I get ideas for pieces all the time-memories that come into view, things I’m working out in therapy, moments in time that I can’t get out of my head once they enter my brain. The biggest challenge can be translating my idea for a piece into the appropriate form. What is the biggest challenge when writing CNF? The literal roots of female genealogy and the roots of our hair as the color grows out over time mixed with the metaphorical roots of the relationship between mothers and daughters, the roots we plant in the craft of writing, how the work is rooted in pain, in love. So, I’d already written this draft when I saw the call for pieces about “Roots” and felt that my work fit into this theme because of its literal meaning as well as metaphorically. I had also just finished a book tour for my first book, a collection of essays titled The Perpetual Motion Machine (Red Hen Press 2018), and wanted to write about that experience as well, how the traveling and all the events and keeping up appearances affected me both positively and negatively. I felt that the two ideas could lyric together and create a sort of manifesto about women and hair and generational trauma, etc. One of our writing prompts was “What does your hair say about you?” I immediately thought of my mom and her condition and wanted to find a way to tie that into the plight of growing up and dying my hair blonde though the years. I’ve always enjoyed the freedom of creation that happens in creative writing and the self-expression that leads to a greater understanding of how the world expresses itself to me.ĭid you have a piece already written when you learned about Epoch’s theme, or did you write a new piece? If so, how did you approach the theme of Roots in the creation of your work?īack in the summer of 2019, I had taken a nonfiction class at UCLA’s Extension program. It’s my way of re-writing my past, my past selves, no matter what form or genre I write in. I always joke that my CNF is “about my family, but actually is really just about me.” Even in my fiction, while every character I write is some amalgamation of a person I’ve known, it’s also a projection of myself, or something I’m lacking, or something I wish I’d done or handled better. One of the things I’ve come to find since then is that I actually tend to learn mostly about myself through my writing.
I loved the idea of documenting everything that was happening around me and trying to better people by means of writing about them.
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I started keeping a diary when I was very young, after watching the movie Harriet the Spy (it aged well, by the way, and still holds up!). Why do you write CNF, and do you explore other genres in your work? Her piece, “blonde”, can be found in EPOCH Issue 03: Roots, available to purchase here. Her debut novel, The Brittanys, was published with Vintage in June of 2021. Brittany Ackerman is a writer from Riverdale, New York.