Lone Star Listens: Bethany Hegedus

 

LONE STAR LITERARY LIFE: Where did you grow up, Bethany, and how would you describe those days?

BETHANY HEGEDUS: Ah, my childhood was spent in the Chicago burbs as free-range ’70s kid, riding bikes, ice skating at the pond, and as a teen sneaking my mom’s cigarettes and smoking them at the creek. I wouldn’t call it carefree, but in comparison to the way we tether our children to ourselves and barely let them in the back yard, where we can see them out the window there was a freedom to grow and explore that I enjoyed. In about 5th grade, I became an avid reader and from them on freedom was found in exploring people and places in fiction.

 

What brought you to Texas?

I moved to Texas eight years ago to have my author money go further. Austin isn’t inexpensive, but it is compared to New York City, where I had lived and where I wrote the last ten years and crossed the threshold from yet-to-be published writer, to author. My first novel came out in 2009 and my second was under contract. I longed to leave my day job and to have more psychic distance (the literary term can relate to our creation process as well as our character’s journeys) and time for myself. I quit my day job and moved to Austin within three weeks.

 

My first year here was taxing, emotionally, mentally, and financially. I worked part-time at the Writers’ League of Texas, wrote and wrote, and watched my savings disappear. Moving to Texas was a leap of faith, and after white-knuckling it through that first year, things began to come together. Soon after, I met my husband, and the year after that we began The Writing Barn — but not before I survived a car with a broken A.C. for a year and had my lights turned off as I waited for the Grandfather Gandhi advance to come in.

 

Did you always want to be a writer, and if so, how did you pursue that goal?

I was always writing, but I never contemplated becoming a writer until I moved to New York City to become an actress. In one of my acting classes, my semi-famous acting instructor told me I was the shyest person she ever met. I knew then I wasn’t being my full self and began The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. In my morning pages, I discovered my secret-to-me dream to become a writer and my love of character and story, that I thought drove me to want to act, was really all about. I walked by one of those yellow newspaper stands in NYC and grabbed a Gotham Writer’s booklet and signed up for my first writing class in 1999.

 

In 2005, I earned my MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Vermont College of the Fine Arts, the first MFA program for children’s writers in the country.

 

It’s been an up-and-down journey. I’m on my third agent, my two novels are out of print, but I seen five books come out, with two more to come, and a number on submission right now. In my work with writers at The Writing Barn, I have begun to explore and focus on what it takes to lead a long-term literary life, and for me it comes down to three components: the writing, the submitting, and giving and receiving support in both the craft and the business side of being a creative writer.

 

What was your first big break as a writer?

Discovering my voice. I was taking a class at the New School with the brilliant humor writer Sue Shapiro and everyone was turning in very erudite essays that I thought could have been published in The New Yorker, while I was writing about being married to a Marine at age 19 that I met on the Fourth of July. Sue asked me to stay after class one day and she asked how long I had been writing. I told her five months. That this was my second class. And she told me not to stop, and I was shocked. I thought my work didn’t measure up to the others in the class, and she told me I was the only telling the truth.

 

Telling the truth in fiction or non-fiction, I realized is what writing is all about.

 

Your first book was the well-regarded Grandfather Gandhi. Would you tell our readers about that book?

I am a 9/11 survivor and went to hear Arun Gandhi speak in October of 2001 to help NYC heal. He spoke about living on the ashram as a boy, after he lived in South Africa and was beaten by Zulus for being too light and whites for being too dark. He lived with the Mahatma for the two years before Gandhi was assassinated, and he shared lessons about listening to our anger and transforming it into lasting change for the world.

 

I felt like I survived 9/11 for a reason and promised myself to put something good into the world. What that was, I had no idea. But listening to Dr. Arun Gandhi, I knew his stories should be picture books and I knew I was the writer to write them. Still it took me four months of sitting with the idea, and having every reason in the world not to approach him: I wasn’t a Gandhi scholar, I wasn’t published, I didn’t have an agent, I hadn’t started grad school yet, but I realized if Gandhi believed we were all one, perhaps his grandson would too.

 

Arun said yes to working with me. Our book then took over eight years to sell, and four years after contracted to come out, which it did in 2014, earning many awards and ending up on many best-of-the-year lists.

 

In addition to being an author, you are teacher, and the owner and host of the amazing writing retreat in Austin, The Writing Barn. What inspired you to start The Writing Barn, and how did that project come about?

I always knew I wanted to teach, but didn’t know serving a community of writers would be among my life’s work, but as soon as we began curating our own programming at The Writing Barn, a retreat and workshop space in South Austin, I experienced a new calling on this literary life journey. Now with our online programming, taking place in real time in Zoom classrooms, taught by some of the best writers in the country shaping new and upcoming talent or where working writers look to hone new skills and try new genres, we are serving more writers than ever.

 

Our motto at The Writing Barn is Retreat. Create. Celebrate. It’s what all writers need: craft skills, space and time to do deep work, and to celebrate and build community celebrating others based on the small forward progress it takes to create a book. There are many organizations that help provide tools and support to get published, but what about after?

 

For me, the desire to write and publish isn’t separate from other aspects of my life, and I suspect it isn’t for many of us. It’s not about one book. It isn’t even about building a career. It’s about crafting and creating a literary life I can be proud of. One that reflects who I am, what I have to say, pushes me and sustains me as I live life. Writers don’t retire — and not just because we don’t have 401K plans, but as long as we can think and feel and don’t lose the physical capacities to write and process, we have the desire to create. We need more than grad school or writing groups to create and sustain an impactful life.

 

It’s not just the writers signing with agents and getting published (10 Writing Barn Success Stories this year) but it is the writers who attend our Write Now’s, virtually or at the Barn, that share they haven’t written in twenty years, but here they are back at the page. Breakthroughs abound, and I am delighted by each and every one I witness. Being the creative director at The Writing Barn takes a ton of time, but it feeds me and when I am fed, I can feed more writers. It’s a circle that keeps the energy restoring and renewing.

 

Your latest book is Alabama Spitfire: The Story of Harper Lee and To Kill a Mockingbird, another respected title. Can you tell our readers about that book?

When I do school visits, I show slides of who I was as a girl and talk to kids about how what happens to us in our childhood matters. I am who I am because my family moved from the North to the South when I was in high school. And the book that I saw myself most in was To Kill a Mockingbird, and so despite the fact that Harper Lee never gave interviews and there wasn’t a ton of research on her, I knew that her childhood impacted her fiction so I set out to research and then write the first picture book biography of her and the writing of America’s favorite book. It sold a few months before she died, published by a division of Random House which publishes the work of Harper Lee, and it came out earlier this year.

 

It’s an ode not just to Nelle Harper Lee, but to all spitfires, who speak up, who speak out, and who change the world with their tools and talents.

 

Are you working on a new project, and if so, can you tell us about it?

As a biographer, I have to keep new work close to my chest but in early 2020, I have another biography of another childhood hero of mine coming out: Hard Work But It’s Worth It: The Life of Jimmy Carter and another title coming out in 2019 that still hasn’t been announced.

 

What is your creative process like?

As a working mom, I write wherever and whenever I can. I try to keep my laptop as charged as possible so I can write in the car when I get to appointments early or before afternoon pickups. I get up early more than I stay up late to write. I am a “lark,” not a “night owl.” I am a deep reviser vs. a pre-writer/outliner.

 

But those are the nuts and bolts things of creating . . . the process of creation itself, for me, is a little like this:

• An Idea: urge to follow a character; real or imagined.
• Initial Major Excitement: This is amazing and going to be so much easier to write than anything I have ever done.
• Disenchantment: There is no story here. I have no talent.
• Years of Mustering Belief: Whether I have any talent, or whether this ever becomes a book, I must write this book if it kills me.
• Years of Revising for My Agent: Is this project ever going to go on submission? How is my vision for this project still not clear? Will it ever get to where it needs to be.
• Submission: Weeks or months to years of nausea wondering if my manuscript will really be a book.
• Rejections: All the agonizing nos, testing my patience, my will, my belief in the work; sometimes leading to more revisions, sometimes clarifying that the project is what it needs to be, for now, and desperately believing the right editor will get it.
•  Acceptance: A contract offer has been made! Elation! This book will make me a zillion dollars, get turned into a movie, win awards.
• Initial Editorial Letter: Why did they buy this book? It sucks. I suck.
• Deep Revision Work with Editor: Weeks or months of back and forth, more digging deep and rounding out. Sometimes a total overhaul.
• Publication Approaching: What is social media again, and how do I do it? Will Kirkus decimate me?
• Publication Day: Nausea and hide-in-bed with covers over my head. Ask all my friends to pre-order and review the book as soon as it comes in. Extreme feelings of self-loathing.
• The Book is Out in the World: I love talking to kids. They are amazing. To experience the reader reactions and to know somewhere, maybe even right now, some family is reading my work before bedtime, or a teacher is using it in the classroom, I settle in to a quiet and contained sense of pride.
• Rinse. Repeat. (And there are plenty of projects that never see their way to publication…those are in the still working on drawer, or the never need to see the light-of-day-thank-heavens-they-didn’t-come out file.)

 

What is in your to-be-read pile on your nightstand?

My to-read pile has turned into two to-read shelves above my bedroom desk. Mostly they are ARCs of books slating to be published soonish, sent to me by publicists for craft and creativity conversations on The Porchlight, the podcast I host.

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