MP3 Tara (Aes) Interview

Tara Eisen, a professor of creative writing and literature, discusses her novels and essays, which range from historical fiction to contemporary stories exploring dysfunctional power dynamics. She explains that she was initially drawn to writing for the aesthetic and glamorous image it portrayed, but eventually fell in love with the process. She also discusses the impact of movies and how they can transport and resonate with audiences, tapping into their sense of empathy. Eisen believes that art can serve various functions, including entertainment, education, and social commentary. She highlights the power of integrating social justice messages into art, as it can be more effective than direct arguments. Finally, she discusses how art and life can influence and imitate each other, drawing from personal experiences and universal emotions. So, just to start off here, can you introduce yourself? Sure. Hi, Julie. My name is Tara Eisen, and I am a professor of creative writing and literature in the Department of English at ASU, and I'm also a novelist, short story, and essay writer. That's wonderful. That's wonderful. So, what are some of the topics that you've written about in your novels and essays? There's an interesting split. A couple of my novels are, I guess, what you would term historical fiction. One is set during World War II France. Another one is actually set on the island of Alcatraz, where a mother and daughter, the families of the prison guards, lived on the island with their families. So, I told the story of a mother and daughter living on Alcatraz, and I love research, so those historical novels require a great amount of research. But my other fiction, my other novels and my short fiction, tends to be very contemporary and looking at dysfunctional power dynamics in relationships. Sometimes it's romantic relationships, so there's like a weird psychosexual dynamic, and sometimes it's a dysfunctional relationship between a child and a parent, or between friends. Yeah, so that's sort of the primary theme I'm interested in exploring. Wonderful. So, what originally got you into writing? I always say, I always wanted to be a writer, but I didn't want to write. I wanted to be a writer primarily because the images of writers I saw in movies and on television just were so cool. It's like everybody had a beach house, or everybody is in a Parisian garret drinking red wine. Exactly. You know, we never see the work of the writing, actually. You get this like six-second montage of someone at their typewriter, but it always looked so cool. So, I thought being a writer was the sexiest, most glamorous, coolest thing anybody could do in their life. For the aesthetic. Yeah. Thank you. That's a great way of putting it. I liked the aesthetic of being a writer, but I didn't want to write, and that's work. That's horrible. A lot of work, yeah. So, I had to really realize that at some point, unless I actually not only wrote something, but kept writing things, people would notice that I would no longer be able to confirm myself as a writer. And, you know, fortunately, I did fall in love with the process of writing stories. Yeah. That's a plus. That is a plus. Yeah. Yeah. Thank goodness. Oh, my gosh. So, okay. Going on to kind of discussing art in general, I'm especially interested in the essay collection that you have going through life, which for me, I only read snippets, but it resonated with me because movies have always been that emotional blanket for me for all of my emotions. And so, can you tell me a little bit about why movies are so impactful for us? I can speak for myself personally, but I think my experience is also very universal. And I'm primarily thinking about movies in the sense of the old-fashioned go-to-a-theater. You know? Not necessarily sitting on your couch and folding laundry or playing with the dog while you're watching something, but that experience of going to a theater and sitting there with that huge screen, it was so immersive. I mean, obviously, you had images to see, and you had sounds and dialogue to hear, but you know, you could almost smell it. You could almost taste it. You could almost feel it. And I think the lure of, I mean, I think of the species anthropologically, we crave stories. We crave hearing stories. We crave telling stories. It's a way to connect. It's a way to see ourselves reflected from a little bit of distance. But in a movie theater, the lure of how you could enter into the world of these other people and experience their lives, I think it's just, I think it's very compelling. I think it's very visceral. Reading's a little different. You know? Reading, even if you're reading, you know, Pulp. Even if you're reading light-hearted, you know, the kind of junky stuff I might read on a plane, you know, you're still processing language in a way that calls upon your brain to, you know, be firing, whereas I think with a film, I don't think it's necessarily a more passive experience, but I think that we process image differently. I think it's more immediate. I think it's more visceral. I think we can turn off our brains a little bit, unless we tend to be, you know, sort of analytical and that kind of thing. But I think you can give yourself over to a movie in a way that you can't always do with literature. You know, but I wanted to say, I have been absolutely transported and swept away by works of literature, obviously. I mean, I've been, you know, I've had transcendent experiences where I get very lost in the prose. But again, I think we're using different parts of our brain. Yeah. That, yeah. And that's, so going off of what you just said, as far as when you are engaging with a movie or a book and you feel transcended, what does that, can you explain to me kind of what that feels like, what that experience is like? Yeah. I think part of it is maybe the experience of, you know, having a really good, strong glass of wine or some kind of mind-altering drug or there's something, it's like you become oblivious to your own existence, I think, you know, your fight with your mother or what's going on at school or what's going on in the world. You know, I guess it's a sort of fancy way of saying it's escapist, but I think it's more profound than that. I think it's deeper than that. I think the invitation to experience another person's reality, another person's life, I think by definition that taps into your sense of empathy and the need to identify with other human beings. Yeah. And I think that the experience of doing it, you know, it is escapist, but it's also transcendent, you know, because it does allow you entrance into another psyche. Exactly. Yeah. I think that's very powerful and I also think there's, you know, a cathartic sense of it too, you know, to see these, I mean, you know, and this goes back thousands of years, but to see other humans playing out your own dramas, you know, we can learn from it, we can be inspired by it, we can feel less alone and that can be a very transcendent experience also. That is, I love that you're bringing up this state because there's actually, there's a book on aesthetic philosophy called On the Aesthetic Education of Man that came out in 1794. Wow. And it discusses this idea that witnessing beauty kind of takes us into an aesthetic state that allows our minds to be more open. Oh, I love that. And potentially what's really interesting is because our minds are more open, we're more receptive to understanding other people, right? So that's where like those social movements come in. And so from your perspective, is there an intersection between art and social issues or how do they relate to one another? I think there certainly can be. I don't think there necessarily is. I don't think there's any singular function to art. I mean, you know, sometimes it's just escapist or just pure entertainment and that's wonderful. You know, life can be really tough. If you can entertain me, you know, for an hour and a half or even 20 minutes, I'm thrilled. I'm grateful. You know, and art functions, you know, again, it can be to educate, to illuminate, to transport, to inspire critical thinking, inspire dialogue. I think that art has a way of getting a point across very often in a way that, you know, where I... And by art, I'm actually sort of leaning towards fiction when I say that, although, I mean, I'm a huge nonfiction lover also. But I think with fiction, with story in whatever form, it's, you know, a teaspoon of sugar. I think that, you know, you can be really sneaky in slipping your messages in when someone like you are saying is sort of open and absorbing the story and the experiences of other people. I think it can be a really powerful, maybe a little slippery and sneaky way of slipping the message in there in a way, you know, differently so that if you were to try to make a social justice argument through, you know, an essay or a debate or a dialogue or whatever it is, you know, I think it's easier for people to find something like that, you know, polemic or dogmatic and to resist it. Wow. But if it's integrated into art, you know, I think it still has to be integrated in service of the character and in service of the story because if all we feel is the artist trying to make a point, say, about social justice, you know, we may as well be reading an essay. Yeah. That's a great point. Wow. That is a great... That is a really great point. And that's what I've also seen. That's fascinating. I used to do, in high school, I did speech and debate and the part of speech and debate that I did, though, was specifically focused on taking fiction and finding the social justice themes that they were discussing and, you know, trying to, cutting the book or whatever down into ten minutes to get that theme across. And it was such a beneficial experience, I think, because... That's wonderful. I know. I love it. I miss it. Yeah. But it's true. It's like, you know, art imitates life. And so, with that being said, how in every day do you see, like, maybe even separating from art forms necessarily, like, how do you see art imitating life? Well, I, you know, does art imitate life or does life imitate art? I think that... Yeah. ...happens just as often. Very good. Yeah. I mean, art is going to imitate life in the sense that so many of us, you know, who are storytellers or artists, painters, sculptors, dancers, musicians, do draw to some degree on our own experience. And a lot, you know, a lot of our experiences are very universal, are very common. Certainly the emotions are. We all feel, you know, fear, pain, love, anger, resentment, inspiration. So, I think by that, you know, even people who don't explicitly draw from life, I think the art that we create is certainly influenced and informed by our own life experiences. And so, I think that the art that is created is going to reflect aspects of life to some degree. But, like I said, I think it works just as powerfully the other way, you know? I mean, whether it's you're watching a movie and one of the actors is wearing this great shirt and you decide you want to go out and try to find that shirt, I mean, that's a pretty superficial example, but... But it's true. Yeah. I mean, you know, whether we like it or not, we're looking to art for inspiration and lessons, even if we don't think that consciously, about how to behave in the world, you know? How to dress, how to act, how to speak, how to love, how to hate, how to, you know... I mean, that's what my book is all about, right? The Reeling Through Life essays book. You know, all of these models for how to live, how to love, how to die in the film. And my own experience, in a way, just sort of copying, you know, behaviors that I saw in film that modeled different aspects of life for me. Wow. Yeah. It's impactful. It's very impactful. So, okay. To close this out, is the big question. In your opinion, can art be bad? I'm not sure how you mean bad. Do you mean bad as in clummy, a really dull story, a poorly directed film, or do you mean bad as in destructive? As in... Destructive. Destructive. Can art be bad? Absolutely. Propaganda. Yeah. Propaganda manipulation. You know, fascist propaganda is very powerful in its artistry, in its posters, in its films, in its movies. You know, Leni Reifenschau, the German filmmaker who, you know, did the film about the German athletes during the Olympics. Gorgeous film. Absolutely breathtaking from a technical, cinematic perspective. But it was created and used as promotion for the Nazi ideology. So, you know, can art be destructive? Can art be used for malicious, destructive, dehumanizing purposes? Absolutely. For every reason that art is powerful as a source of entertainment, escape, illumination, inspiration, it can be equally powerful as a tool, as a destructive tool. Yeah. I mean, it's the difference between, I guess, what we would call art and what we would call propaganda. Yeah. That's a really, that is a very cool distinction. I did not think about that. Oh, really? I love that. I know. It's like, oh, you know, Tori, why are you saying this? I mean, everyone knows this. Everyone thinks this way. This is so mundane. No, that's a great, that's, yeah, that's that kind of connection that I need. I'm glad. That's great. Okay, well, that is, that's all the questions that I have. Is there anything else that you would like to say? Just that I really want to listen to your podcast. I want to hear other people answering the questions that you put to them and learn something about what they think of all of this, and by extension, learn more about you and what you think of all this. It's a wonderful project. Thank you. Thank you. I'm very excited. I am very excited. Great.