My Interview With Quinn Cummings

Last Wednesday I wrote about Quinn Cummings, her blog, and her book. I said that an interview with this talented writer would appear here soon. I am now reminding you to check out her blog. On the right side of her page you'll see a link to buy the book, which I recommend you do. The link will take you to Amazon, but if you go there from her blog rather than going straight to Amazon, Quinn will earn a few more agurot. I am grateful to Quinn for trusting me with this interview. Enjoy!
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RNF: Perhaps my favorite post of yours was about seeing things in perspective. While it was not religious per se' (I can't believe I just used that term) it fit with what I believe is a major spiritual/Jewish world view. Care to comment? On a related note: is religion relevant to your present life or life story? n
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QC: From a rabbi, I take this as praise, and I thank you. I’m not sure I’m that clever, but maybe the idea of framework, of consciously deciding to change the frame you put around the events of your life to include only those things which you believe matter, is a second cousin to empathy. Because if you can decide to only keep your eye on certain things, maybe you can extend that and try to frame the picture as another person is seeing it. If you’re feeling up to it, you can try to frame the picture as your enemy does. You don’t have to agree with what they see, you certainly don’t have to like it, but if you look at their frame, even for a minute, they aren’t quite as alien anymore. Is religion relevant to me? I like to think I’d be the same person whether I tugged the kid into her good shoes every week or not. But it’s nice to have someone reminding me that I want to be a better person and that it’s my responsibility to be of service, however it is that I define that.
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RNF: I am always impressed by the combination in your writing between serious and funny, that's my favorite kind of personal story telling. Can you share anything about the process? You once blogged about the publishers telling you to be funnier, after the fact, which made it sound like the funny lines have to develop organically. Thoughts?
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QC: Oh, the rewrites. Sometimes, I could find more humor in a moment if I look at the paragraph again; sometimes I couldn’t. This is going to make me sound pompous and I’m reminded of the EB White comment that you can dissect humor in the same way you can dissect a frog, but both lose something in the process, but humor must spring from the truth. And the truth is neither humorous nor serious, but also humorous and serious. If the writer does it right, the reader has the electric shock of “THAT! The thing she just wrote! It’s the truth!” Sometimes, the laugh just comes from the shock. Sometimes, it comes from me writing about my cat. But I don’t write about anything that at some level I don’t seriously believe. This includes my love of toast.
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RNF: I learned from your posts about what foundation is and more about make-up than I needed to know (in the post about a photo shoot for an article). Any comments about the annoyances of make-up? nn
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QC: It’s funny having a daughter at the age where she’s just falling in love with the idea of being female. She cannot imagine why I’m not in the bathroom every morning doing Amy Winehouse cats-eye eyeliner. When walking through a department store she’ll herd me like a border collie in walking shorts over to the red lipstick. Why wouldn’t I want to be just the most feminine thing in the world? What would possess me not to want to play dress-up every day? The only thing I can say is that because of acting, I was in make-up earlier than most people and in order to make someone my coloring not appear to be dead on camera, I wore stuff which had the texture of fondant. I developed both a physical and an emotional allergy to make-up which has remained. I don’t find it annoying or deceptive as much as simply wearying. But the kid is more woman than I’ll ever be and she has both of her parents’ strength of will, so it’s likely I’ll be looking better over the next few years whether I want it or not.
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RNF: Do consort or daughter get upset about being written about? Do you worry about your daughter one day reading your writings? Or your cat? j
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QC: Consort has the incredible grace to not only find what I write to be funny, but to send the blogs where I goof on him out to his friends. And the kid’s great objection right now is that I won’t let her read the entire book. She’s read two chapters, which is enough. The entire book isn’t for children, and I think reading about herself would add a layer of self-consciousness to her that would be unnecessary and a little abusive on my part. The cat, without ever knowing of the Internet or the publishing world, had already assumed she was world-famous.
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RNF: Now that you've gone back to reading Sedaris and co, do you worry that it will influence the follow up book? n
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QC: I think that every time I think about the phrase “Follow-up book” I laugh and I laugh and then I make a sound like “Yeeesh….” And then I look worried. So I’m guessing the writings of David Sedaris won’t be compromising my work any time soon. n
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RNF: I've noticed and appreciate that you write in a clean and wholesome way. Is that a conscious decision or just natural? Difficult, or no big deal?
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QC: At the start of writing this, I made a very conscious choice to work clean. There are a few reasons for that. First, my mother reads my blog. Second, my kid is insanely quiet when she wants to be and has been known to sneak up behind her mother when she’s writing. Third, it’s harder to work clean, but it makes me have to come up with creative ways to describe situations which otherwise could be easily and lazily summed up with any of the big seven obscenities. And finally, I think of my blog as a kind of a party I throw every week and while I know that not everyone is going to like everything I say, I don’t like the idea of insulting a guest with an easily-replaced word. A final thought: if I work clean 99% of the time, the other 1% of the time, the chosen word will have the shocking effect I mean for it to have.
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RNF: Anything you'd like to tell or ask me or my readers? k
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QC: For those people who have written to me and said, “You’re very funny Quinn, but you’re not that much of a goof, right?” I can only say thank you for the kind words and tell you that two close female friends have read the book and each called me and said, “I remember when that happened!” So yes, I am that much of a goof. ~