*In 2008, the Silver Lining zine goes online here at Just Eat The Cat! I'll be posting interviews, poems, essays, and other writings from friends around Chicago, Austin, the U.S., and the world at large. It's great stuff -- and better late than never! To kick things off, here's my interview with Ariel Gore, the author, zine publisher/editor, and Hip Mama who largely inspired Silver Lining (the zine and the Chicago writers group by the same name). Thank you, Ariel! And thank you to the contributors and readers for their talents, support, and patience. Viva 2008! - Erin
Erin: The Silver Lining zine's theme is making delicious, hilarious, rockin', and generally badass lemonade out of the lemons life inevitably hurls at us. Can you think of a specific silver-lining situation in your past, where you went from feeling downtrodden to feeling triumphant?
Ariel: Well, that's what it's ALL about, isn't it? I mean, you are born! What a fuck over! You get this human existence and you're wailing about it for a few minutes, and then you just have to say, well, all right, looks like I'm going to be here for a while, and the landscape IS strangely beautiful, I guess I might as well see if I can spread some love around. For me, success has been ALL about taking what the world told me was my handicap and turning that into my strength. Being a teen mom, you learn that real fast. When you have a kid as a teenager--ever an older teenager like I was--you can either be what the world tells you you can be, which is nothing, or you can just pack up and run away in the night and go to college and do your thing and be a bad-ass--sometimes awesome and sometimes tired and messed up--mama. The world told me I should be ashamed of myself, but I flaunted it: Yeah I'm a teenage welfare mother.
Your latest book is one of the best guides for writers I've ever read (and I've read tons). Would you give us a tidbit of writing advice you wish someone had given you along the way?
I'm so glad you like it! I think writers have to reimagine themselves as BOTH artists AND entrepreneurs. We have to dream big and work harder. We have to CREATE a context in which our work matters and makes sense. If you think of the beat writers or any creative community like that, they invented that grouping for themselves--they didn't wait around for some publisher to say, Hey, this might fit into a new little sub-genre I've been thiking about...
What do you think is the best advice for writers that, alas, must simply be learned the hard way?
Well, most writers are very sensitive. We dream of publishing and we dream of our work being loved and appreciated and accepted--and often our work is very personal so we interpret that love and appreciation and acceptance as being very personal, too, and when it all works we are happy and fufilled, but taking the praise personally sets us up, because someone is going to hate what we put out there. They are going to write shitty reviews of our genuine effort. And how can we not take that personally? Worse, someone is going to suddenly feel like it is his freaking CALLING to take us down a notch, and they're really going to get personal and ugly. This is more about being a public person than being a writer, but when you publish--even if only ten people read your work--you have become a public person, and humans are very, very cruel to each other.
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