Emma Copley Eisenberg is a queer writer of fiction and nonfiction. Her first book, The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia, was named a New York Times Notable Book and was nominated for an Edgar Award, a Lambda Literary Award, and an Anthony Award, among other honors. Her fiction has appeared in Granta, McSweeney’s, VQR, American Short Fiction, and other publications. Raised in New York City, she lives in Philadelphia, where she co-founded Blue Stoop, a community hub for the literary arts. Housemates is her debut novel.
What questions do you find yourself grappling with most in your writing? What drew you to the novel format and how did you tackle writing one?
A novel is an open and sort of flexible container for fiction. I got my start writing short stories, and I think there’s a sense in the short story that you want to be driving towards a singular mood or questions and I love that in a novel you don’t have to do that; there can be more than one. I had written a bad novel, an expansion of a short story to prove to myself that I could write something that was long when I was getting out of grad school. Housemates was the first time I’d written a novel so it was very new and unknown. For me the process of writing a novel was very similar to wandering in the woods on a path, and then all of the sudden the path stops and you have to go back to where you can find the path or the last time you felt sure and confident of where you were going. What I think is so special about the novel is its ability to contain and experiment and be big and capacious for a lot of ideas.
In a reading at the Free Library of Philadelphia, you talk about an interesting perspective or a “fairy tale ‘I’ ” that pops in and out of Housemates. What was it like employing a technique like that in your writing and making it feel intentionally disruptive yet cohesive? How was the process of writing Housemates compared to your first book, The Third Rainbow Girl, seeing as both pulled from personal experiences in different ways?
I think for me the first person narrator is what makes Housemates work. When I didn’t have that, or I didn’t know that it was gonna be a first person narrator, it just kept feeling like it wasn’t quite working for me. I think that point of view is the biggest way we signal to our readers what we want the book to be about, and I didn’t want this book to be just a road trip novel or just a queer love story; I wanted it really to be about the question of can art save your life. That’s the question that the narrator is asking for herself by tracking Bernie and Leah as they meet and go on this journey together. It was definitely a risk, and I knew that I was doing something that wouldn’t be for everybody by using this kind of pushy first person voice that had opinions but that was what excited me about it as well. I know myself, and I have to be taking some risks or swinging for the fences, otherwise I get bored very quickly with a project. The narrator was part of what kept me engaged in the mystery of figuring out who was gonna tell the story.
I think each book has its own needs and process, and it teaches you what it wants to be. All the characters in Housemates are in some way a part of me which is not true for The Third Rainbow Girl because those are real people, but it’s still my sensibility and my view of those folks. I’m certainly like the intermediary, so I don’t think either is more true or more objective than the other. In terms of the personal experience that influenced my process, I think it was something that came from me that fueled Housemates in a way that was a little different from the The Third Rainbow Girl. I really like this quote from Grace Paley where she says, “On topics in which you are very smart, you might try writing an essay or piece of criticism; on topics about you are very dumb, write a short story or novel depending on the depth and breadth of your dumbness.” So I think the The Third Rainbow Girl came from a place of a lot learned, and I wanted to share some of that with the world, whereas Housemates came from a real place of questioning and disorientation about things that I couldn’t solve for myself and I wanted to solve by writing into them.
What have you learned through the founding of Blue Stoop and teaching other aspiring writers? What have you learned about the city and its literary communities?
I’ve learned that Philadelphia has a much richer and more internationally significant literary history than we’re often given credit for. So many amazing writers are connected to Philadelphia in ways that I didn’t fully understand when I moved here or when I was living here as a young student. There’s always more to learn and discover about the literary community and literary history of Philadelphia.
Through the funding of Blue Stoop, I learned that poets are organized and good at creating community and systems of being together while prose writers are often not. Poets were already flourishing and had all these amazing spaces to connect and share their work, but prose writers were lagging behind. Blue Stoop was partly created to fill that hole for prose writers. In terms of teaching other aspiring writers, I was very impatient as a young writer, desperate to publish, get some feedback and any kind of sense of what my work was doing. If it was doing anything, if I was good enough. I’ve been really impressed by a lot of the aspiring writers that I’ve met through Blue Stoop and the literary community here in Philly, that they’re not looking for the same kind of mainstream signs of validation that I think I was looking for when I was younger. It’s really exciting because more and more of the systems used to measure success and promise are crumbling in ways that I think are needed and inevitable. A lot of the people that I’ve met in Philly understand that those things don’t matter and those aren’t necessarily things to aspire to anymore.
Housemates feels like a love letter to artists and the struggle to create in a complex world. What do you think it means to be an artist?
I was really struck recently watching an interview Ta-Nehisi Coates did with John Stewart, and he said that he felt that what it means to be an artist is to change people and change the world. He was acknowledging that it sounds very naïve and very high school, and I feel that sensitivity just saying that as well, but I appreciate that Coates said it. That’s what I think it means also. I also resonate a lot when I hear descriptions of being an artist that are about simply reflecting the reality of the world back to people and saying what’s true. It’s not necessarily our job to pass judgment or say what is ethical or unethical, but just to reflect and kind of say what is happening. I say to my students who are questioning if it’s okay to write about being Trans or fat or Cuban or from Kensington that if it’s a part of the human experience then it’s absolutely worthy of being represented in art. I think the job is to represent any part of what being a human is, and that is important and matters.
Your work has been praised for representing experiences and identities that are often overlooked. What is your process for writing diverse characters?
There’s an Alexander Chee piece in which he enumerates some questions for writers to ask themselves if they’re going to write about identity, especially if they’re going to write across identities that the writer themself does not occupy. Some of those questions are: Why do you want to write the story? Are you reading works of art written by people who occupy that identity? Would anything change if the character was not of that identity? Does anything in the piece rest on a harmful cliché about that identity? They were really helpful for me.
With Housemates, I wanted to represent a world in which racial diversity is present and essential and part of the conversation, but I also felt that I had the most authentic things to say about being White and queer as I am, so I did make the main characters both white and queer. There are many characters in the book who occupy different identities, and I tried not to think about them as side characters at all. Not as characters who are serving to teach characters or who are less important than the main characters but rather real people who are gonna walk off the page back into their own lives, their autonomous lives that are real and separate from what my main characters Bernie and Leah are experiencing. You need to have a real sense of their full lives, not just a sense of the role they might play in the story. I was taught in grad school that all secondary characters should not be standing around waiting to be a part of the story, but really should just be walking through the story on the way back to their own life.
You’ve spoken about finding inspiration for Housemates in places you’ve lived and aspects of your life in Philadelphia. What were you hoping to convey about life in this city, particularly as it continues to change around us?
I was hoping to convey that not so much about the city as a whole, which I would never try to speak to you, but this precise corner of West Philadelphia, where I have made my home for about fifteen years. It’s very small and it’s very interesting because it’s mixed with so many communities. It’s a historically middle-class, Black neighborhood up against a historically Jewish-influenced neighborhood up against many immigrants from Ethiopia and West Africa. Then, you have this strong history of White, multi-racial and Black too, but primarily White, queer activist communities, which we often see in group houses. This is what we see in Housemates, and I was trying to talk about this particular micro-climate of lefty queer life in West Philly that I’ve experienced that is a lot about being good. A lot about being right. A lot about doing no harm or less harm, and a lot about justice and equality. Those are very worthy essential goals, virtues, and sometimes in the pursuit of those ideas, I think at least in the novel, Bernie and Leah and their housemates can get a little rigid and a little policing of each other in ways that I don’t know are always the most productive. I think good things happen for Bernie and Leah when they open themselves up to other ways of thinking that are more about other kinds of traditions, that aren’t White queer or urban queer traditions that are open to how others are thinking, that is open to how older people of different generations are thinking and open to artists and people who know about the unknown and the uncertain thinking. So I think I was definitely trying to depict this particular neighborhood at this particular moment which is absolutely undergoing enormous change with gentrification.
Philadelphia as a whole is changing so much and becoming much more expensive and gentrified at the same point as we’re still one of the poorest cities in the nation and losing basic services. As I speak, SEPTA is under great threat as is our ability to access public transportation and healthcare and housing. None of these are guaranteed in our city, even more so than other cities of comparable size. All these questions that Bernie and Leah and their friends are asking in Housemates are not abstract questions. They’re real questions about how to live and how to survive, so I was hoping to convey that all of us are asking those questions all the time. Some of those questions are more urgent for some people than for others. Bernie and Leah’s journey is connected to the broader questions a lot of Philadelphians are asking right now, which are much bigger than the ones that I know how to ask in the book.
