Rachel Beanland writes fiction and essays, and has recently released her debut novel. Her essays have appeared in Creative Nonfiction and Broad Street, among other places, and she has an MFA in creative writing from Virginia Commonwealth University.

With bachelor’s degrees in art history and journalism, Rachel worked in public relations and nonprofit management before focusing on writing full time. She currently lives in Richmond, Virginia with her husband and three children.

Her debut novel is Florence Adler Swims Forever, which we’ll be discussing here today.

In this episode Rachel and I discuss:

• How a family tragedy influenced her approach to writing her debut novel.
• Why rotating perspectives helped with secret-keeping throughout her story.
• Her experience with workshopping her novel as she wrote it.

Plus, her #1 tip for writers.

About Rachel Beanland

Rachel Beanland writes fiction and essays. Her essays have appeared in Creative Nonfiction and Broad Street, among other places. She has an MFA in creative writing from Virginia Commonwealth University and holds bachelor’s degrees in art history and journalism from the University of South Carolina. Before turning to writing full-time, Rachel worked in public relations and nonprofit management. She lives in Richmond, Virginia with her husband and three children. Florence Adler Swims Forever is her debut novel.

You can find Rachel on her website or follow her on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Goodreads.

Florence Adler Swims Forever

Rachel Beanland’s debut novel Florence Adler Swims Forever transports us to Atlantic City, 1934.

The beaches are packed, but the crowds won’t deter Florence Adler, home from college and determined to spend her summer training to swim the English Channel. Training is a welcome respite from Florence’s family’s crowded apartment. Every summer, Esther and Joseph Adler rent their house out to vacationers escaping to “America’s Playground” and move into the small apartment above their bakery. Despite the cramped quarters, this is the apartment where they raised their two daughters, Fannie and Florence, and it always feels like home.

This year, the apartment is especially full. Fannie, pregnant again after recently losing a baby, is on bedrest for the duration of her pregnancy, and her seven-year-old daughter Gussie has moved in. After Joseph insists they take in a mysterious young woman, Anna, whom he recently helped emigrate from Nazi Germany, the apartment is bursting at the seams.

Despite the chaos, Esther looks forward to having three generations under one roof. She only wants to keep her daughters close and safe but some matters are beyond her control: there’s Fannie’s risky pregnancy—not to mention her always-scheming husband, Isaac—and the fact that the handsome heir of a hotel notorious for its anti-Semitic policies, seems to be in love with Florence.

When tragedy strikes during one of Florence’s swim practices, Esther makes the shocking decision to hide the truth—at least until Fannie’s baby is born—and pulls the family into an elaborate web of secret-keeping and lies, bringing long-buried tensions to the surface that reveal how quickly the act of protecting those we love can turn into betrayal.

At its core, Florence Adler Swims Forever is a brilliant depiction of a bygone era of the Jersey Shore, a great novel of big dreams and loss. Based on a true story of her great-great aunt, and told in the vein of J. Courtney Sullivan’s Saints for All Occasions and Anita Diamant’s The Boston Girl, Beanland’s family saga is a breathtaking portrait of just how far we will go to in order to protect our loved ones and an uplifting portrayal of how the human spirit can endure—and even thrive—after tragedy.

If you decide to check out the book, we hope you’ll do so via this Amazon affiliate link, where if you choose to purchase via the link DIY MFA gets a referral fee at no cost to you. As always, thank you for supporting DIY MFA!

Link to Episode 339

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The post Episode 339: The Many Perspectives of Grief – Interview with Rachel Beanland appeared first on DIY MFA.

Family dynamics are difficult enough to grasp, let alone write about. But when properly explored, they make for powerful stories.

Here’s a few rules I follow when writing about my family:

1. Empathy, Always

My number one rule for writing about family dynamics is: always do it with empathy.

Human beings are seldom monsters. They do harm each other because of unresolved trauma, emotions they were never permitted to feel, and pressures that were too much too soon. When we fail to acknowledge this in our stories, we’re only telling them by half.

You don’t have to dive into the details of Grandpa’s PTSD and subsequent struggle with substance abuse to explain the nuances of your father’s self-absorption, but Grandpa’s inability to be emotionally present with him must be a part of your explanation of who he is as a human being.

You don’t have to reprint every malignance Grandma used to whittle mom’s soul down so that she always feels less than. But if you’re going to tell us that mom perceives everything said to her as some thinly veiled slight meant to rob her of confidence, you have to explain why.

Empathy is the practice of standing hand in hand with our characters—allowing them to be human and relatable—and no story about family dynamics is even decent without it.

2. Write Angry, Then Refine

Families aren’t designed to be fair. They can be infuriating, and they can leave you feeling bitter and bruised. When we deny we’re angry, we kiss our truth goodbye. 

I always write my rough drafts with as much anger as I can muster—even if I know it’s irrational—because I believe anger is respect for self. And without self, you just don’t have a story. When I refine that rough draft, and edit out the irrational bits, what’s left behind is just the right amount of vulnerability.

3. Avoid The Clinical

If you’re writing about your family, odds are you’ve already sought therapy to deal with them. You may have picked up diagnostic terms from your therapist. Don’t use them.

It’s all well and good to know your Aunt Grace is codependent with her son, your mother is slightly borderline, your Dad is a narcissist, and your brother has bipolar disorder—and it can be comforting to lean on a therapist’s knowledge when the holidays are nigh—but fact is: clinical diagnoses are boring, unemotional, and reductive. People are more complex than the collection of traits they embody when stressed.

Your Thanksgiving story packs more punch if you simply retell what you saw and felt. Your mother threw a tray of green bean casserole at your father over a perceived slight, and your father was more upset over the stain on his expensive shirt than the emotional impact the outburst had on his loved ones. Your Aunt Grace launched into a rant because everyone upset her nearly 40-year-old son who still lives her basement, and your brother laughed maniacally at it all because he was stoned on pills and had been awake for three days straight. As a result, you felt [insert emotion]. That’s good writing.

4. Dig Deep

What do you really want to say about your family? Don’t ask your prefrontal cortex. Ask your gut. That’s where the answer to that question really lies.

How did your gut feel when your mother threw the beans and huffed off? What went on in there when your dad stormed out the back door to go play with his toys like an infant?

So often we control the way we feel with our thoughts, rationalizing them into something more acceptable (and controllable) when the real story is roiling below. Nobody wants to read the acceptable story. They want the meat. Give it to them.

5. Follow Your Fear

Have you ever written about your family with nausea in your stomach, typing out sentences, deleting them out of fear and then typing them again? Have you ever thought, “Oh, I couldn’t possibly say that. You’re not supposed to say things like that about family.”

Good. Who gives a crap about what they’re supposed to say?

Family dysfunction feeds on our secrets. It is nurtured by our silence. It rolls, storm-like, through generation after generation—feasting on souls and leaving a wasteland in its wake—and the only thing that stops it dead in its tracks is truth.

If there is fear in the pit of your stomach when you write about your family, then follow it. Honor it. That fear means that what you’re writing about is honest and therefore relevant. And if you’re not interested in relevance—if you’re only interested in saying what has already been said—then don’t bother writing about your family.

We don’t need to read it.

Over a celebrated twenty-year design career, Erin Tyler has designed book covers for multiple New York Times bestselling authors, such as James Altucher, Ryan Holiday, David Goggins, and Tucker Max. She is a graduate of the Rochester Institute of Technology and is currently the creative director at Scribe Media. Erin is the author of the Amazon best-selling book, The Bad One: A Memoir About Growing Up a Goat.

The post #5onFri: Five Tips for Writing About Family Dynamics appeared first on DIY MFA.