CUTBANK INTERVIEWS: A Conversation between Shelly Oria and Emily Collins

June 21, 2021

Shelly Oria is the author of the short story collection, New York 1, Tel Aviv 0 (FSG 2014) and is the editor of the anthologies I Know What’s Best for You (McSweeney’s 2022), a multi-genre book on reproductive freedom, and Indelible in the Hippocampus: Writings from the Me Too Movement (McSweeney’s 2019), an intersectional collection of essays, fiction, and poetry that explores one of the most vital social movements of the twenty-first century. She is also a life and creativity coach where she helps professional and aspiring writers and artists access the inherent creativity of their lives. In her fiction, characters contend with their identity and sexuality as they move from states of dichotomy and self-hatred into mental and physical spaces rich with intimacy.

The following interview was conducted via email.

Emily Collins: You're the editor of the fantastic anthology, Indelible in the Hippocampus: Writings from the Me Too Movement and are at work on a forthcoming anthology about reproductive freedom, both from McSweeney’s. While I'm sorry these books had to be written, I love how you and the other contributors challenge white male supremacy in combative and compassionate ways. The writing in Indelible represents a broad range of voices and experiences related to gender violence. Will the upcoming anthology follow a similar structure?

Shelly Oria: Yes! The wide range of voices in Indelible in the Hippocampus is the beauty and power of that book. And yet of course the work of inclusion and inclusivity, especially if you're a curator in a cultural space of any kind, or helming artistic projects like these anthologies, is continuous. I felt with Indelible that I'd have needed about seven anthologies to represent and feature all the voices and stories I wanted to represent and feature... But if you're putting together a book, one book and not seven, making choices is inevitable and often really hard, maybe the hardest part. So, getting to work with McSweeney's on another book feels like a fulfillment of a fantasy.

The new anthology, I Know What's Best For You, has a different focus—reproductive freedom—but it shares the spirit of Indelible in many ways. As is maybe evident from the topic, this book also centers women's agency over their bodies and like Indelible, it is a multi-genre anthology that features a wide range of voices. So yes, it follows the same structure and expands it: I wanted to take the concept of a multi-genre book just a bit further, so this time in addition to fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, we've also included three plays, a comic, and photographs!

E.C: In your first book, New York 1 , Tel Aviv 0, your characters wrestle with dichotomous ways of thinking, especially in relation to identity and intimacy. I've noticed this character struggle (or inner opportunity) surface in your nonfiction as well. I think dichotomous thought is a culturally sanctioned idea, but I believe we come by it honestly as well. Can you speak to how the effects of "either/or" thinking continue to shape your work?

S.O.: I was super black & white in my thinking well into my 20s, I'd say, when life, and therapy, began to show me the power of the gray. And how, you know, most anything lives in the gray. Certainly, that's where empathy resides, and where by definition any complexity resides, and so it stands to reason that fiction, arguably any form of art—endeavors that, at their best, explore complexity with empathy, challenge themselves away from dichotomies, place themselves in the gray mess of life.

That's the thing, isn't it: the appeal of either/or is the “cleanliness” it offers, the sense of certainty. So, the irony is that it's attractive when we're in a state of fear or insecurity—I say ironic because in the long term I think we only become more fearful and insecure when we believe in any kind of dogma.

Am I answering your question? Yes, this theme is in my work because it's in me. I grew up in Tel Aviv and moved to New York in my twenties, which means—among other things—that I write and publish in my second language. It also means that I know the DNA of two vastly different cultures; some days it feels like both are my home and other days it feels like neither really is.

There are parts of personal perspective or worldview that I think exist in literary works whether the writer wants them to or not, because they are so ingrained. There is so much both/and in my personal life as a bi-lingual, bi-national queer writer and person that no matter the fictional landscape I'm writing, the characters are likely to explore duality in some form.

E.C: Your short story, "Carbon Footprint" follows a murder cult convinced they're saving the planet by pushing people in front of subway trains. The piece is included in Tiny Nightmares: Very Short Tales of Horror, edited by Lincoln Michel and Nadxieli Nieto. It was also recently picked up by BuzzFeed. I love climate fiction, as I think the realities of environmental destruction can only be processed through art and fiction. Is "Carbon Footprint" a standalone piece or is it part of a larger work?

S.O.: I wanted to compliment you on your cool turn of phrase but then asked Google about it so I wouldn't come off as an idiot, and apparently I almost did since Climate Fiction is enough of a thing that it has a Wikipedia entry and a nickname, cli-fi. Where have I been? At any rate, I share this love with you—the love of cli-fi, I mean—both as reader and writer. And this particular disturbed take, the notion that in response to this crisis some people may wish to depopulate the planet at some point, has haunted me for a while now; I first explored it back in 2016 as part of CLEAN, a digital novella I co-wrote with Alice Sola Kim for WeTransfer and McSweeney's.

Carbon Footprint is a standalone story, but I know what other stories of mine I'd like it to share bookspace with—not because they're cli-fi—they're not cli-fi—I can't stop saying cli-fi—but because they feel like siblings. Which is all a convoluted way of saying whenever I put out another collection, I do imagine Carbon Footprint will be part of that book. But first I'm going to finish the novel that's been torturing me for I-stopped-counting-how-many years.

E.C: I’d love to learn more about your experience co-hosting a monthly reading series in the East Village. What inspired Sweet! Actors Reading Writers?  

S.O.: I co-created Sweet! Actors Reading Writers along with theatre director Annie Levy back in 2009, and we co-hosted the monthly series in the East Village for five years. It was so much fun. I'd invite the authors—fiction and nonfiction writers as well as poets—and Annie would cast the actors. To be fair, I think much of the success of the series was due to Annie's uncanny matchmaking skills—she just always knew the right actor for every story, essay, or poem an author would give us. In 2014, my first book was coming out and Annie was going back to school for more graduate work and Sweet! became more than we could handle, so we had to call it. It was always so much work—we had a group of interns by the end and still we drowned. But it was more than worth the effort, because it felt like in some small way we were bringing two communities together. And watching actors approach literary texts taught me so much. They never read the text; they performed it. This may sound obvious, but as anyone who's ever been to a literary reading knows.... it's actually quite radical.

E.C.: Can you speak to how your creative life coaching business has evolved during these challenging times? I'm curious to hear your thoughts on how writers and artists can get out of their own way in periods of greater uncertainty. 

S.O.: I've had my private practice as a life and creativity coach for about twelve years now. In some ways I think—or hope—my coaching work is always evolving, and in other ways it's exactly what it was all those years ago, because my core approach has remained the same. I work mostly with artists and writers and other creatives, but regardless of the client's relationship (or lack thereof) to art, we work on cultivating creativity. I think of creativity as energy, a life force that exists in all of us and needs to flow properly. When we feel stuck in life—in a job, a marriage, any problem big or small we feel we can't solve—it means our creativity isn't flowing. When we tap our creative resources, we find new solutions and new possibilities.

As for getting out of our own way in difficult times—you know, I think it’s mostly non-artists who thought artists and writers were going to have a blast during Covid because of all the “free time”…. That wasn’t most people’s reality, for O so many reasons. To me this all often comes down to the same thing, and it can sound hokey, or cliché, or whatever, but I dare anyone to do it for real and with consistency: be kind to yourself. Or at the very least, you know, don’t be an asshole. If you’re having a hard time making work, or you’re not making the work you want to make or not enough of it or whatever—whether the reason is Covid-related or not, whether or not you even know the reason—I guarantee you’ll move faster in the direction you want if you actually meet yourself with kindness. Think about what that really, truly looks like in your life and then do it. It’s way more hard core than people seem to think…. Yelling at yourself, on the other hand, will at best get you to show up very briefly. It isn’t sustainable.

The pandemic hasn't affected my practice all that profoundly—I was already working online a lot before, since about half of my clients aren't based in NYC, and I spend my summers in Tel Aviv, so even my NYC clients were quite used to talking to me on a screen some of the time. So, from a practical standpoint it was an easy adjustment. But certainly the early months of the pandemic felt demanding; I had clients needing more sessions, old clients wanting to return, etc. I coach three days a week and I'm usually pretty rigid about my schedule, as a way to protect my writing. But in March of last year, that rigidity suddenly felt.... inappropriate. I'm back to my rigid ways now, but for about six or seven months I added a fourth coaching day and coached on my writing days too if a client reached out. And you know, it really helped me get through that hard time. Such a cliché, “I thought I was doing it to help others and it ended up helping me....” But that's exactly what happened. That sense of connection, the sense that I was maybe doing something good in a time when we were all so steeped in bad.... It suddenly meant so much more, something else entirely.