Acetylene Torch Songs by Sue Silverman
University of Nebraska Press, 2024
Sue Silverman’s newest book, Acetylene Torch Songs: Writing True Stories to Ignite the Soul, works as a memoir that delves into her raw and intimate human experience, but also provides insight and years of lyrical experience in the form of a craft book for writers. She welcomes readers into her psyche, exploring themes of love, abuse, sex addiction, and resilience in self-discovery, while also teaching readers how to introspectively work through their own “Torch Songs” or ghosts through the art of nonfiction storytelling.
Throughout Silverman’s career, she has taught students as well as published taboo subjects with remarkable insight, compassion, and prose. Her previous works include her debut memoir, Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You; her first craft book, Fearless Confessions: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir; andher memoir on sex-addiction, Lovesick. She currently teaches at Vermont College of Fine Arts in the low-residency MFA in Writing Program.
As a student studying Creative Nonfiction, I was honored to interview one of nonfiction’s most compelling voices and to pick her brain about the current state of the genre and how she maneuvered through writing her most recent book. I also was curious about how her experience as a professor of writing impacted her crafting of a book that trusted readers to critique her own work.
Ally Gero: This book acts as a master class on writing. Was it challenging for you to put all your years of teaching and writing experience into one cohesive craft book for other writers to learn from? And how did you navigate self-doubt or imposter syndrome while writing?
Sue Silverman: Yes, it’s difficult, is the short answer. But I’ll give a longer answer. I teach at Vermont College to find arts in their MFA, so I had all these lectures, and I thought, maybe I will turn them into a book, but it’s a lot harder than just taking something that you know and writing out every word, you know? If you’re at home reading, then I have no idea if it’s making any sense, so I had to be careful to be as clear as possible. How can I make this rather abstract complicated concept very clear and precise? It took a lot of drafts to do that, and then each chapter has a personal essay to accompany it. I thought that might be a good idea to see if I could follow my own advice by writing an essay that speaks to the concerns of that chapter. So yeah, it’s a lot of work, but at the same time, I kind of enjoyed it in the way that writing itself can be really painful. But you like to do it anyway because you’re learning something from it. For the imposter syndrome, well, we just all have it, and it’s never going to go. I honestly think that if an artist does not have imposter syndrome, then they’re probably not a good artist, because the writers that I admire the most are very unsure of themselves. I think that can be a good thing. So embrace your self-doubts, but do it anyway. Go ahead and feel those feelings, but just know that your voice is still important and that this is where I am now in my writing. Yes, I will get better. It’s always a struggle. It’s an ongoing process.
AG: That’s helpful to hear, especially because I am a student pursuing creative writing, and I’m always dealing with comparing myself to other writers. I wonder if I’ll ever get to that level, but it feels like something that pushes me to keep writing, even if it is a little painful.
SS: I mean I compare myself as well. We all do. Even though I know it’s not at all helpful, because in many ways you could also say their writing is just different from mine. It’s not better or worse. Maybe it’s just different. But you also need tenacity. You have to be really stubborn. The people who get published are the people who don’t give up. I’m totally stubborn. I’m much more stubborn than I have talent and just don’t give up, just keep going, and you’ll get to where you want to be.
AG: In 2009, you published Fearless Confessions, a Writer’s Guide to Memoir, a book that acts as a guide to nonfiction writing. How has the nonfiction world changed between then and now? And how did that push you to write Acetylene Torch Songs 15 years later?
SS: It’s changed a lot in that it’s grown a lot, and many more people are writing creative nonfiction. It’s much more accepted as a genre, even though there is still some pushback about it. The other thing that I think has changed the most is it was mainly memoirs, and now it’s gotten so much more experimental which I love. Back then I think I would have been horrified if I thought of an essay or book being written in the third person, but then I think well of course, you could do that. So I think that my own thoughts about craft have evolved since then, and what the genre means. I think it was just my own thinking that had to sort of catch up with where the genre was or is.
AG: You mentioned that you feel like you wear a lot of masks when you write, and you said “As masks change, they offer freedom to be more truthful than we are in real life.” What masks did you wear while writing this book to help you be more truthful? Did you rotate through a collection of them?
SS: Oh, that’s a really good question. Well, I’ll tell you what mask I did not wear. I did not wear the mask of an academic because even though I teach, I don’t see myself as this sort of professorial, “I’m gonna tell you how to do it” kind of person. That’s not me at all, even though I teach it. My teaching style is more like that of a writer, and a friend because I feel like we’re all in it together. So I wore the mask of a writer engaging with other writers. I mean, we all struggle as artists. It’s more like, this is what has worked for me, and this is what hasn’t worked for me. So if you want to skip that mistake that I made, you can. So I wore the mask of a writer, a colleague, and a friend. I thought, how can I engage with anybody who’s going to read this book? How can I engage with you as a friend, as a writer who is struggling in the same way that I am struggling?
AG: In the essay “Matchstick Mistress”, and your previous book, Love Sick, which you reference multiple times throughout this book you dissect a complicated relationship between yourself and your body. Would you say that this is one of your torch songs that ignites your writing?
SS: Yes, yes, yes. I think we all have sort of a basic story, and mine is this incestuous relationship I had with my father, and so my father appears in Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You, after I wrote that book I thought, well, that’s done. I never have to write about him again. But, no, he’s in every single book. Granted, he plays a smaller and smaller role, and his role changes. So it’s not like I’m writing the same story, but another basic thing is that I did spend, you know, years of my life, struggling with this sex addiction and body. But yes, how I look and how men would perceive my body would then dictate what clothes I wore. It’s just not helpful thinking, and that really played a large part. And I think by writing about it, I was able to better understand it. It’s not like, okay now I’m fine. It’s an ongoing struggle with everything. Now, I’m fine, and I’m glad about that. I’m not as conscious, but I still haven’t forgotten, you know? I mean, I still think about it, but it’s more thoughts now than actions. But yeah, I feel like the way I presented myself in the world did last for a long time.
AG: I see a correlation between the torch songs and those ghosts that haunt you. There’s a correlation there with the things that haunt you are also sometimes those things that ignite you to write.
SS: Yes, excellent insight. That is so true. Thank you. I never thought of that, you know. Yeah, though I never did. I’m sort of breaking out the sweat, because that’s just so interesting, because my body haunts me and at the same time it is an acetylene torch song because it’s something that has to be noticed. It has to be written. It has to be addressed to begin to heal. Well, to make sense of it. Certainly, there’s healing in self-knowledge. I mean creative nonfiction is an exploration of the self. Whether you’re writing experimentally or a straight-through memoir, on some level it is an exploration of self. So by writing about my body, or the way the addiction has haunted me, and by extrapolating the way my body has haunted me, I am exploring what that all meant and means to me. That self-awareness is a form of healing for sure.
AG: Yes, and because you’re cracking open that shell of trauma and going into such detail about it, you fear it would re-open those feelings, but no, it allows an outlet to explore them through.
SS: That’s right. I know a lot of people really do struggle, and think, oh, I can’t go to that dark place. I understand that fear, but I think once you sort of get over the hurdle and start doing it, there is a sense of, okay I’m writing about this now. I control the narrative. My father controlled the narrative of my life for years, but now that I’m writing about it, I control the language, I control the images, I control the narrative, and that’s really empowering. I’m now claiming this is my story. This is how I see it. This is how I experience it. I think there’s a lot of power in that.
AG: You offer up your essays as a main as the main pieces of work throughout the chapters that the reader is learning from, but also you open it up to the reader to critique into question. There is a sense of trust and power that you’re putting into the hands of the reader when you do that. Where does this trust come from? And how does it feel to let a reader have that kind of power over your writing?
SS: It’s knowing that if you read my book on some level, I’m just going to love you. But also, when you put your work out in the world, it is a conversation that you’re having with your reader. Yes, I have to trust you, but I also want to trust you. I do trust you, and 99.9% of the time trust is warranted. I think there’s just that built-in trust that has come from teaching for so many years, and feeling like I love to teach. I just love my students, and I love that kind of relationship that’s formed. The trust starts before I even start writing, and I think as artists, we can feel jealous at times, and that’s fine, but for the most part, we do know that we’re all struggling together. So, yes, I’m struggling. Why not let you know that I’m struggling? I don’t want to be false or present myself in a false light. If I’m struggling let me tell you about it. So then if you’re struggling too, you’ll know you’re not alone.
AG: That’s what I appreciated so much as a reader. I was reading a published book by a well-known author, and she explained to me that she knows this isn’t her best, but she’s still offering it to me as a reader. It just made me feel more comfortable as a writer. Also, you mentioned that your pieces will go through 50 to 1,200 drafts, and it just made me feel so much better. I appreciate you, showing that being a writer is a lot of struggle. There is a lot of failure involved, and so many authors don’t share that with their readers.
I wanted to ask as a student majoring in creative writing, if there was a piece of advice you were hesitant about putting in the book, or maybe scrapped entirely, but believe is helpful for this new age of writers navigating the world of writing, but nonfiction specifically?
SS: You’re asking good, tough questions here. I don’t know if I put this in there, but I sent out an essay and got rejected the other week, and when I get rejected it makes me want to try harder. So a lot of people when they get rejected, they want to give up, and they take it personally. Just because a journal didn’t like my essay doesn’t mean that it’s an unworthy essay. This editor just didn’t like it. So when I get rejected I get a little pissed off, but that makes me more stubborn. Stubborn people are the ones left standing, you know? and so I would add the idea of being stubborn and tenacious to the book because that’s important when it comes to writing. Give yourself 5 minutes to feel bad, and then either send the essay out again or think about revision.
AG: So how do you manage to battle between being stubborn and accepting criticism?
SS: I am open to feedback and I never think that I have all the answers. All the feedback I received for these past three books was terrific, and I took all of their advice. I took all the advice and revised it according to what they said and the books were absolutely better. So I’m always very open to feedback, but knowing that it’s not all going to resonate. So you sort of take what resonates, and you just leave the rest, because that’s as it should be. So when I say stubborn, it’s not about revising at all because I actually love to revise. So when I say stubborn, it’s more just about, in a general sense, not giving up. So it’s more just like a global kind of like, I’m gonna keep going.
AG: Did you feel like you were always open to feedback?
SS: I’m much better now than I used to be. I think it just comes down to understanding that it’s not about me. I remember my first workshop and sobbing after. It was so embarrassing, and I probably should have put that in the book as well. You have to understand the intention. But I am better now than when I started out. There’s a lot that goes into it, I think it maybe just has to do with just getting older. Sort of developing as an artist and how we approach our material, how we approach putting it out in the world, and how we approach hearing back from the world. How do we accept it or not? So it’s all kind of a learning curve, You’re going to be okay, you know? Just don’t stop, okay?
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Ally Gero is a recent graduate from Oswego University with a degree in Communication and Creative Writing. Her writing has been published in her university’s literary journal, The Great Lake Review, and she is also the recipient of the Rosalie Battles Creative Nonfiction Award. She plans on exploring the publishing industry as well as continuing to work on her own writing.