Michelle Tea Talks About Community, Energy, and Her Insane 500-page Memoir-Fiction Hybrid Book (Interview)

Perhaps the most brilliant aspect of creating community is the limitless forms in which this process appears. Consider Michelle Tea, a writer and literary arts organizer whose works often explores topics that too often go misunderstood: queer culture, feminism, race, class, prostitution, etc. Michelle reaches out to the misfits and the outcasts, helping them recognize that it's the mainstream culture that needs an extreme makeover.

Ms. Tea is the author of many books and the founder and Artistic Director of RADAR Productions. Each month, the RADAR Reading Series at the San Francisco Public Library, puts on a "showcase of underground heroes, emerging voices and bonafied superstars, each RADAR Reading features four dynamic performers and is followed by a lively question and answer session with the audience, during which home-made cookies are doled out to participants."

Michelle's community-building efforts also include the Sister SPIT tours, which have been described as follows:

We are a free-wheeling gaggle of loudmouthed girls, kicking for revolution and calling it like we see it or how we want it or any other damn thing a damsel pleases. We hold spoken word hoe-downs, showcase a little performance art and fire up the stage every which way but loose, including a lot of cool open mic shit.

On that note, I invite you to check out the chat I had with Michelle shortly after the most recent Sister Spit tour wound down.

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"In the future, they will name the moment"

My Conversation With Michelle Tea

Planet Green: You've been on the road again with the SISTER SPIT: The Next Generation tour and I have a feeling you ate up more than your quota of fun. How'd it go?

Michelle Tea: Our tour ended at the start of May, and it was amazing, one of my most favorite tour experiences for sure. We won't go back out on the road until April 2011. We're aiming for a once a year tour because it is a lot of work, and the tours are actually more successful if we only go out once annually.

PG: Since so much of American literary history is dominated by male personalities like Hemingway, Mailer, Kerouac, etc., it's especially gratifying to live in a far more female-centric writing universe. What type of response to your work and message have you gotten from female writers?

MT: I think all writers tend to hear only from the people who like your work—those who dislike it mostly keep it to themselves, thank god. I am friends with nearly all of my favorite living writers—Ali Liebegott, Eileen Myles, Diane di Prima, Dorothy Allison, Maggie Nelson, Lucy Corin—and feel really supported by all of them as a writer.

PG: What steps have you consciously taken to create community among all writers...and all outcasts, for that matter?

MT: It's just my nature to bring people together. I have a lot of energy and I like to do things and to do things you need other people, so I've always been you know inviting folks to contribute to my zine or come to the Queer Nation protest I was organizing or be a part of my reading series. You don't set out to create a community per se, but communities need physical locations to cohere, and when you create events you are often creating that space for a scene to flourish.

PG: When did you first identify as a writer? How did it feel?

MT: I sort of identified as a writer ever since I was a very young kid. I tried writing my first book in second or third grade. I was going to rewrite the dictionary, only humorous. I remember writing Abundance—a dance party for pastries. I also thought when you were a writer you designed like your whole book, so I started one also around that time where I drew the cover, wrote the back blurbs, all of it. But then when it came time to write the actual novel I got writer's block. When I moved to San Francisco and found the street poetry scene here in 1993, I started really identifying as a writer, and I felt a relief to have something meaningful to dedicate my time to.

PG: What form/genre is the most fun for you to write? Are you more likely to experience euphoria writing a poem than a memoir chapter?

MT: It is easiest, most compelling and occasionally euphoric to write memoir. It just comes really easy, you can blast off on a lot of tangents, which I like, it is what is most natural to me. Novels are a struggle, but very rewarding, I think because there is so much struggle and doubt involved. Poetry I just don't write anymore! My muse has left my building.

PG: As a writer, do you feel any sense of duty to focus on social issues, be involved in activism, and create community or is all that simply a natural expression of who are?

MT: I do sometimes feel like my writing should include some sort of shout out or stance around the issues I care about, but you have to find ways to slide them in organically or else your work will have this agenda and it's generally not artful, and more than anything a book has to be readable, artful. In memoir I don't even think about it, because it's just me and my obsessions so of course queer stuff and feminism and class consciousness will just be in there. When I wrote Rose of No Man's Land I had one of the character's mom's girlfriend be in Iraq because it felt weird sometimes to be playing make believe with this book while there is a war happening. But you know there is always a war happening on this planet.

PG: What's next? Book? Tour? Reality show?

MT: I'm getting ready to take off for the Radar LAB, a month-long writer's retreat my non-profit, RADAR Productions, runs. It's a competitive retreat and it's open to writers who have performed at the monthly RADAR Reading Series in SF, or any RADAR-produced event. It's open to about 300-400 writers and we are able to bring 12 each month. I'll be helping to manage it but I'll be writing too. I'd hoped to be done editing my insane 500-page memoir-fiction hybrid book, Come, Armageddon, Come before I go so I can finish a Young Adult fantasy book I'm in the middle of writing, A Mermaid in Chelsea Creek, but I think I will be working on both! In August I'm going to Miami to work on a piece of journalism for The Believer, about the efforts of a independent, feminist filmmaker, Sharon Barnes, to shoot a documentary about a state-enforced homeless sex offender encampment under a bridge there. Then I'm going to Poland in September to work with a queer, feminist space there, Unidentified Flying Abject. I'm collaborating with poets there on workshops, readings and a regional tour, AND doing research for the Mermaid book. In the fall I'm teaching a novel workshop at Cal Arts, and then we'll tour Sister Spit in March-April! That's my year! Oh, and I will continue my weekly fashion blog. Whew!

PG: To what do you attribute your drive and energy? How can Planet Green readers tap into your energy sources?

MT: A combination of biology and astrology. I have a high metabolism and am generally a fast-paced person with an excess of both dopamine and energy. Partly this is due I think to being a high-functioning, now sober alcoholic, partly to being a visionary Aquarius with an attention-oriented Leo rising and an impatient, athletic Sagittarius moon. But which came first, you know? It's all a mystery. But when I find myself, you know, tired, it is such a mysterious feeling I don't understand what is wrong with me and I get freaked out. Then I'm like, Oh, I'm tired! And I go to bed.