Writing Your Resilience Podcast Episode Sixty-Eight

Finding Your Form: Kelly McMasters on Writing Memoir in Essays and Emotional Truth

What happens when a story won’t stay linear—when your life fractures in ways that defy neat beginnings, middles, and ends?

In this episode of Writing Your Resilience, I sit down with essayist, professor, and former bookshop owner Kelly McMasters, author of The Leaving Season: A Memoir-in-Essays. From leaving marriages to landscapes, identities to illusions, Kelly’s memoir is a brilliant meditation on grief, desire, and the elastic form of the essay itself.

We talk about what it means to write honestly into complexity—how a false childhood memory cracked open the heart of a story, why the essay form became her truest vehicle, and the questions that shape her work long after the final line is written.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [0:00]
Well, hello, Kelly, welcome to the Writing Your Resilience podcast. I am so happy to have you on today.

Kelly McMasters [0:05]
Thanks so much for spending this time with me, Lisa. I'm excited to be here.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [0:09]
I'm excited about the conversation that we're going to have about your book, which I happen to have here: The Leaving Season. OMG. It's such a good book. I absolutely loved reading it because, number one, it's a fantastic story. I really was drawn in by the story. I was compelled by everything that you wrote about. And you just write it so damn well, and that's always so nice. I mean, it's exciting when I see this. I could tell the craft was there. We're going to get into that. But I always like to give my guests the first chance to tell us a little about themselves. What would you like us to know about your book, The Leaving Season?

Kelly McMasters [0:47]
That's great. Thank you and thank you so much for saying that. It means a lot. Hitting both of those marks is something that I struggled with over and over with the story because it is a personal story. So, my book, The Leaving Season, is a memoir in essays. It originated in that way. It is a book about leaving in general, so leaving a marriage specifically, but also leaving jobs, leaving homes, leaving geographies and identities, and leaving versions of yourself in the past. And so that was the center of the book. That's what cohered all the essays together. But you can read it from the first page to the last as a straight memoir as well. It is also loosely chronological, and I think it has been called a bunch of different things. It's been called a divorce memoir, it's been called a motherhood memoir, it's been called a landscape book, and I think it really is all those things.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [1:45]
If you could choose one word for it, what would your word be?

Kelly McMasters [1:48]
That's hard.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [1:50]
I know.

Kelly McMasters [1:52]
I think, you know, look, the essay is my first love, and that form is so elastic and beautiful, and it feels like this open frontier. So, I would, I think the essay is at its heart what this book is, but that doesn't tell you what it's about. So, it would have to be first on an essay shelf, and then, I think, secondarily to me by the end, it probably did start out as a divorce book, a motherhood book, and mostly a book about a woman trying to find her way back to herself.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [2:26]
And I would agree with all those things. There are so many compelling moments in this book, and I want everyone to read it, so we're not going to get too deep into the plot. But you said that first and foremost, this is an essay collection. This is memoir-in-essays. I'm really curious as to why you chose to write it in this way, versus writing a straightforward narrative, because there are so many really strong and compelling narrative elements in this book.

Kelly McMasters [2:54]
That's a great question, and I think it's one that my agent, my editor, and my first readers asked as well, and we went back and forth because this is a book that can be read also as straight memoir. We had a decision to make, but I felt that the essay was the most honest way of describing what was between these pages. And I think it was the most honest way for me to approach the topic. In reality, the topic, whether it's a motherhood, divorce, identity book, is grief in the same way that we talk about, you know, when you lose someone, those sort of stages of grief. My mother, when I grew up, she worked in hospice, and so we talked a lot about grief at home. And so, I'm familiar, and you know, throughout my life the people that I've lost, I'm familiar with that process. And when I was going through the end of, sort of the end days of my marriage, and then moving into that space where we were going to divorce, grief was really the closest description to it. And grief is cyclical, right? There is no linear narrative to grief because it's the kind of thing where two years, 20 years, 200 years, could pass, right, and the smallest thing could still knock the wind out of you by remembering something. So, I think for me, the essay allowed me to approach it in a kind of prism way, or almost like a Rubik's Cube. I would move into the space from different positions, different points of view, inhabiting different identities, different spaces, and sort of dart into the heart of the grief, but from different entry points, and the essay form allowed me to do that in a way that felt most representative of what the actual experience really was.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [4:44]
I want to dive a little deeper into what an essay is versus straight narrative because I feel like, number one, you can go there with me. And number two, I think so many people get confused as to the work that an essay can do versus the work that a straightforward narrative can do. So, one of the ways that I try to describe this for people is, you know, when you're writing a story, you're talking about the transformation of a person. And obviously, this is memoir, so there is this transformation—this person, you start off understanding the world one way, seeing the world one way, operating one way. And then at the end, there are all these ways that are different. But an essay is also an evolution of an idea. And so, when you think about the difference between more straightforward narrative storytelling versus essay, and using essay as the vehicle for telling a story, how would you describe it?

Kelly McMasters [5:43]
It is tricky. And look, there are no 100% rules in writing. Exactly, everybody might have a different opinion, or what works for them. What works for me when I know that I need to sit down and write an essay is when I have these two layers operating. One layer is certainly that personal transformation. Often, for me, it begins with a question, and most of the time, I would say 95% of the time, I don't necessarily arrive at an answer to that question, right? You might arrive at a different question, but that searching, that sort of curiosity, driven forward movement. That's the underlying spine, and then there's this other layer of connecting some other strands that have the same emotional resonance. Usually, I have to have three scenes that match before I can dive into an essay and know that I'm ready to write it. But they have to have both of those elements working in them. So, for example, I had an essay in The Atlantic last year, and it was about squirrels, right? What it was really about, and I knew that I had to write it when I started, I was really curious about these squirrels that were in my actual life. And so, I did some researching, some writing around it. Why do they matter to me? And then through the research, found out that they're actually the single mothers of the natural world. And I thought, well, there we go. Now I'm really interested. And then sort of understanding, okay, there's something about these squirrels where I'm seeing an alignment in my own life, in the questions I'm asking myself at the moment, and they're going to help me move forward in that question. In my classroom, I talk about strategy that every writer has these strategies that they're using, and hopefully you don't feel it too much on the page as a reader, but for the writer, you have to be constantly pushing against something to get to the next step. And for me, the essay allows that in a compact place that holds you tightly and compact meaning. I mean, I've written essays up to 40 pages that then have boiled down to 25 or then boiled down to 12. Right? That compact, as opposed to the sort of symphony of a longer book-length narrative where there's a lot more patience and build-up. So, with an essay, you sort of have to just get right in, otherwise you're trying to entice a reader into an unknown in a way that I think our appetites for books' patience is built in a different way.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [8:33]
Yeah, I think that the setup in a more traditional story can be longer, not too long, though, right? I know you're smiling because in memoir, especially, that can be one of the downfalls when you're writing. One is that you can start too far from the action, and then you have this endless opening that bloats your word count, and then you're not getting anywhere. So, listeners, readers are patient, but they are not that patient. However, with an essay, because you are working in this compact form, you have to get right in there. We have to know where we're going, and there needs to be resolution at the end of some sort. And I love what you said about the fact that it's not necessarily the answer to a question. It might be a new question, and sometimes the way you do it is it's a question that you're posing, but often it can be a question that is elicited from the reader just by reading your work.

Kelly McMasters [9:31]
That's a great point. Yes, and hopefully, right, the most successful essays do walk off the page and go with the reader in that way.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [9:39]
So you talked about the fact that you have to have three scenes to tell an essay. I want you to tell a little more about that, if you don't mind, and then to talk about how you are juxtaposing these three scenes with ideas. I mean, you gave us one example with your essay from The Atlantic, which we're going to put in the show notes. But I'm curious if you say about your memoir The Leaving Season. Is there an example you could give us where you're like, Okay, this is what I did, or this is how I thought about it, so that I could talk about Foucault’s heterotopia and have it make sense in the, you know, context of like, my journey to become married and leave this marriage and all of these other things that I'm leaving.

Kelly McMasters [10:22]
Okay, so much to dig in there. I mean, the heterotopia is a great example because that essay, which is called “Ghosts in the Hills” and was probably the biggest bear of the entire collection, it probably changed shape, I don't know how many times, over the course of five years, and it wasn't working, and I knew that I wanted—I knew what I wanted to say, but I didn't know how to say it. And then I was away at the VCCA, which is an amazing artist residency in Virginia, but I was sitting at a table with a bunch of artists, and we were talking about heterotopias, and I had never heard the word before, and I think in the essay, I say I actually thought it was some kind of heterosexual utopia at first. I am not schooled in Foucault, and so they talked to me about it, and the concept immediately helped me understand what I was trying to explain about the way this particular dairy barn in our community functioned. 

It existed on its own plane, and I didn't know how to push that, and I knew I had come from an approach originally to the piece, because I'm an outsider, and I'm writing about this community. I mean, even though I'd lived there for many years, at that point, I would always be an outsider. And I tried to look for models that did the same thing, and I landed on one of my favorite books, which is In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. 

That essay opens with a quote from In Cold Blood, and the opening, I wanted to really kind of steal, in the best literary sense, Truman's narrator from In Cold Blood, in the way that he positions himself sort of off the center of the image and is looking. He is not of the place, but he is in the place, and he's using, you know, these sort of Corinthian columns in his opening to describe this Kansas wheat field. And so, he's showing the reader what his standing is, and that he is outside, right? Cowboy boots are high-heeled, pointy boots to him, they're not the norm. And so, I thought, okay, great, I can talk about this rural place in an exotic way because it's exotic and use Foucault in the same way that Truman Capote is using those Corinthian columns to sort of announce my otherness. Yeah, this is how I'm experiencing it. 

And so, once I sort of was able to mix that in, and I was also learning about heterotopias, so I was not coming at it from above. I wanted the reader to learn with me. I was not assuming knowledge of this. I didn't have the knowledge of it when I first learned about it. And so, my goal was to just use that to deepen the understanding of this wild place, and my understanding, and then, in turn, the reader's understanding. And I think, you know, that the central moment in that piece is where we're standing there, you know, the sort of oil-stained floor, and, you know, cigarette butts and beer, and we're sitting around with the guys and just chatting. And then I look up and they've strung carcasses, and it felt like a weird curiosity cabinet. And then suddenly I realized there was this flag hanging up near the roof, and you know, it had discolored with age, but it was very clearly a Nazi flag. That, to me, is another example of heterotopia, just how those things can exist within civilization. That's the center. The center was, I can't believe I've been standing here. And I can't unmake that true, yes, and in order to get to that moment, the heterotopia led me in there. And so once I got there, I was also able to build it. That was the pivotal scene. But the scene of I wanted everyone to fall in love with these men the same way I had first, and then also see what it feels to have to leave them behind. And so those were the three moments. And then the layers were, once I found it, the heterotopia sort of snapped everything together. Weave that in to your question. You know, I like to play with scene, sort of introspection. I'll call it, in fact. And so I like to intersperse it, and then, usually, hopefully, at the end, they all become one strand. That's when I feel like I have succeeded.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [15:10]
And so if someone picks up your book, my first I would say, read it to understand the entire story. I think that's always a good place to start. But yeah, you have this nice interweaving. Sometimes I'll talk about it in terms of zooming in and zooming out, like we zoom into our own personal story, then we zoom out to these other concepts or things happening in the world. And I found that all the things you said about the barn to be so compelling, because I grew up in upstate New York, and I know those barns, okay. I know those barns. I have been in those barns also as the outsider. And there have been moments where I have seen things that I cannot unsee, and then I have to reckon with my place in that barn, and what does it mean to stand here? Am I complicit in something? And can I really embrace the fact that the people who are also inhabiting this barn are not one thing? And that doesn't mean that for either of us, we condone anything that is, reprehensible. We don't, right? But nothing happens in a vacuum.

Kelly McMasters [16:25]
Right? And in the same way that a character can't be all evil or good, because that's just not truth.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [16:34]
And so, you use these different techniques to get to the truth of your own experience, but also to tell these deeper truths. And you do that magnificently. And another thing that you do well that I think can be so hard, and I'm curious about it, because I'm also working on an essay collection myself, and I'm finding like, oh, there's the thread again, there's the thread again. And how do you weave threads of your own story, or perhaps metaphors or themes into something like an essay collection, so that it feels like, each time it shows up, it packs a different punch without being repetitive. I mean, I think that's the art form, and you did that well. There were things you wove through and when I found them, they felt like Easter eggs, right? So, you have like, something there, and they're like, oh, there it is again. Oh, it's a new one, but, but instead of just being like an Easter egg, maybe here it was pink, and now it's blue because it has a different meaning. So yeah, how did you do that? 

Kelly McMasters [17:34]
Even the touchstones have to change, and usually I'm arriving with new information as the narrator, and, of course, the reader is on my shoulder, so they have more information and see it differently too. I think a lot of that, honestly, is revision. When I realized I was writing a book, which it took me a little while to realize that I put them all together. And I think there are 19 essays in there now, there were probably 24 at one point when it was its largest. I love the word bloated that you used before, and so when it was its largest, bloated, it was 24 essays, and I had to weigh each one and make sure they were doing different work, that I understood the work they were doing. And when I would read from start to finish, which was hard to do over and over when it's your own work, because you stop seeing it. What I realized was, in particular, oh, hey, I've got fire in a few places here. What's that about? And then I would sort of isolate those spots. So, fire is one thing that I think does move through the entire collection. And my hope is that it would not sort of hit a reader on the head. You know, in the first essay, which is called Home Fires, was the last thing that I wrote, because I knew what I wanted to draw my readers' attention to. 

I had to write everything else in order to know what those first pages should be. That's when I realized, okay, we need to start with this idea of fire. And I understand that ultimately, one of the overarching arguments is not exactly the right word, but my overarching questions, I would say, is the idea of marriage being like a fire that is like a controlled burn, like you're constantly trying to control the fire, but nobody can really. I mean, we've learned that lesson so many times this year, between Long Island, right here where I live, we had someone try to make s’mores in the morning and half the pine barren... So, nobody can really control fire, and that's something in man's history that is a constant. And so that was a thesis that I was working towards trying to prove or understand if I still believed by the end. And so, every time you see fire in the book, it's trying to weigh that question, but I could only do that upon revision, and once I knew I was going to do that, then every time I saw it, I wanted to really crystallize it and dial it in so that I was paying attention to it.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [20:13]
I love that answer, and I have a curiosity in terms of revision, because so much of writing is revision, and I think especially emerging writers either don't understand that or forget that, that you know there is truth in your first draft, there can be magic in your first draft, and there is also so much more to mine. And sometimes the mining happens in your computer with you looking at the screen and, you know, cutting and pasting or doing whatever. And then sometimes the work is off the page, and Lara Lillibridge, she's someone else that I interviewed. I love Lara and her book The Truth About Unringing Phones is a very non-linear, I would say, more of a mosaic. It's not a straightforward essay collection, but it's extremely non-linear in the way that she is exploring this relationship she has with her father, and she did a lot of the work on the wall. I mean, with sticky notes, she was like, pulling out scenes. And, you know, there were so many colors...

Kelly McMasters [21:24]
Yeah, my wall is full of note cards. I didn't mean to interrupt you, but I just wanted to confirm...

Lisa Cooper Ellison [21:29]
No, no. I was so glad that you did, because, yeah, I think that there's something that happens to our brains when we get away from the computer in terms of how we can make new connections and how we can manipulate the work that can't happen on the screen. And I'm a big fan of the sticky note or the note card. I have this great closet in my office, and so I love the closet because it doesn't have anything on it, so like, that's my blank wall. But I think, yeah, finding those ways that you can manipulate off screen to look at, what are those themes? You know, what keeps repeating? What story are you really trying to tell? It can be so helpful. And then also, what is the story that you're not telling? And that makes me think of this one flashback in your book that I actually taught for Jane Friedman. I did a webinar on memoir backstory, and it was really diving deep into the flashback. And how do you write flashbacks—what are the mechanics of this? And how do you think about, why are we going into the past? Like, what work is that past scene doing? So, it's not just something that's interesting to you. It has to be relevant in that exact moment. And there's this flashback that you have in your book about the motorcycle sidecar, and it's really a false memory. And when you were thinking about putting that into this essay where, you know, the lines before are, "I don't know why R wanted to change things, and it's all about, you know, do I get married or not?" At what point did you know that was the flashback that needed to be in there? And how did you think about putting all of that together?

Kelly McMasters [23:06]
Oh my gosh. Well, first, thank you so much for teaching my work, and that essay in particular is another one that took quite a few revisions and changed dramatically. And I think initially, one of the first times that I thought it was done, I asked my mother to read it because I was so little. In some of those flashbacks, I'm very careful about going into other characters' heads, their bodies, right? And so, there were a few moments in there where she, you know, I know this movement of hers, she crosses her arms in a certain way, and you're like, oh, okay, that's not okay. And so, I had a scene in there like that, so I was asking her to read to make sure that it felt true to her, because she would likely have a better memory of those particular moments than me, because I was four, five. What I was shocked about was the whole essay was built around this motorcycle memory. My dad came home with a motorcycle and with a sidecar, and I loved that sidecar so much, and we would drive around in it, and it was just honestly one of my favorite childhood memories. When I talked to them a week later, I was shocked to hear them both say: First, my mom said, you know, great essay, really interesting. Everything's fine, you got it right, except there was no sidecar. And I thought, Wait, no, let's ask dad. And my dad corroborated, no, I've never driven a motorcycle with a sidecar. I don't know what you're talking about. You were right on the bike with me. And at first, I thought, well, crap, there goes the essay. And then I thought, no, that brings us to the next question and deepens the essay. Why is my favorite childhood memory false? And what was my brain doing in creating that memory and then relating it to marriage in particular? And so, I understood, oh my gosh, this is the whole point of the essay. And one strand that goes throughout the book is, again, not necessarily an argument, but a question: Is marriage a fantasy that misremembering, the fantasy of the sidecar, the fantasy of what I thought marriage could be, those two things married each other, and that's when I knew, Okay, we're in. This matters. This matters enough to warrant space as a flashback. Because you're right. They need to, they need to do work.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [25:40]
Right? So, one thing that I really want people to hear is that sometimes we will have either a scene that's really compelling that we've written, and we feel really attached to, or maybe our intuition is saying, I know this belongs. I don't know the work that it's doing yet, but something tells me it needs to be here, and the goal is to do enough work to figure out what that is, so that you understand that work. And sometimes that involves interviewing other people. Sometimes it involves having a lot of flexibility around how you think about something. It's not just one way.

Kelly McMasters [26:17]
Right? And I think the less attachment you can have to that first draft, the better. I think the note cards, going back to that idea, are key for that because of their mobility, because you're modular and you can create six different versions. It's sort of like the '90s, choose-your-own-adventure books.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [26:37]
Right? Loved those, oh my gosh.

Kelly McMasters [26:41]
Right? They were the best. You don't have to do the work of necessarily writing it out, but you can see it visually and imagine them. Imagine it ending differently. Imagine it beginning differently, seeing how it holds in the middle. Because the hardest part is that middle. My editor for my first book talked about that all the time. He was like, "Most books know how to begin, know how to end, but it's that middle 100 pages that just sort of stagnates." And so, I'm very attentive to that. And I think recently, I had a piece that just came out in VQR. I actually shared this in my classroom because I was asking my students to edit. They were so precious about, you know, they were afraid. And I kept thinking, "You know, the draft is right there. You can go back to it if you feel like you've made a blunder, and you wish—it's right there. What are you so afraid of?" And so, I was trying to get them out of their comfort zones, and I actually brought my revision in and put it up on the screen because this was a piece about garlic. They subtitled it beautifully: Splitting the Family Story, Splitting Garlic Bulbs. And when I wrote it and turned it in and it was accepted, I thought, "This is a piece about birth." And when the top editor finished with it, he pulled an entire section out. So, it went probably from maybe 16 pages to 14 or 13, which is a sizable edit. And, yeah, that is, I mean, within as well, like lines. And it was a great edit. And I was at the end, the very last note was, "Okay, this is about death." And I thought, "No, you're wrong." And I, you know, slammed my computer down and sort of crossed my arms like my mother, I guess, for a few days, and I couldn't look at it. And then I reread the piece that he edited it into, and I realized, "I may want this to be about birth, and I probably do have an essay that I need to write about birth, but it's not this one." That's what he uncovered. It's sort of like archeology. That's what it—it's actually what it was meant to be once. Yeah, then I could go back in and finish that archeological dig and clean every—clean all the bones off and get them really clear. But he had to sort of redirect me. Now, of course, birth, death, it's a cycle. They're not that far away from each other, but it helped me sharpen everything so that from that first line to the last, I knew what my goal was, and it was to talk about death.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [29:17]
That is such a great example. And there's two things I want to say about it. Number one, sometimes we think an essay is about one thing when it's really about something else, because we become blind to the work and blind to all the possibilities. The other thing that I want to say is that sometimes people have contentious relationships with editors because they see their work one way, but someone who's, you know, external to them, sees it in a completely different way. And how did you, as the author of this piece, figure out what you wanted to trust is like, "Yes, I think you have a point. Yes. This is what the essay is really about." After you slammed down your computer and you folded your arms. Which we all need to do, right? We all have that moment we get, like, flustered or upset about it. I've had the same thing. And once you get over yourself, right? And you get past that emotion, which is so important to feel, how do you trust that process so that when the final essay comes out, you feel really good about it? How do you tell the difference between "No, this is my story, and this is the best version of my story," versus "I have people-pleased my content into something someone else sees?”

Kelly McMasters [30:30]
That's a great question, and it is a big danger. I teach a literary magazine class, and we talk about that a lot. Often, I find the best editors edit with questions, rather than changing words and lines, and that is what he did. He was asking a lot of questions, making suggestions. And I think another really amazing editor that probably the first editor that made me aware of this is Tom Beer, who now runs Kirkus, and I used to write for him at Newsday, just book reviews and author interviews. And it was the first time I paid attention to this question: why does being edited by this person feel so good? And that was the main difference, I think, the ability—what you're talking about, that moment to understand. And really you have to trust yourself, not just that other person. It's the same thing that makes nonfiction work, and that is critical distance. You have to have enough distance from that piece, from your work, to have a clear sense of, "Is this making it stronger, or is this moving it away from my intention?" 

Yes. And once I was able to cool down and go back into it, and I pulled out what he had suggested, cutting onto another document, and I read through that, it was another essay. It was another essay entirely. So now I have—now I'm excited because I have two essays, but it was trying to wedge itself in. Yes, and it just wasn't fitting. And he called me on it. And maybe, if, instead of 15 pages, maybe in another two to four years and 20 more pages, I could figure out how to do that, but I really liked the essay the way he saw it. And similarly, my editor for The Leaving Season, Jill Bialoski, who's a literary psychic, more like a medium, I came to her with a proposal. My agent and I had a meeting with her, and it was initially—right? Now, the book is split into three, and it's city, country, suburbs. It's very landscape based. That's what grounds it. That's the anchor. And the initial proposal was City, Country, Arctic, which sounds so strange now. This was in 2020, and I had just visited Svalbard. I was really obsessed with these icebergs and that as a metaphor for divorce, which I still hold to. And I had just accepted a Fulbright to go to Norway for a year and back to Svalbard and do a lot more research. This was January 2020, and I was supposed to leave in September. And so, of course, we all know what happened in March 2020, and that Fulbright was canceled. But before even that happened, she said, "I just don't feel it, it doesn't feel natural yet." And she said, "Where do you live now?" And I rolled my eyes and said, "Long Island." And she said, "How do you feel about that?" And I was like, "Oh, you know, I grew up here. I moved away. I had to come back. The suburbs are terrible." And she said, "Maybe you should write into that." Sure enough, this is the book. It's supposed to be. Yeah, and I wouldn't have known that if I said, "Nope, it's the Arctic, and that's the way it is." I know what books she publishes. I know what writers she publishes. In VQR, I mean, that is my dream publication. I was so excited. I trust those editors, and I trust the work that they've done. So, I trusted both of those editors to at least be open to what they were suggesting. And then I made it. It's still my byline. Like, one editor came back about The Leaving Season and said, "I think you should make it all about the bookshop, and that's it." That was not the story I wanted to tell, and I knew that, so I just said, "No, thank you." It's an interesting story, but it's not the story I wanted to tell. But those edits, ultimately, I knew in my heart that it made it a stronger work.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [34:42]
Yeah, so knowing what to take in and knowing when to say "no thank you" is so important, and it can be so difficult, especially when you're working with personal material, where the story can feel so attached to your life, which, of course, it does. I was having a conversation with someone yesterday, where I was talking about the fact that, yes, of course, all these things, especially things that have big emotional connections to you. They are important in your life. And the hardest part about being a writer is that you must be ruthless about what you insert into a story. They're two different things.

Kelly McMasters [35:20]
Yes, absolutely, the story. Everything is in service to the story, as opposed to yourself, and you can still write those things. But even the construction of your narrator, right? We should begin there, because it is a construction. And every essay needs a different narrator. It's a different version of you. And even if you were writing right now, when you go back to revise, you're not that same person. So, it's false. It's not just—it’s not your journal, right? And I also, along with note cards, I'm a big proponent of writing in journals and writing alongside the other work, in that way to allow experiment, to allow right that modularity just moving to handwritten pages or even in your phone. I know my students love their phones, and they all use the Notes app as their journals, whatever works for you. I think anything to remind you, writing is a calling, but it is a job. You have a job to do, and I have a very kind of blue-collar approach to it this way, but I think that that is, you are not the point. It's the piece that is the point.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [36:29]
That is such an important point. And I'm so glad that you shared that. Well, there are so many things that we could talk about today, and oh my gosh, we didn’t even get into all of the good stuff, but one thing that you did talk about in our pre-interview, you were talking about shame, and we don't have time to go into all of it, but there is an aspect of shame in this book. So, if there's anything short you want to say about that, my question to you is, how did you nurture yourself when you were doing that? How did you take care of yourself when there was shame in the story, and now that it's out in the world, and you're working on other things, but you're still promoting this book, because that never ends. How do you nurture that? And is there a way you do that that's people might not expect?

Kelly McMasters [37:13]
That's a good question. I hope I nurtured myself. I think one thing that I that even I didn't quite understand until I was able to do it, is that when I'm done with this book, I get to put it on the shelf too, just like the reader. And it really does feel that way. I said what I needed to say, I shared what I wanted to share, and that doesn't end any conversation. It doesn't make anything not true or not happen, but it feels complete in a way that for my process, I don't know that I could get that completeness in any other way. And the conversations that have come from it, oh my goodness, have been so incredible and healing. And much of the book is about just feeling so alone with so much of this, and that, if anything, has been a gift once the book published just, I mean, on a daily basis, Lisa, people emailing me, letting me know. I mean, just yesterday, somebody over Instagram, you know, just saying, by the way, I read your book, I left, and I never looked back. Thank you. And my book did not make her leave, but it maybe gave her that last bit of courage that she needed, right? And just talking and then, and everybody coming out of the woodwork, it feels like when you're in the middle of it, if everything feels so alone. If you announce it, if you say, "Hey, this is happening to me," your people will find you. And when I was revising and really in the in and writing the last few essays, that were the hardest. It was during COVID. It was honestly as difficult a time as it was. I was a single mom with two little kids. It was rough, but it was also away from the world, and it did give me sort of the privacy and the solitude that I think I needed to go where I went, and that I'm grateful for. And I was with my kids, 24/7, which, yes, again, was difficult, but there is nothing more comforting, nothing more nurturing for me now than that. And so, it was a surprising silver lining to what in the moment felt like a catastrophe. But, yeah, but that did, that did help, I think, in the production of the book.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [39:35]
So much we figure out in retrospect. But what I love about this is that, yeah, you knew this book was done when you could put it on your shelf, right? When the content had been wrapped up, but the questions and the conversations could continue, that there was that both/and of "on the shelf," and then I can still talk about it. And I think that's a lovely way for us to wrap up. If people want to buy a copy of The Leaving Season, or they want to learn more about you, because this isn’t, this isn’t your only book, right? You have written other books. You have other books in the works. What are the best ways for people to connect with you?

Kelly McMasters [40:18]
Sure. My website is just my name, kellymcmasters.com, that's probably the easiest place to find all the other stuff. I usually hang out on Instagram the most out of all the socials. And I've got a Substack called The Magpie, and I've always got little projects. A new one is coming out that has to do with diaries, that's launching in a few weeks.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [40:38]
Well, thank you so much for being on the podcast today. I knew we were going to have a great conversation, and it has exceeded my expectations. So, thank you so much.

Kelly McMasters [40:48]
Oh, I just—we could talk for hours. This was wonderful. Thank you so much for your great questions.