Ruth Gila Berger is a Minneapolis writer who works very far backstage within the publishing industry. She has most recently been published by The Collagist, Slice, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn. Looking forward, she has a new piece to be published by Fourth Genre. There is a memoir in progress in her computer. And some other new essays.
Her essay, "Freeze Frame," appeared in Issue Eighty-One of The Collagist.
Here, Ruth Gila Berger talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about time, writing about her wife, and the publishing industry.
What can you tell us about the origins of your essay, “Freeze Frame”? What sparked the initial idea and caused you to start writing the first draft?
That’s really hard to trace. The content of “Freeze Frame” is part of a memoir I was writing about the first two years of my relationship with my (now) wife, Christi. What started me on that project was the fact I was in a relationship with someone I had questions about the viability of. Was our relationship even possible? I couldn’t find anything out there in existing nonfiction where the romantic lead had the diagnosis of schizophrenia Christi has. All I found were stories told by familial bystanders dealing with the wreckage. In the world of self help there was no one saying this relationship was a good idea or pointing towards a means of navigating what aspects of brain chemistry interference were improvable and which were simply all we could expect with our current medical knowledge and technology. Quite the opposite. Christi and I were talking about the lack of lineage in our situation (for example the list of successful geniuses, artistic and otherwise, with bi-polar disorder is long, not so with schizophrenia, Van Gogh’s issues guessed at and possibly due to lead); she told me it was my story to tell. Get to work. That was the impetus and direction I took. The events of “Freeze Frame” had not yet happened. For two years I was essentially drafting our story in real time. There were probably twenty pages of melodramatic screaming I cut from the documentation of the “Freeze Frame” time period, twenty pages cut from a six hour period more likely. I wasn’t ever sure Christi and I would survive either each other or even as ourselves, alone. By writing, I was tagging a train off-course, like a graffiti artist, I wanted to leave evidence that there was an amazing love there. Something beautiful. I suppose a fancy word would be witness. But in terms of “Freeze Frame” as an essay, that was much later. I had to break the larger memoir manuscript apart into pieces—it read like an unsustainable level of crisis. And I had that stupid J Giles Band song in my head. You know how sometimes understanding the necessary structure for your work can be so random. What pushed this piece of writing into the territory of an essay was the idea that the past is always changing. I don’t mean that the history is revised, like in first draft I had a red sweater but a photograph revealed it to be blue. Or even that our understanding of who we are now, as a result of who we were then, changes, although that is conceptually closer to it. More like we get attached to our stories of ourselves, our personal mythology, our origin stories. But when you look back (again) and realize that you’ve made yourself into a hero and that’s itchy at best. Because you are not a hero. You can’t be. There had to be something of the ugly things you find you are able to face now, back then. Hence “It is hard to look back into the hurricane in which we spun.” That was the start of the “essay”.
This essay has an unusual relationship with time. At several points, you convey the passage of time to the reader with a line like, “Hours and days and weeks,” or, “Time hiccupped, again I was arguing.” Why did you choose this unconventional approach to temporal transitions? Is this how you actually experienced the events, time skipping and blending? Or how you remember them? Or is it more of a narrative device? (All, some, or none of the above?)
Time fucks me up, that’s for sure. So probably all of the above is true in a fashion. There are things, “memories” that I always, or at least consistently, experience in present tense. Some of these have to do with trauma and how early childhood trauma, especially pre-lingual experience is neurologically processed, coded, rewired. Sometimes conversations that just took place at a louder volume remain present tense, are therefore relived more than remembered sequentially. Maybe the moments that aren’t resolved into a neat understanding or interpretation or integration with your regular sense of yourself that lend themselves to this always present tense experience. But that’s me the person—as I walk around, not me narrator created in a careful arrangement of letters. My thinking interrupts itself and so my writing mirrors that thought process where tenses change within a single sentence. I understand what I mean but the story I’m trying to tell is too deeply encoded. Call it a song-to-myself shorthand that shared makes no fucking sense to even my closest reader. I don’t get it. Where am I temporally? Common enough response. So the next draft is untangled as I read aloud and try to correct tenses to agree. Basic grammar. Often the result is I’ll get a draft written entirely in present tense. Which adds an immediacy that exists like a low level hum—you can’t sustain it, at least—I can’t. I find it rings a little hysterical. So I revise towards placing all action in past tense. Except that always feels like I’ve crossed a line in to fiction—it doesn’t match my memory/experience. So again I read to myself, this is also a point where any kind of alliterative thing I have going starts to sound precious—sound can be a self-soothing mechanism with difficult content but it can’t exist just for that sort of prettiness (something I fear I never catch all of, that self-conscious artifice) but the moments that still buzz through me stand out and they get returned to present tense—and truth, that is what is left is not fiction. I hope that makes sense. To explain a phrase like “time hiccupped” I’m not sure. Perhaps it falls into the category of narrative device. For me its translation is the conversation I’m having at the table with Christi starts one night; I close my eyes and open them and it could be ten minutes later, two hours later or a week later, where we are having exactly the same conversation where no emotional or intellectual changes have been made—nothing in the interim has gotten us beyond that impasse so we pick up where we left off. That’s the experience I mean to convey.
Your essay is an almost 10,000-word recounting of a dramatic, difficult time in a contentious relationship. What do you go through when you write about experiences so fraught with intense emotions? Is the writing painful, or therapeutic, or both (or neither, something else entirely)? Do you consider this writing to be helpful and/or necessary for you?
This question has me chasing my tail. The relationship depicted in “Freeze Frame” still exists within the relationship I have with Christi, although its resemblance to us now is very vague. So the question is why put this painful reminder out there? Because “Freeze Frame” is part of a larger project, and because to keep it within the bounds of nonfiction means my story has to be corroborated, Christi has been part of my process, generously rereading multiple drafts. Except this one piece. She jokes that if she knew I was writing everything down, a public record, she wouldn’t have done so much stupid shit. (Of course that cuts both ways, me too, stupid shit.) Suffice to say this piece will not ever get read in public. It hurts too much. So why put it out there. I really don’t have a good answer. All of the standard writer answers sound way too fucking noble, smug, pat. Maybe it has to do with knowing there’s a reason for what still in me aches when even the scars are no longer visible. Maybe the infantile impulse to strike out is present in me way more than it should be. If I am honest I have to admit writing is a scream for attention, it is that bratty and that full of egotistical bullshit. Maybe paradoxically I want to comfort Christi and myself both, and anyone else who is looking for a story that has a lot of gray, because so much of the gray area of emotional terrain is denied. Gray standing in for the ambivalence I see as DNA for love—I’m not about purity. Necessary is a good word. So is selfish. I don’t have this one tied up in a bow-like answer yet. Maybe I thought I’d have a really good justification by the time it came out. The bratty cynic in me questions how many people will actually read it, and then of those how many will remember or be affected by it. But that’s a cop out. I know that. I used to smoke to see my breath—if that makes any kind of sense as an answer to this question. The thing is, there are moments of joy in that time period, alongside the pain of it. That the two conflicting emotions coexist was my point. I’m not sure if I succeeded at conveying that.
In addition to being a writer, you have had a long career in the publishing industry. What lessons have you learned from working in that field that have made you a better writer?
Become an electrician while you write. I’m really not kidding. Ignore the industry. There are wonderful, generous, brilliant, passionate people out there at every level doing great work. Walk into to your local bookstore, or the bookstore where you are visiting and buy new books. And by new I mean books that are coming out now, or recently. Get your classics at the library or buy them used if need be. Same with the “canon” whatever that is. You want to support as many writers coming up around you as you can. Talk to booksellers and buy from them. The industry’s salespeople are its heroes, marketing people too, reviewers. But seriously and assiduously, ignore the industry, it’s fucking devastating. And never be an asshole to anyone, ever. Be the best most generous reader and editor and proofreader for your writer friends you can be and treasure those relationships. Nurture your ability to answer yes, open doors, pull anyone in your reach up. Just keep writing and writing. That is what makes you a better writer.
What writing projects are you working on now?
My obsession for the past twelve years is a memoir or a collection of essays, whichever form it turns out to better be, (working title) We Are a Famous Love Story, that concentrates on the first two years of my relationship with Christi. “Freeze Frame” is the third to last piece in it. Sex and drugs and knives and art (Christi is an artist) oh my. I wrote (am writing) WAAFLS to answer the question of whether or not damage can heal damage—that is, if you follow me—we’ve found how we’ve been healing under the exit light, one foot out the door, towards the grave, still doing harm as we go. There is no particular marker that once you’ve passed you suddenly amass wisdom. You gain it in a helix as you continue to shoot yourself in the foot. Also, I want Christi and myself in the cultural conversation about sanity. Every time I hear the words “the mentally ill” in the news I catch my breath. The two of us laugh about a DSM smackdown, depression and ptsd vs. schizophrenia (or schizo-affective disorder) but the whole thing makes me want to scream. Not that there aren’t positive depictions (of people with the diagnosis of schizophrenia) and strong voices out there but I want evidence of ourselves in relation, not by definition. Twenty-five years ago coming out LGBT was a scary thing. Probably for fifteen years now I’ve been saying that the fact of my being queer is the least interesting aspect of me. Or if it is the most interesting then I’m fucked. So I’d like to get to that point with the DSM labels. To have our story about love and sex and recreating family and our cats. That we are possible and perhaps funny and cute too. That we got from crash and burn to providing a refuge, a model of adult within a program for the throwaway youth of our LGBT community. And we are still messed up as all get out and that’s okay in that we continue.
What have you read recently that you’d like to recommend?
The Bestiary by Lily Hoang from Cleveland State University Poetry Center. It was a book that landed via a contest submission and it sat on my stack for a bit. Completely amazing. Ms. Hoang’s ability to write about all the deep gray levels in the heart, to lay bare the illusion of insight and self-understanding as a possibility and yet show the contradiction that it is there at the same time, has me tied in knots. How she keeps words to a minimum, artistically lays them on a page and lets the presentation add its own layer to the story, to the thoughts she puts down, without losing me to my own distracting mishegas. She uses fairy tales in a way that recalls the theory I remember from Uses of Enchantment but I want to say my mention of that book feels a bit like me striving to say something more intelligent and worthy. But then the fairy tales are just there because they are. Even as she tells stories of the soul deadening words an abusive ex spews she confronts her own survival instinct, the instinct that cuts off the addicted and desperately loved relative. Wow. The ambivalence of continuing damage within a sexual relationship because who knows why. I think her writing is so true it hurts. And to write about sex without writing about sex—if that is even how best to describe it—she does that. Get a bookstore to order it for you.