KYD Podcast: Dear Listener, From KYD

Dear Listener,

In this episode of the Kill Your Darlings Podcast we explore connections made through correspondence, and through the private made public. We listen to Jessica Friedmann speak about our First Book Club pick, Things That Helped, hear how Angie Hart went from reluctant Women of Letters speaker to co-curator, and ask Alexandra Pierce about the multiple identities of Dr Alice Sheldon.

We hope you enjoy their stories as much as we did.

Sincerely,

Kill Your Darlings

You can stream the podcast above, or subscribe on iTunes, Soundcloud, or through your favourite podcasting app.

TRANSCRIPT

Meaghan Dew (KYD):  Hello and welcome back to the Kill Your Darlings Podcast – and to the new Kill Your Darlings. We’re going fully digital, so Issue 29, out now, is the last printed one you’ll find. It’s a happy-sad time – like you, we love the feel of paper between our fingers, but the exciting thing is we’ll be publishing more writers than ever, so do subscribe to our website for even more of what you love. But for now, keep doing whatever you’re doing and settle in for the podcast. Today we’re talking about correspondence, and about the previously private made public – or public-er, in any case. We start with Jessica Friedmann, whose debut collection Things That Helped is the Kill Your Darlings Book Club pick for May.

The essays cover really broad territory – were there essays which didn’t fit in as seamlessly, or topics that had to be discarded because they didn’t feel like as cohesive part of the whole?

Jessica Friedmann: I think a lot of the aspects and elements of the essays themselves got shuffled between essays a little bit. I’d start with something which felt like the kernel of a story and then I’d realise that it made more sense to be told elsewhere in different form, in a different story. I also really can’t think in a straight line so a lot of them are quite recursive and loopy and I think there is an element of “everything fits everywhere” and, you know, I hope that’s worked for the book because it really was like making a jigsaw puzzle by the end of the process.

KYD: Who read the book while it was still in progress, and how did their feedback shape the finished work, if it did?

JF: The first person that I really showed it to was Grace Heifetz, my agent, and I showed it to her at a point in time where I’d been approached by a publisher and I didn’t know what to do, and I sent an email to Curtis Brown saying “hi, you know, if I could take somebody out for coffee, not necessarily to be represented by you, but just, help, I’m freaking out,” and then 5 minutes later I got an email from Grace saying “let’s have a chat on the phone,” and she read the essays, I think ‘Red Lips’ was one of them, and maybe maybe ‘Skywhale,’ maybe that came later, they were some of the earlier ones I wrote. And she just, she liked them. And then we signed with Scribe, which was wonderful, Marika, my editor read them, I worked on them and worked on them, and then I got to a point where I really had to show them to other people. So I think everyone who’d seen them before it was published were the people who featured in the book. You know, my husband Mike is in there, we went through the manuscript together, just to make sure that he wa