Interview from fall 2020
Our fall 2020 marketing intern, Elaine Batty, recently interviewed author Eva Niessner. Eva is a writer living in Timonium, Maryland. Her work has been featured in Baltimore Magazine, Grub Street Literary Magazine, Phemme, and Crepe & Penn. She teaches English at the Community College of Baltimore County.
Huge thank you to Eva for sharing her insights with Elaine and for sharing her story as a writer.
EB: How did you get started as a writer? Do you have any favorite writers or any you draw inspiration from?
I know this is going to sound pretentious, but I don’t really ever feel like I ‘got started.’ I just was. Writing is as much an aspect of my identity as it is something that I do. That doesn’t mean I was naturally a fantastic writer with no practice and never had to learn or put in any effort, of course. It just means that learning and growing felt completely natural. I think of a baby just learning to walk. The baby isn’t born walking, and it takes a lot of stumbling and plopping over and whacking its head on the coffee table to go from crawling to running. But the baby never worries or wonders, “Wouldn’t it be great to be a walker?” It just happens. That’s kind of how I feel about developing as a writer. I had to smack my head on a lot of metaphorical coffee tables, but I always knew that’s what I would be. Even when I feel doubt or angst about a specific piece, I have very rarely doubted that I am a writer.
I think Mary Roach of Stiff fame might be one of my biggest inspirations, period. She really did set the tone for balancing the funny and the weird and the informative, and the qualities that I want people to associate with me are funny, weird, and informative. So she’s quite an idol of mine. If I could write any creative nonfiction piece half as entertaining as her stuff, I’d die happy. I’ve also been a huge fan of David Sedaris for many years, though ‘fan’ has sort of shifted into a Deadhead-ish follower (I’ve been to readings in three states) and then into a loose friendship.
EB: What do you think the implications of being a woman writer/woman in the literary world are and what does this mean to you?
For a long time, I didn’t really think about this. I spent my youth reading female authors like Joyce Carol Oates, Madeleine L’Engle, Margaret Atwood, Sylvia Plath, and Judy Blume, and so it took me a long time to recognize that there was really anything distinctive or unique about making it as a woman writer. That’s a privilege of my age, I think, being a child of the girl-power 90s. I grew up in a household where my ambitions to write were deeply and loudly encouraged, and then I had a lot of fantastic female writing teachers and professors. But as I grew up I realized how much intersectionality mattered and how necessary it was to go looking for more [women-created] works. A woman of color writing about her experiences, or an immigrant woman writing about her experiences, or a queer woman writing about her experiences—these are not really taught in schools as frequently. Maybe you’ll read Zora Neale Hurston in high school, or maybe you’ll read Amy Tan. That’s often it. It usually takes having a special teacher who will encourage you to go further and seek out the kind of books that aren’t part of the curriculum. I never saw my own queerness in anything I read in high school, only in books I was guided toward or that I discovered on my own. And I still got far more representation than many. As a white woman, I know it’s so easy to get complacent and think, “Oh, I read plenty of women writers.” Sure, but if you’re leaving out works by women of color, or queer women, or trans women, or women from other religions or cultures or backgrounds, you’re only broadening your horizons slightly.
One of the areas I’ve seen more debate over the role of women writers is in fan fiction. I write quite a bit of that, and often there’s a weird stigma given to adult women who choose to do it. You sometimes see criticism that’s essentially, “Don’t you have kids to take care of?” when an adult woman wants to write, like, erotic fan stuff. I’d love to see a shift in that thinking that says women are either homemakers or deviants. I certainly don’t think of myself as either of those.
EB: What are your favorite things to write and why?
For a long time I pretty much only wrote fiction. Then in college and graduate school I was reading a lot of memoirs and creative nonfiction pieces, and that just clicked perfectly. I love talking about myself, but I am also wildly intrigued by trivia facts. My whole family is like this. We’ll just sit around and quiz each other. Creative nonfiction is a great way to just muse about trivia for me. You can take your obsession du jour and expand on your thoughts. Somewhere along the way, that blob of rambling and opinion can be shaped, like potter’s clay, into something that’s actually interesting and cohesive. That’s so rewarding to me—seeing all of my random thoughts and bits and lines that I was proud of actually connect and become a full and vibrant work. It’s almost like . . . the good version of [the] imposter syndrome, the feeling that only you know how rough and random it started out. Someone can read it and say, “Oh this is so well-done,” and you can sit there and think, heh, this used to just be a bunch of facts about birds that I taped together and now look at it.
EB: What is your writing process like and what do you do to get motivated?
When I took writing classes, I would always feel like a real loser when I’d learn about how, I don’t know, Ernest Hemingway would get up at 5 a.m. and write until noon every day and then go sport fishing or punch someone in the face over and over until it was dinnertime. I never had the kind of discipline to get up early and write, and I suspect I never will. It took a long time for me to realize that you don’t have to do things a certain way to get results. I’m not a morning person, and I do almost all of my writing in the evening, after I’m finished working for the day and I don’t have that stuff hanging over me.
I usually get ideas when I’m driving to a very familiar place or washing dishes or when I’m in the middle of any fairly mindless task. There’s something great about being in that mode, with your body on autopilot and then your brain allowed to wander. I usually let an idea simmer for a long time. The story I wrote for this newest issue of Grub Street, for instance, “Ballad of the Weird Girl,” that was maybe a year and a half in the making. Originally, I was just going to write about how weirdly connected I felt to true crime podcast hosts because I would listen to them talk all night and their voices became so familiar to me. But I started working backward and thinking about, well, why would that kind of thing be so appealing to me in the first place? So that was how that came about.
EB: In what ways do you think writers, specifically female writers, can change the world?
Something that I think is a huge problem in the world of writing in general, though it also applies to movies and TV shows and things like that, is the idea that men are the default and that anyone can project their own hopes and dreams and fears onto a male character, while female characters are somehow only for women. I don’t disagree with the idea that a person who doesn’t identify as a man can connect to and love and empathize with a male character. I do all the time! But there’s an assumption that starts when kids are little, that boys will not like stories about girls because they can’t relate. Well, we can’t relate to anything we’re not exposed to.
To the actual question, then—I think female writers specifically can change the world by not compromising their vision or experience or their stories because they’re ‘girl stories.’ The more ‘girl stories’ that get put out into the world, the more readers will realize how rich and different and worthwhile they are.
EB: Where can our readers find your work?
I’ve been published in Grub Street twice as well as several online journals and zines—Crepe & Penn and Phemme. Right now, I’m hoping to wrangle some short pieces of nonfiction into a collection.
Elaine Batty is a student at Towson University graduating with a BS in English on the literature track. Her poetry has been featured in the College of Southern Maryland’s Connections literary magazine. In her free time, she enjoys reading all genres of fiction, writing poetry, and playing with her two cats, Catlynn and Cleocatra. Elaine’s two real passions are literature and travel, and she plans to look for a job following graduation that will allow her to pursue both full time. We at Yellow Arrow want to send a huge thank you to her for all her hard work over the past few months. Mahalo nui loa!
You can follow Eva Niessner on Instagram @asongoficeandeva.
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Yellow Arrow Publishing is a nonprofit supporting women writers through publication and access to the literary arts.