Tell Me A Story – Transcript

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NOMI EVE
We interact through story. It’s how we know ourselves. It’s how we understand our own history is through story.

MAURICE BAYNARD
Welcome to Drexel’s 10,000 Hours Podcast. Our goal is to mine the stories behind our region’s innovators, inventors, and thought creators. We’ll be talking to experts in subjects from fashion to neuroscience to find out what lies behind the passion for their work, the inspiration for their ideas, and the motivation for their creativity. I’m your host, Maurice Baynard.

Nomi Eve is the author of Henna House and The Family Orchard, as well as a number of short stories and essays. She is also the director of the Creative Writing FMA program at Drexel University. She primarily writes historical fiction that draws on a deep and personal connection to her Jewish heritage.

MAURICE
So I love to start with people’s childhood. I’m really interested in where people come from and if they think there was anything in their childhood that was predictive of who they would become as an adult. So where did you grow up?

NOMI
Well, that’s a great question. And yes.
[LAUGH]
So I grew up in Elkins Park, which is in Cheltenham Township, just 25 minutes from here, from Drexel by train. During the year, we lived in Elkins Park, but in the summers, we spent two months of every year living on my grandparents’ small village called a moshav in Israel along the coast of the Mediterranean. And we lived there really for a full two months every year.

So even though I was born in the States, I really come from two places. And traveling back and forth to Israel absolutely impacted who I am as a person and who I am as a writer in many different ways.

MAURICE
So many of us understand what it means to grow up in the States, but growing up in a different country, especially something as exotic as Israel, what are some of the things that you think you took away from that part of your formative years that we wouldn’t understand, or that we haven’t had the opportunity to be exposed to. It’s not like going to summer camp.

NOMI
Well, it’s funny that you said that, because I did go to summer camp in Israel.
[LAUGH]

MAURICE
There you go.

NOMI
So there are two ways for me to look at this, and I’ve thought about this a fair amount over the years. First of all, how did growing up in two places impact me as a writer in general, and how did it impact me or lead to me being the sort of writer I am specifically?

And in general, I think that my story of growing up in two places is probably a pretty common one for many different creative people, because when you are forced to look at the world through different eyes, whether you have a disability or your family comes and goes from different places or your own personal identity is different than that of people that you’re growing up with, you become very much an observer of how other people do things. You’re on the outside.

And I think that I often felt, whether in the States or in Israel, a little bit on the outside, because even though I very much belong to both places, I was never in Elkins Park in the summer, so I never went to the township pool where all my friends did. The first time I was ever there, I was a parent. It was my first summer I ever spent in the place that I grew up.

And conversely, in Israel, I speak the language, but not 100% fluently. I make mistakes. I don’t understand everything. And obviously, I wasn’t there during the school year, only in the summer. So I was always, to this day, a bit of an outsider in a place that I call home.

And when you’re an outsider, you develop ways of observing. How do people do that so I can fit in more, so that I know the words, so that I can pretend I belong here more?

And that’s what artists do all the time. We observe and we pretend and we try and get it right, what it’s like to live in somebody else’s skin. We develop ways to empathize with people who are not necessarily us, because my book has characters in it. Well, I’m not all of those characters. I put little bits of myself in each one, and I have to learn how to empathize with them and appreciate their worldview.

So I think that as artists, we often grow up with a sense of a defamiliarization. We’re strangers in our own home, and we learn to cope and adapt and develop skills that then help our art. So that’s one big answer.

And then the other one is just as a writer of my books, my character’s in Henna House, even though I’m writing about a family of Yemenite Jews and I’ve never been to Yemen, I had a village childhood at my grandparents’ in Israel. And it wasn’t the Israel of today, which is a hyper-modern place.

It was a place where the roads were only just paved and some of them were still sandy, and you know, people rode donkeys around the village, and we went to collect our eggs from somebody’s house. And it was very much a village childhood, not as ancient feeling as the ones that my characters lived in Yemen, but I think I had enough firsthand personal sensory knowledge of what a village childhood was like in order to easily imagine myself into that space.

MAURICE
So were you a reader as a child? And if so, what were you reading?

NOMI
[LAUGH]
I was a voracious reader as a child. I remember my growing up through books, what book I was reading at what time and what place. And no greater pleasure was looking at the stack of library books that I couldn’t wait to dig into from the Elkins Park Library or filling up my name on my first library card. That’s one of my earliest memories.

MAURICE
What you were reading during the school year here in America, was it the same sorts of things that you were reading during your summers? I’m assuming that as a voracious reader, you were carrying books on your planes.

NOMI
Yeah, that’s a good question. Well, it all goes back to Narnia.
[LAUGH]
As all great things do.

Those were–

MAURICE
OK, let’s do it. We’re lion, witch, and wardrobe-ing it now. How old were you when you first cracked open that book?

NOMI
I’m guessing it was probably 10, 11. And then I read and reread and reread them. And I think that those books give such an amazing model of why we read. You know, we read to open that wardrobe and to go through the magic door and to find a new world. So the very story itself is instructive in why we like to lose ourselves.

MAURICE
I was wondering. So– yeah. So what did you find inside that story that sort of galvanized your intention?

NOMI
I remember reading it, and I remember I was really fascinated not just by the lives of the children– I mean, I think all of us are really interested in the way people live in other cultures. But also, sort of the swashbuckling and warring and two big parties and big and– you know, darkness and light.

I think that all of that, you know? All the magical creatures and this other world. I think also, there’s this fundamental kernel to what goes on in Narnia, which is that those kids, I didn’t know who they were. And who they were was revealed to them to be different, other, more magical than they thought they were. They had identities that were hidden inside of them that were conjured out by Narnia.

And I think that we all go through life feeling like either that’s about to happen to us, or it should happen, or we want it to happen, or we need to make that happen. We need to conjure our own magic selves. And we do that by becoming the people we’re really meant to be, whether that’s an artist, a scientist, an athlete. And I think that for me, that really is what those books did for me.

MAURICE
Of all the artistic forms, it seems like writing is the one that is mysterious to the general public. And what I mean by that is we all think we know what it means to be sort of a visual artist in your studio, painting someone sitting on a chair. Or even if we can’t dance, we know that the show up every morning at their studio and they do that thing with their leg as they hold onto the bar.

But people don’t understand what authors do. It just seems like one day they walk into a room and then they come out with a full-blown manuscript. What’s the hardest thing about what it means to be a writer and the fact that what you’re doing is not in public?

NOMI
OK. I’m going to unpack that question a little bit. Is that OK?

MAURICE
Please.

NOMI
OK. First of all, I totally get that there’s great mystery to how a novelist writes a novel. But at the same time, what I encounter is that we live our lives through story, right? You get up in the morning and go through your day, and then you come together with your loved ones in the evening.

You say, how was your day today? What did you do today? And you answer that with a story. Oh, this happened and then this happened. You’ll never believe what happened, right? We interact through story. It’s how we know ourselves. It’s how we understand our own history is through story. And story is the building blocks of what we as authors do.

And so I often find that people don’t quite realize it, but they themselves are natural storytellers. Everyone I meet is a storyteller, because we live our lives through story.

Now in terms of what authors do is, well, we make people up, right? So the stories that we are telling aren’t necessarily our own. And so what we’re doing is we’re translating that natural biographical talent we all have to live our lives through story into an invented world. And that’s maybe where the magic is. How do you make people up? How do you– right?

MAURICE
So I had the opportunity to read the first chapter of Henna House, and really would like to talk about the Yemenite Jewish community, how you came about understanding that there was such a thing. Did you start with some historical fact? How long did you do research to kind of understand what that was like?

NOMI
Sure. So I’m an Ashkenazi jew, which means that my roots are in Eastern Europe. The Ukraine, specifically. I had an aunt who is a Yemenite jew. And I’m actually named for her late husband, and so I’ve always had a very special bond with her.

And when I was thinking about a second book, I’m a historical novelist. If I’m not learning while I’m writing, I’m not interested in what I’m writing. I have to be learning about history to do my work.

So I was looking into all different sorts of Jewish history, because that’s my subject matter. That’s what nourishes me is Jewish history, creatively. And I started to get really curious about the person I was named after. His name was Haim. My middle name in Hebrew is Hava. Eve in Hebrew is Hava.

And I grew really interested in Haim and his story. He was a Holocaust orphan. He made his way alone across Europe after the war. Ended up in Israel, married a Yemenite Jewish woman named Ahuva. He became a paratrooper, and very sadly was killed in 1967 in Jerusalem. And I was born in ’68 and named for him.

And so I grew interested in his history, and I started to do a lot of reading. And he married this Yemenite woman named Ahuva, and that led me to start researching Yemenite Jews. And the second I started to read about the history of the Yemenite Jewish community, it was like falling down a rabbit hole. And I grew so interested in that time and place, and I spent a year researching before I wrote a single word. So I really, really read very widely before I felt like I could begin to write.

And let me just say that I didn’t take it lightly that I was writing about a community not necessarily my own. Like, you know, people say, oh, Jewish. They’re all Jewish. Well, no. Jews come in all different colors from all different places with all different life experiences. And I really felt like if I’m going to get this right, I need to do my work. So I read really widely from a variety of sources and then started to make it all up.

MAURICE
Let’s talk a little bit about teaching other people to write as opposed to being a writer oneself. So a long time ago in another life, I dreamed that I was going to go to the Iowa;s Writers’ Workshop, get an MFA. I was going to win the National Book Award.
[LAUGH]
Little known fact. So what makes a person go, you know what? I want to not just do this for a living, but I also want to help others figure out how you do it?

NOMI
So OK. You only dedicate yourself to a creative work whether it’s living the life of a novelist, a poet, a musician, a visual artist if you don’t have any other choice, if you’re going to do it no matter what, because you’re not going to make a living at it. And I say that as somebody who is director of an MFA program. I tell students that you cannot rely upon this degree or this experience of being a writer to make money, because there’s not a lot of money in it.

Look, maybe you’ll sell a book. Maybe you’ll sell another book. I hope you do. You know, that’s my ambition for my students is and they find ways to get their work out there in the world, but it’s not a reliable source of income. So the only reason you should do it is if you don’t really feel like you have a choice, that no matter what you’re going to make these words, you’re going to paint these pictures, you’re going to make this music, because that’s part of your life journey.

But you must separate that from thoughts of earning a living, having a professional– getting a paycheck, because it’s just not there. It really isn’t. For a few people it will be, but that’s few and far between. So I counsel people all the time, only do this if you don’t have a choice. Don’t do this if you feel like this is a whim.

MAURICE
So what are the essential things then that you do hope your students take away? If it’s not the ability to turn their craft into a living– clearly you think it’s important– what are the types of things you think a student who’s considering an MFA might take away?

NOMI
Sure. You know, I don’t think it’s going to translate directly into a paycheck, OK? But that doesn’t mean that we can’t teach people about craft and industry. I believe really strongly that we can teach people about how to structure plot so that it’s compelling, how to craft compelling characters, how to use language in inventive ways, how to harness time in your narrative so that time is actually working for you as a writer and not against you.

There are dozens and dozens of things related to craft that we can teach people so that they can make stories that people want to read and not put down. We can do that, OK? We absolutely can do that.

We can also teach people about how to write a good query letter to get an agent, how to submit to magazines to get your stories published, how to craft a novel that fits a certain niche in the market. We teach our students about market awareness and about how they can position themselves so that the work that they make actually has a chance of being published or produced. We can do that, OK?
And that’s very different from saying, I can train you for a job where you’re going to get a certain salary. So that’s what we’re about. We’re about helping people learn market awareness and develop craft skills, and also sort of step into a community, you know? A community of writers who will help them both with craft and with industry.

Here, read this for me, my fellow student. We graduated four years ago, but you’re still a reading partner for me. Hey, I just published a story. Can you share the link on your Facebook page so other people read it? It’s in this small magazine. I won a contest. We are helping our students develop a community that also will nourish and sustain them for years. Forever, hopefully.

MAURICE
So what are you writing now? What are you– or researching now?

NOMI
So for a long time after Henna House, I didn’t write, because I always need to take a break. And then I wrote a book that will never go anywhere. It will sit in a drawer.

MAURICE
How do you know that it’s never going to– like, what becomes the challenge?

NOMI
You know, at a certain point, it just doesn’t feel right. So it didn’t feel right. It was done with. Let me just say, it was done with.
[LAUGH]

MAURICE
Are you afraid it’s going to get published posthumously?

NOMI
No, no, no.

MAURICE
Someone’s going to find it, or like, there’s another!

NOMI
Right. That’s OK. They can do that. If they want it, they can do that. But finally, I actually went back to Yemen, and I’m writing another book set in the same time and place. I realize I’m not done and I have another–

MAURICE
You have more stories.

NOMI
Yeah. And I am right back in. I am right back where I started.

MAURICE
Other than being historical, Jewish, female-focused short people–
[LAUGH]

NOMI
And blue eyes.

MAURICE
Blue eyes.
[LAUGH]
Are there themes that run through all the stories that you’re telling? Is there something that–

NOMI
No matter what I write– yeah. No matter what I write, it’s a love story. And if I don’t feel great love for my characters and if my characters aren’t wrestling with love in their lives, then I’m not interested. And that’s all different kinds of love. That’s love for brothers and sisters, that’s love for cousins, that’s love for romantic partners I would say over and over again.

I’m also interested in stories that are set against a richly symbolic landscape in which things have other meanings, in which there are ritual objects, holidays, stories that people tell. Henna that has symbols in it, ritual objects that the decorations on them mean things. I’m very interested in symbolism and in what we can learn about ourselves and the lives we live through the symbols that we surround ourselves with.

MAURICE
So I can’t let you get out of here without asking, what do you think the future of reading is in an ever-increasing Netflix world?

NOMI
Oh, didn’t there– there were some BuzzFeed article lately or I don’t know what it was that people actually visited libraries more times than they watch Netflix. I don’t know if believe that.

MAURICE
Yeah, I want to see the numbers on that.

NOMI
Yeah, I totally don’t believe that.

MAURICE
No one’s sitting up in the middle of the night at 3:00 AM going, you know what? I’ve got to go to the library.

NOMI
Right. I totally don’t believe that. But I really do believe that to go back to something from the beginning of this conversation, that we know ourselves as human beings through story, and we crave story. Whether it’s through Netflix or through books, people will always be hungry for story. And that’s going to change how it’s delivered over the centuries, but I have no anxiety about people no longer wanting to read stories, hear stories, watch stories, because it’s part of what nourishes us, helps us understand ourselves, and helps us grow towards the future.

MAURICE
Nomi, thank you for being on the 10,000 Hours.

NOMI
Oh, thank you so much for having me. I enjoyed every minute.

MAURICE
Drexel’s 10,000 Hours podcast is hosted by me, Maurice Baynard. Our producers are Shaun Fitzpatrick and Nathan Barrick.

NOMI
Drexel’s 10,000 Hours podcast is powered by Drexel University Online.
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