There are certain subjects that I can’t bring myself to touch in my writing. So, the first time I read Negesti Kaudo’s writing in workshop, I was deeply impressed by its honesty. Writing nakedly, truthfully, without muffling your subject in verbosity and high metaphor is a very underrated skill and one that she seems to have mastered. I wanted to find out how.
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| Photo courtesy of Negesti Kaudo. |
Like many of us, Negesti started writing to cope with life. But she wasn’t always so honest. In fact, in college, she was often accused of hiding information. “I was obfuscating my work,” she says, “because I didn’t want to be judged by my peers or professors. People in workshop, if they are really invested in your piece, they will dig and dig and dig to get all of the information, so one day, I said ‘eff it, I’m going to give them the dirty truth’ and I did.”
Soon after, she wrote Lovechild, which I stumbled upon while digging on the internet for more of Negesti’s writing. As I read, I couldn’t help but wonder at the fact that she’s trusting any reader with her fears and hopes from the twenty-three days between having “really good unprotected sex” and finding out that she wasn’t pregnant. Lovechild moves seamlessly between the social mores surrounding pregnancy and related subjects (sex, marriage, love) and Negesti’s own thoughts and memories. It demonstrates, very powerfully, the sheer weight of a single choice. And the feedback it received, Negesti says, was “overwhelmingly positive and constructive . . . Now, I’m not really afraid of an audience or the page, so I usually go 90% all-in when it comes to the truth…if there’s something I don’t want to discuss, I won’t publish it, but you can bet it’s written down somewhere.”
So, Negesti seems to have solved the truth in nonfiction question through practice. What about other genres? Most of her fiction is based on her life. How about poetry? She tells me this story about another workshop in undergrad: “I had written this rough, early draft poem called ‘Boys at the Hookah Bar’ where I described all of the types of men I had met at the hookah bar and what it was like and there was a point when I brought up how one of the men had said I was ‘the ugliest female on earth’ and for some reason, this line was the deal breaker of the entire poem. I tried to argue for the power of the line and how it needed to stay and the ‘poets’ (I put quotations because in undergrad are you really an expert?) said that I didn’t have to tell the truth and I shouldn’t, in fact that I should have made something up in its place. But I felt like they’d missed the point of the entire poem and that line was the center of all its meaning, but it was apparently too truthful for my poem. After that I only turned in fiction and non-fiction for that workshop and figured poetry wasn’t the genre for me. I hadn’t been trained in writing poetry (taken a course), so it wasn’t hard to stop writing it, but every now and then I write something or come up with sentences/lines that I know would make a lovely poem, so I put it in my ‘Things for Later’ file. Usually, those lines end up in my prose.”
Then, does Negesti see much of a divide between poetry and nonfiction? It’s a question I’ve wondered about myself [you could link to my last post here, but that might be too much shameless self-promotion], and it’s a little fraught for her. “I feel like I constantly switch all the time, fighting for nonfiction to be an exclusive club,” she says, “but allowing poets like Anne Carson and Karen Green, to join the ranks of nonfiction with [James] Baldwin et al. Poetry and nonfiction have this messy gray area that I feel like writers can just walk into and explore at their pleasure . . . I’ve been working very hard to figure out how to genre-bend and I think I just have to do it and say ‘this is my genre-bent, hybrid poessay, accept it.’” You heard it here first! We just came up with a new genre.
Speaking of poessays, I wrap up by asking Negesti if she has any particular writing prompts she enjoys. “I like one-word prompts,” she says. “I took this class in undergrad and our professor would give us one-word prompts as options to write about and one of them was ‘First’ and you hear that and think ‘oh, first kiss, virginity, first date…etc (insert clichés)’ and he specifically told us not to do that . . . I like the challenge of a one-word prompt, it’s simultaneously narrow and broad, so when I started trying to submit work, I found that an online magazine I really liked (Nailed Magazine) had a monthly column for responses to a one-word prompt, so I did that 4 times and really enjoyed the freedom of exploring a topic while being bound to writing short (1000 words) and staying relevant.”
If I’ve learned anything from this conversation, and my workshops with Negesti, it’s that honesty can be an extremely powerful tool (sometimes the most powerful) in a writer’s toolbox. As you can see here, Negesti often tells a story with very few frills attached. That’s not to say that by being honest, she gets out of all the work associated with writing. Her descriptions are beautiful (I particularly enjoyed “eyes like tar pits”), her writing flows, she grabs the reader at the beginning and punches them in the gut at the end. What’s at the heart of the piece, though, is her story. And it’s her attention to detail, her willingness to share everything, that grabs me most of all.
Try it yourself, and you’ll find that it’s surprisingly difficult. It’s also extremely rewarding. Sit down, write about something you don’t want to write and be completely honest—tell the parts of the story that you’re ashamed of, that you don’t want to admit happened (even to yourself). You don’t have to look to publish it if it’s something private; Negesti doesn’t look to publish everything she writes. But I can guarantee that you’ll produce some of your most powerful writing if you can bring yourself to say everything. If you’re nervous, read some more of Negesti’s most honest pieces here and here.
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