Gayle Brandeis is the author of Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write (HarperSanFrancisco, 2002), Dictionary Poems (Pudding House Publications, 2003), The Book of Dead Birds (HarperCollins, 2003), winner of the Bellwether Prize for Fiction, and Self Storage (Ballantine, 2007). Her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Salon.com, The Nation, Amazon Shorts, Mississippi Review, and Literary Mama. Her story “Collateral,” published by Amazon Shorts, received a special mention in the 2008 Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses anthology. Gayle is also the recipient of several awards, including the QPB/Story Magazine Short Story Award, the Barbara Mandigo Kelley Peace Poetry Award, and a grant winner from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. She lives in Riverside, California, where she works as a community activist and a teacher. Visit her blog, Fruitful, and her website.

Your first novel, The Book of Dead Birds, received the Bellwether Prize for Fiction. Can you tell us more about this award, and your novel?

The award was created by Barbara Kingsolver to honor literature that addresses issues of social responsibility and social change. When I submitted my novel for consideration, I didn’t think it was ready—I had just finished it, and my agent hadn’t even had a chance to look at it. I loved what Barbara Kingsolver was doing with the award, though, and figured my $25 entry fee would go toward supporting that. I was shocked when I found out the manuscript was a finalist a few months later, and even more shocked to learn that I had won (part of the prize is publication) and that Toni Morrison and Maxine Hong Kingston—such goddesses–had been the other judges. I am still stunned by this and will probably spend the rest of my writing life trying to live up to their blessing.

The Book of Dead Birds is about a woman, Ava Sing Lo, who has a nasty habit of killing her mother’s beloved pet birds. When she hears about the bird die-off at the Salton Sea in the California desert (the largest bird die-off in US history), she decides to travel to the Sea to help with the rescue effort and, in doing so, try to repair some karma with her mother.

This book took me on quite a journey—Ava’s mother is from Korea, and her father was an African-American military man. As a white Jewish woman, I questioned my right to write this story at every turn, but the characters would not stop speaking to me. They wouldn’t let me stop writing (and when I did try to stop writing, a dead crow appeared on my patio!)

Barbara Kingsolver has praised all three of your books. Have you met her in person? Has she influenced your work?

Barbara Kingsolver has long been a model for me as a writer–she’s someone who combines art and social responsibility so seamlessly. I’ve been inspired by her for years, so it’s been amazing to get to know her and consider her a friend. We’ve hung out a few times now–we first met when she announced the Bellwether at BEA in NY in 2002, and then she flew out to LA to introduce me at one of my Book of Dead Birds readings (we went out for wonderful Himalayan food beforehand), and she wanted all of the Bellwether winners present when Poets & Writers presented her with an award a couple of years ago. She is so generous and funny and warm. She continues to mentor me, as well–she was instrumental in helping me revise Self Storage–she gave me some very honest, hard feedback that inspired me to change the whole focus of the book.

Self Storage, your second novel, is set in the years immediately following the terrorist attacks of September 11th, and “explores the raw insecurities of a changed society.” What more can you tell us about the plot, and how the attack on the United States plays into it?

Self Storage is about a young mother, Flan Parker, who goes to self storage auctions and sells the winnings at yard sales in her student family housing community. She is intrigued by her neighbor from Afghanistan, Sodaba, who wears a full burqa; when their lives collide, it forces Flan to reconsider what self, family and community mean within a changed America. The whole novel is structured around Walt Whitman’s poem, Song of Myself, which is pretty much Flan’s bible.

I hadn’t set out to write a post-9/11 novel, but I suppose the attacks were still fresh in my mind and couldn’t help but seep into the story. When Sodaba wandered onto the page after I started writing Self Storage (it started as a National Novel Writing Month novel; I knew I wanted to explore self storage auctions, but had no idea about where else it would go), I realized that she gave me an opportunity to explore life after 9/11, especially the ugly billowing of intolerance.

Is Self Storage “chick-lit”?

I don’t consider Self Storage chick lit. It’s a woman’s story, yes, but I hope it’s foremost a human story. One reviewer named it chick lit, and I bristled at the label. When I think of chick lit, I think of fluffier confections (not to disparage these books–I know a few writers who proudly embrace the chick lit mantle, and I admire their work). I wanted to dig deep with the book, to focus on language, to explore social issues of the day. Perhaps the chick lit umbrella is big enough to encompass this, but I find myself shying away from the shadow it casts. Then again, if the term inspires someone to pick up the book, great!

*GIVE-AWAY ALERT!! Want to win a signed copy of Self Storage? Here’s how: Write your own “self-storage” story of 250 words or less, and submit it in the comments section of this interview. Deadline for entries is Wednesday, March 26th. All entries submitted after that date will go unread. Gayle will judge the entries and declare a winner on April 3rd. Have fun, and good luck!!

I love your book of writing exercises—Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women who Write. It’s unusual in its format, and its approach to stimulating inspiration. How did you come up with the idea? What is your favorite exercise from the book?

I’m so glad you like Fruitflesh—thank you for letting me know! It went through a bunch of incarnations—it took about 10 years from inspiration to published book, and morphed a lot in those 10 years. Fruitflesh started out as a project called Writing from the Body; as writers, we tend to live in our heads, and I wanted to help us tap into the richness and aliveness of the body as a way to energize our writing. I was about 150 pages into the first draft, when I saw an ad for a book called Writing from the Body by John Lee. I felt as if my life’s work had been snatched away from me, and fell into a writerly funk for a while. At some point, though, I looked at John Lee’s book, and I realized that while we shared some ideas, there will still room for my voice and my approach. I shifted gears and decided to focus on writing from a woman’s body, since that’s what I know (plus our culture has completely screwed up women’s relationships with our bodies and I wanted my work to help subvert and heal some of that nonsense.)

I wrote a draft, which now had the name Fruitflesh, based on a strawberry that changed my life, but had no other fruit in its pages. My agent sent it around and we got a lot of nice feedback from editors that essentially said “We like this, but it’s too theoretical. There’s not enough of the author’s experience.” That made sense to me; I wanted it to be more personal, so I rewrote the whole thing, using my life at the heart of it. My agent sent it around and we heard “We like this, but it’s too much about the author’s experience.” So of course I was confused and didn’t know what to do and set the project aside for awhile.

Then one day I went to an estate sale down the street from my house, and bought a vibrant limited edition print for $3 called “Virgen de la Sandia”. It looks like the Virgin of Guadalupe, but she’s naked and surrounded by watermelons. As I was carrying the print (which is hanging over my desk as I write this) home, I had an epiphany: I needed to bring more fruit into the book. That way, I could honor that life-changing strawberry as well as the fruitfulness of women’s bodies and creativity. So I rewrote the book from scratch, using fruit as my central metaphor and structuring the book around the growing season of a fruit tree. It was the form the book had been waiting for.

I will never love another exercise more than the strawberry exercise that launched this whole body/writing process; it was introduced to me by my philosophy teacher in high school. Essentially, you just explore a strawberry with all your senses but taste for five minutes, then eat it for five minutes, slowly, mindfully, noticing each layer of flavor and texture, each crunch of tiny seed between your teeth. I share this with almost every writing class I teach, and it always leads to gorgeous work. When we slow down and pay deep attention like this, it wakes us up, both as human beings and as writers.

Your blog is named “fruitful.” Is it connected to Fruitflesh?

I am a fruit junkie, I’ll admit. I love anything related to fruit, including words. So yes, fruitful is definitely riffing off of Fruitflesh. For me, “fruitful” speaks to me of abundance, of creative juices flowing freely. A state I don’t find myself in as often as I’d like these days.

Can you give us any hints about your new project?

I don’t like to talk much about works in progress, but I’ll say that it’s a novel about pears, whales, and figure skating, and it’s set in the Sacramento Delta. I’m going up there for the first time soon–I can’t wait to step inside the world of the story.

Do you have any tips, or thoughts, on what it takes to be a successful novelist?

Well, if by successful novelist, you mean someone who finishes writing a novel and gets it out into the world, I’d say you need persistence, trust in your own voice and trust in your characters and their voices. Fearlessness doesn’t hurt, either (even when you’re feeling chicken)–fearlessness when it comes to exploring subject matter that scares you, fearlessness when it comes to revising your work (the whole “kill your darlings” thing can be hard), fearlessness when it comes to diving into the submission process. If you mean successful as in through-the-roof sales, I have no idea!

Take us through your journey of finding an agent and publisher.

I met my first agent at a poetry workshop. She closed her agency before I had my Fruitflesh epiphany, but remains one of my closest friends in the world. I took it upon myself to contact the editors who had expressed interest in the earlier drafts of Fruitflesh she had sent around; I told them that I had done a radical revision of the book and asked if they’d like to take a look. Renee Sedliar, who was at HarperSanFrancisco at the time, said sure, send it along. She offered to buy it right around the same time a new agent (who I found in the acknowledgments section of another book about writing) offered to represent me.

Is it easier to get non-fiction versus fiction published?

It was actually easier for me to get my novels published than my non-fiction, but that’s only if you count the two published novels, which were both snatched up quickly. I wrote three novels before The Book of Dead Birds that will probably never see the light of day (well, maybe one of them will, but the other two can stay tucked in their drawer forever.) I half-heartedly queried agents with these three, but I didn’t really know what I was doing, and I don’t think I was ready to be a published author yet. I learned a lot through the writing of those “practice novels”, though, and am grateful for the experience of writing them.

How did you know when you were ready to be a published author?

It took me a long time to feel comfortable sending my work out into the world. My undergraduate teachers encouraged me to do so, but I waited a couple of years until I started to submit my work to literary journals and anthologies. Even after I had published quite a bit of my work, I had trouble telling people I was a writer. I used to be cripplingly shy. I had to work through a lot of that–and even though it’s kind of superficial, that included getting braces to correct my wayward eye teeth. I finally did that when I was around 30. Up until then, I hated smiling with my mouth open, hated talking in public. I was very self-conscious about my teeth. So as silly as it may sound, and as much as I hate the fact that I let appearance affect me so much, I wasn’t ready to be a published out in the world author until I felt comfortable opening my own mouth. I also didn’t feel as if I understood the craft of fiction (not that I’ll ever understand it fully!) until I got my MFA; this was after I wrote my “practice” novels. So I had to develop more confidence in myself as a writer and a person before I felt I was ready to be a full fledged author.

Your essay on the meaning of liberty was included in the Statue of Liberty’s Centennial time capsule in 1986. What an honor! Were you asked to write the essay? When will the time capsule be opened?

When I was a senior in high school, I won a National Council of Teachers of English Achievement Award in Writing. All the winners of that award were invited to write an essay about the meaning of liberty. My essay about the liberty of the human imagination was one of three chosen to be added to the time capsule. The capsule will be opened in 2086—long after I’m gone, I’m sure (I’d be 118!) At the ceremony, I was named a “steward of liberty for the next 100 years” which seemed like a token gesture at the time; I was touched, but didn’t take it very seriously. Now that our liberties are being eroded, I feel the need to step into that stewardship role full force. And I still have great faith in the human imagination.

You hold an unusual degree—a BA in “Poetry and Movement: Arts of Expression, Meditation and Healing.” Tell us about this program.

As far as I know, I’m the only person with that degree on the planet. The University of Redlands has an alternative program called the Johnston Center (it was Johnston College in the 60s and 70s; when I went to school in the 80s, it was called the Johnston Center for Individualized Learning—now it’s called the Johnston Center for Integrative Studies). It’s a very cool living/learning environment where students create their own degrees, get detailed evaluations instead of grades, and can contract with professors in traditional classes to change the syllabus to fit their educational needs (I could contract to choreograph a dance instead of write a paper, for instance.) I love how the program balances both honoring the individual and creating community. I was able to pull together the education I really wanted and needed for myself—writing and dance have always been my two biggest passions, and I was able to explore them deeply during my four years there.

What do you do as a writer in residence for the Mission Inn Foundation?

Unfortunately the Family Voices Project didn’t get funding this year, but for the previous six years, I’ve worked with five local high schools to help underserved students research and write family stories. Often when I first start working with these kids, many don’t think they or their families have stories worth sharing, but by the time we finish the project, they are proud of their stories and eager to share them with the class. Each student has a story either published in a book, exhibited in a museum, or filmed for a video that is shown on the local PBS station, so they get the experience of seeing how their stories touch the wider community, as well.

As an activist, what organizations are you involved in?

I am on the national staff of the grassroots women’s peace organization, CODEPINK (I write the weekly action alert that goes out to our membership of around 200,000 people) and am a founding member of the Women Creating Peace Collective (a local organization). Both groups use creative means to end the destruction of war, and find ways to inspire social change through joy as well as anger. I love being part of both of them. I am also a member of PEN American Center and am happy to support their Freedom to Write campaign. I also try to help wherever I’m needed when I have the time (I have an especially soft spot for environmental activism.)

What strikes you most about writers and the writing community?

Despite the stereotype of writers as backstabbing egomaniacs (and sure, there are a few of those out there), I have found writers and the writing community to be overwhelmingly generous and supportive. Writing can be so isolating, and I think most writers are hungry to connect with one another, to celebrate and commiserate over this crazy writing life. I love the curiosity and strange enthusiasms of writers; I love being able to share in the pleasure of the written word.