Interview: Dorothy Freeman

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Welcome to eMerge Unchained, the podcast of eMerge Literary Magazine, where literature kicks off its shoes and wanders barefoot through the wild terrain of human imagination.
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This is eMerge Unchained.
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Hi, I'm Aubrey Green, and this week I sat down with Dorothy Freeman.
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Dorothy is well-traveled, well-seasoned, some might say rode hard, definitely not put up wet.
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With seven decades of stories and 40 years of flash prose waiting to be published, Dorothy is just getting started.
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Sit back, relax, and enjoy this conversation with Dorothy Freeman.
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Well, thank you so much, Dorothy, for taking a few minutes out of your day to sit down and chat with us.
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No, I'm very excited to talk to you.
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The first thing I'd like to know, because I noticed that we don't have a whole lot in our bio for you, at least not online.
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Have you not been published very many places yet?
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You're pretty much, except for like a local community publication and college publication, Emergence Magazine was my first publication.
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Really? Well...
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It was very very exciting.
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I can imagine. I remember my first publication. I mean, even even the ones I get now, it's still really exciting.
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Yeah, for sure. But it encouraged me to maybe do more.
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Well, you absolutely should. Why why have you not published more yet?
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Good question.
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I don't have a good answer. I'm not sure. You know, I think my own journey as a writer, like I've received lots of encouragement, but like believing in yourself, believing in myself, that people actually might want to publish this.
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And of course I did, you know, I sent it into a couple of things I sent some things in to where they had money involved - You know, prize money? And didn't win them. And so I was like, oh, well, I must not be very good. You know, I kind of I can easily convince myself that nobody wants to listen to what I have to say because it's so personal. And I'm writing a personal journey...
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That's how I write.
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Yeah, no, that makes sense.
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It's almost like my journal, you know? It's almost like you're reading my journal.
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And people who know me are intrigued, but that doesn't mean that a stranger would be.
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Is that difficult, putting so much personal stuff to paper?
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No.
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No, and that is why I feel like in a lot of ways I'm different from other people because I learned to write like that.
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My first, you know, real writing experience was with Natalie Goldberg, who wrote Wild Mind Writing, or Writing Down the Bones.
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And I learned in a workshop to just whatever's in your mind, write it down.
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And that was like my most creative, I mean, it just flows out of my pen.
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It's like whatever I'm thinking, that's what I'm writing.
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And part of that is the fear that, you know, people will read it in your family, your friends and family, you know, and what are they going to think?
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And, oh, you can't say that.
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And she sort of taught our workshop group to don't tell yourself that you can't say that. That's what you need to say.
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And I'd always sort of plunge to that when I write, Just like, just let it flow out of the end of my pen and worry about it later.
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And maybe that's part of the reason why I don't, you know, like publishing.
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I want, I actually want to publish a finished piece of work, like a whole book.
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So these little short snatches, I haven't quite figured out how to put them all together yet.
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Hmm. Yeah, there are several different things and different ways you could treat those.
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So I can see why that might require some thought.
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And those are my favorite writers. I was thinking, you asked that, like, who might, some of them, I might want to talk about my favorite writers.
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And I realized, like, oh, okay, so Cheryl Strayed with her, the book Wild, and Nick Flynn, Another Bullshit Night in Shit City.
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Was that the name of it? Yeah.. Just... here's my life you know here's here's what's happening or here's what's happened and those are my favorite writers so...
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So it sounds like you you really enjoy memoir work.
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Oh it's all memoir yeah yeah it really is yeah
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So I'm assuming then based on what you said that you actually have quite a bit of writing just kind of tucked away somewhere?
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Tons.
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Too numerous to mention. And it feels sometimes like an almost impossible task.
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Another writer that I read early on, Anne Lamott, you know.
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Oh, love Anne Lamott.
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Yeah, everybody knows her. And when I read her Bird by Bird, I realized, like, she went through the same thing.
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It's like, how do you put all this together?
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Yeah, it's a challenge. And I keep writing.
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It's not like I'm going back to get all this stuff and figure it out, you know. I put it all together.
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I actually went to graduate school. I graduated with my master's in creative writing in 2023.
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So very recently, I was in grad school.
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Fun.
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I had to have like 180 pages for my thesis to graduate. And that was daunting.
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So I was forced to put a bunch of stuff together.
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When I had to defend my thesis, I got quite a bit of criticism.
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They, like, loved the first, you know, part of my story. And then later on, I got into a story about it's all about this, you know, love affair that's not working out...
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And they got somehow tired of it.
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A nd and it kind of set me back you know to not to not get endorsement for the whole thing. I was just like: oh see I was right. I'm really you know I'm...
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I'm wowing the kids at school but I'm not wowing you know.
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The professors who know. Yeah.
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The experts...
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Yeah writing is is um It's kind of like art. I spent a lot of time: I worked for an art museum in my career. I did PR.
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And art is subjective, you know?
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Not everybody likes the same art. That's just the truth. And I think that's true of writing.
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We all have different tastes, right?
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No, 100%. Absolutely.
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And so as a writer, you have to kind of figure out a way to believe in yourself to keep on going.
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And a lot of my writing is just, it's a way of me explaining myself to myself.
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Like what am I thinking? Why am I doing this? Where am I going with this? Yeah. That's what memoir work I mean for me that's how it feels.
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No that makes a lot of sense I've spoken with a lot of people and we all we all kind of agree that writing, whether it's poetry, or personal essays or it seems like just about any form of writing, is always, to some degree some form of self-exploration and trying to process ourselves and what we're feeling.
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Yeah, exploration is a good word. It really is.
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So I'm curious how difficult it's been for you to kind of work through, work through criticism since, since obviously that defending your thesis took a little bit of the air out of your sails.
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Is that something that you're still working on or are you really in a position now where you really hear very much constructive criticism?
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Well, fortunately, I have formed a little group of four women.
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We all were part of the same University of Kentucky writing group.
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So we had a lot of the same professors, and they're all creative nonfiction.
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And sharing each other's writing.
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And hearing other people who I admire, you know, who I like their writing and hearing what they're doing, and then having them give me good feedback on my writing has been real helpful and has sort of started me again.
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And as I mentioned, I went to Valencia this summer, to Spain, and I just started like a little travel log, you know, and everything was so new and exciting that every day I had like something, you know, to write about.
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And it was wonderful and I went back to pen and and paper which was how I learned to write and I found that it's the perfect speed for me like somehow it's a lot of work because then you have to get it into your computer but there was something so satisfying about writing longhand...
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That I, you know, I put together about 40 pages while I was there, which is a lot for me.
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I'm kind of a one and a half page writer, which has also been a little bit of a problem.
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I'm fast. I've always gotten that people both admire it and criticize it of like how quickly I tell a story, you know, so.
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Ah, but if I'm not mistaken, you write a lot of flash fiction, don't you?
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Right, it's flash fiction. You know, and part of going to school is learning that term, that that actually is a genre that's, you know, acceptable.
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Very much so. I'm a little surprised you've gotten so much pushback on it.
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It's probably most of the pushback is in my head, you know.
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So I'm assuming, based on your program of study, that you have written fiction and nonfiction.
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Do you see much of a difference between those two?
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I actually am terrible at writing fiction. Really? And I had to take fiction classes.
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And when I did, I would tell my teachers, I don't make stuff up. I don't have to.
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I feel like my life sort of reads like fiction because, yeah, you know, I've done a lot of different things. I've traveled.
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Like, for instance, when I was in my 20s, I hitchhiked to Mexico.
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Oh, good Lord.
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Pregnant with a toddler. So, yes, I know. I saw your face.
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So for me to make stuff up, I don't really need to. I can just tell you what I did, you know, and that's kinder.
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And you lived to tell us about it.
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Right. I was living in the Haight-Ashbury in the 70s, you know, in the late 60s and the 70s. So my life is, I was a back-to-the-lander.
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You know, raising our own food in Kentucky.
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So I've had all these varied experiences.
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I've had five children, and they provided me with lots of, you know, stuff to write about.
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So fiction for me was just, and maybe it's because it didn't appeal to me, but when I would try and make stuff up, it just sounded weird to me.
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I admire other people who can do it, but it wasn't my strong, it wasn't my strength at all.
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Well, it sounds like you don't read all that much fiction either, do you?
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Uh-uh, I don't.
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So that makes sense.
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Although I have read fiction, another one of my favorite writers is Annie Proulx.
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I read The Shipping News and was just blown away. And she writes a story about a man, and she's very good at it.
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I think what I loved about her writing and what grabbed me so hard was she didn't follow the rules as far as punctuation and sentence structure.
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That was thrilling to me, that it was okay to do that.
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And I do, you know, occasionally my stuff is not grammatically correct. Yeah.
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So, got a little bit of a rule breaker in you there.
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Yes. Well, you know, you hitch hike to Mexico with your kids.
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That's just an example of a rule breaker.
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And I'm still breaking them. Have you tried your hand at poetry?
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Because I know that that's a very common thing in poetry.
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A little bit. I have, and I appreciate poetry.
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I read poetry mostly for, you know, just sort of a way to calm myself, a way to relax and...
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You know, it's kind of like watching a sunset for me, is to read some poetry.
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That's a really nice way of putting it, yeah.
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And again, I feel like it's not my genre.
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And it was interesting to me in the writing program, so many people did poetry.
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And it almost feels like maybe it's less intimidating. You know you can hide a lot of stuff in poetry instead of revealing it. Yeah.
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I don't necessarily feel a need to hide. I don't know why I don't but I I don't
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So what stories are you working on now?
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Well I'm still editing the piece I wrote this summer in Valencia and it's you know it'll be like 40 pages and I'm not sure it's sort of a strange length. Maybe I'll chop it up and, you know, try.
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I am... another nice thing about being with this small group of women writers is they're getting published and they're giving me a lot of suggestions of where to send my stuff and how to get published.
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Have you found that it's more challenging to find places to submit nonfiction work than fiction or poetry?
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Well, like I said, I haven't submitted much, so it's all kind of back-burnered, and I do feel like at this age, I need to get serious. If I'm going to get published, I better get on it.
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I won't say anything about that. I do know a place, though, that their submissions open in just a couple of weeks.
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Oh, well, please let me know. And I don't know how I found emergence, whether you found me, you know, or I found you.
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But there was something about the name of your publication, Emergence.
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I thought, oh, I'm an emerging, you know, writer.
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So I'm going to send this in. And like I said, I had no expectations when I sent it off, and it was a really old piece.
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I had just, with my little writing group, I had been searching for, you know, things to submit.
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And when I found that piece, I had totally forgotten the incident and totally forgotten that I'd written about it.
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But as I read it, I said, oh, this is good, you know?
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And I read it to my group and they were like, oh, my God, yeah, you need to, you need to, you know, submit that to something.
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And I found your publication and it worked.
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Yes, it did. We are very glad you found our publication.
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Thank you. Thank you.
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Isn't it interesting how you can go back and look at a piece that you wrote a while ago and kind of see it with a different perspective?
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It's wonderful. It's wonderful. And I'm hoping, you know, like I said, my thesis was for some reason so disappointing to me that I put it away and I basically never wanted to see it again.
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And so now I feel like enough time has passed. I need to get that out again and look with new eyes.
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You know, it's my story. It's my memoir.
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And, uh, yeah.
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So I heard that you might have a little bit of work for us that you would be willing to read. Is that, is that true?
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Sure. Sure. I pulled this out.
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I'll just start. I was practicing Spanish at the time, so I called this Domingo, which is Sunday.
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[Reading redacted from transcript - It's great go listen!] The end.
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Oh, yes. I enjoyed that, Dorothy.
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Thank you.
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You have a lyrical way of writing that's really beautiful.
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Thank you. One thing I did hear in my college workshops was people recognized my voice.
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They're like, oh, I would know that was you anywhere.
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Which I felt as a strength, because I feel like a lot of times, you know, people will say, oh, you need to find your voice.
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And I was always like, no problem.
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I found my voice a long time ago, and there it is.
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I can't change it. That's why I said I can't do fiction. It's just, I'm just writing what I think.
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Do you have any stories still inside that like a specific a specific story that you've wanted to share that you've wanted to get out and write and you just haven't been able to yet?
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I don't think so. I don't think so. I mean, I have been writing since I was in my mid-40s, and I'll be 80 next year.
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So I've got a lot of stories.
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And I've written them. And actually, that was something I noticed is like, I keep telling the same stories over and over, you know, like old people do.
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So you know I just need to polish them up and figure out how to put them together and then start submitting them. Sending them off. See what happens.
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There you go. Well eMerge is open for general submissions starting October 1st...
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so if you want to pull some stuff out and uh and polish it up. I know a place.
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Thank you. Thank you. That makes me feel great.
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And definitely, definitely listen to your writing group.
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You do have, I mean, granted, as much as we would love you to just keep sending work to us, there are other options out there. And I'm sure that there are other audiences who would love to get a piece of you as well.
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Thank you. Thank you, Aubrey.
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Well, we don't have a whole lot of time left. Do you have any kind of social media presence that you would want people to be aware of? Or is there anywhere else that people can find you besides eMerge?
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You know, interestingly enough, I've been hearing about Substack, and I thought about having a Substack account, and I started to get nervous that people might copy my work.
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Like take it without my permission, so I didn't do it.
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Early on, I used to have a blog. I wrote a blog for a while, and again, I kind of let that drop.
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I mean, I was an early blogger. And I still had an AOL account. Yeah.
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And it's still out there somewhere.
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I was going to say, I know someone who has an AOL account.
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My only media presence is my Facebook and my Instagram. But I don't put my writing up there.
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That is fair. I know a lot of people who are pretty security sensitive about that kind of thing. It's justifiable.
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Yeah.
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Well, and also it counts as publication. So if it's... you have to be careful what you're what you're posting on social media because once it's up there it's it's published and you won't be able to submit it to other places.
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I learned that after submitting to emergence that you know this this could be the only time I I get to put this story out there so there's a lot to learn still...
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And I'm learning as I go. And even agreeing to do this, this morning I said to myself, why did I do this to myself?
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Hopefully it hasn't been that bad.
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Oh, it's been wonderful. And I feel like I have a new friend in you, you know.
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Aw, well, thank you.
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I've met someone that I like. So that's always good.
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Trust me, the writing community is way friendlier than a lot of people think it is.
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I agree with you. I think we all understand how difficult it is, how lonely it is.
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It can be.
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It's you and your computer or you and your pen.
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And sometimes it can be hard delving into yourself and pulling some of this stuff out and excavating it and then having to deal with it once it's there.
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Well, like I said, that seems to be my strength is I really kind of don't care.
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And even with my children, you know, I remember my son said, well, when can we read your thesis? And I said, do you want to hear about your mom's sex life?
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And he was just like, no.
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Then you might not want to read it.
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There you go. So, you know, some things kids just don't need to hear about from their mothers.
00:29:51.960 --> 00:30:01.109
And I think Anne Lamott says, if you wanted me to write nice things about you, you should have thought about that, you know, the way you treated me.
00:30:03.269 --> 00:30:04.509
Exactly.
00:30:06.990 --> 00:30:11.589
Well, on that happy note, we're going to wrap things up today.
00:30:11.730 --> 00:30:12.289
All right.
00:30:12.930 --> 00:30:15.759
Dorothy, thank you. This has been delightful. I've enjoyed it.
00:30:16.019 --> 00:30:19.130
Thank you. Me too. I'm surprised that I did enjoy it.
00:30:20.480 --> 00:30:22.769
Well, I'm glad we can be surprising. All right.
00:30:23.259 --> 00:30:30.420
We hope you've enjoyed today's episode of eMerge Unchained with our host, the eMerge Literary Magazine's editor, Aubrey Green. The eMerge Unchained podcast is brought to you by eMerge Literary Magazine. Our producers are Charles and Sandra Templeton. Our website designer is Cat Templeton. Thank you again for joining us for eMerge Unchained and remember we'll be here to celebrate the courage it takes to put words into the world. So keep writing. Until next time.