Ellen Meeropol and The Democracy of Multiple Points of View

I met Ellen Meeropol through the Rosenberg Fund for Children, for whom Katryna and I have done many benefits. But I subsequently discovered her an acclaimed novelist and amazing literary citizen, co-founder of Straw Dog Writers Guild, and general all-around awesome person. I recently had the honor of doing a reading with her and Essie Chambers at the Dream Away Lodge in Becket, MA. After hearing her read from her latest novel The Lost Women of Azalea Court, I bought my own copy, and after reading it decided I needed to have a longer conversation with her. Below is my interview.

Nerissa: When Alexander Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize, he gave an acceptance speech in which he offered advice to young writers. He said, “Don’t trust your brother; trust your own blind eye.” 

Every artist is growing and developing, trying things out when they are young and new at their craft. We’re listening intently to feedback from others, especially in an MFA program. We listen to our teachers and take their critiques seriously, and we pay attention to the people in workshop. 

For me, I was listening to club owners, managers, and booking agents who would say, “Here’s the problem with your band. If you did this, you’d go a lot farther.” At some point, though, we have to put all that aside and trust the blind eye inside us that actually sees better than anything else, even if it may lead to terrible mistakes in the eyes of what came before.

But if we’re truly innovative, then those “mistakes” are actually genius, and they set us apart. We declare who we are.

Another way to put it is that we become ourselves. We stop caring what other people think.

So I’m wondering if you could talk about your own journey in that direction, because you strike me as someone highly confident in her gifts and voice.

Ellen: Oh, I think I have as much imposter syndrome as anyone else! I believe all writers—and perhaps all artists—experience this. I would agree with that comment, especially as we develop as artists, but we can become blind to our own work. It then becomes a matter of figuring out who you want to listen to. Who are the readers who truly understand you and your work enough to help you identify where you haven’t effectively actualized what you envision in your mind and heart?

I recently went through this process with a new manuscript and some trusted writer friends. I think it’s important to listen beyond your blind spots. They pointed out things that, the moment I heard them, made me realize, “Oh, of course! I didn’t see that.” It prompted me to think about how to rework this particular part of the manuscript. Ultimately, it comes down to trusting our own work, our vision, and what drives us to write in the first place.

Nerissa: In my workshops, we talk about the “wallpaper” we take for granted, and we need each other to read our work to help. “Hey, I don’t see the wallpaper here. Whatever you have in your head isn’t coming through.” I completely agree. I think I’m referring more to when the work is done—or at least ready to go to an agent, editor, or publisher. You’ve taken feedback from your workshop buddies, but sometimes the feedback can be contradictory. 

But for us, at a certain point, we stopped looking for our listeners and stopped listening to people telling us what to do. Instead, we started having actual conversations with our fans/readers. The readers of my songs and the listeners provided feedback, expressing which pieces spoke to them. Through these interactions, we discovered the real gems in our work.

In The Lost Women of Azalea Court, we see the story from everyone’s perspective, including a wonderful Greek chorus aspect at the beginning of each section. In your work, you are always exploring the differing perspectives of your characters. Not every novelist does that.

Ellen: I love multiple points of view. That clash of perspectives is something I care about. I think it opens up dialogue and invites the reader in, especially if there’s a real conflict in viewpoints. So, where do you fit in this chorus of voices, each with a different perspective? It feels like a democratic way of writing a novel, right?

Nerissa: I get it. All my novels are multi-voiced, and I love it when different readers say, “Oh, my favorite character is Zhsanna.” “No, my favorite character is Liv.” And to see some readers absolutely hate my male character Peter while others say, “Oh, I get him.” That, to me, makes it fun and exciting.

Ellen: It does make it fun, absolutely.

Nerissa: You had so many interesting and juicy characters in this book. I remember you saying that before I had read the book, I heard you read from it and talk about the character of Gloria. I would love to hear a bit about how this book came to be. 

Ellen: Actually, the trigger for this book was an email that a friend sent me in 2002 about something that happened on the street where she lived in South Carolina. It struck me as she was talking about an elderly man who locked himself in his house. They thought his wife had died, but they weren’t sure. SWAT teams arrived because he had apparently threatened a neighbor who came to check on him and find out where his wife was. It was this little incident that fascinated me as an interesting conflict. I started writing it in 2015 or 2016, but it wasn’t going anywhere. It had no juice.

In 2017, I moved to this neighborhood on the grounds of the defunct Northampton State Hospital. I looked out my window at Building 9, which was the old coach house for the hospital. It’s been renovated, but that was one of the original buildings. I’m a walker, and when I started walking around the neighborhood and the dog park next door, I began stopping daily at the bench that overlooks a field where 219 unmarked graves are. These are people who were at the hospital and whose remains went unclaimed, buried there with no markers. Over the first few weeks and months of living here, the ghosts of this place seemed to say to me, “Hey, you should really set your novel here. This is a much better place.”

And I did. Once I changed the setting—because the setting is so important in that novel—the characters came alive, and the story transformed from what I originally envisioned. But that’s fine; that’s what writing fiction does. Often, it takes us a while to discover what the story is. So it was really this place where we’re sitting now that animated that novel.

Nerissa: Well, you write so well about place. Some of my favorite passages were descriptive ones, especially towards the end. I found myself reacting strongly to the way you captured November in Northampton, Massachusetts. You never explicitly say it’s Northampton, but you also don’t disguise it; anyone familiar with the area would know. You spoke about it with a lot of love and respect, as well as some healthy detachment from its peculiarities. I found your reflections on history very affecting. I also loved the way you portrayed Asher Blum. I was furious with him at times, but I also forgave him. I understood where he was coming from. Additionally, I thought it was very realistic how his wife and daughter responded to him at the end.

Nerissa: You do so much for the local literary community, and I’m curious about the beginnings of Straw Dog and how you see being a literary citizen as part of being a writer.

Ellen: Straw Dog started in 2010 when Patricia Lee Lewis invited four or five local writers to discuss starting a writing community. We spent several hours talking about how we didn’t want to step on the toes of the folks who were offering ongoing writing workshops and making part of their living doing that. 

What we wanted instead was something more like a networking organization. We decided not to do ongoing craft workshops but to create one-time programs that would be free or very low cost. We wanted to host salons where writers could discuss the big issues facing us, and participants could be part of that conversation. 

We weren’t really sure what we wanted, but we knew we desired a community of writers instead of teaching writing workshops. Over the years, that focus has evolved to include many open mics and low-cost, one-time craft programs, among other activities. We had a weekly writing group for a while and we publish a journal. Many initiatives have emerged because writers have great ideas, like: wouldn’t it be cool to do this?

Many of us in that early group also feel strongly about social justice as an important part of our writing lives. We aimed to reach out to communities and expand our reach. So we started the Emerging Writer Fellowship, a two-year fellowship for a writer of color who has not had significant work published. It’s been amazing; we’re now in our third cycle of it. We’ve had residencies first at Patchwork Farms and now at The Mount in collaboration with The Mountain in Lenox.

Being a writer in the world is really important, and that means partially bringing the world into my fiction, but also bringing our writing into other places. How can a writer be of use to a nonprofit looking for a script as part of their educational or fundraising work? How can a writer volunteer their expertise in all the things that make our community a good place to live and the things we’d like to do to make it better? So that whole concept of a writer in the world is really important to me.

Nerissa: That’s wonderful. What is it about us writers? (laughs)

Ellen: I think because we’re primed to look outside the box for solutions and come up with creative ways of doing things, we are effective in that way. It’s not necessarily the first person you would think of to be part of a problem-solving team.

Nerissa: But of course, we’re geniuses at that. That’s all we do all day is solve problems.

Ellen: Well, that’s actually true, isn’t it? Of our own devising, or our characters’ devising. But yeah, it is true. And then there are those moments when you come up with something that really works and sparks inspiration. Other people see it and say, “Oh yes, yes.” 

Your song, “Tyrants Always Fall,” is a perfect example of that. Here was a song that brought people together in an amazingly energized way. Now, I don’t know what you were thinking as you were writing it or developing it, but I think that our creative work can be incredibly impactful.

Nerissa: Aw, thank you! It’s hard for me to write “politically.” Speaking of which, your work often involves characters grappling with fears about government interference or aspects of our government that may not be visible to everyone. Can you talk a little about how your politics infuses your art, and how you see the role of an artist as an activist?

Ellen: Well, the first thing to say is that I am not an outliner. I’m a seat-of-the-pants writer, so I never know where I’m going and I don’t start with a specific issue. Each of my novels begins with a small “what if,” or character, or situation, and I am often surprised by the politics that emerge, just as the reader may be. 

For instance, with my first novel, I read a small article in the Boston Globe—this must have been in the mid-’90s—about a home care nurse assigned to give prenatal care to a young woman in an unusual cult. She was under house arrest due to the deaths of two children in the cult the year before. At the time, I was a nurse practitioner, working in a hospital with patients from all around the globe. These patients and their families often had very different health beliefs from the staff. I was very interested in what happens when a caregiver and the person or family they’re caring for don’t share beliefs about health and illness. 

That small idea—the conflict between two characters—became my first published novel. While I wasn’t surprised by how the politics developed, they weren’t planned. For me, that’s the most exciting part of writing politically engaged fiction, which is how I think of my work.

I strive not to be didactic. I want to ask the reader questions rather than provide answers. I don’t necessarily feel I have the answers—just the ones that work for me.

In terms of process, that’s how the politics evolves alongside the characters and the situations or plots they find themselves in.

Nerissa: That makes complete sense. When I think about it that way, of course my characters have their own thoughts. As I inhabit them while writing, the politics emerge because they are people with views. If we’re doing our job right, the truths we hold dearest will appear on the page. They have to be.

Ellen: But I think it’s important not to necessarily know what that truth is when I begin to write. I want the process to feel organic.

For instance, in that first novel, when I was trying to write the backstory of the character who is pregnant and figure out who she was and why she ended up in that oddball cult, I discovered that she had witnessed an act of racial hatred by her father in their home. I didn’t know that about her when I started, but, as you may also do, I developed characters as I delved into who this person is, what brought them here, and how their life led them to this moment where we begin this book. Often, that’s a surprise.

Nerissa: Yes, right. I find that when I try to outline, the characters just go nuts! They’re like, “This isn’t what we signed up for. You can’t do an end-run like this!”

Ellen: Many wonderful novelists do outline, and they know where they’re going. There have been many times when I wished I was one of them, but I can’t do it. It’s not me.

Nerissa: Who are your favorite novelists, and what are you reading these days?

Ellen: I just finished reading Colored Television by Danzy Senna. She’s married to Percival Everitt, and this book is something of a companion piece to his book Erasure, which became the film, American Fiction. Well worth reading! And Kamila Shamsie, whose work I almost always adore, is a British-Pakistani woman who has written six or so novels. Her books are very political, and her characters are incredibly well drawn. I think she is just one of the best. My favorites of her novels are Burnt Shadows and Home Fires.

Ellen Meeropol’s fifth novel, The Lost Women of Azalea Court, was published in September 2022 by Red Hen Press. Ellen is also guest editor for the anthology Dreams for a Broken World (November 2022). Previous novels are Her Sister’s Tattoo, Kinship of Clover, On Hurricane Island, and House Arrest. Her work has been honored by the Sarton Women’s Prize, The Women’s National Book Association, and the Massachusetts Center for the Book.