A Conversation with Myfanwy Collins…
CB: Thanks Myfanwy, for this opportunity. I was really inspired and empathized with a recent post on your blog about author self-promotion. On the release of The Book of Laney, you say in the first paragraph of that post:
“My mission is that if reading this book can lift one young person (or person of any age!) out of darkness and offer them hope, then I will feel I have done my work well.“
Do you believe that hope and inspiration are the true purpose of us as writers and how do you handle that when faced with the business end of writing, like publicity?
MC: Thank you for the opportunity, Chris, and thank you for what you said about my blog post on self-promotion. It can be such a touchy thing to promote one’s work. A fine line between too much and not enough (or none at all). For me, social media is a gift. It’s an opportunity to join the conversation. It can be a great equalizer and… it’s free. Well, sort of free. It certainly can take a personal toll and we give away our thoughts as payment. I enjoy social media (most of the time). Not so for everyone and I respect that.
Publicity seems like just another level of what we’re doing when we put our words out into the world. We needn’t be so embarrassed, so ashamed. Publicity, as I see it, is just a way of holding out your hand and saying, “Here. I made this thing. It might speak to you. If not, you can turn your face away and not see me. That is okay, too.”
As for hope and inspiration being a purpose for writers, I really don’t know. I can’t speak for every person writing. All I can say is that with The Book Of Laney I have a sense of purpose and that purpose is to reach out to the people who felt the way I did as a young person (whether they are young now or my age or in between) and let them know that they can find something to live for within themselves if they haven’t found it already.
CB: Your book has already garnered a lot of attention, especially on Goodreads, Myfanwy. One reviewer wrote:
“‘Why am I different?’ Laney asks toward the end of the novel, and it’s a question that will resonate with every person, as will the main theme in the novel: we may believe that our families and our genes determine who we become, ‘but really there’s something inside us that does that. Some collection of all that we know and all that we feel that molds us.’”
How do you feel you have changed as a writer over the years and, considering your work as a former publicist and the themes in The Book of Laney, how have you changed as a human being?
MC: Well, this is a great big question and an important one to me. First, I just want to correct something. I worked with publicists, but I mostly (for at least a couple of my jobs) worked in promotions and marketing and event planning. I suppose promotions are like publicity but it’s from the vendor side as opposed to the distributor.
I have had lots of different jobs. They’ve all changed me and made me grow in some way. Mostly, I think just aging and letting my heart open up more and more each year is what has changed me. There was a time in my 20’s when my heart was just shut down completely. Impenetrable. I felt like I might finally be broken for good.
But I wasn’t. I wasn’t done.
As an adult–a writer and human being–, I have tried to be forgiving and tried my best to be empathetic. There have been times when I’ve been miserable in my own skin and my misery has turned me mean. I even learned from those times. I learned how I don’t want to be. I learned about why some people are mean. What drives them to it and how much they hate themselves.
When I am perceived as being mean now it is usually when I am being clear with someone who has crossed a line with my family or me or who has crossed a line in a bigoted and hateful way.
People are confused and feel confronted by clarity. It scares them. I aim for clarity.
Mostly, I’m a workhorse and I want to please. I always have been. My place in the dysfunctional family was as the clown and I am people pleaser (though becoming a bit less so with age). It’s hard to let that go. As much as I stay the same, I’m still that little kid who just wants everyone to get along and love one another.
CB: Even at a younger age myself, I can understand and respect that clarity. The older I get the less patience I have for the people I meet or have in my life that really just aren’t good for my growth. I used to run a functioning chapbook press from here Myfanwy and the main theme of the press was loosely based on human condition and fault…namely that the books and work of the press was seeking an understanding in humanity and error. I learned a lot from my mistakes here and there and often wear them (and my heart) on my sleeve. What do you believe the literary community, and publishing in general, could learn or change about how we treat each other, even more important, how we treat a reader??
MC: I wear my heart and mistakes on my sleeve, too. I am fine admitting when I’ve been wrong. It is how we grow, right? I don’t know what the literary community is as a whole. I’m not sure if there is one big literary community or one big center of publishing. Things have diversified quite a bit in that New York is not necessarily the hub and arbiter, though it is always the dream.
I don’t live in New York. I am woman. I am outside of academia. I am a mother. I am in my 40s. I’ve got all of these strikes against me in terms of not being the type of person people want to hear from and yet I look to those women who came before me on this path and I let them guide me. What I’m coming to is that I hope we can stop discounting people for their perceived differences and start to have more empathy for each other. Isn’t the job of the writer partially to understand what it feels like to be another?
Then again, maybe the larger literary community does it exist. Maybe it exists within social media. There are certainly no shortage of writers, editors, publishers, agents, and reviewers active on social media. Maybe that is where we level the field and find our place and begin to hear each other.
CB: What do you feel is the next step, maybe after the whirlwind of your young adult novel subsides, is best or challenging for you?
MC: My immediate goal is to try to figure out what to do with this project I’m working on now. If I decide to write it one way, I go down a different path with my career (such that it is) than I go down if I decide to write it another way. Sorry for the cryptic response.
CB: Ah, sometimes the best kept secrets are also the most affirming, Myfanwy. Thank you for taking the time to interview with me. Is there anything else you’d like anyone reading this post to know, understand or think about?
MC: It has been my absolute pleasure. Thank you for your compassionate questions.
What I want people to think about is how we are throwing away our children at such a young age. About how we are giving up on them and letting them know they are imperfect and unfixable. We are not always considering that both the bullied and the bullies need help and need to be listened to. Certainly, teachers and school administrators are aware and employing responsive classroom and apology of action and such tactics to teach children how to think about each other’s feelings.
But what can we do as adults and examples? And I’m not just talking about parents here. I’m talking about all adults living in the world. What can we do? This is what I ask myself. Especially when I see so many adults behaving badly and when I see myself behaving badly. What can we do?
So there’s this: We can teach them how best to live in this world as imperfect beings. Making them feel unfixable is not the answer. Instead it is part of the problem. If we can look within and love that broken part within ourselves then maybe we can begin to have compassion and empathy for others, for our children.
Let yourselves be imperfect, too. We don’t need you to be perfect. It’s a start, at least.
Myfanwy Collins has published a novel, Echolocation (2012), and a collection of her short fiction, I Am Holding Your Hand (2013). THE BOOK OF LANEY is her first novel for young adults. It was published in March 2015. She has also published fiction and essays in The Kenyon Review, The Potomac Review, The Cream City Review, AGNI, Quick Fiction, and other venues. For more information, please visit her web site: http://www.myfanwycollins.com
The Young Adult novel, The Book of Laney, is available from it’s publisher Lacewing Books, Barnes & Noble, Indiebound, Powell’s, and Amazon.
