Each Other's First and Last Editor: Writing Couple Ted Chiles and Chella Courington

On this episode, Barry and I talk with a wonderful writing duo, Ted Chiles and Chella Courington.

Chella Courington (she/her) is a writer and teacher whose poetry and fiction appear in numerous anthologies and journals including DMQ Review, The Los Angeles Review, and Anti-Heroin Chic. She was raised in the Appalachian south and now lives in California with another writer and two feline boys. Her recent microchaps of poetry are Good Trouble, Origami Poems Project; Hell Hath, Maverick Duck Press; and Lynette’s War, Ghost City Press. Her novella, Adele and Tom: The Portrait of a Marriage, will be re-released by Impspired Magazine (England) in February 2023. Twitter: @chellacouringto  Instagram: chellacourington  Web Page: chellacourington.net

Ted Chiles has published short stories, flash fiction and nonfiction in a variety of literary journals. In his former life he taught economics, the most dramatic of the Social Sciences. He lives in Santa Barbara, California with a writer, two avocado trees and two cats.

You'll enjoy hearing how two authors navigate the writing life in the same household. 

Transcript

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Welcome to M FFA Payday, where we talk with people about all the ways they make their M F A pay. We're your host, Dreama Drudge and Barry Drudge. Today our guests are tele carton and Ted Childs. Cell. Carrington is a writer in teacher whose poetry and fiction appear in numerous anthologies and journals, including D M Q Review, the Los Angeles Review and anti heroin chic. She was raised in the Appalachian South and now lives in California with another writer and two feline boys. Her recent micro chaps of poetry. Good Trouble by Origami Poems, project Hell Half. By Maverick Duck Press and Lynette's War, go City Press her novella, Adele and Tom. The portrait of a marriage will be re-released in Inspired Magazine in February, 2023. To contact her, you can go at Twitter Atella Corto, that's C H E L L A C O U R I N G T O, Instagram cell curing ton with an N on the end of it. And for a webpage, it's c h e l l a c o u r i n g t o n.net. Now for her other half of her life, her, uh, husband Ted Ted Childs has published short stories, flash fiction and non-fiction in a variety of literary journals. In his former life, he taught economics the most dramatic of the social sciences. He lives in Santa Barbara. With a writer, two avocado trees and two cats. We just wanna say Ted and Cell welcome and welcome, welcome and thank you for joining the show. Oh, thank you's. Our, our pleasure. We're so glad to have you here. And of course we know you folks a little bit now, Yes. We'll admit up front that we had a recording snafu and that you very graciously agreed to join us again to rerecord, which on the one hand, we are so thrilled to get to talk to you more, but we just wanna thank you so much for doing that for us. Oh, thank you. You, your honor. Pleasure. That's fun. Yeah., so, either one of you or welcome to start, but tell us about your m FFA journey, you to start with your m FFA journey. Um, so my m f A journey is that, um, you know, I've started getting interested in writing when we moved to California. I, I've been trying to do a little bit back in Alabama, but, and. You know, I went to some conferences. We, luckily we have a very nice conference in town called Santa Barbara Writers Conference. And so I was, I would do that and I'd go to UCLA and I started doing workshops, you know, cause I'm a nerd and I like to take classes. I mean, well, you know, I have a PhD, so everybody of a PhD is a nerd. And, um, and then out of nowhere, Chella decides she's gonna go get an m. And, um, she was teaching full-time and I was only teaching part-time at, at that point I was teaching at Santa Barbara City College full-time and great place to teach, but man, did I have a load, you know, it's like 120 to 140 students per semester. Oh my, largely writing and a lot of comp, and I thought that I was gonna get a sabbatical, so I applied for sabbatical and also applied for my MFA at the same time. Sabbatical did not come through, but I am Fay did at New England College. And that's, of course, I took it. And then I was having to, to, as most of us are balanced, uh, The journey of the MFA with the teaching, but I had such wonderful mentors, especially the first year. Um, Alicia Oscar was my mentor, and she's a wonderful academic as well as a fabulous poet. She's been nominated several times for the National Book Award, and that appealed to me because I had a PhD in English and, you know, we could talk li as well as other things. And we've remained friends and she's, blurbing my collection of poetry that will be coming out next November with finishing line. That name is, of course, hearts forged in resistance. Oh. So my journey in terms of my MFA as I've just sort of sabotaged TED score here, um, was with my teaching. So I'm teaching full-time while also trying to enhance my craft, but it was, it was a wonderful experie. So I'm teaching part-time and I'm looking at her about to, go to school full-time and teach full-time. And I thought, I mean, well, shit, I mean, what am I gonna do? And so I decided to apply for an MFA program, but it was really kind of late in the season and I was looking for something that. Would meet roughly at the same time and near the same place. And I was at New England College, she was in New England College. And so Goddard kind of fit that bill. So I applied to Goddard, so I got in and, and they were roughly overlapping. And we have a friend that lives in Wooster, mass. And so we would go stay with him and use that and we'd go drop shell off and I'd go up to mine and, and they really were very, very closely connected. And I, I did a semester there. And. I started on a novel and I got kind of stuck and I didn't know what I was gonna do. I didn't know how to get through. I'd gone to a place that I had had as sort of the target for the j the beginning of the journey would go here, and then, and then I got there and I just sort of got stuck. And then I finally realized at some point my character didn't want to be there. And then our friend in Wooster had had some experience with Spalding and um, yeah, well we knew some people who had taught at Spalding. We knew Brad Watson, who taught there. We had met him a few times, right through our friend in Worcester. Mm-hmm. and, um, There was a writer I really enjoy. Uh, Mary Lari Waters was also at Balding for a brief period of time. She had, she left by the time I got there. So when I, I was getting over my, I got ulcerative colitis and when I got that under control, I started looking around and I had a few sort of requirements for an MFA program. Um, one, I didn't wanna stay in a dorm. Two, I wanted to be able to transfer my stuff and Spalding popped up immediately, you know, and then I'd heard some good things about it. And so I applied there. I got in and they were very nice to me so that's how I ended up going to Spad. And uh, I was very lucky. I, I got great mentors. I had, um, John Pipkin and then I had Kenny and then I had Robin. So I mean it. I don't know why I ended up with all males. I didn't ask for all males. And then I went to Spalding on the counter post MFA cuz my MFA had focused on poetry and I was moving into fiction. I'm really engaged in the alum activities that go on. So I assume that within the household is both being writers that you at times Yeah. Look at one another's work, uh, each other's first and last editor, wouldn't you say? Yeah. Um, well, you know, ch again, she has a PhD in literature and I'm, I have a PhD in economics and so I'm writing literary analysis. I tended to approach. A little bit more as an economist. And it was quite funny on some of these sp none the Goddard ones, I would give it to her and she would go, oh, you're gonna have to stay up all night. And I said, no, just, just make sure the commas are in the right place. And I never had to rewrite any of them. I up all night. Yeah. But really the most help was when I did my, um, you know, critical essay, long essay. Mm-hmm. um, which I wrote on Cormack McCarthy's, no Country for Own Men in Edward p Jones', um, the known world. And it was establishing moral authority through an, um, through point of view and, Yeah, that was that was a project. That was a project, but I, I came back from the residency. I wrote it in a month and Shea edited it and I sent it off and I got a few comments and I came back. And so I was done by Christmas with my essay so I could get back to work on my novel. And I was. Looking through stuff on my computer and I ran across this, um, online journal called Annotation Nation Annotated. Ah, and it's, it's a couple MFA programs, running annotations. And so I sent'em one and they, they turned around in about 30 minutes, accepted it. it was making more like 30 seconds. Oh, I don't, but it was, they read it. They took, wow. Yeah, it was, um, it was one I wrote on, um, chess Beach by Ian McEwen. And it was talking about, um, Well, I doesn't matter when it was time, it was about narrative style and how there the narrator was definitely telling the story. So he would like freeze the narration and go off and do stuff and come back and then unfreeze it, which normally I find really offensive. In a novel, if, if I have a character going on a path and another, you pick up another character, I want them both to move through time together. Yes. And I'm always harping on this with people. It's like, you know, you can't just, we're not time travelers as most readers, you know, unless you set that up and, but he did it and he got away with it. So that's why I wrote it on that. Since we're a couple of writers and in the same house, we were just wondering, tell us a little bit about what that's like. How do you get private writing time or do you have writing time together, or do you write about one another? Or just tell us a little bit more about that. Um, well I've, I've written one story about. And then we turned, you turned into a play. Oh, no, that was, that was something we wrote together. Okay. No, I wrote one, one short piece about cell, and this was early on in our relationship. I made her something and she said, do you have any jalapenos? And she took it out and poured some jalapeno juice on from the jar pickle jalapeno on what I sing. And I said, you hadn't even tasted it, And so I wrote this story about this guy makes the sandwich for a woman, and then she just, and he just, the woman just sort of tears it apart and deconstructs it and eats it in whatever orders she wants to, and he's deeply offended, but it, it all ends well. Um, my novella that's been reissued, Adele and Tom, the portrait of marriage. Is more auto fiction in the line of someone like Ben Lerner. Uh, it's so, it's based loosely on us, two writers living together trying to negotiate their relationship. There's a lot of fiction in it at the same time, but I'm writing about Ted to some extent. Of course, Ted always likes to say that he is kinder than Tom and he is, I'll have to agree with him. And then I took, um, what cello novella, um, and adapted it to a, a play and actually worked with some Spaulding people. Yeah. What I did is, um, I took, uh, one, I took one of those, um, homecoming. courses and I was, um, I guess I went once and I was a grad assistant at Spalding during Yeah. A residency. Yeah. And after I'd graduated and I worked with, um, Charlie Schulman, I, I basically got him to read it, and then afterwards he and I just hit a sort of, we worked together on it and, um, yeah, we, we, I sent it out to a lot of places and we got one staged reading from it, but we haven't gotten anything else on it. And I'm gonna, your advisor of course, since I'm having the reissuance in the, no. Yeah. And he worked with his Spalding group. Online. Yeah. They had recommended that Ted take his backstory and turn it into Front Story and the play and add Adele and Tom as two younger. Adele and Tom's enacting what we had been telling. Yeah. Which is really is our. Am now working on another work. It's, I have a sa same sort of craft issue, taking backstory and moving it into the front and trying to make it more dramatic and immediate. Yeah. And younger characters of the same characters of younger sales, same characters that I think that would be interesting to be staged that way. I would enjoy that. I think. Yeah, I think so too. Yeah, because there was just a lot of, um, them talking about what had happened versus, and they said, why don't you just show it? And then I'm thinking, oh, well one of the keys we were trying to do was to, again, this is more of an economic argument, but a single set. but needed no ch no set changes in just two actors of, um, middle age. And that seemed like it would be appealing to a lot of theaters, especially just colleges, small colleges. Yeah. Yeah. But so far not that appealing. Not that appealing. Oh gosh. Well, I've got a question though. I just think it needs some tweaking. Oh, maybe. Um, he's the tweaker, We did, I, I did one residency in theater. So that was really interesting. And I will tell you, the theater people are a lot more fun. Oh my. And of course, all the playwrights and script writers for film are, are clapping and applauding your, uh, statement Yes, exactly. So I mean, it just sort of like, they dragged me out to dinner. I was always very reclusive because when I first got there, I was, I was still fighting, dealing with my colitis. And so I, you know, I'd make it through classes and I'd go up to my room and just sort of crash and take naps and wake up. And, but later on they, yeah, they dragged me out to restaurants and they were all very, it was very lively group It was a lot of fun. That's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Although it makes those of us who are fiction writers a little sad, but uh, so the, both of you being, uh, you're, you're both a little bit. Different in your approaches to things? I mean economics, were you micro or Macro? Micro. Okay. Completely micro. What is it that, uh, you guys are currently reading something that's sparking your imagination? doesn't, doesn't have to be fiction or, yeah, it doesn't have to be fiction. It can be whatever. Well, lemme say I've been reading recently, I just finished, um, the Old Man, which is the novel that the TV show is based on with Jeff Bridges. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And it's, it's completely, it's the same character. Um, but the TV show's completely different. Huh. The plot lines are, it starts off roughly the same way, but then it just diverges. And, um, I really enjoyed the novel. I've always liked, um, Perry as a writer, he wrote a book called Butcher Boy, and I've always had an affinity for, for mysteries and procedurals and stuff. Even though I'm working on a novel and I should, I do read fiction, but I haven't, I read Kate Zinos Green Girl and the thing, the fiction that I'm drawn to is not a good novel necessary for what I'm trying to do in this novel cuz it, I'm probably more attracted to stream of consciousness. Mm-hmm. and um, really I need to be a little bit more aware of plot and narrative turn. Mm-hmm. But I've also been reading a lot of poetry since I have this poetry collection coming out. So I just recently ordered a, a book of Diane Seus and I've been reading Ocean Vion and points that are trying to play with new things and experience new things. Usually at night before I go to sleep, I'll just pick up the most recent New Yorker and read through the short story and the poems in the New Yorker. I guess The New Yorker is in a sense, a vehicle that keeps me a little bit, um, up to date in terms of the fiction. Mm-hmm. the poetry I wouldn't be reading, and I always read the poetry, but I also always read the fiction just to see what's going on and, you know, that might be, well it's, it is approach that works for me. Yeah. Yeah. I um, I love that idea. I think that's so good, you know, because that, you know, It's modern, obviously it's, you know, it's of the moment, but also, yeah, there's a classic feel to it. Right? Right. Yeah. And it, it seems as though the New Yorker tends to, I mean, once, once a name pops up in there, there's someone that's, that is up and coming. I've, yeah, I've, I've been introduced through there to a number of things and we've, we've had stacks and stacks of New Yorkers in the house at times, Oh. I've been seven New Yorker covers for 30 years. Oh my goodness. And always had different notions of what I was going to do with the covers from, uh, wallpapering a bathroom to, uh, inserting them in frame spaces on a screen. Oh, yeah. Uh, and what I wound up doing, and then I had my hesitations about the. Uh, wall cover because we would move and there would be all my New Yorkers for someone else to enjoy. Not that I wouldn't wanna share So as close as I've come is framing single covers. I have about. Hanging in the house now. Yeah. No, but we really are interested in how other writers write because like, for instance, Barry and I will sometimes set aside time where we'll be across from one another at the table or wherever. We'll go to a cafe together and actually write. Side by side, Or sometimes I'm writing and he's not, or vice versa. Do you physically write in the same space together at all or do you prefer to write separately? Generally not. No. No. We have once we literally wrote a play together and when we go to a coffee shop and we were writing on the computer, he was doing the male character, Travis doing the female, I would write a couple of pages or a scene or two. Flip, turn the computers dead and he would write. That's all the time. Yeah. Normally, um, if I'm, I like to ride away from home, um, so I'm not worrying about anything or I can't get interrupted or anything. I like to go to coffee shops, um, normally ones that don't make a lot of blended drinks because that's pretty noisy. But otherwise, I'm, I'm very good at working in a, um, somewhat noisy environment cuz I can just kind of focus in on it. The only thing I've, found is that there's a couple of times I have, I have one scene in my novel that is, uh, it was the hardest thing I ever wrote and it's very violent. Um, and I couldn't write it in public. I had to, I had to write that in private. Mm-hmm. no one else around. Yeah. But otherwise, yeah. And so the pandemic has really kind of cut in on my desire to, to write in general, just because the world seems to be falling apart. But also the fact that, that I literally, because of my pre-condition, pre-conditions, it's really difficult for me to go to a coffee shop and sit inside. So I have to be able to go somewhere. And if I'm gonna work, I'm gonna work outside. Okay. But I still have, um, I still go down, sit outside, bundle up, and um mm-hmm. do some writing that way. But generally of late, I haven't written much. Um, I wrote a little bit during the beginning of the pandemic. Some fairly and editing a lot for me. Yeah. And so my main writing these days has been editing cello's novel. Mm-hmm. And we write very, very differently. Uh, so whereas Ted likes a public space, he likes, I think the anonymity around him, I get very intimate and very personal. So the best times, many ways for me to write is in the bed. Those aren't times place is in the bed. But in the morning when I first wake up, just take my iPad and start writing. And late at night or early in the morning when the cat's in 10 are asleep. And I'm, I don't know, I feel like I'm in another sphere, but I like riding in the bed. You know, I probably did my dissertation in the bed. It's just, In the bed. It's a good starting place for me. I work a lot at my desk, but that's after things are kind of rolling and yeah, going. I like a completely clean, flat surface with nothing on it, except, you know, with me that's, that's, I just wanted, it's like, you know, I could ride under a pile of coats. It's just nice and dark and me and I could just crawl in a hole and ride. Mm-hmm. Fascinating. Yeah, it's the pandemic. Even though we were going through so much heartbreak and sadness and sorrow, for me as a writer, it was very conducive to just producing. Uh, I really didn't have to give excuses of why I couldn't leave the house. Right. I already Right. Yeah. I think we personally give that, um, for us, during the pandemic, Barry wrote his first novel, and so it was almost every night he would read to me in bed what he'd written for the day, and I would say, okay, where's my story? Where's my story? And so every night I would get a chapter or however many pages he'd written. It definitely opened up opportunities here. And I put my headphones on and way away at the typewriter. I think we kind of missed each other when he had to go back into the office. I found when I was, whenever I'm working on something, I find one of the best things to do is to read it right before I go to bed. And hopefully, you know, my, my subconscious will work on whatever writing problem or, and occasionally I've, I've had characters, I wake up and I'm sort of like herd a character's voice finally. Um, but I remember early on I was writing this one story. It's, it is one of my more successful stories. I've published it a couple of different times and it won an award. It was called Knife. And I was reading it to Cell at night and I was just creeping her out and she's like, did you read that to me in the morning? writes more bleakly than I do. I'm a Bleecker writer. Yes. I think I might have told you this, but my, my last semester when, I mean, my last residency when I was graduating, and, um, God, who was, who was. Yeah, but it was Jacob, but I'm trying to think who was the class. Well, we had a writing assignment, and this is my favorite bleak story. And it was to show somebody's emotion, um, without saying it. Show narrative and just per, you know, and so I, I had a barn and I start off describing the barn and all these rusty things that could kill people. And then all of a sudden there's a trap and there's a dead rat in it, and there's like flies rising from it. And I'm describing all this. And then the last thing you see is a woman just laying on the floor crying. And when I read this in our, our workshop, Jacob went. Jesus Ted which I, that's one of my favorite moments. Yeah. No, I'm, I I tend to like to read. Um, well, I like watching things that are more cheerful and I, I absolutely really dystopic just, but I tend to write a lot of dystopic and sort of very bleak things do either of you or both of you have,, tips for writers in general? You've actually already given us some really cool ones, but is there something else in particular you'd like to share? Yeah, um, Well, yeah, always read what you've written that day before you go to sleep. That's great. That's, yeah. Um, maybe don't read it to your partner if it's too big. Um, you know, the other thing that, that for me is when I'm, when I'm getting ready to write, um, I to, to quote Cena or Catherine, I want to go, I wanna read some of the competition before I write. So I take a book that's been published that I think is a good writer, and when I sit down to start working on something, I would order a coffee or, and, or a pastry or something and sit down. And as I'm drinking that and eating, I try to read a page or two of somebody who. Been successful, who's really good, and not necessarily somebody who's doing my style, not necessarily someone doing my topic, but just somebody that has successfully put words in front and made sense and brought a narrative forward and, and then do that. And then I go back and I read the last page I wrote again, and then I start writing. And, it's a way of going from being in here into my writing world is to slowly move myself into it. So that's, I think, yeah. I like that. Yeah. And the other thing is that, and everybody knows this, if you, if you want to be a writer, read Yes. You know, if you wanna write, if you wanna write screenplays, go to movies. I mean, it's, it's, you know, fairly straightforward there. Yeah. You need to, you need to exercise it. Yeah. And exercise it with reading and with writing, even if you don't have. A project at hand, whether, even if you're not writing fiction or poetry, just write. Mm-hmm. can you get up, write for about 10 minutes? It doesn't have to be a lot, but it has to be enough that keeps you in the space of writing and keeps you close to what it is that we who do write, feel passionate about. And that's right. Every day. And also be reading something Ted's, right? Yeah. There was one point when I was working on the mfa, I had a book, um, by Calvino. Yes. Yeah. And it was all these old Italian folk tales and they were all like a page or two, or maybe three. The longest one I think was five. And I tend to get up before cell. I would come in here and make my coffee and everything and I'd sit down and instead of looking at my iPhone, I would read one of those stories every morning. Love that. Oh yeah. Another thing to do, like a book I would recommend if you wanted to write, if you were writing, maybe not so much in realism. Um, Einstein's Dreams is a book that, it's a very, very little book and it's, it's got different kinds of things. And it was written by a physicist and it's a brilliant book. It's absolutely brilliant. And that's something I would suggest people could read in the morning. It'd be really good. And I would suggest to read in various areas, fiction, poetry, hybrid journals, letters, um, And I would, I would sort of discourage how to books because you want the experience of the writing. You don't want someone to say, this is the way I do it. Yeah. So keep something going. And I always keep something that challenges you as well. It's easy, you know, you like mysteries, you pick up a mystery, but also keep something, maybe you have collection of stories by an author you find very challenging. Just keep something going that challenges you as well as entertains you. Yes. I agree. I think that's, that's wonderful advice. Wow. We just wanna thank you both for your time, cell and Ted. It's been, oh gosh, this every, you hate, we should make it maybe in segments, half hour segments weekly with you guys. let's tune in with, oh my gosh. We just appreciate that. So thank you again. And we just wanna encourage everybody to keep writing, writing all the Thingss We bought everybody all.