Paola Corso - Wordsprouts

The Park Slope Food Coop, a member-owned and operated food store, has grown over the years from a small collective to thousands of members. And I bet half are writers. Accomplished writers such as Sapphire, author of the bestselling novel Push, which was adapted into an Academy Award-nominated film, and Coretta Scott King Award-winning children's/YA author Jacqueline Woodson to name two.

In this city of the Coop, every member works a shift each month. Some receive, some stock, some bag. I co-curate Wordsprouts and write articles for the Coop's Linewaiter's Gazette to feature authors who participated in readings, workshops, and panel discussions. Check back for updates:

October 2011

Donna Minkowitz and Jacob Slichter

(First of two parts)

Ben Yagoda, author of Memoir: A History, says outstanding memoirists show readers that they have thought long and hard about themselves and their experiences. Their work is what he calls "well considered." Coop authors Donna Minkowitz and Jacob Slichter proved just that as they captivated an audience filling the meeting room to launch a new season of Wordsprouts. Not even the loud speaker piped in didn't interfere with their words. That's right, questions about the availability of skim milk mozzarella and asparagus tips seemed trivial in comparison.

Minkowitz, the award-winning author of the memoir Ferocious Romance: What My Encounters With the Right Taught Me About Sex, God, and Fury, read an excerpt from a new manuscript, The Marvelous Toy. Slichter read from So You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star, recalling his days as the drummer for the band Semisonic. This report is the first of two parts, beginning with Donna's memoir followed by a second part on Jacob's to appear at a later date.

Donna says she's always been fascinated with toys and was encouraged to make herself one in her new work. This combined with the fact that her mother learned Jewish magic gave her the idea to be a golem in the memoir, a creature made of inanimate materials as in kabbalistic folklore. She conveys what it's like being an object in the following excerpt:

Golems (and robots) are but two species of our kind, of course. Many clumps of mud on several continents have been over-stimulated with unnatural spirit this way, by persons of power like my mother, for millennia. Certain rocks and springs have been galvanized (for eons) with a painful awareness, and there are young girls (and boys) imprisoned in 11-inch Barbie dolls, living spirits imprisoned in bottle caps, baseball and tarot cards smarting and throbbing inside locked-up collections. Puppets and toys created far, far realer than they should be. Trees twisted with the force of something alien inside them. We are all over the world, we half-human sad, impregnated, lonely things, sung into life by magicians and pallid Hasids and evil PhDs who wanted to try and see—just try and see! they had wild hopes—if they could reproduce themselves without a partner.

What Donna discovers in her memoir is that being a golem is the reason her life falls apart in her late 30s. Close friendships end, her therapist gives her the boot, and she develops an arm condition so painful that she can't use them. In Marvelous Toy, she goes on a quest to find out if and how she can become real.

I asked Donna a few follow-up questions about her journey in the book and her considerations writing it:

What was the biggest discovery you made about yourself in this quest for humanity?
Minkowitz: That I'm capable of behaving abominably when I feel threatened (like golems in the legend). In the book, I call it the Minkowitz Death Ray.

Corso: You say this new work is 87 percent true except for the magic and time travel. How much of a difference did that 13 percent fantasy make?
Minkowitz: It made an enormous difference, especially because it's not just fiction but fantasy fiction. I wanted to combine memoir with out-and-out fantasy because I had been getting rather impatient with people who don't take memoir seriously as a literary form—a story—and expect it to be some sort of verbatim record of your life. In reality, that's impossible—that's not how stories work, or how memory works—so I just decided to say that this book combines true memoir with material that is not only untrue, but physically impossible!

Corso: Tell us about your writing process. Did you consider writing the book without the fantasy?
Minkowitz: I did try writing it without the fantasy first, but found it worked much better with. One reason, I believe, is that certain childhood experiences—physical abuse, for example—feel surreal when you experience them, so they come across in a truer fashion in the language of "magic" and having your body manipulated by magicians.

Corso: How does the experience of writing The Marvelous Toy compare with Ferocious Romance?
Minkowitz: Both of them were fun to write, but in this one my imagination got to run wild, and I really appreciated that. I love fairy tales and myth, and I believe these archetypal stories still shape the way we all see our lives. I didn't want to lose that way of looking at the world just because I was writing a memoir.

Visit Donna's website and read the first chapter of The Marvelous Toy.

December 2011

Jacob Slichter and Donna Minkowitz

"Ben Yagoda, author of Memoir: A History, says outstanding memoirists show readers that they have thought long and hard about themselves and their experiences. Their work is what he calls "well considered." Coop authors Jacob Slichter and Donna Minkowitz proved just that as they read in October to launch a new season of Wordsprouts, the Park Slope Food Coop’s Reading Series. This report, the second of two parts, closes with Jacob's memoir.

Slichter read from So You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star, recalling his days as the drummer for the band Semisonic. Kirkus Review called the book a "a wry and sharply realized account" of one rock group's rise and fall. The following excerpt—with its spot-on details and ever-so-frank self-reflection—is a backstage pass to the music scene:

So You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star excerpt:

Until touring with Dan and John, I had spent little time in rock clubs. These dark caverns of stale beer and cigarette smoke were now home to my afternoon routine of loading equipment from the van to the stage and setting up my drums. The club staff and house techs, covered in gothic tattoos and 666 shirts, blasted frighteningly aggressive rock over the house sound system while I assembled my kit, insecurity furrowing in my brow. Dan and John were familiar faces to the club employees. For now I was known as "new guy," a moniker given to me by Conrad Sverkerson, the legendary stage manager at First Avenue.

The settings I found myself in gave little comfort to my strained nerves. The typical dressing room was a corner of the cracked concrete floor of the club’s basement, where a ripped-up couch with at least one broken leg sat surrounded by empty beer kegs and crumbling plaster walls covered with scatological poetry and Magic Marker penis art. At the Hurricane, I hung my bags from the pipes to keep the roaches out. John cautioned me that this very practice had ruptured a ceiling pipe at the Seventh Street Entry, covering the musicians with shit and piss. The house managers told stories, like one about the singer of some band who “shoved one of the microphones up his butt last week.” And which mike was that? I was embarrassed by my sensitivity to the crudeness of it all. I felt like one of the children in the singing Family von Trapp. At thirty-two, I imagined I was the oldest tenderfoot in the history of rock-and-roll.

Jacob said he didn't write his memoir for himself or for the band but for people who want to be in a band. In doing so, he pokes fun at himself as he reflects back on his stardom. I asked him a few follow-up questions:

Corso: Tell us about your writing process. Were you always so open about your vulnerabilities and exposing them with self-deprecating humor or did this come in later drafts?

Slichter: After I sold the book (on the basis of a book proposal) I sat down to write and realized I had a problem. The proposal had hyped my success, but in fact, I wasn't a rock star, as the title suggested. My band had a couple of hit songs, but no one knew who I was. Then it occurred to me that the disconnect between the rock-star dream and my reality made for an interesting story. Whereas most rock memoirs are written by famous rockers who recount their lives of rock-star excess, mine was a sort of anti-rock-star story focused on other things: stage fright; the strange business of record deals, payola, and MTV; and the ways in which the insanity of the music business becomes your own as you fight your way through the star-making machinery. For instance, our hit record, which sold over a million copies, was deemed a disappointment by the record company, and I actually found myself swayed by that thinking. These were the sorts of things I was able to let myself document once I let go of pretending I was a rock star. So by owning up to all of that, writing the book helped me process the whole experience I was describing for the readers.

Corso: Did using wit in the book help release some tension you may not have been able to outwardly express on stage or with the band?
Slichter: Yes. I always take the stage with the intent of conquering the audience, but that kind of bravado is actually attended by all kinds of insecurity. Describing that insecurity, along with my daydreams of ever-elusive star status, not only made it a funnier book, but a truer one.

Corso: How have wannabes responded to your book?
Slichter: I've heard from a lot of fellow musicians, and regardless of the level of success they found, almost all of them reported that the experiences captured in the book resonated with their own. Some of them even gave copies of my books to their families and friends, telling them "Here's what it's like to do what I do." It was really gratifying to hear that.

Corso: Was there any problem with you writing a memoir solo and not with the other band members?
Slichter: No. My two band mates and I are close friends who trust each other. When I finished the book, I showed them the manuscript before handing it in. Each of them spotted exactly one inaccuracy, which I corrected (and the corrections only made the book funnier). In reading the book, both of them were surprised to learn certain things about me, for instance, the extent of my stage fright. Had either of them written the book, they might have focused on things other than the insanity of the music business and the chase for rock stardom, which is what I wanted to capture.

Corso: How would you compare drumming with writing?

Slichter: When you switch from one creative realm to another (drumming to writing, for instance) you realize how universal certain principles are. 'Prune away the extraneous stuff and trust that something simple can be powerful.' 'Don't try to drum/write as as the drummer/writer you wish you were but aren't. Just be yourself.'

Corso: One last question. Has being a drummer helped with your coop workshifts, say around closing time?

Slichter: I'm sorry to report that drumming has not helped me become a better bagger of raisins and sliced mangos.

Check out Jake's Semisonic website.