Shannon Waite is the author of the interactive novel Raising Women. Yesterday she released the follow up/prequel story collection, The Women. Shannon lives close to me in Michigan and we recently started hanging out, exchanging our writing for weekly get togethers, going to the DIA and zoo. We share a love for Chuck Palahniuk*, Bret Easton Ellis, Miranda July, writing, sobriety, walks and discussions on being a woman, being a writer, being a female writer, relationships, men, and how to balance a life of creativity, friendship, love and health.

            I wanted to ask Shannon some questions about her books Raising Women and The Women and introduce you to her writing** which I think is a unique and relatable take on girlhood, womanhood, and how we navigate the transitions through both worlds. 

-ee

*it should be noted I am currently rereading Fight Club for the, idk, sixth time? 

**here is an excerpt from The Women

The Women is a prequel and sequel to your first novel Raising Women. Did you always know, when writing Raising Women, this book would also exist? Or did you after writing Raising Women come up with the idea there would be the prequel/sequel?

I started writing Raising Women out of compulsion, and then quickly fell in love with it while in the depths of it. As I neared the end, I knew it wasn’t finished. I became friends with the girls in it, and knew that they had so many more stories that needed telling. So to answer your question, I wasn’t even thinking about The Women when I started Raising Women, but as I was in the depths of it, I figured this is what would come next.

Raising Women is an “interactive” novel. What brought you to the idea of interactive works in writing? Had you been a fan in youth of interactive books for young adults?

I’d never actually read interactive novels as a kid, but I knew of them.

A few years ago though, I was thinking about my favorite books and the experience I had the first time I read them, which made me think about how cool it would be to get to reread them for the first time (which is obviously impossible). I’m obsessed with form and experimenting with form, and so it made me start thinking about interactive novels and how they offer many different ways to read the same story. I didn’t think I’d ever write something like that though, so I set that thought on a shelf in my mind, but a year or two later, when I had the title and characters for Raising Women, the form also just felt so right, so I did it – combining lit fic with interactive fiction – and absolutely loved it.

The Women is defined as a linked story collection and Raising Women as a novel. How did you decide on the distinctions in writing these two books? How does each one – novel, story collection – serve the narratives?

Raising Women is an interactive novel because at the end of each section it provides choices that direct readers to a new page to continue the story they create for themselves. The Women is a collection of short stories; however, it’s not a traditional collection of stories that are all isolated pieces. Many of the narrators have multiple stories in the collection and, sometimes, the characters get mentioned in another girl’s story. In this way, they are linked. Because of how heavily they are linked though, the collection as a whole almost sometimes feel like it’s telling one bigger story, acting sort of like a novel? I don’t know. I’m just out here writing the things I want to write. Either way, the formats I chose further support and develop the characters and themes in the book, which I love.

Raising Women explores the themes of womanhood and identity, and forces readers to confront the chaos, courage, and contradictions of becoming a woman. By making it interactive, readers have to face those confrontations. As these themes develop, the main character, ‘you’, comes to terms with what it means to be a woman and how to become one. By giving you choices, it seems like you have the freedom to decide, but the thing I love about the interactive format is that the options presented to you are never yours. You’re still picking between two or three things that someone else has forced you to choose from, so do you really have choices? Is it really freedom? See how the interactive format helps develops the themes?!?! (:

Because Raising Women is an interactive novel, it’s all told in second person. The Women is told in short stories so that I could write from different POVs (and not just one). Eleven girls and women from the novel get to tell their own heartbreaking stories from their own points of view, and in this way the format allows the girls to share their hidden thoughts and anxieties, when oftentimes women’s stories and truths get shoved to the side.

Both of these formats were intentional in ways that supported the stories’ themes and characters.

Inside the opening pages of The Women it tells us, “The Women is a collection of linked stories that allow readers to enter the self-loathing and self- destructive minds of eleven girls from the original novel.” How did you come to inhabit the “self-loathing and self-destructive” minds of these girls/young women? I suppose we all at one time in youth and in adulthood can identify in ways with being self-loathing and self-destructive, but did you feel you personally experienced these feelings in your youth, as a girl? How do you relate – and not relate - to your own characters in this way?

After ‘meeting’ these girls in Raising Women, I knew who they were and I knew what they’d been through and how they’d react. It was easy to enter their minds because of this – and because I’ve been there too. I go through times of being self-loathing and self-destructive, and I’ve listened to my friends tell me about the times they’ve been self-loathing and self-destructive. So the girls in these books became my friends as I wrote about them going through the same things (heartbreak, embarrassment, jealousy). I love the reviews that come in saying that these are the girls you know; they’re your friends; maybe they’re you, because that’s what I wanted this collection to be. Navigating womanhood and the expectations that come with it is so hard, and I don’t know if I know anyone who’s played the game and come out of it never having self-loathed or self-destructed. It’s really that simple, I guess.

What sort of books were you reading and possibly identifying with as a young woman, teenager, early 20s? Were you a voracious reader in your youth?

I was a voracious reader when I was younger. Back then, internet wasn’t what it is today, and social media was just chat rooms, so I spent a lot of time reading, writing, drawing, and making things instead of scrolling. The library was in our neighborhood, so over the summer I’d walk to the library and get a bunch of books. When I was younger, I was really into fantasy, magic, and faeries. My favorite books were Ella Enchanted, the T*Witches series, the Circle of Magic series, and the Harry Potter series. In high school though, a friend recommended Chuck Palahniuk’s Invisible Monsters which completely changed the things I read and wrote. I ate up a lot of his earlier works, but didn’t know where to find similar types of writing. Around 2015, I went to a writer’s retreat at Interlochen where one of the women running it suggested I check out the lit magazine PANK, and once I found other writers writing these transgressive, contemporary pieces, I really found the things that I love reading: stories that feel like secrets and criticize society.

What brought you to writing? Did you go to school for writing? Did you have a mentor?

I wrote all the time when I was young, so I can say without a doubt that I was always a storyteller, and an ex once told me that word counts were the bane of my existence (which is no longer true – I now prefer a good flash fiction piece, but I love that his comment speaks to my storytelling nature). After college though, and some years of not writing much, I realized how much writing makes me who I am, so to make it a very regular practice in my life, I decided to go back to school a few years ago for another degree (this one in creative writing). And while I’ve never had one mentor necessarily, Peter Markus has been incredibly helpful and supportive the last few years, which I truly appreciate. So I’ve gone to school for it, I’ve had supportive people, and I’ve simply just done it a lot.

I guess if I had to answer what brought me to writing, it comes down to this: I am obsessed with the human experience and creating, and writing combines both of those things which I can’t imagine living without.

What are your goals now for your writing? Do you see yourself writing anything more with the characters of Raising Women and The Women?  Is there more for these characters to be explored? Or do you think you will go in a different direction with new work?

I’m not closed to the idea of writing more about these women, there is definitely more that could be explored, but for now I’m setting them aside. That being said, I think because I’ve spent so much time with them for the last two years, I’ve found it so hard to connect with the characters in the other projects I want to work on. I’m trying to go in a different direction; I just don’t know which way that is yet.

A very popular genre of writing currently is what is referred to as “autofiction.” How, if at all, would you say your writing is autofictional? Are your characters drawn in ways from your own life? Or do you tend to shy away from writing directly from your life? What’s your experience with autofiction: do you read it, write it, think it’s stupid? Haha.

I’m totally down for autofiction, and to be honest, a lot of my work has some element of autofiction in it (it just usually leans more on the fictional side by the time I’m done with it). In fact, there are very few things I write that are straight up fiction. Instead, I’m always collecting the strange experiences from my own life, the lives around me, or the news, that I then place my characters in and see what they do. I love the way it makes the stories realistic and relatable, while still being something fun to create. So to answer your question, yes I read it and, to some extent, write it.

“… to explore the wild that is growing up girl” - is part of the opening description to Raising Women. What I know of you is you are someone very self-disciplined, you don’t drink or take drugs, or smoke. But there are other ways to be “wild.” How do you self-identify, as a young woman in the past, or now, as a woman in your early thirties, with “the wild”?

Growing up girl is wild enough without drugs, haha. Like the ways that friends betray you, the body that we are sold, and all the other things we are taught that destroy us. I mean, simultaneously trying to be an individual and a part of a community when you’re a teen is so hard. Balancing friends, attraction, and figuring out the things you like and how to keep those things from pushing people away – it’s all wild, and so the wild, for me, is the trauma of loss, the drama of figuring things out, and the exhaustion of becoming. I’ve lost myself for others. I’ve lost others for myself. And sometimes I’ve lost things for no reason at all.

Wild is defined as: “living or growing in the natural environment; not domesticated,” so trying to unlearn many of the things society taught me, I guess, is wild. Right?

Wild in my life isn’t being under “the influence,” but instead it’s the never-ending experience of handling life and figuring out who I am in it.

The very last line of The Women is: “You know that there is no winning, so there’s no reason to play by the rules of the game.” What does this line mean to you, and to the characters of The Women? Is this something you personally feel or have felt at times in your life?

I love this line so much because I really do think it encapsulates what the girls in the book go through, and it very subtly echoes back to the first story and the way ‘you’ as an eight-year-old girl think about Marilyn. I think there are so many ‘rules’ in this world, and many of them work against each other, so it doesn’t matter how many times you try to play by them, you’ll always lose, and you can see the girls go through that in this book. They try to play by them, and they lose. Or they decide not to play by them, and they still lose. At some point, I think many of us start to pick the lesser of two evils. I mean, if I’m going to lose anyway, which loss will I enjoy more?

In my life, I’ve been through enough losses and a few mindfulness meditation classes to learn how to accept things as they are and move on because ruminating over them almost never does anyone any good. I don’t know that I like feeling this dismissive, but it makes navigating life (which is often very disappointing) easier. For the women in these books, it speaks to the way they try and overcome a system that has continuously pushed them down (sometimes purposefully and sometimes accidentally).

Things aren’t always going to go our way, of course, but when it never goes your way, it’s like, why bother? It feels better to kick the system to the curb and make your own.

What books as an adult have been particularly inspirational for you and why? Do you seem drawn to books that contain women struggling with similar themes as in your books?

Books that have been particularly inspirational to me:

• Invisible Monsters – Chuck Palahniuk (first book I read that was like, WOW, writing can really tear humanity open in such a powerful way)
• Fight Club – Chuck Palahniuk (because of its universal themes, and man did he interweave details in such complex ways)
• Fast Machine – Elizabeth Ellen (my syntax Bible. The way the sentences and stories unfold in such a way that just pops has always inspired me)

Those are my favorites, but then so many others have inspired me for other reasons. For absolutely stunning language that I can’t forget and will continue to reread: The Meat and Spirit Plan by Selah Saterstrom, Love by Maayan Eitan, and Here in the World by Victoria Lancelotta. Then, as a complex person, Miranda July’s Nobody Belongs Here More than You makes me feel seen. And someone who writes fearlessly: Bret Easton Ellis.

There are so many things I like about so many different writers’ stories that have all influenced me as a writer myself, it’s so hard to narrow them down when I have to think about it.

Do you read mainly books written by women? What books by men are you drawn to, if at all, and why and how do their books, maybe, relate in ways, and not, to books you like by women?

I almost always used to write stories from the points of view of men. A few friends in an old writing group of mine pointed that out one time, and I didn’t know why I did that. After some thought, I decided it was probably because I was reading primarily books by men. Anyway, those friends recommended a bunch of stories about women by women (in writing styles I like), and women are all over book social media currently, so I read way more books by women now than I used to, and I guess that’s why I wrote these books about women too.

Chuck Palahniuk’s old work is some of my favorite. Like I mentioned, Invisible Monsters was my gateway into what I read and write, and then when I read Fight Club it beat Invisible Monsters as my favorite book (and has held that place for almost two decades). Other male authors I really like include Jay McInerney, Denis Johnson, and Bret Easton Ellis.

The thing that I love about these writers and the female writers I love is both what kinds of stories they tell and how they tell them. Like, I love very conversational narrators. I love stories that feel like secrets and criticize society – I want to feel like I’m learning something about the world that I wasn’t supposed to know through the book. That’s good writing to me, writing that I find enjoyable, and writing that inspires my own stories, so if a man or a woman is writing anything like this, I’m going to absolutely devour it.

I think maybe the books I’m reading by women are different from the books by men in the way they transgress. The women’s books totally address transgression, but transgression that’s usually based more in reality, where the books by men are sometimes more wild and maybe a little more unrealistic. I’m not sure if it’s just the books I’m choosing, or if it says something about genders, but it’s an observation, I guess.