Lucy: I’m Lucy A. McLaren, fantasy author and professional counsellor with a keen interest in mental health and how it’s explored in stories. Which is what brings us here today, because I learned about Courtney Denelle’s debut novel, IT’S NOT NOTHING, which is releasing from Santa Fe Writers Project on 1st September. So, Courtney please tell us more about your book and why I'm so interested in it. No pressure.
Courtney: Well, I'm Courtney Denelle. I’m a writer from Providence, Rhode Island. I've written an autobiographical first novel, a novel in fragments, that's drawn from my experience of homelessness and recovery. And it is a slim novel, it's definitely, like, within the lineage of minimalist American contemporary fiction, but it's an exploration of a young woman responding to her own recovery. So, it is very taut, it’s very interior. It’s essentially, like, the story of a young woman landing in a human body after having not lived in her own body for, you know, 24 years. But, yeah, I’m still not super well-versed on selling it in an elevator pitch.
L: I'm with you there. Writing the book is one thing, isn’t it? But succinctly explaining it in a few sentences is the challenge.
C: Yeah.
L: But yeah, it’s a snapshot of Rosemary’s life, isn't it? I felt as though we were coming towards the end of the addiction, and more towards her recovery and gaining self-awareness. For me, it felt like a really intense, emotional read. I read it, because I'm a counsellor, almost as if she was a client of mine. You get these really deep inner thoughts. She's quite self-deprecating, but also really self-aware because we're seeing, you know, glimpses of this past trauma that has happened when she allows herself to think about it. And you start to understand, okay, so this is what's led Rosemary to this addiction, why she's landed where she's landed. So, I wanted to ask, where did you start with the story? Was it something you planned, or did you just start writing it?
C: Well, I kind of accidentally wrote a novel! I thought that I was writing a linked story collection, specifically like a linked collection of flash pieces. I’ve drawn so much influence from writers Amy Hempel and Mary Robison, you know, super, super taut on the sentence level. And so, I was kind of exploring that idea and thinking that I was writing exactly as you said, like, little snapshots, not unlike SAFEKEEPING by Abigail Thomas, which is a memoir in snapshots, and if you haven't read that you should, it’s so good.
L: Noted.
C: But all of a sudden, I had this whole mess of documents on my desktop, and I was like, it's all here! I had little scenes, I had jokes, I had bits of dialogue. So, when I talk about this book it's really difficult for me to talk about this novel without talking about the process of making it, and I feel like it very much was made; it was written and then assembled in this very particular way. My therapist was my first reader, I think that's really important to establish. I didn't have anyone else. I didn’t have, like, a writers’ group or writers’ community; it was very much me kind of engaging with myself on the page. But I was really interested in the idea of articulating the conflicting kind of narratives that exist within ourselves, you know? Really rejecting that idea that we have one little, tiny person behind our eyes that's like thinking the thoughts and pulling the levers and pushing the buttons, you know? Because my, like, experience of myself is not a stream. It’s a room full of belligerents, all of them grabbing for the microphone, all of them insisting on their version of the truth. As an extension of my recovery and of my therapy, that was really interesting. As a writer that was really interesting. I thought that that narrative kind of tension existing within the tension of opposites was kind of fascinating. I think in, like, trauma therapy they call it internal family systems, and meditations, schools of thought, they call it witnessing the quality of your own mind. It’s all kind of the same thing, just using different placeholder words, and I think I was looking for a literary point of entry to examine that.
So, in that respect, keeping the trauma off screen, so to speak, was a deliberate choice. Almost like those Greek tragedies, you know, the Greek theatre, where the murder happens off stage, and the dramatic tension comes from the long shadow that the traumatic event has cast. That was a deliberate choice. A way of the narrator experiencing herself and responding to her own recovery, and responding to herself, you know? Kind of, oh, you know, that's just me talking to me about me. That kind of dynamic. And also, compression like in terms of style, like sentence compression, and how can you say it with less? Just as a writer, that's interesting to me.
So, all of those things just turned into this big old mish-mash of, like, magazine cutouts or something, and then putting that together. Having said all that, because it's drawn from my own experience… I wouldn't call it a cathartic experience, because I think that denotes some kind of release or some sort of transcendence or moving beyond. I think what the process of writing this, of making this work, provided for me was a sense of feeling real to myself. I'm 40, I was reflecting on a time in my life where I was 24, where I was 25. And I can say that who I am now is no one I could have known then. And it required me as somebody who--I was 38 at the time I was writing--who was 38 reflecting with the benefit of hindsight but stepping into the shoes of a narrator who is completely lacking hindsight. She is, like, permanently present but not in, like, a monk way, I mean just like living in this terminal now. But that process in and of itself has allowed me to live alongside my own trauma in a way that I don't know that I would have been capable of before I set out to write this. And also, artistically, creatively, like, I don't have a higher education. I've always just turned to the blank page to understand myself.
So, finishing this novel is like… I get to keep going now. I feel like I’ve revealed myself to be this deep-cover optimist, who did this really hard thing and did it every day, you know? Like we write these books not knowing what's going to happen, but we still show up and do it. I’ve revealed myself to be this deep cover optimist, kind of, like, trying to pull bodies out of the fire. So, I get to keep going, and that has been a radical change in terms of my own way of bearing the weight of my reality.
L: Yeah.
C: That was a really long answer to your question!
L: It’s so interesting though. I just imagine you with a tapestry on the wall. Like this whole wall of pages that you wrote and just somehow tying them all together. I think that's how this story works being told. Where we come in is Rosemary starting to, like you said, she has no hindsight, but she's starting to look back when we meet her.
C: Yeah.
L: She’s still pushing it away to start with and not wanting to go there, but, you know, she slowly starts to, I think, accept herself, would that be right? And actually work towards being like, “Yeah, okay, some really fucked up stuff happened, but I'm going to try and move forward from it.” It wasn't necessarily a cathartic process for you, but it sounds like it was still valuable for you to do it, to write this, to have your therapist be the first person to read it. That must have been like… was that nerve-wracking? How was that?
C: Well, she is an actual Earth Angel. I wouldn't have been able to do it without her. And also, I have to say as a client, as a patient, you know, the effects of having a counsellor, a therapist that is able to walk beside you in this process is ultimately the difference. The difference between just surviving and at least opening up the potential to thrive, or thriving, and my therapist is that person in my life. And so it wasn't, I wouldn't say nerve-wracking. I felt like it was almost like, “I made this for us.” I didn't share it until I was pretty much done. I had just got back from my first residency, and I just handed it to her like a big stack of papers. Like, I gave her actual paper, and so it was a really moving moment for both of us, because I think even if it totally sucked, it still would have been like… “If not for you,” right? “If not for you, I wouldn't have been able to do this.”
I often think like in visual art there's this space for outsider artists, so people that make visual art without any sort of instruction outside of academia, and almost always it's having to do with mental illness, you know. Sometimes they call it naïve art. That is really like my experience of having written this novel and engaging with the page in general like that is, it's such a direct extension of my recovery but there doesn't seem to be, like, a place for that in literature. I think maybe because publishing is like an industry, you know, publishing is like the noun. Maybe all writers feel alienated, all of us feel slightly mentally ill. But I think that notion of outsider art, that, kind of, like, deep dive into your own emotional underworld, that’s the closest I can come if I were to try to define my approach, my literary approach. And so of course it made sense that my therapist would be like my co-pilot. It’s easy for me to imagine her experience reading it the first time would be like, “Oh, shit—I actually said that!”
But I think there’s something to be said about writing autobiographical fiction versus writing memoir. Even though it’s drawn from my experience, it’s still a novel. The timeline is compressed, you know. So, it was almost like, I’m sure she saw some sort of proxy of herself in there. And, yeah, so it’s… I think, seeing, like—I used to be active on Twitter, I’m not anymore. It just makes me feel bad.
L: I don’t blame you.
C: But when I used to be active on Twitter, every once in a while, there’d be, like, a literary Twitter flare-up, right, about whether or not writing is therapy. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that, maybe it’s different in genre circles or what have you, but the literary camp loves it. Every once in a while, the same arguments crop up and one of them is, you know, “Writing is not therapy.” And I think the diminishment of that kind of presupposes that we’re all just like sharing these flabby journals for the world, as if it’s not rigorous, as if it’s not serious, or as if because it’s therapeutic, we’re somehow not cutting along the nerve, we’re somehow not doing the work. And maybe I understand the impulse behind that argument, especially if it’s coming from a workshop mentality of, you know, peer call and response. But, I mean, I was directly engaging with myself through the process of not only writing this in terms of generating the work, but brutally revising. I mean I could recite it to you at this point, I’ve gone over it so many times. So, if that’s not rigorous in a literary sense, I really don’t know what is. I apologise, I feel like I’m going so wide with all your questions. I’m deep in my coffee at this point!
L: Don’t apologise, it’s all really interesting. I find it interesting; I write such a completely different type of story. You know, I’m a fantasy author, I’m making up worlds and characters, but I also use my own experiences from a mental health perspective within my characters and I fully think writing is one of the best types of therapy. I’ve said to so many of my clients: just write. Just start writing and see what comes out. I think you just need to read it, almost, like I did—as the counsellor reading the client’s experience, with no judgement. It felt like a really honest book. You didn’t want to be fully autobiographical, this is a story, ultimately, but it also was something that you wouldn’t have written if you hadn’t had your therapist alongside you. You see that with Rosemary as well, in terms of her starting her therapy and where that leads. I just find it absolutely fascinating. So, how would you say your experiences informed how you told the story? You didn’t want readers to be able to distinguish what is you and what is Rosemary, but how important was it for you to put some of your experiences in there?
C: Well, I mean, I feel like it was almost the only way it could have been, you know? Because of my origin story, not as, like, a human, but my origin story as a writer is so enmeshed with my own recovery. And, I mean, just the basic idea that you’re always in recovery, you’re never recovered. It’s this perpetual process, it’s always keeping one foot in front of the other. And also, it was important for me—and this, kind of, came together more in the revision phase, where I was compiling and editing and moving and clipping and cutting and cutting within an inch of its life—but it was really important for me to resist at every turn some sort of overcoming adversity narrative, you know? Because that is exactly my experience. There’s never going to be a laurel crowning that is going to place her on the other side of all that has passed. The best we can do in terms—and when I say we, I mean me and her—is that we can learn to live alongside it. We can learn to live in the world and, kind of, solve the problem of living. And when you’ve lived with a fatal urge, even when that urge is not activated, it casts a long shadow. So, you know, feeling in a sustainable capacity, at least in my experience, requires me to perpetually recalibrate and try to understand, or at least move towards understanding, in order to bear the weight of my own reality.
And, so, I think that was the trajectory of the novel. It needed to land on… not hope, but something like it. That had to be the case. I mean, maybe this is specifically an American problem, it feels like it but it’s not possible that it is—but the idea of bootstrapping, you know, the idea of meritocracy. All of these things that guild the turd of trauma in order to make it all seem worthwhile. Like, there needs to be a finish line. All of that, to my mind, just reduces our capacity for care and concern. It’s like a way of auditing who among us is trying hard enough, wants it enough. And that is really fucked up, and there’s no solutions there. If you’re moderating who among us is worthy of care and concern, it demands that shame and feigned self-accountability are the only ways to keep going. That idea, it requires the baseline assumption that we’re all choosing a choice. We’re all choosing our path. Again, that was, in terms of the novel, it was important for me to write Rosemary grappling with that. At one point, she’s trying to take on, “Okay, well, if I’m a fuck-up, if I’m a piece of shit, well then, okay. Accepting that is the first step and I can just get myself out of it. If I’m living a choice, I can just un-choose it, can’t I?” But, of course, trauma is not like that. Mental illness is not like that. Economic situations are not like that. Poverty is not like that. So, all of those things, kind of, moving alongside them in terms of the structure of the novel was an important nod to those ideas. Which is directly related to my experience.
And also, the overcoming adversity narrative, like, I mean, I’ve been experiencing that kind of tension myself in pre-publication. This idea of creating a public face of the writer-self. You know, in terms of marketing and promotion, and that’s a really daunting task not only because it’s such a private endeavour, right? Writing in general. But also, because it was autobiographical, not wanting to completely lean into the sad story, you know? I’m opposed to that because the idea of that marketing snapshot or what have you is that there was some sort of inevitability, you know, to my having survived… or my having even finished this novel. And there’s nothing inevitable about it.
L: It’s like that idea that you said—I don’t think it is just America, you know, I certainly see it in the U.K.—this idea that, yeah, some people are overcoming the trauma, the bullshit that they were born into or that’s been inflicted upon them, and that they’ve overcome it and “made something of themselves”, and therefore it was worth going through the trauma because that’s how they’ve ended up being a “success”. Whereas, actually, it results in there being these people that are completely looked down on, as if homeless people, for example, as if they’ve chosen to be homeless. As if they want to be living on the streets. As if anyone would make that choice. I remember reading a quote once that was, basically, “No one wakes up and says, ‘I’m going to go and do some heroin’.” No one makes that decision because they just fancy it.
There’s a psychologist called Gabor Maté, he’s amazing, he works with people who have been through trauma, addicts. I highly recommend his book, IN THE REALM OF HUNGRY GHOSTS, if you haven’t read it, it’s amazing. But he basically looks at the fact that addictions are rooted in abuse, trauma, or some kind of painful experience. And I don’t think that’s fully appreciated by people, no one is an addict because they have just decided to be an addict. Something has happened to them in childhood or whatever it may be, something too painful, they don’t want to look at it. It’s almost, like, this form of suppression, right? Something there to push away whatever they’re feeling. I think you’ve already touched on this, but do you feel like those things, trauma, addiction, homelessness, do you feel like they’re completely misunderstood by society as a whole? There’s this “war on drugs”, which is a completely ineffective way of trying to deal with drugs and drug addiction. I think we see that in both our countries.
C: Yeah, yeah. I mean, you see, like, attempts at destigmatising. You see that happen in little spurts here and there. Again, this is as a non-professional, this is as a person just living in the world. I mean, I remember at one point there was the conversation around mental illness as it pertained to psych meds. And it was about destigmatising antidepressants and psych meds in general—all like, “If you had diabetes, would you shame somebody for taking their insulin?” And I think at that particular time, it was like, “Okay, that’s something.” But that was only one step, because that particular strategy is not without its own limitations too, because operating under that assumption, you know, you take your meds and, like, now you’re right as rain. You’re able to be a functioning, productive member of society. Of course, that’s not the whole story. There does seem to be—again, this is just me noticing—but there does seem to be a more comprehensive, or at least the beginning of a more comprehensive, conversation around complex trauma that seems to be happening. Things like addiction, symptoms of mental illness, personality disorders, things like that, are kind of referred to as the constellations of symptoms, you know? And so, addressing just one of those things is never going to be the end all, be all.
I think all of the little, like, blips, and all the little pop-cultural ways of destigmatising these issues are not without their own challenges. Or not without their own limitations. I think you see such an abundance of really, and I’ll say really, funny memes about living with anxiety, living with depression and things like that, and I think that they’re hilarious, they resonate. And so, I guess you could make an argument of, “Oh, this is all of us normalising the ebb and flow of symptoms of anxiety and depression.” But there’s also a nihilist aspect of it, too. That could just be the precarious times that we live in, but those things dance together too.
L: Yeah. It’s like that weird enmeshment of… Like, the fact that there are memes, for example, and the fact it’s all on social media, and that social media in and of itself can have massive negative impacts on people’s mental health. It’s a weird relationship, isn’t it? On one hand, it’s great it’s being spoken about more. People feel more open to talking about mental health, I think especially the younger generation, probably the generation below me. You know, I work with teenagers, and they just seem so much more in touch with their feelings than I ever was when I was their age. But, at the same time, they’re also glued to their phones, right? With the rise of stuff like TikTok, you’ve got children on there. It’s… I don’t know, I find it somewhat scary.
C: Yeah.
L: Yeah, it’s a weird dual relationship between them. On one hand it’s good, on one hand it’s terrifying how much stuff is put out there.
C: Yeah. Well, and it also creates pop-cultural, kind of, archetypes for what are acceptable expressions, for lack of a better phrase, of mental illness symptoms. I always joke with my friend and my husband that I’m not pretty enough to be sad on the internet. Like, you know, the pretty girl, sharing the confessional, “This is what I look like after crying.” Again, I get the impulse, but it still is accepting some form of who gets to be mentally ill in public. Like, who gets to confess, or publicise maybe the more anti-social symptoms of mental illness and trauma and how sometimes—most times, maybe—there is a gendered aspect of that. So, me saying, “Oh, I’m not pretty enough to be sad and confessional on the internet,” is, like, I’m joking, but also, I’m not, you know?
L: Yeah.
C: That’s some dystopian shit.
L: It really is. Going back to the subject of homelessness, addiction--people aren’t liking and sharing images of homeless people on the street going, “This is awful, how do we deal with this?” It’s a hidden aspect, it’s something no one really wants to see.
C: Yeah.
L: I think because it just feels like such a massive issue. Like, again, with the rise of talking about mental illness, great. But if our governments aren’t funding mental health care, what do we do then? You can only do so much as an individual person in society. You can give a homeless person some money. Ultimately, what’s that going to do in the long-term? You feel helpless in a way, you want to help but you don’t know how. Part of it I think is being able to talk about it more. Stuff like your book I feel is really important in opening that dialogue. But that feels like it puts way too much responsibility on you as an author going out there and talking about this stuff.
C: Yeah.
L: But I think it opens up that dialogue, and that’s the first step, right? To people being aware of these issues, noticing them more. For me, I only became aware of these things when I trained as a counsellor when I was in my late twenties. Before that, I was just ignorant, I would say. I think being able to read stuff like this can be quite eye-opening for people who haven’t been anywhere near these kinds of experiences, have lived what would probably be seen as a privileged life. They haven’t been through trauma or witnessed addiction or been through it themselves or anything like that.
C: Yeah. I also think we live in such dark, precarious times. I think there seems to be an aspect… I mean, I live in a deeply polarised country, it’s God-awful. There seems to be, like, again, this desire to measure who among us is worthy of care and concern. And in order to do that, you have to actively work against compassion. You have to actively reverse engineer your empathy, you know? It could just be that everyone, for the most part, is in a precarious situation, and almost, like, acknowledging someone else’s greater issue that’s maybe plugged into a bigger, vaster mechanism of adversity is somehow taking away from their pain. And it’s like, well… it’s not cake, you know? It’s not like there’s a finite amount of pain and acknowledging that socio-political catastrophe is somehow taking away from you.
Yeah, I mean, I write fiction. I have no answers. I think there’s one point in the novel where Rosemary is really entering into therapy as a willing patient for the first time, and she says—I’m paraphrasing myself—she says, “I ask questions with no answers, and so they’ll be asked forever.” I think that is really my experience engaging with the blank page. It shows up in my novel that I’ve just finished, I’m starting my third. It’s, like, the same kind of stuff. I’m tilling the same soil over and over again. I have a friend that I met at a residency, she’s a poet, and she has this idea--and I’ve heard it from others as well--that she’s always writing the same poem. Like not, of course, line by line, word by word, but she’s always approaching the same stuff. And I feel like that’s the only way that I feel capable of impacting in my own teeny, tiny little corner of the world, just impacting these heavy, grief-laden things, is by engaging with those questions. Not with the hope of necessarily landing on an answer, but in sussing something out in the process. I mean, you can drive from New York to LA with your headlights lighting up, what, only 20 yards ahead of you, and you somehow get there. Yeah, something like that.
L: Yeah, I think you’re right. It is often the case, you are just asking yourself a question and each time, maybe, you’re getting a different answer, and you’re exploring it in a different way. When you said that about, you know, writing the same poem, actually that resonated with me in terms of exploring a lot of the same issues in different ways in the stories that I write. I’m sure it’s the same for you. So, you’ve just started your second book, did you say? And you’re working on your third, too.
C: Mmhm.
L: Writing this has been important for you, but, like you said, it doesn’t mean what’s happened to you has gone away.
C: Yeah.
L: You’re still going to keep exploring that. And, I don’t know, I think in a way, doing that keeps those questions at bay a little bit. I almost imagine them growing and growing until it gets to a point where you have to start doing something about it, otherwise it just starts really weighing down on you and being quite a repressive feeling. And just being able to deal with that, to keep it at bay, to know that you’re doing all you can. There’s not a magic switch that you can flick in your brain that goes—
C: I’m all better!
L: Yeah. If only that was the case! And I think that can feel frustrating for people. I’ve had clients where it’s been like, “Why can’t this just go away?” And unfortunately, it can’t, the brain is not equipped for that. There are no answers, really. I think we’re all just doing our best, really, aren’t we? And trying to deal with our own shit, basically, in whatever way that we can.
C: Yeah.
L: It sounds like for you, that is writing. You’ve found your way here. So, you started writing at 38. Have the floodgates opened?
C: Yes and no. I have always been a reader, first and foremost. A voracious reader. Like, my bio says that I received my greater education at the public library, and that’s the truth. I have always been a covetous reader. Like, I’m mad at all the books I haven’t read. I’ve always written in an effort to understand what felt completely ineffable to me; in order to, like, reduce the charge of feeling so much all the time. I have stacks of these composition notebooks—you know, the black and white ones—and a lot of it is just bullshit. A lot of it is terrible. I don’t relate to writers who are, just in terms of process, really enamoured of their first draft.
L: Oh God, no.
C: Oh my God. But there’s always something there. It’s kind of, like, describing myself to myself. I didn’t start writing deliberately. Meaning, like, writing with the intention to make something. Writing deliberately with the intention to improve. That didn’t start until my mid-thirties. Up until then, it was me and my notebook. My way of trying to figure out, like, “There must be something to do with all of this noticing that I do. There must be something!”
When I read certain writers of minimalist short fiction—Amy Hempel in particular—it was like a religious experience. Because her way of writing, not only did it make me feel less alone at a time when I needed to feel less alone, but it told me I could be a different kind of writer, you know? Because I wasn’t telling what I thought were stories. I wasn’t, you know, creating story worlds and stuff like that. I love that as a reader, but as a writer, I don’t know that that’s my DNA. But when I read Amy’s work for the first time… I mean, it coaxed me on.
And so, I started writing short fiction. A lot of that short fiction was not short stories, but it did show up in my first novel. But the catalyst of deliberate practice, writing with the intention of improving, and then writing with the intention that I was going to finish something and send it out into the world come what may, that has had a reverberating effect. And with finishing the first novel, it presented a whole new fascination, a whole new approach to those questions, you know? It enabled me to pursue those fascinations, kind of, not really knowing what would come of it. Wound up being an art world satire—go figure. But while still, kind of, having that whistling in the graveyard voice. Finishing that work has created a whole different approach to those same questions. Themes of belonging and what does legacy and ancestry look like, feel like, beyond, like, documents? Family tree stuff. What is the actual thumbprint of ancestry? I’m still working something out. It’s like I’ve built up that muscle now. And also, have been bolstered by the writing community that I’ve found only recently in the past couple of years.
I’m still really challenged by imposter syndrome. Even that feels like, almost, too cute of a descriptor. Like it feels so much more existential than that. It feels as though, oh my God… pre-publication has really been challenging for me emotionally because it’s made me aware. It’s really pushing up against this system of limiting beliefs that I had. Whether or not they were thrust upon me, whether or not they’re coming from myself, whether or not it’s both of those things… the system of limiting beliefs that, like, conditioned my responses, conditioned my way of understanding what I could expect, what I deserve, how much space I had the right to claim in the world. Publishing this book has really been pushing up against all of those beliefs, and that is interesting, to say the least. So, that’s another aspect of the ways in which writing this particular novel continues to shift my perspective in terms of not only all that has passed, but in all that lies ahead of me.
L: Yeah. I’m with you there. You don’t really know what to expect, do you? When you’re a debut author going through all this for the first time. You feel that sense of vulnerability of putting, basically, a part of yourself out in the world. And, yeah, imposter syndrome does sound weirdly cutesy, but it’s on such a deep level. Like, for me it brought up my inner teenager, she reared her head. And I was like, “Whoa, okay. There’s stuff here I need to deal with.”
C: Oh, yeah.
L: And you just don’t expect it. I don’t know whether that’s going to happen with every book, or whether it’s just… having never been through it before, you’re blindly walking through…
C: Yeah, yeah. You know, somebody asked me—they were like, “Is it the subject matter? Are you feeling apprehensive about these darker origin stories living in the world?” I’m like, “No, that is not it. I made peace with that a long time ago.” The weird thing that has been activated within me is, almost, like… I’m ill at ease with my own audacity. Of having made this thing and now I’m saying to the world, “Look at what I made.” That feels so audacious. And it’s so at odds with how I endured. Meaning what I told myself about what I should expect, you know? And that’s crazy.
I think in a certain capacity, I realised in the process of writing this book, I was submitting short fiction, I was sometimes getting stuff published, mostly not. I was getting those, kind of, tiered rejections that are like, “We love what you’re doing, we just wish you’d do it differently.” But I think all of this existential woe that I’m feeling, it’s making me realise, like, oh my God… I feel like I would have been all set shovelling those in the slush pile forever. Like, I would’ve had the moxie to endure that. The kind of moxie that’s indistinguishable from fear, you know? But the fact that, in my own little, teeny corner of the world, there’s an element who are receptive to all that I have to say, it’s thrown my whole system through a loop. My whole system is, like, wired against all of that. And so, I’m not anxious about the grit of the work living in the world. That’s like… “Well, if it’s hard for you to read, imagine how hard it was to live!”
But it’s the conundrum, right, of making art in a dark time. It challenges everything that you’ve conditioned yourself to believe in order to keep yourself safe. And I say this as somebody who, as a young woman I dumbed myself down to keep myself safe, in my early twenties. So, we do certain things to keep ourselves intact, to keep ourselves safe, you know, as women, as vulnerable people are wont to do. We rely on certain things to just keep on keeping on. And it’s also interesting too. When I think about, you know, conflicting narratives that exist within ourselves, some of those narratives do not want to go down without a fight. They are, like… they really think they’ve got my best interests at heart by girding me for the worst.
So, yeah, to establish, my therapist is an Earth Angel. She is earning her paycheck, keeping the ship upright or whatever.
L: Yeah, I’m sure this has brought stuff up for you to work through. Like I was the same with my counsellor. I think, like you said, as women, as vulnerable people, trying to keep yourself safe—it’s like making yourself invisible, right? Trying to make yourself small. And putting a book out in the world is like the opposite of that. You know, when you said about the audacity, the words, “Who the hell do you think you are putting a book out?” came to mind.
C: Yeah!
L: It definitely brings up stuff. But, for what it’s worth, your book is amazing. It was so different from my usual style. Like, I read epic fantasy. So, to read this minimalist, literary book, I did not know what to expect going in. But I was just so compelled by it, and, yeah, I think just from the mental health perspective, like I’ve said, it brings up really important topics that need to be spoken about more. You know, it’s the first step. Like you’ve said, you don’t feel like you’re an expert on this. You’re not a mental health professional, but you are someone that’s talking from your own experiences, and I think that’s, in a way, more valuable to people. Not everyone has been through these kinds of things or has any idea what it’s like to go through them, and being able to connect with someone on this level, via a story, really gives people the opportunity to try and understand what other people have been through. And where we’ve been through so much utter shit the past few years, just being able to connect on a human level feels like really… the most important thing. Cutting through everything else, social media, bullshit politics, all that kind of stuff, just reading a book feels really special, I think. A window into something we don’t get in other areas of our life.
Okay, so--to finish up, where can we connect with you? Author website? Social media, which we’ve put down as something evil!
C: Yeah! I have an author website. It’s mostly photos that I’ve taken, I’m a photography hobbyist. You can shoot me an email there—it’s just courtneydenelle.com. But you can also find me on Instagram, which is probably the social media network I’m most active on. I love visual art and memes about existential woe, so you can count on me for that.
L: Awesome. Listen, thank you so much Courtney for chatting with me today. It’s been really insightful and interesting. Thank you.
C: Thank you, thank you. And thank you so much for your close read. I really appreciate it, especially as a writer, as a mental health professional. The writer Alexander Chee has this essay, I turn to it like a sacred text, it’s called ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN WRITER, it grapples with the idea of making art in really precarious times, and he says at one point in the essay, “It’s easy to feel like your work doesn’t matter, your art doesn’t matter, in dark times. But there’s no way of knowing what a reader having read you will go on to do.” And so, your close read just means the world to me. I really appreciate it. And thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to listen to my caffeinated ramblings!
L: My pleasure. Thanks Courtney.