening before. And do you remember when Clear Nation was? Because I know you were directly connected to them. I was just an enthusiastic onlooker with friends in it. It was early nineties, right?

Alexander:

Oh yes. It was 1990, I believe was where it began if not 1990, 1991. But I believe 1990 because I wrote about it and let’s see, 1990 was also the year the wall fell, right?

Rebecca:

1989, October, 1989. That was an affirmination that I feel has never gotten its due.

Alexander:

1989, then it was the summer of Clear Nation.

Rebecca:

Great. So, you know, and I had just mentioned this wonderful sticker, which I mentioned in the book that I saw all over San Francisco that says, “What causes heterosexuality?” And it was such a wonderful inversion of the old homophobic heteronormative, what causes homosexuality. And it just addressed in such a funny saucy punchy, concise way that heterosexuality is not only socially constructed, but something I think about a lot now, the co the obsessive constant enforcement of it, where you just want to say, “Hey, if heterosexuality is natural and inevitable, how come you constantly have to prevent boys from doing and wearing and saying, and feeling this? And girls from seeing and seeing, and wearing and doing that?” But it was so wonderful and, you know, I’ve never forgotten it. And so I was talking about how do you measure impact speaking of planting seeds? And here’s a sticker that I’m sure no physical example of it is up in San Francisco now, but now it’s in my book, which will have some circulation on other continents in another languages. And it had a huge influence on me.

Rebecca:

And so I, and so that’s so much part of the kind of stuff I tried write about and hope in the dark and write about now, how do you measure impact? I think it’s always important to acknowledge in some ways you can’t, because often the most important impacts are not the most immediate and quantifiable. And so here 31 years later is a sticker being discussed between two people who were somewhere around that sticker in its many and giving the joys and wonders and possibilities of that sticker and its message to whoever listens to this out there in the year 2020.

Alexander:

I was talking to some former students who were interested in activism about what they could do in this particular moment. And I did actually find myself recommending stickers and wheat pasting.

Rebecca:

Yeah.

Alexander:

The sort of way in which you can place an idea in an unexpected context and catch someone when they’re off guard. Say when like a BART door closes or a subway door or they’re walking down a street at night and the unguarded moment is what you’re after giving someone a moment to change their state in the way that you’re describing.

Rebecca:

One of the things that’s been really nice is people putting things in their windows. I know there’s rainbows in some places, I made some cutouts from my window on my neighbor’s window and might start distributing them. If people are into them. My nephews have a Teddy bear in their window. I think that’s what they’re doing in the East Bay. And I like this kind of breaking the muteness of houses with stuff like this, but that’s actually a really nice reminder as people look at what are the spaces in which we can still be active. And I think all of us get weary of the endless online mess of this pandemic quarantine time.

Alexander:

So are you gardening?

Rebecca:

With Gusto. And it’s really fun. I have just a tiny little city garden that gets finite sunlight because it’s between three story buildings. But I’m not complaining a lot of good stuff’s happening. And so I had herbs in a fig tree in a struggling Meyer lemon. And I’ve been planting stuff in because I’m there so much more, I’m noticing so much more. And that’s one of the upsides for me. And I want to first acknowledge that this is an intersectional crisis in which people are having really different experiences, whether they’re in financial free-fall, whether they’re sheltering in a comfortable place where they’re safe or a battered spouse or homeless, or just overcrowded. But I do live in an apartment in a four unit building. And I’m the gardener just part of what I was looking for when I came to this building.

Rebecca:

But just like there was, was it yesterday or the day before? Oh, yesterday — Thursday. So maybe it was Tuesday. I was there in the morning, afternoon and evening. So just seeing flowers that weren’t open in the morning were open in the evening roses that were still tight green buds were starting to show their color. And then I’ve planted forget me not seeds in one of those little six packs, you get starters in and Tuesday morning there was one tiny green dot, and these are seeds smaller than poppy seeds. And then by the end of the day, three of the six little compartments had dots. And now you can see tiny leaves. And just that sense of being deeply grounded, you know, in the literal sense of ground and dirt and earth and that quality of close attention that doesn’t feel available in the same way when we’re so much more dispersed in our energies has actually been really nice.

Rebecca:

And as somebody who’s done way too much kind of public speaking travel the last 20 years, just staying home and having something vaguely resembling a routine and time to do some things like garden a little bit more has been really good at the same time that I’m deeply distressed and preoccupied with the larger impact of the disease, the economic collapse and I think that emotional and spiritual crisis, the both of these posts for a lot of people. And anxiety and the isolation, all the other things going on. But I feel like what is calm and grounded-ness and centeredness and a comfortable place to work from good for, and it’s for addressing all these things.

Alexander:

I started a kitchen scraps garden almost immediately. And I did it because I was reading things back in early March about how this could possibly disrupt a food supply. And I was thinking about “Parable of the Sower,” by Octavia Butler, which I had just read and Lauren, the main character, is this incredibly inspiring young woman who she knows that her culture is about to fall down hard and she has started gathering knowledge that she thinks will help her survive. And one of the things that she reaches for immediately is seeds. And at time that feels foolish to be so happy about sprouts on a carrot. But it’s like free joy or something.

Alexander:

It costs me whatever, whatever the bag of carrots costs me. And now I get the sprouts. Now I know that I can eat the sprouts. I can use them to make like the chimichurri, or a pesto. I never knew that about carrot greens. I’m sort of having this whole re-evaluation of how the pattern of my life through thinking about turning these things that I used to throw away into a garden. And it’s been sane making amid all of the, just like the storm of broken dreams

Rebecca:

And love other people are using the phrase victory garden from World War II, because there has been intense garden activity all over. Partly because people recognize we’re probably going to have some food crises, but also because people are home. And I think like all the baking that this is a form of connecting, I kind of hate the term self-care, but there must be some euphemistic alternate. But this is a way to take care of yourself and the people around you and also to slow down. And I think at a time we can’t touch a lot of other people to really have something that’s also tactile and visceral and kind of immediate. I cook a lot and I’ve always felt as a writer, it’s cooking is so satisfying because it engages all the senses in ways that typing on a computer does not. And because the results are immediate and I know whether or not my pie is good. I don’t know whether or not my book is good or my essay or article is good.

Rebecca:

And I think gardening is also, it feels like one of the honest things in life. If you plant carrot seeds, you get carrots, not rutabagas. And just to be connected to the process. And we all know exactly how it works, but still to see a seed turn into a plant is kind of amazing. The happiest thing in my garden, the only surviving thing other than one garish hybrid rose that was here when I moved in seven years ago-

Alexander:

I love the garish hybrid rose. Sorry.

Rebecca:

What?

Alexander:

Oh, I love the garish hybrid rose, I was saying. Sorry, please.

Rebecca:

No, every rose is a wanted rose. But I was going to say, we have this prolific fig tree. And fig trees are magic. And I found this out when a friend’s brother died and somehow a fig tree became part of the story of a clipping from a fig tree that magically rooted in, turned into a tree. So I’m also routing slips from my prolific fig tree. And I’ve given away a lot. I actually started apricots from seed and just gave it away to apricot, saplings, to people with more sunlight and garden space than me. And one of the outcomes, I think possibly for me of this crisis is a deep yearning, which I’ve kind of always had, but it feels a little more urgent now to have more garden space. And so I’m not moving in the near future, but if, and when it’s earmarked to something I really want. I’ve always wanted to plant. I think, what was it, a lemon tree, a pomegranate tree, quince tree and apricot tree and a fig tree.

Rebecca:

And I’ve got a sad Meyer lemon, which now that it’s in the ground may grow up beyond its root bound life. And a Meyer lemon, formerly mine at my brother’s house from which I get fantastic lemons, but I do have this thriving fig tree. And so I’m part way there, but I want more. And it is really nice.

Alexander:

I think that’s a perfect place for us to conclude this, even though I wanted to keep talking to you. We are allotted time for this conversation.

Rebecca:

Yeah. Well, it’s such a pleasure. Thank you so much.

Alexander:

It’s a pleasure for me too.

Rebecca:

I look forward to more conversation about writing and gardening and roses and revolution and why all those things belong together.

Alexander:

Indeed. I want more too. Thank you.

Rebecca:

Thank you so much. Take care.

Thank you, Alex. And thank you Rebecca, for such an amazing conversation, Alexander Chi is the author of, “How to write an Autobiographical Novel.” It’s published by Mariner and is available now. Rebecca Solnit is the author of “Recollections of my Non-existence,” which is published by Biking and is also available now.

Bookable is a production of Loud Tree Media. I’m your host, Amanda Stern, five feet tall, which is tall for a bonus episode. We’re produced by me, Beau Friedlander and Andrew Dunn, who also mixes in sound design for show Beau is Loud Tree’s editor in chief. Find us on the web at bookablepod.com and subscribe and us five stars on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your shows. That’s one of the best ways for other listeners to find Bookable. We’re back next week with another episode. So we’ll see you then.

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