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Clients Crushin’ It: Juliana Teal

Madison Utley speaks to astrologer, intuitive, and first-time author Juliana Teal about the catharsis of telling her story through her book, Flying to Freedom, how she tempered the heaviness of the abuse that she endured with honoring the ways in which she healed, and the good that sharing her words has already done in the world. 

 

MU: I’d love to hear about your motivation to tell your story, and your choice to do so in the form of a book.

JT: Since I was a child, I’ve loved to write. My early school experiences were not good, but even back then my teachers couldn’t deny that I was a natural writer. For a long time I didn’t have the self-confidence to share what I wrote, so I’d keep it to myself, but it was around a decade ago that I realized I wanted to tell my story. I thought a book would be the best format because I was hoping to reach other survivors and loved ones of survivors in order to provide healing and education around what I’d experienced.

 

MU: I’m sure that natural aptitude helped give you the confidence to decide on a book, something that many people find to be a very intimidating thing. 

JT: That has to be true in ways, but it didn’t feel daunting to me. I felt an internal pressure to tell my story. Once I started writing, I could not stop. For several years, I was writing literally every single day. I was so motivated. I could not not write. Sometimes I’d feel stuck as I tried to figure out how to say something but then I’d wake up at 1am or 2am with an idea. I would get out of bed and turn on my computer to get it down as soon as possible. 

 

MU: At what point in that content generating process did it occur to you to bring in an assisting hand–and how did you go about doing that?

JT: I had finished about half or three-quarters of my manuscript, but I wasn’t feeling fully satisfied with what I had. I was happy with my writing, but I had material about three distinct things and I knew I needed to figure out how to tie them together better. I wanted a developmental editor to help unify what was feeling too choppy to me. I approached someone who, in her area, is pretty well known. I told her what my book was about and she agreed to be my editor, without even seeing my writing. We exchanged lengthy emails where she asked me a lot of questions about my writing experience. She finally told me to send her my manuscript. Three weeks later, she wrote me a brutal email. She said that no one wants to read about abuse and that I should toss out my whole manuscript. I was crushed. When I finally calmed down, though, I realized her words were not at all constructive criticism, but really just cruel, and I fired her. 

After that, I thought: All right, Universe, I can’t find an editor. You’re not sending anyone to me. Maybe I should not do this. But then a client happened to mention an editor she really wanted to work with herself. She shared about how kind and intelligent he was and I found myself asking, “What’s his name?” Instead of researching Stuart to see who he was and what his qualifications were, as I normally would do, I went by gut feeling and I called him. It was a great fit from the start. He had me send a sample of my manuscript and having seen my writing, he became my editor. When we worked together he’d make it clear, “You know how to write already. I’m not teaching you how to write, but how about expanding on this? What if we put that there?” He really believed in my abilities and my book, which helped heal a lot of the pain left by the other editor. 

 

MU: There is heavy, hard material that is a necessary part of telling your story. How did you embrace communicating the fullness of what you had to share without alienating your readers?

JT: My mission when I wrote my book was to make it as easy on the reader as possible. I knew I had to tell the truth of the ritual abuse I experienced, but also I knew my story is mostly about healing. There are five parts to my book, and the abuse is only discussed outright in part three. The other sections contain material that is healing and hopeful and expansive, which works to balance the heaviness of part three. I’ve been getting the most amazing, beautiful feedback from readers–better than I ever imagined. People have told me that my voice has made it possible to read even the difficult parts without feeling traumatized. I’ve also had feedback from people who have been abused themselves and they’ve said my story has really helped them, which is everything I could have hoped for.  

 

MU: What have you found to be the most difficult part of this process, and how did you overcome it?

JT: It’s interesting because people’s assumption is that emotionally, this book must have been hard to write, but it really wasn’t. I’m so enamored by the writing process that even as I wrote the difficult sections, I’d ask myself, “Hm, how can I phrase this? How can I creatively talk about this hard thing?” There were places where Stuart asked me to expand and those moments could be challenging, because I wasn’t just reporting on something, I was diving into what I felt inside. When I’d read certain sections out loud to friends, that would be difficult as well, and make me teary, but overall the process was easier than I think a lot of people would expect. 

That said, sharing the book and the vulnerability that goes along with that I have found to be very difficult. I was open about what happened to me. But I pushed through that fear by sending love to myself, by reminding my child self that I’m safe and I’m doing this for a greater cause. This isn’t about me. I’ve never been in this for money or for fame; it’s about helping other people who may have experienced a similar trauma. Remembering that is incredibly empowering. 

 

Clients Crushin’ It: Michele DeStefano

Madison Utley speaks to legal professional, professor, and published author Michele DeStefano about what her writing process has looked like thus far, and how the next writing challenge in the pipeline will be different. 

 

 

Q: How did your previous experience as a marketing executive help inform your subsequent legal career, and what it is you wrote about in your books?

A: I believe that marketing and law are very similar. What you do as a marketer is try to understand how your target audience thinks and what they believe, both of which drives their purchase behavior, and then you attempt to convince them to believe and think something different so they’ll behave differently. That’s very similar to what litigators do with a jury, for example. Or what regulators do in trying to get people to behave in a certain way. It’s also very similar to what law professors do; my job is to figure out what students are thinking and feeling and then to convince them to think and feel and behave a different way. That’s been my calling in life, in fact: to get people to change the way they see the world and the way they behave. 

Q: When and why along this journey did you decide to write a book(s)?

A: I’ve always wanted to write a book. I’ve kept a journal since I was seven. I wrote my first poem when I was 13, and it got published in Young Miss magazine. I was paid $25 which was a pretty big deal in the ’80s. So I’ve always wanted to be a writer. As a professor, we write articles, but I always wanted to write a book that was more accessible, that anybody could read. So even though my three published works are professional services books, I kept my writing style very conversational and not professorial. 

Q: What did you find most challenging and most beneficial through the book writing process? 

A: The actual writing of the books, the first draft, isn’t that hard. It’s just time consuming. You’ve got to get it out there. The revising and organizing is the challenge. It’s the number one reason why I adore and rely on Stuart. I always write too much which means it was really important to find someone who I could trust. When he said “cut,” I’d just cut. I didn’t have time to go back and really review. I trusted him like you can’t believe. But I knew I could because Stuart had taken the time to read the whole thing through first, learn my voice, learn my goals, learn about the legal profession. Having a person to help me do that, to bounce ideas around regarding organization, to help me see and eliminate repetition, wow. I found all of it extremely, extremely helpful and I couldn’t have done it without him. Wouldn’t even try to do it without him, to be honest. 

Q: Do you envision writing any more books in the future, or is three enough? 

A: Writing a book is like having a baby. It’s so much time and care and attention to detail, it’s not necessarily something you want to go do again next week. That said, I have already started on my next book. I’m a couple of chapters in to a fictionalized take on my life, so not a true memoir but something similar. It’s a coming of age story about loss and learning how to let go. The shift in genre definitely makes this feel different. It’s way harder for me to figure out how to organize. Way more challenging to figure out how to deal with tense and timeline. And it’s also going to be much more emotional. There’s some of that with the other books, but this one is much more personal. I will definitely be reaching out to Stuart eventually to help me, as he’s helped in the past. 



Clients Crushin’ It: Meg Appelgate

Madison Utley speaks to first-time author Meg Appelgate about her memoir, Becoming Unsilenced: Surviving and Fighting the Troubled Teen Industry, and how she was able to find her voice after years of being told she couldn’t possibly have anything important to say.

 


Q: When you reached out to Stuart, you weren’t confident that you had a book. What about those initial conversations convinced you that you did, and that this was the time for it to be written?

A: It was definitely on our first call. I realized that someone who knew relatively little about the troubled teen industry and its effects on the youth who enter it still cared a lot about my story. Survivors are programmed to believe that we aren’t worthy, so Stuart’s response to what I had to say helped counteract the inner narrative that tells me that nothing I do will ever be important. 

Q: In the book, you share about your TTI experience of being “reprogrammed” and intentionally given confidence issues, and yet the voice you bring to this work is so strong and clear; how did you discover that voice? How did you learn to trust it?

A: First, I had to learn how to put what I was feeling into words. Figuring out how to label my feelings was particularly hard because I had been intellectualizing my emotions for so long while masking my autism. Once I let myself feel my feelings for what they were, I then had to process them. During that time I felt angry, and anger can do some pretty powerful things and really energize you, and that propelled me for a while even though I still didn’t have all that much self confidence. However, once I saw that the things I was doing were actually creating change, my confidence began to grow and that newfound self-validation has enabled me to believe that my voice deserves to be heard–as does every survivor’s. 

Q: How did working with Stuart help in that process of discovering and refining your voice? 

A: Deciding to write a book is so intimidating. I let that get the best of me in the beginning, and I really relied on Stuart. I had no idea what I wanted out of this, or how to organize all of my thoughts we put down on paper. Then, there was a big shift once I saw the first draft. It provided me with a basic understanding of where the different things that I talked about were going to go. Stuart did a really good job of creating that framework. 

That framework got me excited. Things didn’t feel so daunting anymore because it was starting to look like a book. I wrote pages and pages of additional material and made suggestions to refine my voice between drafts. Stuart had done an incredible job, but all of a sudden I had this need to fully become unsilenced and make it sound exactly like me. 

At that point I started gaining a lot of confidence in my ability to shape what was happening. Over the course of the year we worked together, through the draft process, the manuscript really changed into what it was supposed to be. Without having Stuart to help guide me through this process, especially in the beginning stages, it felt so scary; but now I’ve not only decided I want to write another book, I feel confident I can do so. 

Q: Who do you most hope reads this book? 

A: There are a lot of people I believe would benefit from reading this book, but first and foremost, I hope my story reaches any and every survivor. I had what I consider to be a very traumatic experience and I’m writing to bolster other survivors who might feel like because they didn’t have it as bad as other people out there, they shouldn’t be traumatized. Trauma is trauma is trauma. Just because some forms leave bruises and others don’t doesn’t mean anyone’s story is more or less valuable. I really hope this book brings that message to the people who need to hear it, and delivers a sense of validation and hope. 



A Few Words From Viet Thanh Nguyen

Hosting Viet Thanh Nguyen on a panel was one of Stuart’s highlights of the Tucson Festival of Books…for the decade. Viet is witty, humble, and brilliant–all qualities that shine through his most recent work, the memoir, A Man of Two Faces.

Stuart tried to take good notes on some of Viet’s best answers to the questions he patiently endured. We hope you enjoy his company half as much as we did.

 

SH: In your book, you trademark the American Dream™. You’ve also said that Hollywood is the unofficial Ministry of Propaganda for America™.  At what point in the writing process did you realize that this branding was going to be such a central organizing principle for your work?

VTN: As serious as the subject matter of the book is, I think it’s also really playful. I had a lot of fun writing the first two thirds of this book. Two things in my life really set the context for this, one is that I read a lot of contemporary poets of color. In writing about some of them, you read their work, you feel very serious things; however, they’re very playful at the level of language. They use the typography, they rearrange words on the page, to emphasize certain things they’re trying to discuss. Prose writers are not allowed to do that. I don’t know why. Poets can do whatever they want. So I wanted to capture in the writing of this book some of the playfulness I found in these poets. The playfulness is also serious at the same time because they’re using the playfulness to again emphasize certain kinds of aesthetic or political/personal issues. 

So I just let myself go, and it felt right in talking about America. Many people probably routinely say “America” without thinking twice. No matter your politics, we have probably internalized to one degree or another the power of American mythology. To even say the word “America” already implies so many things that many of us take for granted. I wanted to make sure that when people saw the word America, they stopped and had to think about what the very meaning of that word is. 

 

SH: You’ve discussed how being a model minority, you have to express your gratitude by successfully validating the American Dream™. Is that something that you’ve fought against, that you have to constantly guard against? Or did you never really think you were going to fall prey to it?

VTN:I’ve read a lot of Asian American literature, a lot of so-called “ethnic memoirs” and “ethnic autobiographies.” I think I have a pretty good idea about how it is that a minority or a person of color is supposed to tell their story in the United States. I can give you a five step program of how to write an ethnic bestseller, in case you’re interested. 

I’m not interested in telling that story. I’ve seen it 1,000 times and I know exactly how it’s going to be interpreted. Basically the situation is that Americans are perfectly willing to accept that the United States treats its immigrants kind of harshly, that we had a complicated history, we’ve had an imperfect union; however, the arc of history is inevitably going to make us perfect. “It’s too bad that your immigrant parents or grandparents had these travails, but look at you!” I wanted to make sure that even if I told my family’s story–because it is a meaningful story, a powerful story, an emotional story–that I wasn’t going to let the readers off the hook in terms of allowing readers to turn back to the standard American mythology within which so many of our stories are contained. 

 

SH: You’re talking about not letting the reader off the hook. Your book contains a pretty good skewering of what you call the “quiet American.” We’ve got the quiet American and the “ugly American.” The “quiet American” is the polite, sensitive person who’s appreciative of multiculturalism but still sort of endorses special ops blowing up innocents with drone strikes, or at least doesn’t do anything to oppose it. As my 18 year old daughter would say, “I feel attacked.” 

VTN: There are different ways in which writing can provoke and writing can entertain. We’re not supposed to educate in contemporary American prose. One of the standard cliches of writing is “show, don’t tell.” That’s perfectly fine; it works in a lot of contexts. But sometimes I’m also really interested in telling. 

When I’m writing memoir, I’m certainly aware of show, don’t tell. I’m aware of the compulsion to reveal the secret, to reveal the trauma. I mean, why would you read someone’s memoir unless there’s something traumatic? “I had a great life.” “Oh okay, good!” I’m more than aware of all the formulas I can choose to work with. But I am also turned on by provocation, by satire—all those things are art forms to me as well. I think you can, in fact, provoke, entertain, educate, satirize all within 10 or 15 pages. 

 

SH: This book represents a shift in genre for you. You have had great success with your novels, and a lot of times I think that success can potentially get you stuck. It can make you feel like: “I’m a hero and I’m going to stay here.” But you switched positions, to use a baseball analogy, and you started working in a different genre.

VTN: One of the themes of A Man of Two Faces is about coming to the point where I’m able to trust my own intuition and my own rhythm and my own internal voice. Because I grew up raised by very devout Catholic parents who are also Vietnamese which meant I was extremely repressed. Then I went to get my PhD in English which means by repression grew even deeper. Self-repressed is really good for being an academic. It’s not so good for being a writer. So for me to become a writer was about trying to identify where that repression was, where it was coming from, and how to lift it off in order to give access to this voice inside–which also has become increasingly a childlike voice. I if you read the book, there’s a lot of political critique and obscenities and things like that, but it’s all born from the spirit of getting close to that child who’s willing to speak the truth as they believe in it without worrying about what the adult or the authority or the culture at large is going to say. 

 

Audience member: I wonder if you would tell us, other than family members, who has been most influential in your life and why? 

VTN: It would have to be my partner, my wife. When I told her I was writing this memoir, what she said was, “Don’t write about me.” She reads everything I’ve written. So I finish the book and I give it to her and she reads it and she says to me, “Why am I not in the book?” So the penultimate chapter of the book is, in fact, something I wrote after that. She said, “I think you really need to write about your and my nuclear family.” Not because she wanted to be in the book per se, but she was right. Becoming a husband, becoming a father, was crucial to myself as a person and myself as a writer as well.