What Are You Working On?
Writers on their works in progress

Daphne Gottlieb

poet

San Francisco performance poet Daphne Gottlieb (website) stitches together the ivory tower and the gutter just using her tongue. She is the editor of Homewrecker: An Adultery Reader, an anthology just released by Soft Skull Press, and is the author of Final Girl (one of the Village Voice's top books of 2003) and Why Things Burn (both from Soft Skull) and Pelt (Odd Girls Press, 1999). Until 2006, she served as the poetry editor of the online queer literary magazine Lodestar Quarterly. She is the poetry editor of Other Magazine and was a co-organizer of the 2002 spoken word festival ForWord Girls. Gottlieb currently teaches at New College of California, and has performed and taught creative writing workshops around the country, from high schools and colleges to community centers. She received her MFA from Mills College.     photo: Rebecca Meyer

 
Daphne, what are you working on?

Jokes and the Unconscious, a graphic novel illustrated by Diane DiMassa (creator of Hothead Paisan), which will be published this year by Cleis Press. And I'm about to pitch a super top-secret anthology to a publisher.

 
How did you get the idea for Jokes and the Unconscious?

A little over a year ago, I felt really stuck and wasn't writing, and thought that collaborating with someone would help. I have always wanted to do a graphic novel, and contacted Diane DiMassa (who I knew a little bit) to see if she was interested in working with me. She was. We thought about what we wanted it to be about, and I remembered a novella I'd written as a college senior. It needed a lot of work, but I thought it had a lot of potential. I sent it to her, and we were off and running.

 
The title "Jokes and the Unconscious" is, of course, a play on the title of a book by Sigmund Freud. Does your book have anything to do with Freud, shrinks, or stand-up comedians?

Two out of three -- Freud and jokes (not so much comedians). Specifically, the book deals with a girl whose father dies. The narrative is punctuated by jokes -- in reference to Freud's theory of Jokes as a safety valve to allow anxiety a safe expression of fear. So all the jokes in the book have to do with fear. The whole book does, really.

 
What are you trying to do with this project that you haven't done before? What challenges are you overcoming?

Well, I'd never worked in this genre before at all. Also, I had to revamp a manuscript that was about fifteen years old, written by a far less sophisticated writer. There were things omitted from the story that I thought it really needed, and things that were in it that had to be excised for one reason or another (datedness, pacing, etc.). Past that point, it was a new experience seeing my writing envisioned. I gladly gave Diane full rein over the images -- I absolutely trusted her. I think results are amazing; the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

 
How did you turn the novella into the graphic novel -- what was retained, what was changed?

Well... I took the text from something I'd written when I was 21. So it was dated culturally by 15 years to begin with, and dated personally 15 years as well. There weren't really any technological things that needed to be changed (like references to 8-track tapes or something), but there was sort of a gee-whizness to some parts of it -- a wide-eyedness that made me grimace. So it had to go. Also, a good deal of the source material was drawn from my own life, so I had to fictionalize more pieces, because I didn't want to collapse the distance between myself and the protagonist. That said, there were two themes that I avoided in the originial manuscript that I felt needed to be added -- child abuse and queerness. And, finally, I think that 15 years ago, as a culture, we expressed "otherness" in different ways -- ways that are not acceptable to me now. So passages (even if they passed a "pc" test) needed to be rewritten for that reason as well.

 
What has been rewarding about this particular project?
 

Working in a new genre has been exciting and satisfying -- there's a whole different resonance to the work than if it were just text. Getting to know Diane has been incredibly wonderful. And producing a piece of work that I think is important and provocative and very different than everything else that I've done is really... terrifying and satisfying.

 
When do you expect (or hope) to finish, and what happens next?

The book will be out this year from Cleis Press. We've got a contract, and right now, we're working on the cover.

Links

Reviews of Homewrecker in The Advocate and the Detroit Metro Times

Slam Channel interview

2002 Gay People's Chronicle interview

Fall 2005 interview by Small Spiral Notebook

See more What Are You Working On? interviews.

published 11 Jan 06 on Too Beautiful. email copyright 2006 Mark Pritchard, Bernal Heights, San Francisco