Alanna Okun is a writer, editor, and crafter living in New York. She is currently a deputy editor at Vox, and she has previously worked at Racked and Buzzfeed. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Brooklyn Magazine, Apartment Therapy, The Billfold, NPR, Vogue Knitting, The Hairpin, and other places. She has appeared on The Today Show and Good Morning America, as well as other local and national television and radio shows. Okun’s first book, The Curse of the Boyfriend Sweater, was published by Flatiron Books in March 2018.
This month’s guest Non-Fiction by Non-Men interviewer is Céillie Clark-Keane. Céillie lives in Boston, where she she currently works as a managing editor. She has a Master’s in English Literature from Northeastern University, and her work has been published by Electric Literature, Bustle, Entropy, and more.
CCK: What first drew you to writing in general and then non-fiction writing specifically?
AO: I’ve been writing pretty much since I’ve been reading. When I was six, I had this little canvas tote bag that I would carry to school. I would always keep about seven chapter books in it so that whenever I finished one, I would have a bunch of choices for the next. My favorites were fictional books that were more realistic. Harriet the Spy, for instance, was a huge favorite. I favored diary books or books where the protagonist was always turning a keen eye, I suppose, on the world around her—because they were always girls—and that really affected me. I was always drawn to the idea that you could observe the world and that your particular lens could be something worth pursuing, something worth polishing, something that other people might want to read about one day.
CCK: That’s so interesting! So even though these books were fiction, those stories still included great examples of non-fiction techniques of observing and noting what you’re observing.
AO: Exactly! That always stuck with me, and when I got to high school, I started writing a column for the school paper and then realized that I really loved writing nonfiction, so I continued that in college. I loved to wrestle all the chaos and all the different threads of the world and shape them into something that I could articulate to other people. Since I graduated from college, I’ve worked as a staff writer as well as an editor. Nonfiction, and journalism in particular, has always been my bag. The hallmark of my life and my career has just been, how do you tell the truth in a way that someone else can see things more clearly for themselves?
CCK: How did your book project come about, then? Did you know you wanted to write a collection of essays? Did you set out to write a memoir?
AO: It’s funny—if you ask me now, it’s easy to Monday-morning-quarterback the whole thing and say, “This is the book I always wanted to write.” In some ways, that’s true: I had been crafting for as long as I’ve been reading and writing. Writing about the theory of crafting and how it could serve as the central metaphor of my life was something I always wanted to do, and I always knew that I wanted to write a book of essays. Those two things were always present. When I was working at Buzzfeed a few years ago, I wrote two essays that became the cornerstones of the book, one about knitting a baby sweater when two friends had recently passed away really young, and another about how knitting has helped me mitigate and manage and think about my anxiety. Those were such a joy to write, and they felt different than other pieces I had written in that so many folks connected with me after them—not just in the comments but also in nice emails that made it feel like my writing was resonating with, you know, my people. At the same time, I didn’t get tired of writing about it. I felt like, “Oh, man, I could write five more pieces in the next couple weeks about this.” So I asked some of my fellow editors at the time who had more experience in publishing, how do you even make a book? They lovingly pointed me in the right direction. I was very lucky to be at a place like Buzzfeed where, first of all, I could write these pieces that were really meaningful to me, and, secondly, I was working with people who had so much experience in this industry and were willing to help. And more than anything, they just made it seem possible. It was not this, like, “Oh, yes, I was born to write this thing and it fell out of the sky.” I was very lucky and very privileged all along.
CCK: With that in mind, how did you approach writing your book—this full-length print work—compared to your writing process for the positions you’ve mentioned, where your writing is primarily for the internet?
AO: That’s a great question! I actually don’t know that I would do the same thing a second time. I think I had to build up to it. Before the book, I was used to writing essays of up to about 2,000 words. The book largely is comprised of essays about this length, with a few that are on the longer side, closer to 5,000 to 6,000 words, and a few shorter. Having to conceptualize the book as a whole was a challenge. I’m someone who likes to reread the previous day’s work before I sit down to bang out some new stuff, often as a procrastination tactic but also to help inform the next section. I realized that, to write the book, I needed to get organized. I sold the book on a proposal that included a rundown of every possible essay that I thought it could be included. I tried some things that didn’t work. and other things that I thought would be very small became big, and things that I thought would be big were small, but I did actually mostly stick to the table of contents as it was in my proposal. I realized that I needed that structure in order to feel like I was getting anywhere with a much bigger project.
CCK: You mentioned that you had this topic that you would not tire of writing about it. That sounds like an overwhelming place to be—a good overwhelming, but overwhelming. How did you go about structuring the book, then?
AO: This book became a memoir but, at the same time, not the most ever has happened to me, I want to be clear on that. This is a book that is hopefully substantial and that someone will get a lot out of, but it’s not a book about all these incredibly interesting things happened to me. There were certain key moments in my life that I definitely wanted to write about: these deaths, this big breakup I went through, moving. These touchstone moments had really evoked particularly strong feelings in me that I thought belonged in the book—and luckily I could make a laundry list of those and there were about seven instead of, say, 40. So even though there was so much that I wanted to say, there were actually fairly specific buckets about how I wanted to say it. The question wasn’t how to structure the book, but how to sit down and wrestle it into the shape of something that someone else will think is interesting.
CCK: Thinking through big events and topics and then gathering them into larger buckets sounds like such an interesting process. Did you use any techniques to organize that way?
AO: Well, I basically wrote the whole book in Microsoft Word, which made everyone cringe, but I liked that it was disconnected from the internet. It was as close to a typewriter as I was going to get! I’m a pretty organized person, so how I went about writing it was, I had the proposal, I had all of these touchstones and topics I wanted to include, and so I just started a separate Word document for each of those. I had these twenty blank Word documents, and I would go into them one by one. This is really dorky, but it’s a lot like making a blanket, where you make all of the different component parts, and you have a little freedom to shuffle them around—oh, should the green one be next to the blue one or the white one?—and then once you decide, you stitch the whole thing together. That’s what I did writing the book. As I completed these pieces, I would put them into the master document and make changes there, seeing how they fit in there and how they flowed all together.
CCK: Within all those pieces, the book has so many wonderful depictions of your family members and your relationships with them. What were some of the challenges in writing about people you care about, and how did you approach that?
AO: This was, bar none, the thing that caused me the most anxiety writing this book: the challenge to tell other people’s stories in a way that feels fair and equitable and loving but also true. Honestly, I ended up reframing how I was thinking about it. I thought, “I’m not telling other people’s stories; I am telling the story of my experience with these people.” I tried very hard not to ever once put words in, say, my sister’s mouth or presume that she was thinking something she wasn’t. All I could allow myself to write about was my reaction to her and how I felt as a sibling, close to her but also with a wall up between us. That very intricate project that I undertook. I felt that every sentence I wrote, particularly about Moriah and my grandmother, and even in the essay about my ex-boyfriend, I went over each word with a fine-tooth comb to make sure that I maintained this frame. On a mechanical level, I asked for permission and confirmation, “Does this feel accurate? Does this feel like a summation of how things were?” I don’t think anyone can ever give you that full confirmation. It’s impossible, because a big part of why we write is to explore this subjectivity, and you can’t get 100% accuracy on a piece that is largely based in memory. But it was something that I just really wanted to get right. That was how I felt about every aspect of this: I wanted to get the knitting right, I wanted to get the people right, I wanted to get the thinking right. In some ways I think that that can make me too rigid and too scared, but in other ways I think it’s good to have this sense of duty to the people you’re writing about and to your readers. Wow, this question just hits it on the head: from the second I sold the book to the day it came out, I was thinking, “Did I get these people right?” And luckily they were all incredibly kind about it.
CCK: In the book, you also delve into your own experience with anxiety. What was that experience like writing about your own personal experiences? And what’s it like now that it’s out in the world?
AO: You know, it’s funny because people have asked me that, and I acknowledge that it is personal and for many people it’s a taboo and something that is really hard to discuss. But for better and for worse, it’s just always been there for me. We’re very lucky to be alive in an era when people are talking about this. In some ways, I’ve always had an uneasy peace with anxiety, which is not to say that it doesn’t completely fuck up my life a lot of the time, but it is something that’s always been there, so to not write about it would be to, like not use the letter “e.”
CCK: In crafting, there’s a pattern to follow, so there’s a clear end goal already determined for most projects. In writing, though, you can always keep going. How do you know when your writing is done?
AO: I think I am very informed by the fact that my day job is being an editor. Honestly, I wish that it made the act of writing easier, but it doesn’t. It does make the act of conceiving of a piece and how it lives in the world clearer. I think about the fact that I don’t let my writers overwrite something. And, again, I work in journalism, which is different than literary or personal essays in that regard. And, frankly, I have worked full-time the entire time I’ve been writing, so I realized pretty early on that if I wanted to be at all sort of efficient or economical with my time, I couldn’t get super precious with any one word or one paragraph or story, even. I needed to know from the get what I wanted out of it, how I wanted it to scan, how much time and energy I wanted to devote to it, and then not stray super far from that unless some catastrophe came up.
CCK: I love how practical that is.
AO: Yeah, it’s not very artsy. I love writing, it’s like my favorite thing in the world—don’t tell knitting—but it is mechanical. Writing is a muscle, and it’s possible to overwork muscles.
CCK: What do you find most challenging about writing nonfiction?
AO: Source material. Learning how to identify what the story you want to tell is, how you’re going to tell it, what the scope of that should be. Because you’re not completely inventing this world the way you are with fiction, you do have some parameters and some limitations to what you can do. I like to try and use those to my advantage, but it can be really daunting. You have so much you can work with that it almost feels like you have nothing to work with.
CCK: What do you find the most rewarding about writing nonfiction?
AO: There is such an essential moment that manifests a little differently with each topic or project, but it’s the same at its core: feeling like I have encapsulated this thing so perfectly well that maybe I’ve even learned something new about and, hopefully, someone else will, tool. The space can be as short as a sentence or as long as a book, and I’m sure for many people it can take all kinds of formats. But I love that moment when you’re typing away so intently that you barely realize it’s happening and suddenly you think, “Oh, that was it. That was exactly what I wanted to say.” That is why I do this.
CCK: Finally, what is a favorite passage of nonfiction by a fellow non-man writer?
AO: This was a hard one to answer, and it might be on the cheesy side, but a passage I think about again and again is from Anne Lamott’s book of writing instruction, Bird by Bird. It’s my favorite book of writing about writing, even though much of it is devoted to fiction—I find that plenty of the lessons are still applicable to non-fiction, and every time I’ve taught a writing class I include a selection from it. This passage reminds me of that simple, ineffable magic behind why I write in the first place:
Because for some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die. They are full of all the things that you don’t get in real life—wonderful, lyrical language, for instance, right off the bat. And quality of attention: we may notice amazing details during the course of a day but we rarely let ourselves stop and really pay attention. An author makes you notice, makes you pay attention, and this is a great gift. My gratitude for good writing is unbounded; I’m grateful for it the way I’m grateful for the ocean. Aren’t you? I ask.