The Craft of Posing Naked on the Page: Barrelhousing with Philly Conference Craft Workshop Leader Paulette Perhach
In the next few days we’ll be highlighting some of the presenters for our upcoming conference in Philadelphia on October 5 at Temple University. Today we’re talking with Paulette Perhach, who will be presenting a craft workshop on “The Craft of Posing Naked on the Page.”
Barrelhouse: In describing your session for the conference, "The Craft of Posing Naked on the Page," you say you want to help essay writers be vulnerable on the page. I'm wondering how you think about vulnerability when it comes to writing, and why that feels like such an important part of essay-writing to you?
Paulette Perhach: To me, the vulnerability is a metric in essays in a way it is almost nowhere else. It’s a tension on the line in the story. When a vulnerable story is being read out loud to a room, nobody moves. Something is happening. Risk. Reward. In a world that’s becoming more and more surface, the writer is free-diving deep. That is the art of the essay.
One of the challenges of writing about one's own experience, it seems to me, is figuring out what's unique or interesting about that experience--and how to convey that on the page. Do you have advice for writers who might be worried they don't have interesting stories to tell, or who aren't sure what "material" from their lives they should be writing about?
As one of my students from my personal essay class recently said, “I realized so many more things than I’d though are write-about-able.” The two essays I’ve written that have gone viral to more than 2 million readers each are about the fact that you should save money and about a hard break up. Tales as old as time. We don’t need you to say something that’s never been said before. We need you to be the storyteller of this place and time.
If you could give one piece of writing or publishing advice to your younger self, what would it be?
Just read, write, and learn for the first three years. Then start submitting your work.
Finally, a question that Barrelhouse is legally required to ask everyone: What's your favorite Patrick Swayze movie?
Dirty Dancing, baby!
Paulette Perhach’s writing has been published in the New York Times, Vox, Elle, The Washington Post, Slate, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Marie Claire, Yoga Journal, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Hobart, and Vice. She’s the author of two million-reader viral essays.
Her book, Welcome to the Writer's Life, was published in 2018 by Sasquatch Books, part of the Penguin Random House publishing family, and was selected as one of Poets & Writers' Best Books for Writers.
She blogs about a writer’s craft, business, personal finance, and joy at welcometothewriterslife.com and leads meditation and writing sessions through A Very Important Meeting. She serves writers as a coach and a speaker on the topics of creativity, writing, and business.
Hugo House, a nationally recognized writing center in Seattle, awarded her the Made at Hugo House fellowship in 2013. In 2016, she was nominated for the BlogHer Voices of the Year award for her essay, “A Story of a Fuck Off Fund,” which is anthologized in The Future is Feminist from Chronicle Books, along with work by Roxane Gay, Mindy Kaling, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Caitlin Moran, and Audre Lorde.
In 2021, she was selected as a Jack Straw Fellow. In 2022 she celebrated a nomination from Barrelhouse for Best of the Net. Her work has been included in round-ups from Memoir Monday, the Aspen Institute, Fortune’s Broadsheet, and Girlboss. She shared the honor of a 2021 Washington State Book Award for the anthology Alone Together: Love, Grief, and Comfort in the Time of Covid-19 as a contributor.