Cool People Doing Cool Sh** #1 - Vickie N.
~ 9 min. read
Hey PDW Reader
As you may recall, once a month I’m going to feature a creative individual doing cool sh** out in the world for a series called Cool People Doing Cool Sh**
This month’s CPDCS is…
Vickie N.
Vickie Navarra, PhD, is a pop culture scholar whose work on music, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, geek culture, feminism, and rhetoric can be found in many academic journals and books including The Journal of American Culture and The Routledge Companion to Popular Music and Humor. A diverse and prolific writer, Dr. Navarra’s non-academic work covers memoir, essay, science fiction, Young Adult fiction, and poetry. Recently she sat down with me in Atlanta’s historic Oakland Cemetery to discuss writing, the creative life, and being an artist during a pandemic.
Enjoy!
{this interview has been edited and condensed}
An Adventurer Introduces Herself
Pat: Dr. Vickie! Hi!
Vickie: Hi!
Pat: You are primarily a writer. You are also a crafter, a gardener, an amateur chef, a baker could we say?
Vickie: I bake. I bake some stuff.
Pat: An ink maker –
Vickie: I made ink only the one time.
Pat: You recently lost a sourdough starter. My condolences.
Vickie: I did, yeah. It was really sad. It made some really good bread…and biscuits…there were good biscuits.
Pat: You’re all these things, you’re an adventurer. Where do you think the fuel of your curiosity comes from?
Vickie: Maybe reading, because I read a lot.
Pat: You read more than anyone I know.
Vickie: Books are different worlds. [They] kinda make me think about what can you do. Also, life is really short. If you have the chance to do something, you should probably do the thing.
Pat: The thing that has always amazed me about you is [that] you get an inkling to do something and you just do it. You seem to not have some of the hang-ups and anxieties around trying shit.
Vickie: I watched season one of Cobra Kai and I said, “Oh I wanna be on that show” and then I was. But I didn’t say I want to be on that show as a named actor that says things. Because I have never done that, and I don’t think I would be really good at it. So, I figured being an extra would be an appropriate way to be on the show. And it was. (But you get to see me which is cool.)
Pat: You just follow impulse?
Vickie: Kinda. And I research.
A Writer’s Work
Pat: Looking at your work, I would say that one of the things that you often explore [is] paradox, like feeling trapped in vast spaces, finding comfort in traumatic scenarios, living in the face of death. These opposite things that always find their way into your work. Why do you think you are drawn to conflicting ideas that occupy the same space?
Vickie: An idea I really like is Sherwood Anderson’s idea of the grotesque in Winesburg, Ohio. [It] is a collection of short stories that all showcase different people in this town –
Pat: Where everyone drinks wine?
Vickie: Right. You’re exposed to different truths throughout your life and you pick one or two. If you’re really strong you might pick three. But when you only pick one, you become a grotesque. You become misshapen and deformed by that truth when you take a lower-case truth and make it a capital-t Truth and base your life around it. Some grotesques are hideous, and some grotesques are really beautiful because there’s lots of different types of truth out there. It’s one of the things I think people are really prone to do – is to just latch onto one or two truths. But there really are a lot out there. And they all occupy the same space.
I guess that’s why juxtaposition and conflict like that [are] interesting to me. Everybody thinks they’re right. Nobody sees themselves as the villain. Everybody always sees themselves as the hero. A lot of conflict and argument is ‘sides’ – us vs. them – people don’t wanna see the other side. So how do you see both sides?
Pat: Do you think it’s possible to explore Truth without getting into paradox?
Vickie: I think [it] is because [it] would have to be. If all avenues are going to be open, you’d have to have an avenue of looking at absolute truth from an absolute point of view. Then also being able to hold both of those ideas at the same time. They can both exist. Everything exists at the same time. That’s my Truth.
Think about multiple worlds and multiple universes. Whether or not we’ve got life on other planets, or whether we’re all living in slices that exist on the same plane of existence and next to us is a parallel universe that we can’t really touch. That’s one of the reasons why I like science fiction so much. I think science fiction has neat ways of asking these questions of ‘how do we live our lives.’
Pat: What can we learn about being human on planet earth through the lens of science fiction? What can we learn about humanity?
Vickie: That humanity is really complex, but we like to be really reductive about it. We like to only pick a couple of things. I think good science fiction gets really complex and looks at those nuances and all those layers. People are really complex. We have all this history and memory and experience and knowledge. Then we have to operate within a society that’s based on a culture, and then we have to interact with other people in the world that are unlike ourselves.
Rules, Rules, Rules
Pat: You’ve written a lot in science fiction. You’ve [also] done a good bit of memoir, essay, fiction, nonfiction, young adult. You tend to play a lot with form and structure and genre. You bend rules…sometimes break them. Is that conscious? Is it some type of resistance to convention or is it a way to almost celebrate convention?
Vickie: First, I would say sometimes [re: conscious vs. unconscious]. Sometimes you do it on purpose and sometimes you look back and you’re like “ooh that was good, okay I’ll keep that.” You do weird typos or something and it turns out to be like “oh an even better word!”
I don’t know if I ‘celebrate’ convention. There’s definitely some convention that’s good. I wrote a lot of poetry once (I haven’t written a whole lot lately) but I read a lot poetry. Poets have the real “in” for language. They look at the musicality, the sheer sonic impact, but also the emotive essence of words. And they push that limit…I think reading a lot of poetry helps me look at how I want to play with form and structure and language together.
If you also take something and push it too far from something that’s familiar, it loses that impact. You always have to have a tether.
Pat: I get really annoyed with people who claim that they are rulebreakers when, in fact, they simply don’t know the rules. You kinda know everything about everything [though], so I feel like when you do break rules, it’s intentional. I feel like you are saying something with your breaking of a convention.
Vickie: Sometimes…also I can be lazy. That’s a true thing.
Pat: Is a that capital-t Truth or lower case-t truth?
Vickie: [laughs] Um...it’s both.
Big Ideas
Pat: What are some themes propping up your words?
Vickie: Nature comes in a lot, nature as a good grounding energy or force that we probably shouldn’t fucking destroy (like we’re really hellbent on doing). We should probably, you know, save the world that we live in so that we can continue living oh-my-god-how-do-people-not-realize-that. We have nowhere else to go!
Pat: There is no Plan B to this [planet].
Vickie: Yeah! That. I get a little social justice-y [too] because it’s important. I don’t like ‘white’ as default in literature. That needs to be destabilized, just like it needs to be destabilized in all the rest of society. It certainly needs to be destabilized in our canon. We still have “this is Literature and this is African-American Literature,” for example. It’s all literature. We should absolutely be emphasizing other writers of different ethnicities and races. We also need to acknowledge that it’s not separate from the canon! It is part of the canon! This is all literature. It still gets put over there and “othered,” which drives me crazy. The same thing happens to women and LGBTQ+ [writers], everything that’s not straight middle-class white dude.
Pat: It’s almost like if you are “othered” you have to create your own canon.
Vickie: I can’t remember who said this, it was a while ago, it’s probably an outdated feminist writer-
Pat: It was probably me.
Vickie: [Laughs] It was talking about how there [are] steps in changing the paradigm. One is to make ‘Women’s Literature’ and then ‘Women’s Literature’ becomes a part of the larger canon. I feel like we just can’t seem to get things into the larger canon. Like you can contextualize things without separating them.
Pat: Things fit within a culture and not separate from the culture.
‘Times Like These’
Pat: What’s it been like for you to create during the pandemic?
Vickie: Hard! You get pandemic brain where you can’t really focus on anything. There’s no leadership or direction and you don’t know what’s going to happen and money’s a problem and living and being afraid of everybody getting Covid and all your normal pandemic response takes up energy and space.
There’s another part where you don’t have the same stimulus that you did pre-pandemic. Like we don’t go to shows or movies or the museum or basically anywhere. You’re not taking in that creative energy in the same way that you’re used to. You can write and you pull out of your creative bucket but you’re not putting in fast enough. When I do sit down and write something, it’s not a lot. It’s like pulling teeth. It has to trickle back into the bucket before I can do anything else.
Usually you can write and get all the trash out before you get to something that’s more interesting. By the time I get the trash out [now], I’m like “oh shit the bucket’s empty.”
Pat: I think that’s really astute. Especially for writers, we write about the world. We go experience the world [and then write about it] but if you’re not in the world, what are you left with? I think that’s the dilemma.
Vickie: People that are able to write these great essays about the pandemic and all this stuff that’s insightful is…great but I don’t feel like I can distance enough to write about it. I’m so impressed by the people that are able to write about it right now.
Pat: So when you’re in something, you can’t write about it? You need a little space?
Vickie: Usually.
The Lightning Round
Pat: Are you ready for the lightning round?
Vickie: I am!
Pat: These are fast, short answers. I don’t want you to think too hard. Tell me the first thing that bubbles up.
Vickie: [starts deep breathing]
Pat: Describe the perfect room to make art in.
Vickie: It doesn’t have carpet, that’s for damn sure!
Pat: Whose career would you like to have?
Vickie: Pass.
Pat: What’s one thing you want your tombstone to say?
Vickie: A really good quote from a book. I don’t know which quote or book yet.
Pat: Comedy or drama?
Vickie: Ohh. Both.
Pat: What’s one thing that scares you?
Vickie: Heights.
Pat: What’s one song you can listen to on repeat?
Vickie: Any [song] by They Might Be Giants
Pat: What’s one thing that’s made you laugh in the last week?
Vickie: Patrick Donohue and his ‘Fangbangers & Mash’
[Pat and Vickie erupted into inside-joke laughter]
Pat: Last question - what’s inspiring you right now?
Vickie: This whole conversation!
You can follow Vickie here!
Check out her mini book reviews here!
Read her blog here!
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