Elisabeth Sharp McKetta joins me today for an episode all about how the mythology we inherit from our cultures and families, can be combined with the personal, to enhance our stories. She discusses the similarities of crafting poetry and prose, and how she weaves the magic of myth into her works, making them resonate with readers while keeping things fresh and exciting.

Chapters:

• 00:15 - Embracing Mythology in Writing
• 08:25 - Exploring the Intersection of Fairy Tales and Memoir
• 21:52 - The Mythology of Water: Crafting a Narrative
• 31:59 - Archetype Phases
• 46:33 - Choosing the Child's Perspective

Elisabeth's Information:

Elisabeth Sharp McKetta is an award-winning writer and writing teacher and a mother of two. With a PhD on the intersections between fairy tales and autobiography, as well as a seven-year streak of writing weekly poems for strangers, she teaches writing for Oxford Department for Continuing Education and for Harvard Extension School, where she won their highest teaching award. She has authored thirteen books across genres, most recently the novels She Never Told Me about the Ocean and Ark, the essay collection Awake with Asashoryu, and the personal growth guide Edit Your Life, based on her experience living three years in a 275-square foot backyard guest house with her family of four (five, if you count the Labrador). She co-edited the anthology What Doesn’t Kill Her: Women’s Stories of Resilience, which Gloria Steinem described as stories that “will help each of us to trust and tell our own.” Elisabeth’s work with myth and memoir, which she began studying at Harvard College and now teaches, has been spotlighted in Harvard Magazine. (elisabethsharpmcketta.com)

Elisabeth's Books:

She Never Told Me about the Ocean

Ark

Edit Your Life

Elisabeth's Ted Talk: Edit Your Life Like a Poem: TedXBoise

Also Mentioned:

The Virgin's Promise by Kim Hudson

The Heroine with 1001 Faces by Maria Tatar

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We all have mythologies that follow us. They come from our history, our culture. They flow down from our families. Even books and movies can have their own mythology.

Instead of blindly allowing them into our writing, leading to flat characters and cliches, how can we embrace them, use them to make our stories better? Welcome to the Epilogue.

I'm Michael and I'm here today with Elizabeth Sharpe McKetta, who has kindly agreed to talk to us about her writing craft and maybe about how the craft of writing can intersect with your life choices. So once again, thank you for joining us today.

Michael, thank you so much for inviting me. It is such an honor.

And I was so delighted to hear that you were doing this podcast because you are a writer who I quote regularly at any writer who comes in my path. So your wisdom is with me often.

And it was really fun to hear that you were going to be doing a podcast that spoke about writer's wisdom and how we can think about craft and be inspired.

That's very kind, especially coming from you.

Professor Maketa is the author of several books of poetry, including Fear of the Deep, Fear of the Beast, collaborations with artist Troy Passey, nonfiction books such as Edit yout Life, which is using your writing skills to apply to your everyday kind of handling of your life, middle grade book arc and the novel she never told me about the Ocean. She has a PhD on the intersection between fairy tales and autobiography, which we'll be talking a little bit about today.

Teaches for both the Oxford Department of Continuing Education and the Harvard Extension School and has a TED Talk.

Thank you for that lovely introduction. Mini projects always it is fun to be a creator with mini projects.

Just to start with your writing path, we'll zoom in. Your doctoral work was on blending myth and memoir, connecting pieces of yourself to the pieces of the cultural story. You talk a little bit about.

I think you phrased the veil of myth. How do fairy tales offer protection to writers exploring the the facts and fiction of their lives and and how that interacts with the world?

Yes. This is a topic very, very near and dear to my heart. I had two incredible teachers when I was a very young writer around 21 in fairy tales.

Maria Tatar, who is still publishing on fairy tales and all sorts of cool.

She wrote the book on it.

She wrote the book on it. She wrote the book on it. Several editions. She's brilliant and so warm. Such a great teacher and so she taught me to see fairy tal everywhere.

I've become the kind of horrible to watch movies with person because I'll see you know Sixteen candles and say that's a Cinderella story. Look, look, that's. See, this is the ascent, this is the ball, those are the shoes. Because they really are so fun.

It feels like all of life is like a literary treasure hunt for, you know, for these kind of mythic spines that become clear once, you know, once you study them with a, with a great teacher, which I got to do.

So fairy tales came into the picture pretty early on as something that I just never, I had never thought of as being a multi layered thing and I had never known other than the Disney movies.

So it felt like that was my first experience of really understanding, close reading and thinking that, you know, that a story is about more than it is about. Like that idea sort of came to me through fairy tales.

So I think that really sort of began my curiosity as a reader in that way and as a viewer and observer of stories.

And then at the same time I started taking a really lovely memoir writing course with Hope Hale Davis, who's no longer living, but she was a former communist, outlived four husbands, this very storied woman who used to write for the New Yorker and had a group of Cambridge, Massachusetts memoirists who came to her, her house, well, first to Radcliffe, but later on to her living room every Tuesday. And she had us on a very strict schedule of turning in a new essay each week that she would critique.

And so I lear, I sort of cut my teeth writing with these women in their 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s. Hope died at 101 and I wrote with her for the last four or five years.

I learned to write with these women looking back on their life from so far away while also thinking about fairy tales of writing from this bottom up way of is this a rags to riches? Is this an overcoming the monster?

Like those two sort of came together for me so early that it just felt like it felt so I didn't have the words for it then, which is why I studied it in graduate school, because I just thought let's understand why these things are so important together besides the fact that I just like them. You know, that's not a good enough reason. Like there has to be something in the clique that can be useful for other writers.

And what I've come to see, which feels so obvious now but didn't to me yet then, is that the spine of most great stories are pretty, pretty cliched. You know, there are a couple of great mythic plots that humans have been telling in our stories from, you know, 4,000 years ago to today.

That we love to hear again and again because. Because they work, because they resonate with our experience, because they link with the things that we. The sort of. The.

The segments of life that we recognize.

You know, we've all thought of eras in our life where we overcame some sort of monster, be it an internal part of ourself that we felt uncomfortable with or a difficulty with another person, or human versus, you know, illness, human versus sort of community problem. Like we've all sort of had. Had opposition and found a way to. I don't know, to tell stories about that.

And similarly, you know, all of us have probably seen or heard or lived some version of. Of a. Of a Cinderella story. You know, we were sort of not seeing the thing that we fel ourselves or made us special or made us worthy of love.

And we had to sort of gradually, gradually find our way up, you know, any underdog sports movie. But we have this in our own lives too, I think, as we come of age.

So it feels like these mythic plots and these fairy tale plots are pretty much made up of what the sort of the bone structure of storytelling, like it feels like for universal plots. Look there. Don't look any further, because we don't need to reinvent that. Those are what story. What make up stories almost mathematically.

But then for taking these structures and making them fresh and interesting and personal and fun to tell, therapeutic to tell, you know, all the reasons a writer comes to story, it feels like we have to dress them in our own perspective, whether that's fact or fiction. We have to sort of make good art when we can in this world.

You know, like you and I are writing different things today than we would if we'd been born 100 years ago. And everything we've seen or read or talked about, like that kind of feeds our art.

So this idea that one of them is the kind of bone structure and the other is everything else feels very true for how we approach any story. And. And I think that often when writers get stuck with plot, we can look, you know, ask, what kind of story is this? What kind of.

What kind of bone structure are we talking about? And get a. You know, to use your phrase, you know, we can sort of collapse the decision tree based on thinking about what. What is the structure? And.

And then I think, what. Whatever genre we're writing, if we can start with the images we know. You know, I grew up in Texas.

The heat, the smell of the trees, you know, how people spoke like those. Those images will be with me forever. And I Can make good use of them if I so choose.

There is an awful lot of just story that descends from story and there's a resonance between, well, good works now and older works.

You mentioned, though, dressing it up obviously in your personal experience and pieces of your own memoir, your own autobiographical details, even things that I guess are kind of emotionally related to you, I guess. Would you say there's a difference, though, between what we commonly think of as fairy tales and how we would typically structure a story today?

Sometimes people will say this is very fairy tale like. And I, you know, that was something that has been said about Ocean, for example, and what. I mean, obviously we're all just telling a story.

Yes, I think I feel like this is. I love this.

I feel like this is a one of those wonderful questions that will continue creating more heads of questions because it does feel like, you know, what is a fairy tale? What. How do we use it? What is not a fairy tale is a wonderful question.

And when I think about what a few things, and maybe one place to start is, is thinking about a very obvious difference between fairy tale and life writing, which is that in a fairy tale we usually have a very clear ending of either, you know, happy for some, red hot shoes and eyes poked out by doves for others in life writing when we're writing memoir, or, you know, we'll start with life writing because we can do all sorts of other things in other genres.

We are the writer and we are alive to write the end and to take the reader to some sort of ledge where we leave them and hope, leave them feeling that there's some even subtle, not, you know, not shoved over them like a cage, but some subtle elixir, you know, in both fairy tales and memoir, like someone goes through the woods and learn something and is maybe a little wiser, but.

But in memoir, as far as I can tell, and I'm sure there are other ways to see this, but this is what I always come back to when reading the ones that I love. They're really only two possible endings because we can't end with we all lived happily ever after because we don't know that.

Who knows what will happen tomorrow. And we also can't end with and we all died, you know, and it was very sad because obviously, like, we didn't. And here we are. So we.

So the sort of marriage, death, you know, comedy, tragedy, like those typical endings of fairy tales are off the table for the memoirists. So. And tell me if you can see other ways between these, because I would love to see it being more nuanced, but I haven't been able to yet.

I think in memoir, all we really have, we go through the woods and we come to sort of a place where we can say, okay, here's what I've learned, or here's what it all adds up to. We've got either the option of change. You know, like, I decided I would be who I really am, or I would leave Texas, or I would.

I would marry him after all, or I would have to make a large change in some way to align what I know the life needs to be and what it currently is. Change is one option, and then the other, I think, is this sort of acceptance, surrender. Like, well, yep, it's a flawed place, but Texas is my home.

Or, yep, it's a tough relationship, but he'll always be my brother. You know, there's the sense of, like, well, I accept these terms, even if they're not perfect, which is a very kind of adult we, you know, wisdom.

But a fairy tale, of course, would not end in either one of those, you know, that's way too nuanced and way too, you know, grayscale for the fairy tale. But. But. But I think we. And then there are other things that we can dig into.

I think the imagery we should definitely look at, too, because fairy tale imagery is sort of timeless and doesn't have logistics like parking tickets, but sort of sticks to the big epic essentials. But I would.

I would love. I would love the. The parking ticket complication.

You have to, you know, on the way to the ball, you know, the pumpkin gets a parking ticket or something. You have to.

You should write that. You should write that.

Yeah, I could. I could see that being a. A thing. The modern New York fairy tale.

Totally. The pumpkin carriage is parked in the wrong zone. Yeah, totally.

Well, interesting. He brought up the nuance, the difference between, say, a myth and a fairy tale. There is mythic story, and then there's fairy tale stories.

Typically, myths are much less even. Much less subtle than what you might even think of as a fairy tale. It's not just a personal victory or tragedy. It is a cataclysm of.

Or, you know, whatever the opposite would.

Yes, we have offended the gods.

The boon.

Yeah, it is big. Yes, exactly.

Because you have stories of different shapes, and you have.

There's some interesting strata going on in ocean here because there's some stuff that's kind of bordering on mythic, but there's also this kind of folklore, this local mysticism that's kind of you're seeing it through that veil and that's obviously touching the lives of your characters.

Yes, totally. And it you. You use the phrase. I think you were the one who said these are rules, not these are tools, not rules.

Like you're not going to use every single one. And at the end of the day it all has to serve the story. And it may be that none of these tools do. So those aren't your tools. Use other tools.

But I think that's very true when. When thinking about these tools and you touch on the difference between myth and fairy tale.

Which is a question that in my classes I don't really worry about so much because I'm coming at it from a creative writing perspective rather than a scholarship. But when I come but when sort of pressed I tend to think of it exactly the way that you talked about that.

I think of fairy tales as a little more domestic centered around house, village, family. And I think of myth as we're talking underworlds and overworlds and you know, no one's really home except for, you know, the vestal virgins.

Like it's really a different scale.

And nobody answering the doorbell.

Nobody's answering the door. Exactly. There are no doorbells in this. But. But for Ocean I found that and. And. And I'll maybe tell reader tell listeners a little.

A little bit about it. It's. Would this be a good time to just give a quick sketch of it so people know what we're talking about?

Yeah.

She never told me about the Ocean is my first novel and it and is a four generation coming of age story told by. By four different narrators. One of whom is 18. One of whom is. Is an older woman but telling a story that happened to her when she was young.

And then the other is a very wounded mother who's lost a son and has not been able to to heal and forgive herself. So we've got sort of the. The Maiden, the Mother, the Crone and then the fourth and the.

And the fourth silent Voice.

The fourth silent voice. We love the silent Voice. The Silent Voice was was heavily debated when it was time to publish because do we need fourth one is the mythical fairy.

I made her a woman fairy woman Charon of the underworld who takes the souls. Who's sort of. Who's the sort of death midwife the midwiferys something that links the characters. The youngest character is a midwife in training.

And so it really deals with how women carry each other's stories and how women. And it could be anyone that in the story I was looking at, women ferry each other through sort of turbulent periods in life and are able to help.

Help each other kind of grow and learn and forgive themselves and others. So it's really a healing story in a lot of ways. Uses lots of kind of.

I had a lot of fun doing research on, on sort of healing herbs and, you know, conventions of midwifery. Like lots of sort of stuff about, you know, sort of women's healing arts filter into it. But. But what? But my ambitions for it were so big.

And I always forgive myself as a writer for having ambitions that are way, way, way, way above my skill level. And I think I got this idea from. I feel like you're gonna have to help me track this down.

But I feel it was probably Annie Dillard's writing life where she says something to the effect of, you know, the idea is huge and all we have is this little humble pencil stub in our paper. Like we're never going to get it. As beautiful, big as we've conceived it, we're just not.

And yet with the writer we are, with the skills we have, with the time we have, we're going to have to try. And I really took that to heart because what I wanted Ocean to be was enormous.

I wanted it to be a mythology of mothers and daughters the way that I think of Star wars as a mythology of fathers and sons. You know, I wanted it to be enormous. And, you know, I have these skills. And so I got it, yeah, you know, as high as I could.

And then it still was not what it needed to be. And so I grew some more skills and got it as, you know, so I wrenched up as high as it could be.

And it, of course, is a very mortal book, you know, like any book. It sort of became, you know, the, the art that I make. Make art when you, you know, make good art in the world, you know, when you can.

So I'm so happy it came so much closer to my ideal version for it than I thought it would be able to.

I. I would.

Was going to talk to you about your engineering of this interwoven structure that you've talked about before, of these, these women and the points of view and this single story that they kind of share. So, so I guess let's talk about it because that's, that's really, it's really. There is something big about the way that it is structured.

Like this multi generational thing kind of tends to give age and weight to stuff, but it's also intimate. And I know you went through an awful lot of trying to weave that together, so I'll let you talk about that.

Yes, it felt. Yes, because the intimacy had to be part of it. It was each and back to the mythic memoir.

Each person's small individual journey clashing against everybody else's and making each other miserable, really, in various ways. Each one did. Not each one, but many of, you know, several of the characters did tremendous damage in each other's lives.

Not on purpose, but that's sort of hanging in there. And each one gets a first person eye because I only really know how to write in first person because memoir.

But it's so personal, it's so intimate, and it really deals with the sort of mythic themes of, you know, it's about birth, love and death. The whole story is birth, love and death. And I really struggled a lot with the structure because I knew.

I knew a few things that your word again, collapsed the decision tree of the book. When everything else felt incredibly wiggly. The timeline was one of the wiggly things I wanted to take us from unwanted mythic time.

Charon has been fearing souls for a really long time. I had to sort of put her in there in some outside of the XY time axis. You know, she had to be in sort of like myth time, but part of. For the.

For the main narrator, for the frame narrator named Sage, who changed names a few times throughout the book. I needed to take the reader from.

From before she was born, when her mother lost her son, you know, lost her big brother before she was born, to when she was 18 and, spoiler alert, served as her mother's midwife for. For the. For another sun, a new sun. So it's, you know, so I knew. So I had no idea how I was going to work with the time.

And then that's only one of the time, you know, two of the timelines, then the other two had to find their own. Their own spectrum. So the timelines were disastrous. But I knew from the very beginning that the ark would go from.

From death in water to birth in water. Like it was going to do. So that was a certainty I was going to have to get from those. From there to there. That was.

That helped to sort of create some parameters. I also knew that that water was going to be seeping through as an image in the book.

You know, often when we come to any story, there's sort of one dominant image. My second novels was. Was house and structure and shelter, but this one was all about water.

And I think part of that Is because of how the idea for the book came. It came from a piece of birth mythology given to me by. By a midwife friend who I dedicated the book to.

But so I knew, so, so I knew that there would be sort of water mythology in there just because that was the source of the book. But I also, even though the book is pure fiction and, you know, it's a ghost story, in some ways, it's an underworld story. You know, I'm not a ghost.

I've not been to the underworld, you know, pure fiction. My mother's nothing like the mother in the book.

But there was one part that I did bring through, and it was a story that happened to my mother when she was very young, when she was put on duty to watch her younger brother in the pool and he stopped breathing and was brought back to life by her dad, who was a doctor. So for my mother, the face of mortality for her children always wore the face of water. And now.

And I started writing the book when I became a mother and the faces of mortality were everywhere, it turns out. So, so, so I used water to sort of.

Because that was the mythology that I was brought up into that, you know, all of our rules involved like not swimming unattended and locks on the pool gate.

You inherited.

Yeah, exactly. The fairy tale, right?

We were born into the fairy tale that, like, water is wonderful, water is fabulous, water is life, water is death, you know, like any big thing, right? Fire, water, like, it was sort of this elemental fear that I was kind of born into for my mother.

And of course, as kids we made fun of her incessantly. But then, you know, you realize, oh, right, like this, this is, this is her fear.

So I knew there had to be water as the imagery everywhere for the fear of the mother, the main character's mother. And so because of that, I knew I needed an island. I needed to have it set on an island so that water would be everywhere, would be unavoidable.

Water would seep into the way they talked to each other. Water would seep into the way they gave directions. I needed an island. And I grew up in Texas, which is not an island.

So I had to sort of use my imagination to think how, you know, how can I create, how can I create this place? I also knew the island needed to have access to an underworld, so it needed to be a mythic fairy tale.

It couldn't be an island where we point and say right here. It had to be a made up island.

Even if I infused it with, you know, whatever Ocean mythology I could find or whatever I could, you know, dredge up from my own experience of, you know, of oceanside communities. But. So those were certainties. I needed an island. Needed. Needed the Birth to death arc. Also. I felt pretty sure early on that I would need.

I knew I'd need to have these four narrators. Although I debated taking Charon out a few times, I'm glad I didn't. But I initially felt that the obvious structure was that of.

Of those lovely nesting dolls, those wooden dolls where you have a woman inside a woman inside a woman inside a woman. And right now, I'm actually adapting Ocean into a script which is new and exciting and fun and hard and. Well, that's.

You're gonna have to talk about that. I'll let you finish this then.

I'm very new, and I'm a total baby writer in that realm, but I'm finding all the teachers I can and trying to learn as much as I can and having a lot of fun doing it. One of the images early on is of. Is of a nesting doll in the. In the credits, knowing, again, everything will change. But. But I. But.

But I feel that image is so important to the book. But in my initial structuring of it, when I tried literally, to follow the structure of having, you know, these different.

The frame narrator, inside one, inside one, inside one. I tried to do that nine times, one for each when the mother is pregnant, which is the track of the main book. It was a disaster, Michael.

It was totally a disaster. Everyone who read it was like, what are you doing? Like, I don't. I don't stay.

The sort of most helpful advice I got about that is one reader who said, I feel unmoored. Also, I guess a good water. Water word. I don't stay long enough in any one character to know or care about them. So the structure.

And this was sort of the. The damning feedback, which I had to accept was correct. The structure is getting in the way of the story.

I have to say, your nesting doll.

The way that these women are related and the way that they inhabit each other, in a way, through the narrative course of the story, the structure really reinforces that there's something where they bleed into each other the way it is right now, and that really just reinforces the sameness, which is great, where they're in conflict.

I'm so glad. Thank you for saying that.

That was what I wanted it to do, and I needed to loosen it, to give it any chance of doing that, because when it was that tight it was almost as if I was suffocating, really felt. And one of my wonderful readers, Lynn Miller, who always, you know, I fling the spaghetti of a first draft at her and say, help me.

It was her idea to loosen the structure by thinking about how I could give at least the first 30 pages to my main woman. And that. So I gave. So she does have the beginning and the end and then the other sections got parsed up.

Still, it has the nine month structure, but much, much looser. And you're right.

I appreciate that you said that because that was my hope was I could do kind of a nod to the structure, not feel sort of caged by the structure.

To do otherwise really feels kind of Tolstoying.

Yes.

Sort of effort. Yeah. He wrote an entire book about a war that he never actually even got to in the book. So it's like.

Anyway, there's a lot of themes in Ocean, the water, the family myth, the repeating cycles, the mothers and daughters, birth, love and death. Your mythic themes. And they're all in there. The characters themselves inhabit those pieces so much in there.

So much. There's so much.

And part of what helped them do that, again, I always think that in, you know, so much of writing is this sort of infinite toggle between, you know, fun play, throw spaghetti against the wall of discovery. You know, this sort of grown up equivalent of like building stuffed animal apartments out of cardboard boxes. You know, just like, fun.

Like, we ultimately do this because it's fun, even if it doesn't always feel fun. But, like, don't you think at the end of the day it should be fun? I don't know. We've got the fun part, we've got the crate part. Right.

Most of the time we've got the sort of like, craft hat part. And I think so much of the process is toggling between the part that is full of, like, fun and eureka.

And often what I think is disparagingly called the therapeutic draft, but I think is a necessary draft. You know, the draft that sort of lays out how we feel about everything, whether it's real or false. But that was the one where I.

My first draft was the one certainly where I was able to sort of look hard at why did I write this book and realize how much of it, even though it is fiction, was about my own, was sort of taking on, you know, like, we could mythic, like, getting Proteus to keep the shape.

Like, taking on my own fears about motherhood and mortality and wondering, like, why, like, what is the grip these have on me and what am I going to do about that? So it was really, really healing in terms of, of that even though again, fiction, underworld, ghosts.

So I feel the first draft is really kind of emotionally useful. But then we've got to put on the craft hat and draft again. I use, you know, you know, we go back and forth all the time. You know, who knows when it.

We're doing both all the time.

But when in this sort of craft realm we actually have to make it good and we have to ask what does this do for the reader and what does the place exert on the character? What do they both do with the theme?

We have to sort of think like we have to critical read our own work, which is so different than just saying like, I think his name is going to be Lance. You know, it's just like such a different kind of. It just uses a different part of the brain and taxes sort of different resources, I think.

And now I'm forgetting where I was going to go with this.

It's okay. I may, I may have diverted in.

The, the women personifying the, the birth, love and death, which I love that you said that, that they, that they do. I instinctively needed an 18 year old because I felt like she's, you know, like she's on the cusp.

I instinctively needed a mourning mother and I instinctively needed this sort of wise old woman.

And then Carol, on, you know, other topic, but, but I didn't quite understand until I read this beautiful book that I think you and I have talked about before by Kim Hudson called the Virgin's Promise, which is sort of put forth as a, is another lens for the hero's journey.

But when I, but when I read Kim Hudson's book, I felt that I understood hero and heroine's journey at phase of life, at season of life so much more broadly than I ever had before. And this is again, very, very sketchy summary. And so apologies to Kim Hudson for a very sketchy summary.

But my take on it is that she, she put the hero in opposition to the coward that, you know, the hero's test is do I have the willingness to. Do I have the courage to sacrifice myself for a greater cause? You know, is we greater than I?

And if the hero can answer that positively with his actions and his, you know, could be, could be Moana.

It doesn't have to be gender, gender specific, but you know, the hero's narrative, if the hero can answer that positively, then the hero is a hero and if not, then the human was a Coward.

So it's kind of a test that I read as sort of a daily emotional test that we all run through, you know, that every moment, you know, can I, how can I be heroic in this? Oh, I was cowardly in that conversation. Oh, well, tomorrow's another day. You know, like it's. The reason it resonates is because it's so human.

And then we move to the next stage for the hero's journey in the second third of life. The. I think it's the. The father. The father tyrant, maybe.

And again, if the, and I think the idea is that if the, if the hero at that point is able to just be a good leader, you know, be a good responsible leader of the kingdom, whether that's a family or a business or a magical kingdom, then they're the father, they're the king, and if they rule it unjustly, they're the tyrant. So, you know, how do we use our power, do we use it generously, etc.

And then in the next phase, the third third of life, I think it's the mentor, the miser. Do we recognize our mortality enough to say, okay, I'm going to leave my wisdom behind in well placed ways, you know, I'm going to mentor generously.

I'm going to teach that Luke Skywalker a thing or two. And, or do we are miserly and do we like harder all our gold and try to take it with us, you know, whatever that means.

So, you know, how do we deal with our mortality?

And then to the heroines, the same sort of a mirror of it that I very much felt, that I very much felt was happening in the sort of creative spaghetti against the wall work of my novel, but that I needed to really understand structurally in order to get it right.

The idea that in the first phase of life we've got the maiden, or as Hudson calls her, the virgin, who's trying to understand who she is and if she has the courage. So it's a courage test again, if she has the courage to show who she is, even if the village depends on her being someone else.

And Hudson gives the examples of bend it like Beckham, like, are you a good infant daughter or a soccer player or Billy Elliot? Are you a boy or a dancer? Who are you?

And I think that, and certainly I think as a writer, and I think probably every writer has one of those courage moments where am I a writer or something more practical. But to be able to say, oh, I am this. And we're going to need to figure out a way To.

To bring this out into the open, you know, the sort of uncloseting of the artist self like that, I think is a. Hudson would probably call a heroine's journey. And if we fail to do that, then. And I always hated this phrase when I studied Joyce in college.

I just felt so bored. Bored. Bored by, like, virgin horror. So boring. But this helps me see it in a different way. That Hudson sort of puts it as a.

Do we honor what is innately valuable in ourselves, even if it is of no economic value to others? Or do we sell our version of ourself to others because we don't trust it?

And that is what makes, you know, the virgin or someone who sort of sells herself? So I thought that was a really interesting way to look at that. That certainly felt more interesting than Joyce. But then we get to the.

To the mother, and I think it's mother monster or mother martyr. But, you know, can the mother nurture. Same question as the father. Can the mother nurture her family business community without burning out?

Without, you know, sort of killing that spark in herself that she identified in the first third? If she can, great. She's the mother. She's the queen.

And if she can't, then she becomes mother martyr, which is where my fictional mother is pretty stuck.

We definitely see the reflections of these in your character journeys.

She's so. So she's such a mother martyr, a monster martyr. And then we've got the third. Third for the. Is for the.

For the hero's journey, I thought was so interesting. I had never thought of this in quite this way, which is why this book was such a spark for me. But the idea that for the third.

Third for the heroine's journey, there's the question again, facing mortality and what are we going to do with that?

And Hudson distinguishes between the crone who looks at her mortality, accepts it, and looks back at the world that she's about to leave with a kind of trickster mischief. And I love the trickster idea. And I think some. Now that I see this, I see it everywhere.

There are lots of sort of tricks, tricky older women that play that role.

And I mentioned Moana earlier, Moana's grandmother, you know, someone who sort of smiles and kind of sometimes, like, throws, you know, pebbles into the path of the heroine on the wrong way or the hero on the wrong way, and says, is this really where you want to be stepping? Have you thought through this? You know, ask sort of tricky questions to sort of help the people, the young, wise people get on their own Path.

So I love the trickster Crone. And then the hag, I think she puts forth as like a Mrs.

Robinson character who's sort of afraid to die and therefore says like everything is mine, you know, won't let the world turn naturally. So it's such a cool idea.

And so, yeah, so very much that helped me finish the book by thinking we've got my maiden, we've got my, my monster who needs to become a mother and we've got the, the crone who will die by the end of the story. Spoiler alert. But who will sort of imbue her wisdom on the generations.

But that book, like it's always so funny what tools or resources sort of come when you need them to help you finish a project.

I think especially wrestling with a work which deals so much in mythic structures. You obviously have to be kind of explicit about wrestling with those mythic structures directly.

But that's still sort of a thing that can apply for even more personal works which I guess probably ought to be a segue I guess for me to start talking. There's an awful lot to talk about in Ocean and I guess we could keep going on. Ocean could go anywhere. But I also would.

You know, we should also talk about Ark. It's a middle grade novel and it's told in these kind of freeform verse ish missives from the point of view of a 11 year old.

This is also something has an origin in the personal. You actually did move into a tiny house with your own family. TED Talk, actually. Speaking of which. Which will be in the show notes.

So I mean you can obviously google it. There's. First of all, you want to talk about how this novel came to be and, and how it was it affected by events as you were. As you were writing it?

You know, things kept happening.

So yes, it was. You're so lovely to bring up these. I feel, I feel I should make a birth order analogy here and I should voice on you. Are you.

Where are you in the birth order?

I'm. I was first born.

Firstborn. Me too. A firstborn. The fairy tales really don't. Don't treat us very well. Usually the third one gets the best.

Yeah, it's okay.

It's okay. I feel that probably deserve.

In the birth order of my novels, all of the, all of my learning showed on Ocean, you know, which I feel about as a parent. You know, I feel like, oh my gosh, all of the learning pains.

Like, you know, I learned everything and my sweet firstborn is quick to Remind me, like, you are not this way for my brother, you know, just because, like, we didn't know what we were doing. And I think for the. For Ocean, I had no idea what I was doing. I had no idea how to finish a book. Every.

It bears so many marks of my learning, and it was a life changer in teaching me how to write a book, you know, it was an amazing. Like, I don't think any experience will ever kind of feel as transformative as the firstborn book. And I'm so glad the second one was easier.

ARC was so much easier than Ocean. I think just it had to be. I think that there's some books just, like, wear us out and take every bit that we will give them and more.

I remember so many times when I would think Ocean was done and, you know, send out a flurry of queries and think, okay, now I can move on to the next thing. And then, you know, like a.

Like someone in a bad relationship would come back and be like, you know, rejected again, but with enough hope that if you just revise this, it'll be.

I mean, it just felt like every time I was ready to move on to another project, Ocean to land back in my lap and be like, maybe this time you can get it.

It just took forever, and it never seemed to get good enough for my standards for it and for, you know, for the people that I wanted to publish it with. So Ocean just went on and on. Took, you know, eight years from. Yeah, I guess 10 years to publish, eight years to sort of get right.

So I think I just couldn't have. I wouldn't have done another novel, I think, under those terms. Those felt like very bad terms to repeat.

I think that's reassuring to a lot of people who think, oh, my gosh, I've been working on this for so, so long. You know, that's something I.

You hear about these Paolini, you know, just dash something off and people just, like, published it and poster plastered, wallpapered their house with it, whatever. And then you got. You hear these nice reaffirming stories about how it took me 20 years and three kids and a.

And two mortgages and a couple of major surgeries. Who knows, whatever else was, you know, involved in that time. Yes.

Yes. These are the scars, right? Like, these are the scars that we wrote through.

And, like, it's all part of the soup.

It's part of the soup. Oh, I love that. Thank you for. Thank you for pausing to point that out. It's so true, because it Isn't easy. You know, it isn't easy.

And I think we don't have to get into there today, but maybe a future one. I think probably one of the risks of, yeah, I won't go there.

I was going to get into AI and robots and things, but, you know, the promise that it will be easy seems like it.

It is a way of diminishing the potential of the toil to shape us, you know, because we are always wiser when we finish an enormous project than we were when we started it. And in a way, the kind of greater the toil, the wiser we are, because we've earned every one of those lessons and scars.

But the second one had to be easier, and luckily it was so the site. And I think this is really advice that I give my writers a lot that I actually for once took with with arc, that sometimes things write hard.

You know, they just write hard, and we have to be patient with them. But every once in a while, there's a project that writes easy. You know, I think maybe it was Faulkner, like, tossed off one book in eight weeks.

You know, sometimes a book just writes easy.

And I think that the temptation for us is writers who expect the toil is to look with, like, great skepticism at that one and ask, like, are you legitimate? And I think it's worth to, like, feel that maybe that is.

Maybe that is a gift, you know, like, maybe, like, that actually is legitimate and we should trust it and we should assume that our, you know, our instincts about what is good literature actually still hold true, that sometimes a book writes easy. And arc did write easy.

And I felt like I could look that I didn't have to, you know, looked the gift askew because I felt like, my God, give me an easy one. And it wrote quite. I think it was maybe. I can't remember if this is exactly how it lined up, because I was using the. The myth.

The myth at the center of ocean, where a lot of sort of ocean myths and a lot of mother daughter kind of grinding against each other, you know, stepmother fairy tales, those are influencing ocean. But Ark was. Was about, you know, the Noah's Ark story.

This idea of, you know, what happens when you're sort of living in your own little planet, you know, microplanet, during some sort of, you know, external natural disaster. So I think I actually set out to write it in 40 week days, which is to say eight weeks.

And I think I did succeed in getting the draft done in that period of time, which, again, like Covid, I had nothing else to do, you know, like my kids didn't want to all day. So it felt like that was a really lovely draft and that I just set myself the assignment of writing. And I love that you call. What did you call them?

You called them these little freeform missives. I love that you use the word missives. It's a great word. They started as. I thought of them at the beginning as poems. But I always.

I'm very disrespectful to her genre. I feel like a story is a story is a story. Pretty language is pretty language. Like, make it a good story, make it beautiful.

I wrote it as poems, thinking that that would just make it possible for me to.

To write it, to sort of skip along in it, you know, I write, for whatever reason, poems feel like a more permeable art form to me, that you can write a poem in, like, a lovely short period of time. But a novel, you have to think about the connective tissue, and you have to think about what happened 40 pages ago.

So I gave myself the grace of, you can write this thing in poems. They can be in any order, just grow at five pages a day. And most of them became kind of little prosy chunks. Some of them were haiku, but. But.

But I watched the manuscript grow five pages a day.

And then once it hit about 100 or 120, I stuck on my bulletin board and sort of moved it all around and was able to get it into its shape pretty quickly. But it was such a pleasure to write something that had. Where I started with sort of a clear moonshot of here's what it needs to be.

Here's we need to take the girl from here to here had a shorter timeline, only a few months, only one narrator. That was good. And the imagery in there was so clearly home and shelter. And she had a school project involving shelters that she failed.

And because it started by, you know, it started with an idea of a. Of a girl who is bummed that her family moves into a tiny house and they can only have their dog half time. That's the premise.

And that premise is very much drawn from my own life, because we move from a big house to a tiny house and the dog, and we found another family to do a dog share. So my wonderful dog loving daughter, you know, clearly thought what the hell? And had every right to feel what the hell.

So that was sort of the truth at the center of it. And I think we all feel. I think all four probably agree that moving to what we call the shed was a Wonderful choice.

And shaped us, shaped our family culture in ways that I think we all now feel com. You know, continue to pay dividends, you know, wherever we live in the world and we no longer live there. But, but at the time that was.

That was sort of a problem for her.

And so I took that as an idea and thought what would happen if during COVID you know, people are buying, you know, you could see interesting things happening with animals, right? Like lots of people were getting dogs, but also lots of people were having to move. I know so many people that did big moves.

Many animals would later on end up being, you know, left or abandoned. So I was interested in the early days of it, of what will happen to these animals and what if we come up with this girl who's loosely inspired by my.

By my wonderful, fierce, animal loving daughter who sets it upon herself to stop resenting this change passively and start participating in creating her house as an ark by rescuing the abandoned animals. So that was sort of the. The premise of it.

And so because I knew where I was going more than I did with Ocean, it was easier to sort of put into place. And because it was rooted, the family members were based. They were sort of caricatures of us.

The mom is an organizer for a university who becomes an herbalist. I'm obviously not that. I'm not that organized. And you probably don't want to take my herbal tinctures. Although I'm interested in both.

You know, I made us all fiction, but I used themes from our lives. The younger brother is very much a Buddha baby as my son is. And that sometimes drives the daughter nuts.

So it was fun to be able to kind of have my antenna on at home. And when I heard sort of wonderful lines, jot him on my phone and think this could be of use.

And so that's that character talking. At least you weren't as mean about it as Hemingway.

No, no, no, no. I want to keep my family. That was.

Keep your family intact.

Keep my family.

It's an interesting choice. The, the. You lived this from your point of view parts and yet you chose to tell this story from the 11 year old point of view.

The, the style of it is short. There's a terseness that really like my 11 year old. I could see the, the way you captured the subject which aren't actually changes of subject.

And then the suddenly okay, that's the end, you know, kind of yes way that they. He. He writes stories sometimes on. On a little typewriter upstairs. And there's. There Is that kind of a. A style?

You could see the complexity of, of stories that they've read coming through, but the way that they're actually like there's a. Sometimes an impatience to get to the next part or what gets abbreviated and stuff.

And there's something you captured in the voice of the 11 year old. What made you choose the child's point of view?

You had the idea to tell this story and you decided to tell it from the point of view of this person without the power, without the decision making that's getting thrust into this rather than. And maybe that's part of it rather than like the decree maker.

I had been working on our. We call it our shed. We need to, we keep saying we need to rebrand it and give it a better name because it's not a shed.

But the reason we call that little house the shed is because the original idea was that we put a tough shed in the backyard and I would write in it. So it sort of became obviously a place we could live in. But the shed name never went away.

So I was writing my own shed story through what became Edit yout Life. So I kind of felt like. And my shed story was not that interesting. Mine was more of a. Let's simplify people.

Like, let's see if we can find a way to sort of have all the good parts of life fit in with less of the faffy parts. So that was kind of my shed story.

But, but I think that thinking about the, the 11 year old version and I did take so many liberties and I did very much use, you know, the, the premise as kind of a diving board to launch into pure fiction. And for that reason my, my daughter has not yet read it. I think she is sort of nervous about. My son has read it and liked it very much.

And I read everything aloud to my husband before, before it goes to press. But my daughter I think is sort of nervous about it and I, I get that because you know, she's the, she's the heroine. She's.

And, and everyone who has read it who loves her says, you know, says, you know, I very much see, see, see her in Arden. And, and it's a very loving portrait of someone who is very fierce. You know, she's a very fierce 11.

And that very much is, you know, is something that, that I would, that I, I, you know, it was inspired by my daughter. But yeah, it felt like her story, you know, it felt like. I think partly it was. That was the psychic inch that I needed to grow that it felt like.

Like how, what is this like for a kid? You know, maybe at some deep level it was to sort of, you know, get a handle on my kind of mother guilt of like, was this the right decision?

But I think that ship had sailed by then. So I think it was really just trying to think what would this be like. I think I was really curious about what it was.

What it would be like to sort of come of age into that, you know, at age nine, I think she had her ninth birthday, you know, so sort of. So. So I felt curious about a kid's perspective of that.

And I was at home a lot with my children, so I think it felt like I didn't even question that the book just sort of. The idea of it just sort of came in a perfect three word overview which definitely didn't happen for Ocean.

So it just felt like, wouldn't this be a nice idea? Write it out. Let's start on Monday. It all happened so simply and it just never seemed like it would be anyone's story other than Arden's.

Like even their names. But yeah, so it just felt like very, very obvious that it would be her story without ever questioning it. Currently I'm working on a sequel for that.

Not a sequel so much, it's just like a companion from the brother's point of view. Again inspired by my son. Very different story.

My son loves tragedies, which is funny for a 10 year old, but he says stories that inhappily are quite boring. So this one is actually a tragedy. A dog has to die. So in the works.

But you know, both are about children and animals and morality and our relationship with sort of home and you know, village essentially but through very different perspectives and very different kids.

You have your TED Talk and also your book Edit yout Life. You're talking about applying the principles of writing or most especially editing to your life, which.

Crafting the world that you want, removing things that don't fit. That's a wonderful thing to be able to do as a writer.

But you know, and then how do we do that whenever we really wish somebody would take an eraser to something happening right in our lives.

So what a beautiful way to put that. Yes.

And that does feel like, you know, and this is something I'm thinking about more and more I keep like wiggling toward the line of AI because I'm thinking about it, but I don't want to again go there today.

But, but, but when I ask the question like what are we left with as writers if at Some point, what we would publish can be done as well by a non human.

And I keep finding comfort in the thought that the toil that shapes us, you know, the work of, of reflecting on our lives, using words to the best, you know, to the best of our abilities, thinking about structures and what they mean. You know, the work of becoming wiser with each project. Like, that's, that's. That's what we get to do.

Like, we get to, we get to, we get to have the fun and wisdom of writing it.

Which again, there are certain points in the book where none of it feels fun or wise, but it does feel like that's, you know, at the end of the day, I think the most important part of the writer's life is, is the life. And I think that goes back to also the, the. The hemming, the Hemingway question. You know, at the end of the day, like, we. Like nothing.

Nothing is like there's nothing that I could want to write that I would want to write enough to like, hurt somebody that anyone, you know, but especially not the people that I love. And it always just feels like if there's a question between writing and life, if the two are at odds.

And I feel lucky in that for most of my life they have not been. You know, my family and both birth and maid have been very supportive of my writing.

But ultimately I feel like if, if the question had to be answered, it. I think we gotta choose life. So I guess that sort of comes to my.

Sort of comes back to this, the edit the edit life question that so much about the, you know, the edit your life is about asking, you know, what. What is it that makes us feel alive? And for writers, of course, you know, writing is certainly part of the answer.

And how do those things become more of what we look back on our life and remember, you know, having, having, having engaged with, you know, day after day, because I feel you, you know, you and I who traffic and writing communities, you know, so know so many people, and at different points I've been this person who are the, you know, writers who don't write or writers who are afraid to write or writers who, you know, damage their lives because of how much they're afraid to write.

I mean, it's just such a, you know, whereas at the end of the day, I think healthy people do things that make them feel alive and try to remove or deal with or somehow find a form of compromise with the obstacles to that whenever, you know, whenever we can. But the life does feel like the, like the primary work of art, which is not to say like perfect schedule because I don't think that's possible.

But, but I think that's, I don't know, what are your, how do you, how do you shake out on that? That's, I'm thinking about that a lot.

I really like that, that life is the perfect work of art there. So that's, I think that's an excellent thought to, to go out on. As a matter of fact, it's a good thought.

Thank you so much for joining us and spending your time here talking about all of this today. If, if people who are, who are listening to this wanted to to find you, where should they go?

The most often, the most frequently updated place is my website, ElizabethShartmanKetta.com I'm very spotty on social media, but that's healthy. Yeah, you're right. I think you're right. But yeah, but always and I have my, you know, I always love getting emails from, from writers and readers.

So I would be happy to, to be contacted.

Great. Great. So we've got your website. We'll make sure we put that in the show notes.

Obviously we'll, we'll also be pointing out the books that we've, we've talked about. But everybody can find everything including the links to the rest of your social miasma on, on your website. So thank you again for joining us.

Thank you so much for hosting and thank you so much listeners for listening. And I would like to compliment, compliment you on the end on your beautiful ocean shirt. I didn't mention that earlier. That fits our.

Oh yes, I, for the visuals. Yes, I have the, I have this is the Bill Murray wear the life aquatic shirt. So it's kind of all right.

We are a product of the mythologies that surround us. An ocean of culture and family that helps to make us who we are.

It's inevitable for that to affect our writing to work its way into the worlds we create.

But rather than drowning, you can be intentional to channel the mythology you want into the flow of your story to make it resonate and even feed upstream part of the folkways to inspire others. That's the power you have as a writer. I would like to thank Elizabeth Sharp Miketta once again for joining us to talk about story.

If you would like to check out her work, you can visit ElizabethSharpmiketta.com or you can visit the links in the show notes which.2bookshop.org in order to support independent bookstores following those links may also support this show. I really hope you are enjoying this first season of the Epilogue.

If this interview was helpful to you, please subscribe to the show in your podcast player of choice. You can Also visit visit theepilogue.net and sign up for the newsletter so you don't miss future interviews with other fantastic authors. Thank you.