Susannah Felts
Photo by Heidi Ross
For a long time now, Nashville has been a city blessed with every resource a writer could ever desire — as long as you’re a songwriter. Although great writers from Robert Penn Warren to Tiana Clark have called Nashville home, there have been precious few non-academia resources dedicated to building a community for writers.
In 2014, writers and Nashville natives Susannah Felts and Katie McDougall shook that up when they founded The Porch Writers Collective, a nonprofit literary center offering classes, events, and community to the city’s writers. In the years since, it has grown to be a powerful resource and a rallying point for writers in search of kindred spirits, including immigrant and refugee writers, and at-risk youth.
Susannah Felts already had an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a published novel under her belt when she and McDougall started the Porch, and she has published essays and fiction in The Oxford American, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Guernica, Longreads and more.
When we caught up to talk, her piece Notes on a Christmas Bombing was just about to appear in Joyland.
“It’s about the December 25 bombing in downtown Nashville,” she says. On Christmas morning 2020, a suicide bomber detonated an RV-full of explosives on Nashville’s 2nd Avenue, ravaging blocks of the historic district and disrupting multiple city services. It was a grim and deeply strange event.
“It's also about just that weird time of year,” she adds. “It's a personal essay that covers that moment, that week after it happened. When they were trying to figure out who did it. That was a depressive moment for me, and I think it was for a lot of people. And so it's about thinking about how I talk to my daughter about those feelings, and what are my hopes and dreams for her.”
Felts first came to many readers’ attention in 2008 with the publication of her first novel, This Will Go Down on Your Permanent Record, a compelling coming-of age tale about a teen girl growing up in Nashville, hanging out with the burnouts at Dragon Park (depending on when the story takes place, I may have been one of those burnouts), and making friends with a glamorously rebellious girl. The two test each others’ limits, eventually pushing one another too far.
The novel was born as a short story that Felts wrote in graduate school and then gradually expanded over the years after getting her degree. “It was very messy,” she says of turning a 20-page short story into a novel. “It was a matter of taking those characters in that setting, and trying to make them make them live in the world a little bit more and think about what other conflicts or what set series of conflicts can I put them through. How can I develop their characters and their relationship in such a way that it makes for a a compelling narrative?”
“I've just recently finished a novel that I did not write that way,” she adds. “The new book is called The Come Apart — at least that's the title that I've had on it for a few years. And it is a basically a prodigal daughter story about a musician, sort of an indie musician who, as her band is starting to fall apart, gets the news that her father has died suddenly, and she blows up her life, and moves home, and tries to restart her creative life as a baker. And at the same time, reconnect with people from her past. It’s really it's all about me trying to make a life as an artist in late capitalism. It's also very much about family relationships, father/daughter relationships, concepts of home and loss.”
While she’s shopping that novel to agents, Felts keeps a full slate of work with The Porch and carves away at her writing practice.
Art and capitalism have a very complicated relationship, as we all know. One of its most insidious aspects is the way it distorts our ideas of “success.” Is artistic success connected to money? To attention? At what point do we get our idea of success to align with what’s healthy for us as human beings?
“To use a cliché, I'm not getting any younger,” Felts laughs. I have [to ask] what is my life really about? You know, is this one particular artistic project the thing I want to devote the very small amount of time I have for my own creative work to? Or do I just move on? Do I try to do something else? What is it lighting me up inside? All of these things come to come into play. It's about your very idea of what makes life worth living.”
Our conversation turns to the practice of writing — always deeply personal and always jealously protected, especially with the constantly shifting demands and interruptions of life.
“It's not always been a process that was very constructive,” Felts confesses. “But I think I'm getting better at all that, and I have noticed tendencies that work for me … in the last year and a half, I've gotten really interested in ritual. I do think it's kind of a trend, but it's a useful trend. One thing that I did when I was working on [Notes on a Christmas Bombing] back in the winter, I would sit down in the morning — I try to work in the mornings, because if I don't, it's probably not going to happen. And I usually only have about half an hour. And so I’d sit down, and I was doing this thing where I would draw a sigil. I would I come up with a phrase — I can even show you some of my sigils that have been taped to the wall — I’d come up with a phrase that would be my little intention for the day, and then I would draw my sigil. And then I would trace it onto this tracing paper. And so then I would pull a card from my oracle deck. And I would read that, and then I would set my little timer on my phone for 25 minutes, and I would just start writing.
“I try to keep early drafts very exploratory,” she adds. “I used to get stuck on trying to make the sentences right, and every time I sat down to write, I would go back and revise what I'd already done. I just don't want to do that anymore. I really want to be able to get in there and be fairly messy, and explore ideas, and not self-edit, not self-censor, for a good long while before I then print all that gobbledygook out and read it over, and circle things and star things and think, ‘okay, there's something here that I can pull out of this mess.
“I am trying to write more loosely and without overthinking and being worried about like, ‘where's this going? This doesn't make any sense.’ It's hard to tune out that critic.”
The Porch provides a grounding community for Felts and a multitude of writers. Its success is no small feat.
“I am certainly proud of the way it has nurtured authentic community among Nashville writers, but if I'm being completely honest, I'm also really damn proud that, eight years later, the organization not only exists at all, but has grown by nearly 25% every year, and is positioned to thrive into the future. I started with $1,500 of my own money invested in branding — that’s it — and a big idea, and here we are.
“Katie and I have really worked our asses off, and for an idea that, in the beginning, got a lot of confused squints, or questions about how our ‘writing group’ was going. A lot of people didn't understand what we envisioned, and to this day I think a lot of folks think it's just a part-time passion project or something for us. It is most definitely a job, a full-time one, and we have poured ourselves into it, coming from a place where we knew next to nothing about arts leadership to where we stand now. I'm really proud of how much I've learned and grown in this role, and I'm proud of how many people whose talents and good energies we've help lift up into the public eye through this work — our beloved teachers, everyone who has read or performed at an event, the folks behind Versify / Poetry on Demand, and so on. I'm proud that we're a woman-led nonprofit and the largest organization of our kind in the mid-south, maybe even the whole Southeast at this point. It feels really good to have created something that engendered all of that, and it's exciting to think about what might be to come.”
As with any artist conversation in the past 18 months, we find ourselves talking about art right now — does it matter? What’s it for?
“Art is always sustaining for the artist, or in its best form, it should be,” she says. “Sometimes art can be hard. You know, it can be a very difficult, lonely process, too. It can have its bad days, but overall it's a practice. Writing is a practice, art is a practice that in the end nourishes the artist, and is valuable for the artist. And especially at a time when we feel uncertainty, or grief, or frustration, or isolation, it is a way to channel and process those feelings. Every single day, you can find countless examples of the way art that is entering the marketplace is reflecting the world that we live in, or speaking back to it, or amplifying voices that need to be heard. There's countless examples of that happening.”
“It excites me, you know,” she concludes. “I think, ‘wow, that's how I want to measure my times.’ What is the art of this period? When we look back 15 years from now, we're gonna listen to the songs, and we're going to watch the films that came out of this time — and that show us something about ourselves.”
