Rob Lavender, September 2011

An Interview with Author Rob Lavender

Robert teaches creative writing at a psych hospital as therapy for suicidal adolescents www.360westproject.com. Robert’s work has been published in Reed Magazine, Brevity, Bare Root Review, Front Porch Journal, Controlled Burn, Clackamas Literary Review, and other publications.

Redivider: Your story, “Robotripper,” takes place in the psych hospital where you work, running writing-as-therapy workshops for suicidal teens. Surely this provides limitless inspiration. From where else do you get that inspiration?

Rob Lavender: With me, inspiration starts with a sense of place. It seems to me that we depend on places for our thoughts, humor, passions, tastes, and sentiments. Place is our link with the world. So I guess I depend on a sense of place for inspiration. From there I explore ways we lose our place in this world.

R: Going along with that, what else do you write about? Is it all nonfiction, or do you dabble in other genres?

RL: I write fiction as well. I write mainly surreal stuff, which seems to come from a different place psychologically. In fiction, I write to discover. In nonfiction, I’m creating a mood for the reality I’ve experienced. Then I tell the story once I feel I have the mood to match the place where the story is rooted.

R: One aspect of your story that we find so enticing is your juxtaposition of humor and dark reality. What results is something terribly real. Do you find that humor helps deal with day-to-day life at the hospital?

RL: There’s a fine line with humor at a psych hospital. There’s the danger of laughing at a patient in mockery, which is always wrong, no matter how one sees it. Humor occurs when we no longer see them as patients, but as fellow travelers through the madness of the world. This creates the dark reality that makes it humorous. It’s a shared humanity, an equal understanding of our own frailty. I think this is what Denis Johnson does so well in the “Beverly Home” chapter of Jesus’ Son. He creates a shared loneliness between the narrator and the place he depicts in that chapter.

R: Where did this piece start for you? Did you go into it knowing that you wanted to tell James’s story?

RL: Each day I try to journal about what happens at the hospital, and this story began as a journal entry. Then it became a story once I wondered what it must’ve been like for the policemen who caught James stealing cars in the nude. It gave the story the energy it needed to kick start the wild ride James took us on.

R: In your therapy workshops with these teens, you use photos from The New Yorker and The New York Times and write prompts on the back. It’s interesting that you marry images with prompts, rather than just using one or the other. Why do you present the topics this way? Any reason why those publications specifically?

RL: I hear [the adolescents] say repeatedly that using the image makes it easier for them than the straight writing prompt. My theory is that they tend to be more visual at this age, which steers the story into the realm of fiction. I also believe the images allow them to enter into the story, to own it themselves in some way. It gives them the permission to interpret what they see. And interpretation is what I’m after. I feel it’s hard to get interpretation solely from a prompt.

I guess I chose The New Yorker and The New York Times because they always do a wonderful job marrying an image with a story or a book review, and I thought, This could work in a classroom setting. At the beginning of every class, I tell [the adolescents] they don’t have to use the prompts. I want them to tell me what they see in the image, and most of the time I get stories from an angle of the image I never noticed.

If anything has evolved in the class, it’s probably the making of the book itself. After publishing 143 issues, we’ve gotten faster and more efficient. We started out making chapbooks, but now we are producing an incredible, handcrafted hardback book. We use foam board for the boards and cover them with scrapbook paper. Each issue has original artwork by one of the patients, and I’ve had some unbelievable covers. Then we sew the pages in, which is a lot of work. And sometimes we do special issues. One week we made the book out of recycled Starbucks bags. Thankfully, the hospital gives me the time I need to focus on not only the workshop method but also the publishing end of it, because the books make it all tangible in a way that only books can. The adolescents really value these books. It seems that in a lot of ways they just want to be heard, and these books become their voice.

R: Can you share a prompt with us?

RL: A popular picture in the class is from The New Yorker short story, “The Fountain House.” It’s a crying heart in a red hand with a girl’s face beneath it. It’s a strange picture, but I think they are drawn to this image because of the crying heart. It represents how they feel in that moment-an exposed heart, weeping. The prompt on the back is simple. “Someone has ripped your heart out. Now they hold it in the palm of their hand. What happened? Tell me a story about being brokenhearted.” Usually I get stories about love gone wrong or about love that is forbidden because the parents don’t like the person they are dating. Very real scenarios, but fictionalized.

R: Can you tell us about the 360 West Project?

RL: Before I started the class I was a psych tech, which meant I did the dirty work at the hospital, working mainly with adults. If the patients puked, I cleaned it up. If they got confused and wandered into the wrong room, I retrieved them. I took them out to smoke and had to mark their whereabouts every fifteen minutes on a sheet. I was their shepherd in fields of madness, and I wasn’t thinking about a writing class. But when I finished my MFA, I started thinking about ways I could use it to teach. So three years ago, I pitched the class to the senior therapist. I told him I would like to start a creative writing workshop that combined writing and counseling, focusing on what they are saying about themselves through the characters in their stories.

Administration gave me a three-month trial to see if the adolescents would like such a class. They weren’t sure it would work. It’s been three years, and the frequent visits to timeout for unbecoming behavior are down. They seem to be wired for creativity, as if depression and originality are the same.

Every week we have a book launch. We break the tables down in the classroom, leaving only one for our refreshments and completed books. We drag in stacks of chairs and create rows, and then we invite hospital employees-nurses, techs, the front office-to attend the launch party. No visitors from outside the hospital can come due to confidentiality, so you never know who will attend. Each week, I hope my fellow employees will support our endeavors. But I’ve learned that if you serve chocolate, the nurses will attend. So I serve chocolate chip cookies. Cooked fresh by the cafeteria. Drinks, too. Whatever works, right?

We make 30 copies of each issue, and we give them away to the audience. Then the adolescents get up and read their stories. Each issue contains about 18 stories. The audience-my fellow employees-do the rest of the work of clapping and telling them how much they loved their stories.

We do an autograph session at the end, which further supports each adolescent. You should see the proud look on each adolescent’s face as they sign autographs. This is my payoff. Remember, here are adolescents that just 24-48 hours earlier have mutilated their bodies or attempted suicide. Now they are authors. I can’t tell you the feeling I get at each book party.

After the autograph session, we take a copy of the issue and Velcro it to the wall in the classroom, so it can be removed and read by future adolescents. There are now 143 issues on the wall in the classroom. It looks like one of those crazy restaurants that have hats hanging everywhere. But there’s so much pain and healing represented in the collection on the wall. Sometimes I sit in my class and relive an issue that I thought was excellent work. There’s so much to be proud of up there.

R: You received your MFA from Queens University of Charlotte. What was your emphasis in?

RL: My emphasis at Queens was fiction, which goes well with what I’m doing at the psych hospital. The majority of the stories written in my class are fiction, whether they are fictionalized accounts of their own psychological trauma or just pure imagination. Rarely do I see the straight nonfiction story. This could be a result of using images to spark their imaginations.

R: How did that transition into running this workshop for suicidal teens that you’re involved with today?

RL: I’ve tailored the workshop method to fit the needs of counseling. Instead of only making comments about how they can strengthen plot, characterization, etc., I use their characters as a way to expose their inner feelings as a patient. It makes it easier to respond to their behavior through their characters. Mostly I want to create what the Germans call lebensraum, room to live in. It’s a place where anything is possible, a place where they can be themselves-free of judgment. A place where they belong, where they can feel without mutilating their bodies, a place that reminds them that they are alive and things will get better.

R: How have you seen this working for them?

RL: I point out the similarities between their stories and their real situations. But there’s a fine line here. I never want them to feel their craft is a by-product of a larger idea. They sniff it out real quick when I get more interested in their problems. It makes them distrust my interest in them as writers, and I’m very interested in their craft. I make craft suggestions. Even as a group, we suggest changes to their stories. So I’m equally interested in both, never raising one above the other. But it’s my job to build self-confidence. Each patient has a treatment plan that the hospital wants every staff member to execute, so mainly I build self-confidence and report to the psychiatrist about each patient’s attention span.

R: Why do you work with these kids?

RL: I had a troubled childhood and suffered many of the same psychological traumas they have, so working with them gives me purpose and a way to give back, even though I must face some of my old demons at times. Plus, I want them to remember their experience in the class, and someday, if things get bad again, I want them to say, “I’ve felt this before. I’ve written about how this feels. I’ve been depressed and gotten better.” I’m trying to build a reference point.

R: Suppose you’ve been given paid time off for two years to write your great American (fill in the blank). What are you writing?

RL: I just completed a narrative nonfiction book about my work at the psych hospital. “Robotripper” is a chapter in the book. Now I’ve turned back to fiction for an escape. So if I had two years, I’d finish the novel. It’s a surrealistic bildungsroman about a girl who channels crime as it happens, but she doesn’t want the burden society places on her to solve it. It’s strange, but it explores the psychological and the moral aspects of crime on innocence.

R: What role does writing have in your life?

RL: Writing gives me a sense of meaning, an opportunity to reflect on what has happened, and is happening, to those I work with every day. I want to be their voice. I want the world to know that we live in a society where adolescents are giving up before they even begin their journey. The odds are stacked against my students. They’ve already made at least one suicide attempt.

R: What else should we know about you?

RL: I have a dog named Kerouac that reminds me every day to shoot for spontaneous prose.