Ali Barthwell is a writer, comedian, teacher, Chicagoland native, and an alumna of Wellesley College. She was a recipient of the Puma/LOL Second City Diversity Scholarships in 2010. Barthwell also participated in The Bob Curry Fellowship at The Second City, and she was a member of The Second City touring company from February 2015 to August 2016. Barthwell is an instructor at The Second City, and she performs with the improv group Sweet Tease. She writes recaps for Vulture, and her other written work can be seen in New York Magazine, the Chicago Tribune, The A.V. Club, and Second City Network. Ali is a former staff writer at Cards Against Humanity. She tweets about lipstick and Black Panther at @wtflanksteak.
EB: How did you begin writing nonfiction?
AB: It’s interesting you ask that, because I don’t really think of what I do as nonfiction writing.
EB: Oh, shoot. Well, that’s awkward.
AB: I mean, I don’t really think of what I do as either fiction or nonfiction.
EB: I guess, then, let’s start with how did you begin writing in general?
AB: When you’re doing sketch and improv, at least how they do it at Second City, all of the performers are also writers. So that’s when I started writing sketch. And then Second City also has a website for funny, timely, news-based articles, and that is how I began humor writing. I also started writing for my friend’s site—it was this WordPress site he thought was going to be the next McSweeney’s—so I began to do culture writing for him, stuff like Here’s Why I Think The Next Batman Should Be A Black Man. And then I was in a Facebook group with a bunch of people who were writers—some people writing for TV, some working on novels—and one day I was in there just complaining about an old episode of Sex and the City, and my friend said, “Hey, this is really funny. I’m the list editor for Vulture, can you write this up as a list for me?” I wrote a couple Sex and the City lists for Vulture, and then the person who usually did The Bachelor recaps for them dropped out, and the editor asked me to take over. So I learned how to do that style of writing as I was doing it.
EB: That’s awesome. The thing I love the most about talking to writers is hearing how they got into writing, because everyone gets into it in a different way. There’s no one path. Like if you talk to a lawyer, it’s the LSAT and law school and the bar for everyone. But with writers it’s all over the place.
AB: When I knew I wanted to be a performer and improviser and I told my dad, he said, “I just don’t understand what that path looks like. If you said you wanted to be a lawyer, a doctor, I would get it.” He just couldn’t see how you get there. It’s just not linear at all.
EB: As both a comedian and a writer, how is your writing process different when you are writing something that you know is going to be read versus something that is going to be performed?
AB: I take longer with the things that are going to be read, because there isn’t that element of being able to fix it in the moment. The collaboration process is different. If you’re working on a sketch or a solo piece, you have the opportunity to test it out. If you’re writing something that is going to be published, it just goes up and that’s that. There’s no trial period of putting it out there and seeing what happens and going back to it. The process is longer because I have to do that testing on my own.
EB: Right. When I was teaching high school English, or, actually, even in my writing workshops in grad school, there is always the writer who wants to jump in and say, “Well, actually, what I meant by that was…” But you can’t actually do that when something gets published. You can’t sit next to all of your readers and explain what you were trying to say. It has to stand on its own and you have to accept how people interpret what you write.
AB: Exactly. I’m teaching writing at Second City now in their sketch-writing program, and students get so precious about their sketches. It’s because they’re just starting out and it took them a long time, and so they get really protective over them. But I tell them that you have to be willing to take it apart and rip things out and think, “Okay, the one good part was this one character. How can I go from here?” But students look at it like I wrote it, I printed it, so now it’s done.
EB: That’s the hardest thing to explain to students, that writing is never really done. You can always make it better.
AB: Definitely.
EB: The only reason I end up publishing anything is because the deadline happened and I had to turn it in.
AB: Exactly.
EB: Do you like teaching writing?
AB: I do! My goal when teaching is to help shepherd different points of view into the world. The thing that I love about Second City, what drew me there, was that this is a place for people who have something to say. It’s funny and something else. Educational, shocking—not just funny. And I like teaching writing because it forces me to examine my own writing and explain the choices I make and why I do what I do, instead of just doing it.
EB: Yeah, when I have to explain stuff to students, I often have moments where I think, “Oh, why do we do that?”
AB: Right. A lot of things I have figured out how to do myself, but I haven’t figured out how to properly teach it yet.
EB: And I feel like I can understand things better, once I figure out how to explain them to students.
AB: Yeah!
EB: So, going back to being a performer and a writer, as a comedian and improviser you are very funny. What role do you think humor plays in nonfiction writing?
AB: It can disarm your audience. And it can put them in a more receptive place to go along with your viewpoint. Also, with humor, you signal who is in and who is out. It shows this is where the boundary is, that if you don’t understand this joke, you are outside of this group. It’s a way to signal to your audience what you’re going to talk about.
EB: That makes sense. I think your Bachelor recaps are hilarious, but to people who have never seen the show, they would probably think you’re insane.
AB: There is no joke that 100% of people will get. If that joke exists, it’s terrible. It’s like, “Ugh, waking up in the morning, am I right?”
EB: [laughter]
AB: You’re telling your audience that there are acceptable things and unacceptable things, and you’re leading them to that point of view using humor. They will either follow along with you or they don’t. It’s a more fun process of educating the audience.
EB: So, going back to how you approach different types of writing, how do you go about writing a piece of nonfiction that is personal, versus nonfiction that is, say, a funny recap of a TV show?
AB: For me a lot of my sketches and solo pieces come from a personal place. They’ll start from a nugget of a personal truth, and then you see how far you can blow it out, exaggerate, or heighten that thing. When I am sitting down to do a personal essay, the thing I am most concerned about is making sure it feels accurate to what I feel in the moment. I just want to be able to communicate to someone what this feels like, rather than using analogy or metaphor, just trying to see how accurately can I describe that moment.
EB: You’ve had some of your more personal pieces go viral. How is that experience, of having your more personal writing out there and read by so many people?
AB: It’s cool to know that a lot of people are reading this thing and being excited about it. But with that piece I wrote about Ferguson, for example, I got two reactions to it. Close friends being like hey, I’m sorry, if you ever want to talk, let me know and me feeling like, well, why didn’t you say that before? You could have known this was difficult for people. Those responses feel just like people wanting to interact with this piece, to interact with you—and it feels less sincere and more performative. And the other reaction is people getting really angry at me. I wrote a piece for xoJane about white gay men appropriating black women culture, and I got some really angry stuff. And for the Ferguson piece, this newspaper in Dallas reposted my piece and asked if they could put my personal email at the end, so people could get in touch with me, and I said NO and they just didn’t understand why I wouldn’t want that.
EB: Right.
AB: I am not speaking for all black people. I am saying something that might be relatable, but I am just writing about how I feel. And if your first reaction to someone saying I’m upset or sad or afraid is your own anger, that’s your thing. That is your problem. This happens especially when you write about race, which I do a lot. Even if you’re just talking about your own experience as a marginalized person, white people or people in the majority think you are indicting them. No. I’m just saying this is how I feel. If I wrote about being carjacked, you wouldn’t jump in and say, “Well, not everyone who has a car is a target!” It’s a different thing, and we handle and process it differently. And it’s interesting to see how people misread my emotions in my work. People read anger where there is none. Like in the Ferguson piece, it’s all sadness and fear—I’m not angry, I’m sad and scared. But people thought I was angry, which gives an interesting insight into how black people and black women’s emotions are read.
EB: People love to put their own baggage on your stuff. I mean, you can do your best to get your feelings across as accurately as possible, but people are still going to interpret things in their own way.
AB: Yeah.
EB: Is that what you find most challenging about writing nonfiction?
AB: I’ve gotten a lot better at handling reactions and realizing, okay, this is your thing, and not feeling like I have to answer every response. I even had a showcase at Second City where I read emails that I had received in response to my Ferguson piece. I just read the emails as a solo performance. The opening up and being personal has never been strange or challenging for me. I do get the feeling of will anyone want to read this? Is this necessary? Does this need to be said? Getting over that can be challenging.
EB: How did people respond to that email piece?
AB: They were shocked. People thought that can’t be real, those emails are unbelievable, they must be made up. I got a lot of you’re the reason why we have race problems, back when I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s we didn’t have these problems emails. That kind of thing. Very expected, for me, kinds of reactions. But there was something about reading the emails in a plain voice. Something we talk about when writing satire is taking something and changing the context. The people sending me these emails think that no one is ever going to see them but me. So why not put them somewhere else or read them out loud in public to say this is what happens. I can’t write a better racist than a racist.
EB: [laughter] Definitely not. And what’s the most rewarding part of writing nonfiction?
AB: If someone else can say I felt this but didn’t have the words, or this opened my eyes to a different way of seeing the world. I wanted to get into performance because I saw a show at Second City where this woman, Amber Ruffin, who writes for Seth Meyers now, did this piece that I felt contained part of my own experience. Having people relate to my work and say that it made them feel seen or have their point of view represented or something they can relate to—that’s definitely the most rewarding thing.
EB: I totally agree. That’s my favorite thing about both reading and writing, is finding that shared experience.
AB: Mhm.
EB: I also wanted to ask, on a totally unrelated note, what was it like working for Cards Against Humanity? What is that writing experience like? It’s sort of non-fiction-y?
AB: I guess? [laughter]
EB: Sure, why not?
AB: I was part of the team that writes expansion packs, and it’s run like a writer’s room with two head writers. One of the missions in establishing the writers’ room was to diversify the voices that make the game and increase the references. So we are there to have different voices and perspectives when writing the game. Individually, you generate about forty cards a week—twenty black cards, twenty white cards—and then we generate some in the room, generating some together and some on our own, some in meetings. And then we test them. Last year we did the weed pack and the period pack—those came out over the summer. We also do holiday-themed things. We also generated the cards you got each day in the Cards Against Humanity Saves America promotion—that little map you got, we worked on that. We also ran panels at conferences where we critiqued audience member cards, and there is a Cards Against Humanity comedy show, and I even went on a cruise with Cards Against Humanity performing for them.
EB: Oh, wow.
AB: Yeah. It was all nerd stuff, but not just I like Batman, I like Captain America. It was like three levels deep of nerd. It was weird.
EB: Well, that’s cool you wrote collaboratively for Cards Against Humanity. Something I find challenging about writing is often being alone so much and losing track of what is actually funny, or what maybe only you think it’s funny because you’re kind of going crazy?
AB: You can read something and see, okay, there is something here, though I don’t know exactly what it is, and then to go around and work with other people and do a couple rounds of punching it up. Everyone is responsible for everything. Everyone had a hand in everything.
EB: That’s so true. And it feels good when you feel like you helped with someone else’s success. A friend of mine from grad school had a piece published in Modern Love, a piece that she had brought to our workshop together and that I had given feedback on, and when I saw it in print, I was so excited. I kept thinking, I helped her edit that! It felt like a success for everyone who was in that workshop.
AB: The other thing is that the Cards job really challenged me in terms of volume. Everyone made fun of me because I would research a card—like I would read a bunch of articles on it, and write things based on that. Like one thing I would do is go through reviews of sex toys and trying to make cards based on what people say about them. It’s all about having ways to trick yourself into inspiration. I would read a list of the hundred best movies of all time, or every play to ever win a Tony, and I’d write a card for each of those things.
EB: You would research your cards? That’s totally nonfiction.
AB: [laughter] I guess so.
EB: Finally, what is a favorite passage of nonfiction by a woman writer?
AB: From Samantha Irby: “You can’t delete the neighbor whose eyesore of a car is parked on his front lawn whose cat keeps shitting on your deck, but you can delete your cousin who earnestly believes that rap music is reverse racism and vehemently comments as much on every Kendrick Lamar video you share. No mute button for the woman at the grocery store who won’t stop asking where the shampoo is even though you’re pushing your own cart while wearing both sunglasses and a coat, but you know who you can mute? Everyone you hate on the Internet!”
E.B. Bartels is from Massachusetts and writes nonfiction. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, The Toast, The Butter, xoJane, Ploughshares online, and the anthology The Places We’ve Been: Field Reports from Travelers Under 35, among others. E.B. has an MFA from Columbia University, and she runs an interview series on Fiction Advocate called “Non-Fiction by Non-Men.” You can visit her website at www.ebbartels.com, see her tweets at @eb_bartels, and read her haikus about strangers’ dogs at ebbartels.wordpress.com.