By Alex Poppe
Strip, Hannah Sward’s unflinching debut memoir, chronicles her journey through trauma, violence, addiction, and eventually grace. This frank account of her life, contextualized by psychological insights and buoyed by emotional memory, transport the reader across the landscape of Hannah’s heart. When I finished this transportive work, I felt I knew Hannah yet wanted to know her more. What powered her extraordinary bravery to tell this story, this way? How did she develop her capacity for forgiveness? How did she remake the personal violence, violence she had experienced at such a young age, into art?
There is so much I want to ask, but first I want to congratulate you on writing a book I could not put down! What was the catalyst to write Strip?
A book that you couldn’t put down. Wow. Thank you. The catalyst was my mentor, Jill Schary Robinson.*
She saw the book in me that I was afraid to tell. I had attended one of her writing groups at the Hollywood Library where I read an excerpt from a piece I was working on. After the group, she came up to me and said, “You’re writing a memoir.”
A memoir? I was very reluctant at first. She invited me to a writer’s group at her home that met two nights a week. Then we began working one on one together. She was amazing. Helen Gurley Brown had been Jill’s mentor, and in turn, I had the good fortune to be mentored by Jill. Every Sunday, I’d go to her home in West LA and sit on her couch with my pages. During those sessions, I would piece together fragments of my life until I could feel it breathe on its own.
The beginning, narrated from a child’s point of view, is especially haunting. How did you arrive at that craft decision? Why/how did you choose that perspective over an older narrator looking back?
I was drawn to the immediacy, the innocence that writing from a child’s point-of-view could potentially provide. It really was an organic process. I didn’t start in a child’s point-of-view. In fact, I had no intention of writing about my childhood. It was my mentor, Jill, who encouraged me to do so. And once I began, seeing it from a child’s point-of-view seemed like the most natural way to tell that part of the story. I think writing from a child’s perspective also appealed to me because I felt it left room for the readers to have their own experience. There’s no need for commentary. That is and has always been appealing to me.
I want to commend you for bravely and honestly owning your decisions and actions to undertake escort work. How did you keep the narration from sounding like self-justification?
I feel like anytime I’m justifying my behavior or my actions it’s a signal that I need to pause. Taking responsibility for my choices provided a certain freedom. There were many times when I’ve wanted to justify my actions, but it’s tiresome. And if it’s tiresome for me, I would imagine it is for the reader as well.
Nature becomes a character in Strip. Can you talk about how nature influences your writing?
Nature has always been and continues to be a source of incredible nourishment. Being with the trees, the ocean, or walking in the forest reminds me what is important: breathing, coming back to center, listening, and being still. At some point there’s no writing without stillness.
What about the physical world?
Just like nature, it is everything. As long as I’m paying attention, looking and listening, there’s never a lack of material. Even when I was in the midst of my addiction there was a part of me that was taking it all in. For example, when I was working at the Gentleman’s Club, stripping with my sister, I remember watching Candy, a girl with her auburn hair and perfect boobs. Even then I had a sense that, one day, I’d put Candy on paper.
Sometimes, trauma leads to disassociation. When that happens, how do you reconnect to yourself?
That was and continues to be a process. A long one. I remember when I began seeing a therapist, she said, “You’re not in the room. You’re somewhere else.”
I didn’t know what she was talking about. I felt incredibly uncomfortable. It took me many years to even recognize when I wasn’t in my body. I think that’s in part why writing the book was such a long process.
As an example, there are parts of the book I don’t think I could have written without a certain amount of ‘recovery.’ Specifically, the sex scenes. At first, I would write, “…and then we had sex.” I never went directly into the scene. It wasn’t until maybe the third draft that I was able to go back into those scenes and flesh them out. This happened, for example, in the scene about the man with the light lashes. I fleshed out the scene by adding the womanly way he took off his robe and how I felt seeing him on television receiving an Oscar.
It was all very intentional. I was given a concrete practice of getting into my body before writing, checking in with myself during and a re-grounding exercise after. Being present for it all – that was very uncomfortable. But it was also healing.
I am in awe of your ability to forgive, that some of your life experiences did not harden you. Can you talk about how you were able to forgive? Is it intrinsic to your nature, or did you consciously develop it?
I came to a point where I really had to ask myself, “How free do I want to be?” Free. I want to be free. And unless I step outside myself and look at my part, there’s no freedom. That’s not always so easy to see. What part could I have possibly had with the man in the brown car taking me away? Not letting it go, that was my part. I held onto that old story. It was and continues to be an awakening from the unconscious to the conscious.
There’s also so much I have to be grateful for. In so many ways I’ve been blessed. Very blessed.
I love your list of food you would eat, a wonderful accounting of your emotional state through food. Was the use of food a planned craft technique or did it arise organically from your emotional connection to what you were writing?
Organically. I don’t think I even realized there was so much food in Strip until someone in my writing group said, “There sure is a lot of ice cream in your book, isn’t there?”
I felt embarrassed. As if ice cream was a bad thing. As if food itself was bad. Although now that I think about it, it’s not too surprising considering how much my mother hated food. It put her in a bad mood. As kids, my sister and I would swing open the fridge door as if this time something might be in there. Food might have magically appeared. But, alas, there would be only pearl nail polish and Red Zinger iced tea. My mom’s staples.
How do you write about people you love when what you have to say may not put them in the best light or may inadvertently spill some of their secrets? Do you let them have a say in what you disclose?
I didn’t, no. My sister is pretty open about it all so really, I never thought to ask her. But my mom, that was and is very hard. I didn’t and don’t want to hurt her. And I’m sure she has her own story about it all. But what I kept and continue to come back to is that this is my story. One that I wanted and needed to tell.
That said, my mom also has a certain attitude about what I have written about her. Like the chapter titled, “My Mother’s Men.” I told her I didn’t want her to read it because I was scared that she’d feel hurt.
“Hurt because you wrote a chapter about me and my men?,” she’d said. “Believe me, it would take much more than a chapter to write about my men. It would take seven books.”
September is National Recovery Month. You’ve said that writing is healing and therapeutic, and you work a lot in the field of recovery by being a coach/companion for people struggling with addiction and mental health issues. How do you transform journaling into literary work?
I went to a talk that Natalie Goldberg (author of one of my favorite books on writing, Writing Down The Bones) gave a few years ago. Someone in the audience asked her, “What is the difference between when you sit down to journal and when you sit down to really write?”
Natalie said, “There is no difference.”
I really liked that answer and in many ways I relate to it. Quite a number of the stories I have published came out of journaling.
One just never knows what material may be used. I remember when I was writing Strip, and I came to the chapter about my sister and I deciding that being dominatrix foot fetish sisters was a good idea. Since I had kept a journal during that time, I knew that I must have written about it in real time. And I had. Scribbled in handwriting I could hardly read was a list of the do’s and don’ts of what it takes to be a good dominatrix. I even found the ad that I had placed on Craigslist looking for an exclusive arrangement with a sugar daddy. That ad is in the book word for word.
In Strip, you marvel at how you weren’t fired from jobs while you were using. In these reflections, you have gratitude for your luck/grace at holding on to your jobs. Now, you are on the board of Right to Write Press, a non-profit that supports emerging writers who are incarcerated. I am wondering if that gratitude, in part, motivates your work with Right to Write Press, especially since many non-violent offenders are incarcerated for addiction-related offenses. Can you talk a bit more about your non-profit work?
Gratitude. Yes. I am very fortunate. So many people have helped me along the way. Without my community, I wouldn’t be where I am today. Sobriety has been a gift. And for me to keep that gift I must give it away. Right to Write Press came at a time when I was really looking for ways to give back. At first, I didn’t know what that would look like so I began by volunteering at Angel Food Project. I’m pretty terrible in the kitchen, so that didn’t last long. But I kept on. Not long after, I was doing a reading in Northern California with my father. It was at that reading that the opportunity to become involved with Right to Write Press presented itself.
What’s the truest line you have ever written?
When I think of truest, I think of hardest. So, from that perspective, it is in the chapter titled “Dove Bars & Madame Ava.” The line takes place in room #808. How’s that for hoping to pique readers interest? It’s still a hard line to write down. Even here in this interview, all these years later after writing Strip.
What is your next writing project? What can we look forward to from Hannah Sward?
“My Mother’s Men,” a novella that is all written in my mother’s voice. And “Angel Down the Drain,” a novel. I’ve also compiled a collection of short stories that I’d love to publish, “Queenie Goes to Bosnia and Other Stories about Love, Jealousy and Affairs.”
Thank you, Alex. Thank you for such thoughtful, insightful, inspiring questions. I had so much fun being interviewed by you – an author, a woman I deeply admire.
*Novelist, essayist, memoirist, and teacher Jill Schary Robinson trained with Helen Gurley Brown, Cosmopolitan’s editor-in-chief from 1965 to 1997.
Hannah Sward is author of Strip, A Memoir. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous literary journals including Arts & Letters, Kaleidoscope: Exploring the Experience of Disability through Literature and the Fine Arts, Yemassee (University of South Carolina), Halcoyne (Black Mountain Press), Red Wheelbarrow, Porter Gulch Review, Other Voices (Canada), Anthology of The Mad Ones, Milk, Alimentum, Anthology of Women Writers, Hypertext, Pig Iron Malt, Pindeldboz, Nerve Cowboy, Afternoon, Wimpole Street Writers, and Word Riot. She has been a regular contributor at Erotic Review since 2015 and was Editor and Columnist at Third Street Villager Los Angeles and a contributor at The Fix and YourTango. Hannah is on the board at Right To Write Press, a nonprofit that supports emerging writers who are incarcerated. She lives in Los Angeles. www.hannahsward.com
Hannah Sward bio pic courtesy Jad Nickola Najjar.
Deeply rooted in place and real-life cases of injustice, Alex Poppe writes about outsiders wrestling with identity in the aftermath of loss or violence. Her books include Duende, Jinwar and Other Stories (2022 International Book Awards finalist), Moxie, and Girl, World (35 Over 35 Debut Book Award winner, First Horizons finalist, Montaigne Medal finalist, Eric Hoffer Grand Prize finalist, Eric Hoffer Honorable Mention in Fiction). www.alexpoppe.com