Reviewer Rebecca Foster Interviews Julie Marie Wade, Author of Otherwise
In celebration of this conversation between Rebecca Foster and Julie Marie Wade, author of a spectacular collection of essays exploring identity, queer visibility, feminism, and so much more, we dusted off a proprietary poem which points to the creative energy needed to live fully.
Happy to be
here where the others
are also otherly
not the given thing
but anotherly imagined self.
Here’s Rebecca’s review of Otherwise. Enjoy the interview.
Your interest in hybridity and fluidity applies to gender identity as much as it does to form. How have you crossed lines in both your life and your writing?
This is a fantastically timely question, as I’m teaching my graduate seminar on hybrid forms right now, and this experience inevitably leads to abundant new questions as well as the return of some perennials.
In an email to my students that I composed just this morning as a follow-up to last night’s class, I asked them to consider how names/categories/classifications mean something in their own lives—not if, but how. Would it be simpler, or more pleasing, or both, if we simply called all people people, period, with no finer distinctions of gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity, et al.? And what about literature? Would it be simpler, or more pleasing, or both, if we did away with all genre distinctions and simply called all literature literature?
My own sense is that these broad-strokes, all-inclusive categories serve us well in some contexts to highlight, say, equal value and common ground, but not as well in other contexts, where individual and group differences may indicate divergent needs and desires or invite varying expectations from a reading audience. As much as I believe that humanity and the human arts we make exist on spectra rather than in rigid binaries, it also makes sense to me that some of us are going to find ourselves located on the ends of the spectrum, any spectrum, and some of us are going to find ourselves located somewhere in the middle. Ultimately, a spectrum doesn’t—can’t—exist without poles.
I’ve always felt at odds with most of the ideas handed down to me from my parents and their conservative Christianity concerning what a woman should and shouldn’t be, should and shouldn’t do, but I don’t feel that our differing ideals make me less of a woman, and they don’t make me less comfortable identifying as one. I’ve come to see my way of embodying womanhood as expanding what I was told I could be as a woman. In my parents’ world, a defining factor of womanhood was being desirable to men and ultimately becoming a wife and mother in a heterosexual marriage. I don’t see my womanhood as ancillary to other people, as contingent on anyone else’s desire for me or on my social role in relation to them.
And because I am a woman who is oriented toward other women and married to Angie, the particular woman I love, my womanhood chafes against what I was taught a woman could be—was allowed to be. Still, I find that my gender and sexuality are more clearly located at one end of the spectrum (woman, gay) than closer to the middle where non-binary folx and bisexual folx might place themselves. I’m comfortable with these categories, comfortable operating within this nomenclature—lesbian is fine, but I’ve always preferred the word gay simply because it matches my cheerful disposition—I’m a happy homosexual! I think it’s important that people have many options for naming themselves within our larger shared humanity as possible, even as I’m aware that many of my identities are not especially fluid.
For a person like me, raised as I was, to be able to claim my womanhood and my orientation as gay is no small feat. It feels rather radical in fact, in light of my own history, to be able to say I am a woman when my first family would not recognize my womanhood as acceptable or my sexuality as even something real—certainly not something I would ever be able to admit publicly, let alone embrace, in an interview like this one.
Genre is similar in many ways. I have a clear sense of when I’m making a poem or making a work of creative nonfiction, and it feels good to me to be able to claim those genres. Sometimes it’s very important to me to claim them—to be able to say, This thing I have made is a poem or This thing I have made is a work of creative nonfiction prose. But other times, I am genuinely somewhere in the middle of the genre spectrum, working in a space that might feel “unclassifiable” or “outside of recognizable genre classifications.” Alternatively, because of growing attention to hybrid literatures, I might know exactly the name I would use to describe the hybridity of a current project. That’s a gift the hybridists who have come before me have given me, have given all of us, placing more names (genre markers) along that literary spectrum. Lyric essays, “hermit crab” texts, haibun, prose poetry, and flash are just a few of the names I have reached for along the way and that have helped me articulate where I place my work on any given occasion.
It might surprise some readers to learn that you’re ambivalent about gay marriage in the book. What are your lingering reservations, perhaps in relation to the stereotypical romantic conventions that obsessed you as a child?
It’s true. I have a lot of mixed feelings about gay marriage, though not in terms of marriage equality itself. I’ve always felt strongly that every person should have the freedom to marry whomever they choose and also the freedom not to marry if they choose. Choice matters. But in my personal history, the concept of marriage has been fraught. Now that I’m approaching ten years of legal marriage with my partner of more than twenty years, marriage feels significantly less fraught.
Otherwise opens with an essay called “Meditation 32,” which explores my ambivalence about marriage up until that point in my life. As the title suggests, I was 32 when I wrote the essay, and at that time, Angie and I had been together for nearly a decade with no options for legal marriage in the states where we had lived. I don’t think either of us really believed we would see national marriage quality in our lifetime. So, that’s already fraught, when you spend your 20s and early 30s being together, living together as most married people do—sharing everything, building a life—and you watch many people in your life, from casual acquaintances to close friends, getting married, having access to the kinds of legal protections that you don’t have, can’t have—and being together long enough to see what can happen without those protections.
Angie always knew that marriage wasn’t about the wedding, but I was raised to conflate marriage in many ways with a wedding—the spectacle and celebration of a woman claiming her womanhood and social value by marrying. It took me a long time to separate in my head being a bride from being an equal partner to someone else, to uncouple my romantic sensibilities from big, public displays that required validation from others. When I fell in love with Angie, it was the most real thing that had ever happened to me, but it also cost me the support of my first family. This seemed the opposite of what marriages—weddings—were supposed to do. And that was hard: how could the best thing that ever happened to me be the worst thing my parents could ever imagine for me? And also, how could the best thing that ever happened to me be denied the same social benefits and legal protections that other people—those who found themselves in different-sex partnerships—could access with ease and often accessed with a whole lot of gifts and cheers and revelry? I didn’t want to be petty or begrudge anyone else their happiness, but it seemed that mine came at a much higher price. Why should that be?
When Angie and I could finally marry legally and have our marriage recognized at the national level, we were frankly weary of all the situations in which our relationship had not been accepted as valid—or at least legally so. Hospitals were terrifying because we couldn’t claim each other as next of kin. My first full-time professional job in my field, as a professor of creative writing no less, didn’t permit me to cover my domestic partner on my insurance. There were no “spousal equivalency” benefits except that Angie could use the gym at the university where I worked if she wanted. This was shocking to me. I remember the human resources representative was deeply apologetic—she wanted Angie and me to be treated the same as my colleagues and their different-sex spouses—but legally, she couldn’t allocate any comparable benefits for us until after Obergefell v. Hodges in June 2015. Angie and I were single under the law, and 1,138 legal protections were inaccessible to us as a couple until the national marriage equality decision passed.
But then, when we finally could marry legally—and I explore this a bit at the end of the essay “Nine Innings”—I discovered a different kind of problem. In the mainstream consciousness, people tend to assume a married woman is married to a man. It’s a pretty knee-jerk response. All those years that I was referring to my partner, I watched the culture catch up with the idea that a partner often meant (but didn’t have to mean) a same-sex partner. But I don’t think we’re there with marriage yet, and since it’s only been eight years since the national marriage equality decision, this makes a certain kind of sense. If I say “I’m married” in a general context, most people will ask me my husband’s name, what my husband does. Marriage had the unintended effect of pushing me partway into a closet I had rejected years before.
Also, I really hate the word “wife.” It conjures terrible connotations from my childhood of a woman existing to serve and accommodate the man to whom she is married—“wifely duties” and other phrases I wish I could forget. So somehow I also wasn’t prepared for the fact that being a married person or a married woman would lead everyone to call me a “wife.” The word is accurate, but it still makes me cringe! So back to the power to choose the words we prefer to use, the words that resonate with us.
I know many lesbians who are delighted to be able to claim, subvert, and reimagine the meaning of “wife,” just as I know many women in heterosexual marriages whose experience of being a wife resembles nothing of the early impressions I internalized about “wifery.” Still, I tend to use “partner” or the gender-neutral “spouse” as much as possible, to refer to both myself and Angie. I don’t feel like a wife, but I do feel like a partner, and I love being partnered. I also love having a legal marriage.
Over the years, I’ve mellowed about the word “wife,” especially as I’ve caused confusion when I try to skirt around it. Typically, if I don’t say “wife,” being explicit about the fact that I’m married to a woman, the listener will change “spouse” to “husband,” and then I’m participating in an accidental closeting. So I will say “wife,” grudgingly, for the sake of clarity, for the sake of “outness.” I chafe a little when I hear it or use it and wish I could be more joyful about reclaiming it. Of course, as I continue to evolve—live more, think more, write more—I might arrive at a new peace with the word. We’ll see.
There’s been a recent surge in memoirs by women who came to lesbianism later in life (Glennon Doyle, Alys Fowler, Suzette Mullen, Peggy Seeger, Molly Wizenberg)—is there a collective term for this kind of story? Is it more common for Gen X? What does it say about women’s freedom and a new understanding of gender?
I don’t know if there’s a collectively recognized term—maybe “late-bloomer lesbian”? I hear that phrase sometimes. I think I tend to associate a late-bloomer lesbian with a woman who comes out after a long marriage to a man, raising children with a man, and then a sexual awakening, maybe after her children have left home or following a divorce or even leading to a divorce that opens up all these new possibilities for another chapter of life as a lover and partner of women.
By those standards, I’m not really a late-bloomer lesbian. I got engaged to a man at twenty two but didn’t go through with the marriage because I realized I was in love with a woman and averted the altar at the eleventh hour. So I came out and began to make my life with Angie when I was twenty two, going on twenty three.
That said, I’ve been teaching the entire time I’ve known Angie, and I’m struck by how many students I’ve taught over the years—both college undergraduates and even high school students during my time working at a boarding school in rural Ohio—are already out as queer people in their teens. I even have a nibling who came out as non-binary when they were thirteen, knowing they’d have the full support of their parents, my incomparable “Outlaws” (as I call them) and of course the full support of their gay aunts.
It’s encouraging to think of young people being able to claim their genders and sexual orientations openly, being able to connect with others through LGBTQ organizations for teens, and also to see alliances where straight and cis teens and young adults aren’t threatened by the genders or sexualities of their peers, their friends. Nothing makes me happier than when I see these kinds of friendships among my students, when I hear young people ask each other their pronouns or clap when someone reads a coming-out poem or openly queer essay in workshop. I feel incredibly heartened by the openness and kindness I witness every day across subject positions. This, of course, is one of the many gifts of working with young people (I have some students who are older, of course, even older than I am), but I have had a unique vantage point from which to observe generational change these last twenty-two years in the classroom.
That said, I still have plenty of students who are out only to me, as a known gay faculty member, or only out to me and to their peers in a given creative writing class, students who struggle with—who write honestly and poignantly about—families who would never accept them if they knew, who would kick them out of the house or bring them immediately to church for intervention if they even “suspected” (such a sad word in this context) that their child was queer. And I have a special place in my heart for those students because I remember what that was like.
I remember a time when I couldn’t even be out to myself, let alone to anyone else, and I think that’s maybe the most significant difference in the generations post Gen-X: young people seem to know who they are more fully and be able to articulate who they are more precisely than I could have ever done at their age. I didn’t witness anyone else in my peer group who was able to do it either. But being out to yourself or to a few trusted people is different from feeling safe to be out in your whole life. And there are plenty of young people struggling just as much as ever with homophobia, transphobia, and the very real fear of reprisals against their true selves. In Florida, with our homophobic-transphobic governor, the emotional setbacks are real, palpable. Knowing who you are may be easier to name, easier to identify, than in past eras for queer people, but there’s so much fear and hate directed at the queer community from increasingly emboldened political “leaders” that I’m as worried for my students—for today’s younger generations—really, for all of us—as I am inspired by them.
Your complicated relationship with your mother is a thread running through. Were there any realizations, or specific aids like therapy or books, that helped heal it?
My mother is an enduring presence in my work, certainly, and that may not ever change, at least not in a permanent way. I grew up feeling much closer to my father, identifying him as the person I could trust the most in my early years, but that, too, began to fall apart as I got older and our views of the world began to diverge more dramatically. Still, it continues to surprise me that my mother always turns up in my writing, even more than my father—this person with whom I had such a difficult relationship during my entire coming of age. Now, even though we have no relationship at all, she’s still there, perennial.
What has changed isn’t her omnipresence in my work or the way she cycles through my dreams, but how I feel about that fact. It wasn’t actually writing Otherwise that helped me heal—or shift—I guess that’s the best word I have for how my thinking about her has changed. It was a book I wrote called Same-Sexy Marriage: A Novella in Poems (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2018), which explores the alternate life I might be living if I had married a male doctor the way my mother always intended I should.
After Angie and I had partnered up, after I had come out to my parents and ultimately moved across the country, my mother didn’t know what to tell her friends about my life. The truth was unthinkable for her, so she decided to explain my absence by saying that I had married a surgeon (in her world, this would definitely mean a man) and had moved to New England. Of course my mother got caught in her lie more than once over the years, especially as easy access to the internet proliferated among her friends.
But I thought a lot about that lie, which one of my mother’s friends shared with me in an email. She knew the truth of my life because I had told her, and when she confronted my mother, their friendship was never the same. It’s a sad story, and a desperate one, to feel such shame about the way my life unfolded—saddest because I’ve been so happy and unable to share that happiness with my parents. How can my happiness make my mother so sad and also so furious? But when I plumbed that subjunctive more fully—what if I had married a surgeon and moved with him to New England—I came to see how my mother and I have a great deal in common. We’re both storytellers. We’re both passionate people. We’re both completely dedicated to the lives we’ve pursued. I can see now how I have inherited my mother’s strong will and her creativity. I’ve just tried to use them to different ends.
And now I feel like I can claim a certain kinship with my mother. My father was an easier person to know and to love during my formative years, but I take after my mother in ways I hadn’t considered before. I don’t know if I would be who I am without her—without her profound resistance to so much of who I am. It sounds strange, I know, but I had to fight harder to become myself than I’ve ever fought for anything, so I’m very clear about what’s at stake for me in any given situation, what I would risk and wouldn’t risk, and what is worth it. My mother and I would risk very different things because we value very different things, but we are both driven people who will dedicate ourselves tirelessly to what we believe.
I am grateful to and for my mother in ways I never expected to be, and for my father, too, who modeled such gentleness for me when I was small and gave me the gift of gregariousness, of enjoying people and being patient with others. Ideologically, I don’t seem to come from these people at all, but I appreciate deeply many of the qualities they passed down to me, modeled for me. And writing them is also a way I continue to have them in my life, to acknowledge that I wouldn’t have a life without them, and paradoxically, poignantly, perhaps not even this life I love so much without them, even as it is a life I live without them.
Florida, where you’ve been based since 2012, can seem like an uneasy blend of the politically regressive and the untamed. Is it purely maddening, or does it present literary possibility to the nuanced writer?
The simple answer is—both! I’ve lived in Washington, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, and Florida. I’ve known phenomenal people everywhere, truly progressive people everywhere, and also, regardless of blue, red, and purple state monikers, truly regressive people, too. I remember once, in a graduate workshop, a student wrote that he didn’t believe in the authenticity of my memoir because “no one who came of age in the ’80s and ‘90s in a place like Seattle would have to deal with such archaic thinking and backwards ideas.” But that’s where I come from, and Seattle, like everywhere, like anywhere, is not a monolithic place. I did have a deeply repressive upbringing, and yet I also met people at every step of my journey who inspired me to keep going, keep searching, for the kind of community where I would one day belong.
The job I have at Florida International University is my dream job. I say that, and yet it is equally true that the whole Florida educational system is imperiled, and there is damage being done that I’m not sure can be undone, at least not easily or quickly, even once [Governor Ron] DeSantis is out of office. Also, the “ideals” of DeSantis don’t stop at the Florida borders, to my great chagrin. Anti-education sentiments have always been bound up with anti-Democratic ones, and they’re profoundly dangerous, particularly in the ways they are being implemented as laws in this state and in others.
But like everyone, I live inside many concentric circles at once. I live with the visible realities of increased flooding, more intense storms, and visible sea level rise. Sometimes I’m driving through water as high as my tires in order to make it to campus. And yet, my daily life is full of interactions with open-minded people, curious people, students and colleagues who care about learning and are committed to resisting bigotry in all its forms. We say gay here—and trans—and non-binary. We acknowledge, in flagrant disregard for SB 266, that our country was founded on political, social, and economic inequalities (how is this even a question?), because how can we make socially conscious art that encourages empathy and understanding if we deny that anyone has ever been othered—or that anyone is being othered right now?
Nobody here is going down without a fight, but it’s heartbreaking how much we have to fight for things we thought we had already won. Where I live, in Broward County, is widely known to be the “bluest” county in Florida. Our supervisor of elections was elected, then removed from office by DeSantis, with a new supervisor installed. Almost immediately, the mail-in voter registrations were purged. Angie and I have had to re-register for our vote-by-mail ballots multiple times this year alone. Think of the privilege and resources we have to keep checking online, to keep registering, to know that if we don’t receive a mail-in ballot we can go to the polls in person and still vote. Many people who have been kicked off the vote-by-mail rosters, particularly if they have no work-day flexibility for voting in person, may simply not be able to vote. This is one small but specific example of what’s going on in Florida at the most local level. The attacks on democracy abound, in voting, in education, in the denial of climate change by our “leaders,” et al.
Living through this time and in this place has made me more aware of my responsibilities as a writer and a teacher to keep bearing witness to what I see happening around me and to me and to encourage my students to do the same in their work.
The topics here range from apples to guns. What inspires an essay? When do you know that you have a viable subject rather than a handful of musings?
This is something I talk about a lot with my students—one of my favorite things to talk about, in fact! For me, a big part of writing in the hybrid form we call the lyric essay is the challenge of finding “the smallest door.” Our lives are big and complex. It can feel overwhelming to find our way into a particular aspect of our past, or a particular aspect of our world, without seeking out the smallest door. Even a tiny port of entry opens into a massive room—sometimes more than one room—sometimes a whole house, a whole book.
As a writer, I like to give myself the challenge of finding particularly “small doors”—often, an object like an apple or a gun. One seems especially ordinary. The other already feels loaded, because it is. By choosing a specific, concrete noun, I can place it on the page like the hub of a wheel. I do this on the whiteboard in class as well. Once we put a word there, we can start spinning the imagined wheel or jiggling the implied door knob, and so many associations begin to announce themselves.
When I picture the wheel spinning, I notice spokes: memories related to the word, other places in literature where I’ve encountered the word, its appearance in other art forms (ekphrastic elements often arise in lyric essays), research I’ve done related to the word, or should do in relation to the word, even the etymology of the word itself, idioms in which it appears, etc. And that’s thrilling to me, that spinning-wheel process or door-knob-jiggling process, because it’s so capacious. There is always more than we expect lingering behind any single word.
With an essay like “How Do You Like Them,” my apples essay, I decided to write it because of a small interaction with a new acquaintance in Florida. The person asked me, “You grew up in Washington State, right? How does it compare to Florida?” And I laughed because they’re such different places, or at least my experience of them is so different, that it feels almost inexpressible in a simple conversation. What I said was “Apples and oranges,” and then I laughed again because I hadn’t realized until I said it how salient that phrase really was. Washington, of course, is known for its apples, and Florida is known for its oranges. So that moment became a prompt in my writing mind: Could I trace my coming of age in Washington and coming into adulthood in a life that took me far from Washington using the apple as my smallest door, the hub of my literary wheel? I think the answer is always yes, but in addition to the wild free-writing for associations at the beginning of the process, there is also the challenging fun of sequencing, deciding which associations to keep and which to discard and what else to write as the essay begins to take shape, then ultimately revising and streamlining the original work, with omissions and additions, into its most elegant and compressed possible form.
“Still Life with Guns” began with a different kind of question—not an aesthetic challenge but a deeply felt desire-to-make-sense-of-something inquiry. I’ve always been terrified of guns, and I wanted to know why. This meant going back in time and tracing my relationship with guns across my life so far. The fear of guns long predates the shooting that took place on my college campus during my senior year. I knew that before I began writing. Those who know about the shooting know that I was there, inside the stairwell of a dorm, watching two men bleed to death while nursing students tried to save them, watching the police flood the campus and lock it down—they may assume that’s when my fear of guns began. But it was long before that. My fear has felt eternal, almost a priori to my whole existence. So that essay, like all my essays really, became a kind of investigation.
It turned out that guns are ubiquitous in my life history in a way I never realized. Maybe they’re ubiquitous in most of our histories, in ways many of us have never realized. Not literal guns, but references to guns, depictions of guns, news stories about guns, even the way our language revolves around phrases like “you son of a gun,” etc. Writing the essay helped me uncover the implicit history I had with guns, the reasons I had to fear them all along. It’s not a polemical essay against gun ownership, but then I’m not a writer of polemic. All my essays have in common an inquiry-driven approach that I hope invites the reader into their own questions and reflections on any given subject, maybe even leads the reader to their own insights. That is my greatest hope.
What is the particular power or appeal of linking multiple topics in a braided essay?
I think it’s a combination of the aesthetic challenge of braiding and the tacit acknowledgment through this form that our brains are never just thinking about one thing at a time. Sometimes I try to strain out that multiplicity while creating a particular kind of essay, something micro or short-form, but when I’m braiding, I feel especially in touch with the associative and really the palimpsestuous nature of the mind at work. I like drawing forth those multiplicities and finding resonances between the different strands of thought going on in my head. Often, by working in braided forms, I’m able to uncover and articulate, for myself as well as for a reader, how various, seemingly disparate strands of thought are actually connected. For instance, maybe your to-do list and the class you’re teaching that day and the dream you had the night before aren’t as separate as they might at first appear. And then you’re teaching that class, and you do the free-write with your students, and something unexpected comes up—a memory you hadn’t thought of in years.
These might all be prompts for separate essays, or they might intertwine in unexpected ways. And of course, we might not know until we experiment with braiding as one of many possible techniques. To me, one of the best things about a braided essay is that you can un-braid, too—reclaim the individual strands and use them differently than you had originally planned. Nothing is wasted in the process, even if the braid doesn’t come to fruition in a single essay.
My essay from Otherwise, “Meditation 36,” actually began because I was free-writing with my students and found myself transported to an Albertson’s grocery store in West Seattle circa 1985. I don’t even recall the prompt I had given to the class, but somehow I ended up in the hair-color aisle of that grocery store and could viscerally recall touching the little curls, the locks of hair (I assume it was real hair?) that were displayed in front of each box of hair dye. These were meant to provide a visual for the potential customer of how her hair would look, what color it would actually be, if she purchased that particular shade of dye.
I had forgotten entirely the number of times I passed down that aisle with my mother, who purchased hair dye and made me promise I would never tell anyone that her own color was not “natural.” The free-write experience was so vivid—and I could feel the texture of those display curls under my fingers!—that I kept writing through the timer, and when I looked up, my students were looking back at me, wondering why I never called time.
Many facets of my personal history, including my life as a woman, a professor, a poet, and someone who often feels out of place in the more fashion-conscious sectors of Miami, were ultimately braided into that essay, but it was the time-traveling memory to a grocery store all the way across the country and thirty years back in time that made itself known as a must-write, must-explore, must-see-where-this-leads literary investigation.
Rebecca Foster
