Write To Save Your Life With Venita Blackburn

There are very few people in this world who can pull off a pair of round, wire-rimmed, rose-colored glasses, and Venita Blackburn is one of them. She’s not the first writer to be known for her lenses––Joy Williams, James Baldwin, and Joan Didion were inseparable from their sunglasses, so she’s in good company. I love when a writer has a signature look––and Blackburn’s writing has its own trademark style as well: Expertly concise, packed with intensity and emotion, and balanced out with a good sense of humor. She is the author of two volumes of short stories, Black Jesus and Other Superheroes and How to Wrestle a Girl, plus a debut novel released in January: Dead in Long Beach, California. Clearly she knows how to pick a title, which is what drew me to her writing in the first place.

I meet with Venita over Zoom to chat during her office hours and I feel like I’m in college again, slightly intimidated by the cool, hot, talented professor. (Her students are lucky.) And like a good professor, she dispenses wisdom and writing advice, and responds to each of my questions with thoughtful introspection.

Cora Lee: First off, how did you get started out as a writer?

Venita Blackburn: I wrote some kind of poem or something in elementary school and I didn’t think that much of it, but I remember showing it to my mom and she was really proud of it. She showed it to people at work. That kind of sparked something in me. I didn’t think I could do something that could make adults excited. But I still didn’t put myself into the mental path of becoming a writer because an artist was a poor person––I did not want to be poor. I wanted something to give me financial stability, I wanted to be rich. I grew up in Compton. But I was always writing in some way, as a compulsion, not a career. So I didn’t really accept that––trying to be a writer––until grad school, when I decided to apply for an MFA and decided to be poor.

CL: You have two books of short stories out, both of which are amazing. You have really mastered the pacing, structure, and format of the short story. And now you have a novel out. Did it come naturally to pivot to a longer piece or was that a challenge?

VB: It was a challenge and not something I am eager to return to. Part of it was the content––it was really heavy content, but still filtered through my delirious playful nature. So it’s all of that that made the book really really difficult. And when I was writing it, I was just kind of deep in the weeds thinking, What did I do? Why am I here? What’s gonna happen? And that’s the challenge for big pieces––compressing your brain down into the moment and allowing yourself not to be able to see the edges.

CL: Well, I feel the writers who know how to edit themselves the best are the ones who are used to short formats. They know how to cut out all of the excess, because that’s crucial for a short story. So is having a memorable title––which you’ve mastered: Lizard Sex, Black Jesus, Annie Oakley’s Gun School for Women. I love a good title. Do you come up with the title while you’re in the process or is it something you choose after the piece is formed?

VB: I have a rule: the title needs to be both real and symbolic. Both concrete and abstract. So it has to be some tangible thing within the story that is carrying double meaning for what the story is really about. And that’s harder to do than it sounds. But it’s a really important way to understand what you’re trying to write about. It is interesting and fun and not cliche and surprising? I play with that alot when I’m choosing titles.

I like that you appreciate them––I do think about them. They have to have something playful about them in order for me to be satisfied. For my novel, the title is a little heavier than I’m used to. The original title was “Lesbian Assassins at the End of the World,” which I do love. My apocalypse would be full of lesbian assassins. But I had to talk to my editors about how to make the whole thing connected. And we settled on Dead in Long Beach, California.

CL: Your work has intense themes in it, but you handle them in a nuanced way. You show the darkness but also the power in girlhood. Like your character T––she is discovering how to be a girl in the world, she’s discovering this power but it’s attracting perversity…I don’t know if I’m making sense.

VB: I love everything you’re saying. I think it's absolutely accurate. Girlhood is this fine line between delight and danger. You’re delighting in all these wonderful changes and the beauty of being alive, and there’s these other forces that will corrupt that. That will turn that beauty into suffering for the girl in that moment.

CL: But I never feel depressed after reading your stories. I don’t leave feeling disgusted by the world. There’s humor, there’s light, it’s like “this is how the world is, but this is how you navigate it.” You’ve said in an interview before that you have so much love for humanity. It comes through in your writing. It never feels like “you should pity this character,” it’s more like “this is someone’s life and this is how the world is.”

VB: Even though every once in a while I feel tired of people, I still love them. People are beautiful and grotesque. For every cruel thing, another generous thing is happening. We can’t pretend like one erases the other or one pays for the other, or one is not happening. It’s us. I’m not in the business of writing about heroes and monsters. It bothers me when someone names a criminal a monster. No, that’s a man, that's a human, this is what people do. And we have to look at it. To be honest about humanity is to recognize the joy and the delight and the malicious suffering. It’s not even a balance. It’s just all there. That’s in everybody to some degree. Life is not Law and Order SVU.

CL: People can’t be defined in simple terms––in life or in literature––that’s too easy. I did want to ask you, as a professor, what piece of advice do you give out to your students who are trying to make sense of the world by writing?

VB: Great question. As an artist, you have to really consider your intention. What makes you laugh, what makes you feel something. Remember that first. Once you do that, you’re writing to be understood. First write for your own joy, then write for clarity and understanding. Not everyone will be your audience. But you still are. If you're gonna commit to this, write like it will save your life, like it will save the world. Don’t focus on the end goal but focus on that push behind it. Something good is going to happen at the end of this.