Hanging Out in Other People's Heads: An Interview with Catapult Instructor Shelly Oria

Shelly Oria is the author of New York 1, Tel Aviv 0, which earned nominations for a Lambda Literary Award and the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, among other honors. In addition to writing, she has a private practice as a life and creativity coach. Her Catapult workshop and craft class—The Backroom of Fiction—begins on March 15th; you can find out more about that and  apply here. 

Below, Shelly answers some questions about her writing practice, collaboration as an art form, and what she hopes students will take away from her class.

What’s the most important lesson you learned as a student in a writing workshop?

Oh there are so many! My time as an MFA student at Sarah Lawrence years ago was when I first started writing fiction in English, my second language, so I was just so thirsty for everything I could possibly learn. But perhaps more than anything, I learned to listen—to feedback, to my own instincts, and to language. And I learned how to let what I was hearing dictate and inform choices I made on the page—whether that’s writing a surprising POV shift or cutting that weird POV shift... I learned how punctuation interacts with the reader’s breathing. I learned to watch for the kind of passive narrator who refuses to be implicated in the narrative no matter what we do, and I even learned how to (sometimes) trick that kind of narrator into action, or how to separate from him or her lovingly... I could go on and on. So many great lessons!

What do you enjoy most about writing?

I love hanging out in other people’s heads! Literature lets us do that in a way that no other art form can, and that’s something that writers and readers alike can enjoy, but as a writer you get to know the characters so much better—their quirks and fears, the wirings and miswirings of their psyche—and it can be so much fun, and at times such an escape from whatever is going on in your own mind. Another way of putting it is voice—what I enjoy most about writing is following a whacky voice and slowly figuring out who that person is and what story they’re trying to tell.

In what ways do life coaching and teaching fiction overlap for you?

In my coaching practice I work solely with artists and writers, and a lot of the work is centered around creativity and creativity-unblocking. So while with my clients I often look at ways in which their work interacts with various aspects of their personal lives, and that’s not something I do with my students, in both settings I’m hyperaware of how we all (artists, humans) get in our own way, how often we’re being total assholes to ourselves, and I try to offer strategies to cope with and counteract those habits.

What are three things you hope every student leaves your class with?

I only get three? Okay: first and foremost, because of the focus of this class, I hope students gain a much clearer, stronger sense of story structure and feel able to harness this new understanding toward, ideally, every piece they write in the future—whether traditional or experimental or anywhere in-between. Second, I hope that students leave the class energized, feeling excited about fiction in general and their own stories in particular. And last but not least, I hope everyone leaves with some tools for those times in the future when—for one reason or another—they don’t feel quite so happy with their work. Such times are inevitable, part of every artist’s experience, but we can develop mechanisms to help us release negative voices and stay inspired.

You recently collaborated with Alice Sola Kim on a novella, and I know you also worked with Nelly Reifler on a short story. How important is collaboration to your work, and how does that writing differ from the writing you author alone?

YES! CLEAN! Alice and I had so much fun writing it together. And Nelly and I are actually in the process of developing that story (“Ruben,” which was published in No Tokens) into a book of linked short stories. I’m involved in a few other collaborative projects, too. I find collaborations incredibly inspiring—when you’re responding to someone else’s ideas (or even better: to someone else’s madness on the page) you’re forced outside your comfort zone in the best way. You find yourself exploring creative landscapes you simply would not have arrived at on your own, and to me there’s no greater gift.

What writing projects are you working on now?

I like to juggle a few projects at once, especially in the last few years, and at the moment it’s a bit out of control—I’m at work on nine different projects!—so it would probably be super boring if I listed and explained every single one of them. But I can say that five of the nine are collaborations—one of which is a screenplay for a feature film—and that of the remaining four, the one I’m most excited about is a novel that follows the lives of five activists in an underground unit that’s (loosely) based on my old military one in the IDF.

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