By Diamond Dees
A few of Sheree L. Greer‘s latest obsessions include coconut water, talking to strangers, waiting for Dexter and holding her collection of short fiction, Once and Future Lovers, in her hands. In addition to being a dedicated and passionate teacher and writer, she’s also an amazing live-performance reader. Sheree recently sat down with HYPERTEXT and waxed elegant about a few aspects of her writing process.
DD: How do you keep your writing voice authentic?
SG: I don’t really set out to have a particular voice in my work. I tend to let the characters speak how they speak, let the story come out the way it needs to come out. While I’m writing, I really give myself over to the vibe of it. It sounds hokey probably but I truly believe every story, every character has something it, he, she, they are trying to say. I can’t stifle it, or impose my will on it. Sometimes, and you can’t say this around non-writers too much or they’ll order you one of those special jackets to wear in a new padded room. I really do feel like a recorder. I just try to listen and get it right on the page.
My vocabulary isn’t something I single out as a goal. I read a lot and talk to a lot of different types of people and my vocabulary grows by the sheer virtue of those things. I don’t aim to use big words if the character or voice of the story doesn’t warrant it, and I find it clunky and irritating when people do it to “sound” a certain type of way. Being true to the voice of a character or story is just that, letting it come out the way it wants, imposing vocabulary can screw up the flow, the personality of the piece. Also, vocabulary is about more than just the words you use; it’s about learning new references, making new connections between words, and even finding new ways to use old, familiar words. Building a dynamic vocabulary to strengthen my writing just means reading, researching, and just seeking out new experiences and people.
DD: I’m currently in a non fiction writing class and I am having trouble with trying to tie memories together without it sounding false or choppy. While reading I Do My Own Stunts I see you are able to connect pieces of memories together so well. How do you write about memories so vividly and realistically?
SL: I Do My Own Stunts is a fiction story though it began with very clear memories from my own history of bicycles and falling down. Memory is great place to mine for story. The concept of finding story by remembering, or “recalling” to borrow from the workshop vocabulary, is something that really came alive for me in the Prose Forms course at Columbia College. When trying to discover what the story is about, it’s about finding the things in your memory that stand out the most, that take your attention as the writer. I can see each of my hand-me-down bikes in my mind’s eye. I can see them and see myself riding them. The other details get foggy or come to me fragmented, but that’s where the fun and challenge of fiction comes into play. Instead of trying to get the story’s truth with a small ‘t’ (the actual details, the exact details), I focused on the objects which were clear and put myself to work finding the story’s Truth with a capital ‘T.’ What is the Truth of these bikes? Of these experiences? The Truth is that I’ve never gotten a new bike, that I’ve fallen down a lot, that I’ve been hurt, that physical pain is temporary but emotional pain leaves scars that heal the slowest if at all. Trusting my memory is part one, trusting myself to push farther than memory is part two, the best part if you ask me.
DD: There are certain scenes in your stories that may be viewed as taboo. Have you always comfortable with not censoring yourself? How did you learn to not to censor yourself?
SG: I’ve never had a problem censoring myself in my writing. I think that’s a result of being an avid journaler. Most all my stories start in my journal. My journals are private, so I can say whatever I want and let the characters say and do whatever they want. The challenge, though, is going from journal to story. Leaving the security of my journal presents a dare almost: am I willing to put this out there? Am I willing to paint this picture, to share this feeling or attitude? Am I willing to create a record of this? Whether I’m writing nonfiction or fiction, there is still that element of Truth that comes through that shows the world a little bit about what I see, what I think, and what’s important to me in terms of story and character, which can be translated easily to what’s important to me in life and people. I get a little nervous sometimes. I feel raw and exposed sometimes. But I have to ask myself how important is it to tell this story the way it’s demanding to be told? How important is it for this character or story to do what it needs to do? And in the end there is no other way to do it: if I’m going to tell it, I have to tell it all the way. Things that matter to me, that really, really matter to me, get my all. My work is important to me and deserves everything I got. I can’t hide from the story. I won’t hide from it.
DD: Can you elaborate on the process of self-publishing?
SG: Writing is art and passion and all that, but it’s also business if you want to one day make a living at it, which I do. As an active writer who frequents conferences, open mics, literary festivals, and readings, I got tired of people asking me where they can find my work, did I have a book, am I published. I am published in anthologies, magazines, and journals, and I totally pub those when asked, but the stories I was reading and the pieces I was most proud of had no permanent home. Very early in my performances and appearances I would sell these ‘Tasty Treats’ which were one-page flyer-type excerpts of my work. I sold them for $1 or suggested donation. It went well. It gave people a chance to take my work with them, to have something. But, that wasn’t enough. A friend of mine, and fantastic novelist, Fiona Zedde, had recently begun working with eBooks and researching self-publishing as a way to offer her fans something to read while she was in-between traditional projects. She encouraged me to put out an eBook. I had the stories, so I made the time, and put Once and Future Lovers together as an eBook. I met a wonderful Public Relations agent named Michele Karlsberg at Saints and Sinners Festival in New Orleans shortly after the eBook’s release, and she gave me wonderful ideas for promoting my work. I put a lot of the ideas she shared and some of my own ideas (my business degree really comes in handy in this regard) to work and sold over 70 copies of Once and Future Lovers as an eBook. I took those proceeds and a grant I won from Astraea Lesbian Writer’s Fund and set out to publish a paperback copy in the next year. With more assistance from Fiona, who had recently published her novella, Nightshade, with Amazon’s CreateSpace affiliate, more support from friends and family, and the patient, attentive work of artist Sharon Norwood, who helped me with layout and cover design, I published the eBook as a paperback earlier this year. The process was tedious and frustrating at times, because I wanted it to be good. I needed it to be good. From there, I went back to the same hustle as with the eBook, promotions and social marketing, more appearances and readings, book salons and building networks. It’s hard work, but I love the way the book turned out. I love the response I’m getting from readers and audiences. It’s been really, really good. I feel like I got really got something that showcases my passion and love for this whole writing thing.
DD: What is your writing routine?
SG: I don’t know that I have a routine right now. The only regimented thing I’m able to manage right now is what I affectionately call my “Fiction Fridays.” I don’t teach on Fridays, so I reserve the day for working on creative projects. Other than that, I really write when I can, however I can. I push myself to make time when it seems I have none, and I remind myself to use my time wisely when I find space in my schedule. If I have a particular project, I actively wrestle out a few hours a day to devote to it. I’ve also given myself permission to think more inclusively about the kind of writing I do and enjoy doing. For example, taking the time out to write a post for my blog “Doing the Write Thing,” working on something for magazines like Hypertext or Everyday Gay, updating my website, sending a letter or card to a friend or lover, even coming up with witticisms and reflections for Twitter, Facebook, and the like have all become ways to feed my writing jones. I try to do something creative every day; sometimes it’s a new scene or revising a chapter, and other times it’s writing a love letter to my partner or reflecting on an article I’ve read. And I’m okay with that.
DD: Do you have any advice for writers that are struggling with their own writing?
SG: My advice to writers struggling with their writing is to stop fighting, stop struggling. Usually, the battle to write something good comes from some internal fight between what the story or characters are saying and what we think we want to say or what we think others want us to say. Forget all that. Stop it. Give yourself over to the work and write the damn thing already. The struggle isn’t the writing, that’s the easy part. The real work comes with the revisions and the editing, and that takes time, and though we claim to suffer alone, it takes trusted readers and gifted editors. You’ll have plenty of time to stress out over the re-writes, so don’t fight yourself over the writing.
DD: Do you come up with these stories from personal experience? How do you create new ideas for stories?
SG: Story ideas usually come to me as dialogue. Characters speak and I write it down, usually in my journal. Then, when I come back to the conversation or monologue from characters or a character, I start imagining what came before or right after that moment. I write from somewhere in the middle of scene and build around it. If I’m lucky, I’ll end up with a story.
DD: How do you think that the future of printed material will affect you as a writer?
SG: I don’t think print is dying, how we read is changing. I read somewhere, and I don’t know who to credit with the saying (but I can say it ain’t mine), but someone said something like saying eBooks are going to replace books is like saying elevators are going to replace stairs. You can offer books in all sorts of formats, but there is something lasting about the book in the print form that I don’t think will ever really go away. I also read an article about how movement towards digital only moves books and records for that matter into a place where they can be easily erased, forgotten, and ultimately denied. Think of writing on cave walls, think of scrolls, and all the other old stuff we find. We find it and cherish it as proof that something before us, someone like or different from us, whatever, existed. That’s what books are. Proof that something bigger than this moment existed. Go completely digital and one can wipe out an idea, a people, an event they don’t like with a single key stroke. I don’t want to live in that kind of world, so I will support print. I’m not alone in this, so if everyone who supports print continues to support print, we should be fine. That isn’t to say that writers should also embrace technology. Make sure you’ve got a website and eBook version of your work, all that. Yet, and I hope we can start to do this more as a society, we do have to be mindful that not technological advances necessitate the destruction of what came before it.
DD: What are the challenges of being an African American lesbian writer?
SG: I’m a trifecta of otherness: a woman, an African American, and a lesbian. I also don’t have a lot of money. All of these things bring their challenges. I’m not alone is this sort of “otherness” either. It’s hard being any type of other — meaning anything other than the dominant culture of wealthy, white males. I could go on and on about the challenges to print, to publishing, to just living and making a living, but I’d rather spend my time connecting with those who share my challenges to find possible solutions, make a lot of noise, and get in some faces.
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A Milwaukee, Wisconsin native, Sheree L. Greer has been published in Hair Trigger, the Windy City Times, Reservoir, Fictionary Magazine, and Windy City Queer Anthology: Dispatches from the Third Coast. She has performed her work across selected venues in Milwaukee, New York, Chicago and Tampa, where she hosts Oral Fixation, the only LGBTQ Open Mic series in Tampa Bay. She received a Union League of Chicago Civic and Arts Foundation Award, earned her MFA from Columbia College Chicago, and currently teaches writing and literature at St. Petersburg College. Ms. Greer is an Astraea Lesbian Writers Fund grantee, completed a VONA residency at University of Miami, and recently published a collection of short stories, Once and Future Lovers. An excerpt from her yet-to-be-published novel appears in Best Lesbian Romance 2012.