Self-Disclosure and the Search for Authenticity
Betsy Robinson and Amy Lou Jenkins Discuss CraftÂ
ALJ
Your essay âTwo Kinds of Gardenersâ Â in âFriends: Voices on the Gift of Companionshipâ begins with the structure of compare and contrast.
Did you consciously choose this structure, or did it evolve out of the experience organically?
BR
The first paragraph set up the dynamic of Angie and me, so it was an organic choice to set up the essay. Also, it was something I'd thought about a lot regarding understanding our friendship.
Compare and Contrast Not Good and Bad
ALJ
Often in a compare and contrast essay, a writer feels a nudge to declare who or what is right or the best. However, your essay demonstrates what may be gained by not choosing, but by seeing less pragmatically. This kind of openness may be comparable to art in cubist paintings. The art of seeing an issue from many sides isn't just for paintings. How do you respond to this concept? What are your thoughts on having fluidity in a judgment of events?
BR
As a human being and as an artist, I love being proven wrong. I love surprising myself. I love learning something new that I did not know. The only way you change is by being willing to see that your fixed notions are wrong. There is no other way. It's funny because, like most people, I want to be right. But I've found liberation in learning that I'm wrong. And the liberation comes with a lightening of grandiose responsibility. You don't always realize it, but when you think you're right all the time, you are assuming an exaggerated obligation to be right and be responsible for things that you can't be responsible for. When I learn I'm wrong, the weight lifts, and I find myself giggling. So everything I write seeks to come from a place of not knowing, or thinking one knows and then finding out something else.
Betsy Robinson Embraces Change
The only thing I really want is to use this life to change. As a result, I'm more afraid of not doing that than I am afraid of the fleeting sometimes humiliation of being wrong.
First Paragraph Excerpt of TWO KINDS OF GARDENERS by BETSY ROBINSONÂ
An urban landscape designer I know says there are two kinds of gardeners: the coddlers and the pragmatists. My sick ward of houseplants rescued from New York City garbage cans inspired her remark. She specializes in high-rise terraces and exquisite window boxes in brownstone front windows. She places a high priority on the right look; if a plant doesnât perform, she chucks it.
In the book video for my novel The Last Will & Testament of Zelda McFigg, I discuss self-disclosure from the point of view of honoring and even celebrating the shadow self.  It's worth referencing it at this point in the conversation.
Spotlight on Craft: Self-Discourse and Shadow Qualities
ALJ
I love that you discuss celebrating âshadow qualities.â That is a concept for life and art. We cannot eliminate the shadow; we must make a peace. Iâm thinking that any writer considering their fictional or real character must consider if they have presented a character honestly -- with shadow qualities.
Some writers want to paint themselves as the good ones. Your essay navigates self-disclosure and what feels like honest self-appraisal. As a result, it rings true. I find this an essential trait in successful personal writing. Do you have to work through resistance to this kind of self-disclosure? Do you have any models of writers who do this particularly well?
BR
No, no problem doing this. It's what I want to do through writing. I think all good writing exposes flaws. People are flawed. So any characterizationâin fiction or nonfiction, third person or first personâthat does not include this kind of honest exposure of flaws is not good writing.
I am also an editor, and I've had memoir clients who have a lot of problems exposing themselves. It's tricky to ask for them to expose flaws they deny to themselves. I've actually come to believe that can't be done. My job is to help them do the best that can be done, but sometimes I've just had to pull back and accept what they want to doâsomething shallow. You can feel when you get to a point of resistance that will merely make the client hate you and refuse. I only pushed past that point once and I'll never do it again. Now I know when to stop.
As far as writers who do this honest exposure well, I'd say any good writer. But most recently I read a wonderful novel that did this magnificently: The Knockout Queen by Rufi Thorpe. I highly recommend it as an example of a first-person narrator letting it all hang out. Every character in this book is authentic. Thorpe is kind of a genius at this.
ALJ
We writers love a good turn of phrase. One of my favorites you used in this essay was  âSelf-righteous sadness.â It accomplishes a depth of feeling in only a few words, and it feels fresh. Was that a phrase that appeared in your first draft? Did you work for that phrase or did it just come?
BR
Honestly, I can't remember. I wrote this piece years ago, but I suspect it just came because it was the truth, and I knew it.
ALJÂ
And that brings us back to the search for honest disclosure, and the search for precision and authenticity in truth-telling. Thank you, Betsy. Iâve enjoyed our conversation.
About Betsy Robinson
Betsy Robinsonâs novel, The Last Will & Testament of Zelda McFigg, was published in 2014 as a winner of Black Lawrence Pressâs Big Moose Prize. The Trouble with the Truth, a novel posthumously edited by Robinson and written by her late mother, Edna Robinson, was published in February 2015 by Simon & Schuster/Atria/Infinite Words. Her first novel, Plan Z by Leslie Kove (called âone of the funniest books I have read . . . a fabulous readâ by Sixth Sense radio, KKNW, Seattle), was published by Mid-List Press in 2001 as the winner of their First Novel Award Series, and after it went out of print in 2016 Betsy published a revised edition. Her story and play anthology Girl Stories & Game Plays includes Chronogram Magazine's short story first place winner âJakey, Get Out of the Buggyâ and the full script of the play Darleen Dances, whose opening monologue was published in the best-selling actor's monologue book, Moving Parts (Viking Penguin, 1992).
Acting and Scriptwriting
For more than a decade Betsy was an actor (Return of the Secaucus 7; Lianna; and assorted fools, clowns, and sexy wenches all over Off-off Broadway). She is also a playwright, and her scripts have been produced at the renowned Eugene O'Neill Playwrights Conference, Theatre in the Works (Amherst, Massachusetts), in Los Angeles, Off-off-Broadway, on cable TV, and in Iowa where she won first prize in the Dubuque Fine Arts 1-Act Contest. With her mother, she received a Writers Guild East Foundation Fellowship to write a movie, still unproduced, called The Love Convention.
Betsy is a book editor specializing in alternative therapies and spiritual psychology. She served on the staff of Parabola and Spirituality & Health magazines.
