The Bookshop Podcast
The Bookshop Podcast
Exploring Mental Health and 80s High School Life with Author and Poet, David Ebenbach
In this episode, I chat with author and poet David Ebenbach about Possible Happiness, his latest teen and YA novel set in Philadelphia in the 80s.
What can a high school journey in the late 80s tell us about today's struggles with mental health and sexuality? Acclaimed author and academic David Ebenbach explores this question through the lens of his latest novel, Possible Happiness. Discover how David's personal experiences shape his characters and narrative, providing a deeply relatable and insightful look into the complexities of teenage life. Unpack the surprising classification of his novel as a YA book and understand the nuances behind the protagonist Jacob's experiences and challenges.
We also dive into the multifaceted world of David Ebenbach's career, from his poetry and short stories to his commitment to student-centered teaching at Georgetown University. Learn about his creative process, the importance of the arts in education, the therapeutic nature of reading, and the bittersweet emotions tied to an empty nest.
Enjoy,
Mandy
David Ebenbach
Possible Happiness, David Ebenbach
A Thousand Times Before, Asha Thanki
Les Fourmis (Empire of The Ants), Bernard Werber
Anne Carson Books
For Australian listeners, you can purchase books from yourbookstore.io
Hi, my name is Mandy Jackson-Beverly and I'm a bibliophile. Welcome to the Bookshop Podcast. Each week, I present interviews with authors, independent bookshop owners and booksellers from around the globe and publishing professionals. To help the show reach more people, please share episodes with friends and family and on social media, and remember to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to this podcast. You're listening to episode 268.
Speaker 1:David Ebenbach has been preoccupied with the human condition since 1972. Born and raised in the great city of Philadelphia, david wrote his first stories on a manual typewriter heavy enough to sink a ship. He's now, thankfully, a laptop user and the author of 10 books of fiction, non-fiction and poetry, winners of such awards as the Drew Hines Literature Prize and the Juniper Prize. His work, which has been set everywhere, from his hometown to the planet Mars, focuses on the hidden challenges and surprising beauty of living. David lives with his family in Washington DC and is the Assistant Director for Graduate Student and Faculty Programming at Georgetown University's Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship. In other words, he promotes student-centered teaching at Georgetown, where he also teaches courses on creative writing, literature, identity development and creativity. David's MFA in writing is from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and his PhD in psychology is from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Hi, david, and welcome back to the show.
Speaker 2:Oh, it's so nice to be back. I always love these conversations.
Speaker 1:I do too. It's fun speaking with you. One of the things I look forward to is what your background on your Zoom photo is going to look like, because we've gone from Mars landscapes I think there were cherry blossoms and now you have all this greenery. Looks like ivy, you know, kind of representing growth.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I hope it does. Yeah, I think the Zoom background is an opportunity for a little bit of self-expression. So yeah, I'll take that opportunity.
Speaker 1:Well, as you can see, my background is a very messy bookcase, but, as one author said to me, I'm very dubious of anybody with a tidy bookshelf. Yes, and I agree with her, I can pretty much find any book that I need quickly, whereas if it was tidy I don't think I could.
Speaker 2:I think it's more credible this way. I mean that you're actually a book person. Yeah, it's not like show books.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think the books are happy this way. Now for listeners who may not have tuned into our previous conversations, let's begin with learning about you, your work as a teacher and writing fiction, nonfiction and poetry.
Speaker 2:Well, I think writer is probably the identity that comes first to me and second and last and so on, I do think of myself first and foremost as a writer, and I do jump around. I love to write poetry, I love to write about the creative process. Short stories are maybe my favorite thing to write, but then novels novels too. I mean. It turns out that you need all of these different outlets to be able to capture all the things that are going on in your head and your heart, at least for me anyway. So there's that, and I'm also at Georgetown University where I am the assistant director for graduate student and faculty programming at the teaching center on campus, and that basically means I just I work with faculty and grad students to help them be the passionate, informed, skilled teachers that they want to be. I also teach there. I teach undergraduate courses in creative writing and a graduate course in creativity.
Speaker 1:And have you found that there is just as much excitement and enrollment for students wanting to study creative writing as, say, five or ten years ago?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I have found the same level. I'm in a kind of a weird situation because I teach it in what is essentially Georgetown's Jewish Studies Department. They decided they wanted more humanities there, which is great, because a Jewish studies department, if it doesn't have humanities, becomes all Holocaust and Middle East conflict. So it's not exactly like housing these in an English department where everyone's expecting to see creative writing. But I do get students and I haven't noticed any tailing off over the last few years.
Speaker 1:And is it the same for people wanting to learn how to teach creative writing?
Speaker 2:Well, I don't work specifically with any one department, so you know I work with people. I worked with somebody today who studies technology and war, and someone worked with a philosopher yesterday, and you know folks in biology, folks in history, from all over the campus, so it isn't necessarily particularly creative writing. Some of these are just principles that transcend any discipline, like building relationships in your classroom between you and students to help set up learning, giving students feedback that's helpful to them, and so on.
Speaker 1:Well, let's talk about your latest novel, Possible Happiness. It's a teen YA novel and I was so used to reading your poetry, which I adore.
Speaker 2:So my question is why this genre? And why now? Well, I have to say I have a long standing habit of having no idea what I'm doing, and that typically takes the form of not knowing what genre I'm apparently writing in. So you may remember, a few years ago, when my novel how to Mars came out so that's science fiction, and anybody would know that it's set on Mars. But I didn't realize that I was writing science fiction, and so I just thought I was writing about people, and so my agent sent that around, and he sent it to presses that were interested in sci-fi. And a total surprise to me In this case, a press picked it up and said well, we're going to put this novel out through our YA division. And I said oh really, is it YA fiction? And they informed me that indeed it was. I thought I was just writing about a kid growing up, although when you say it out loud it does kind of sound like it and do you remember when the story first came to you?
Speaker 2:I was at this retreat center in Virginia called the Porches, which is a wonderful place, and I had driven myself down there and was listening to music on the radio and I was hearing all this music from my youth and it was making me weirdly sad. You know, it wasn't this kind of happy nostalgia and I thought what's that about? And I'm very interested in writing into the difficult emotions. You know whatever's bothering me or making me uncomfortable. So I said, well, let's get in there. And this novel is set during the time period when I was a teenager. It's set at the same high school I went to. You know a lot of the same situations and he's going through some things that I went through and it really helped me to get a little bit under what was hard for me about some of my high school years, but also what was exciting. I mean, I think I hope the book is a blend of serious but also funny.
Speaker 1:It's definitely both for sure. Let's talk about the music from the 80s for a bit. Some people look back and say, oh my God, the 80s terrible, blue eyeshadow, big hair, you know crazy music. But I was living in England at the time, in London, and you have to remember that it was a very tumultuous time. We had Reagan and Thatcher. People were angry. I think the music reflects that, and when something like this happens in history, that's what happens. The music, the art, the writing, it all reflects what is going on in society at that time, and I actually loved the music from the 80s. I thought it was really fun, but it definitely reflected our emotions, as did the fashion, I think. What are your thoughts? Do you agree?
Speaker 2:I really do, and I think it is connected to the larger social political scene. You know, here in the States we were dealing with the Reagan era and you know then the first Bush era and so a lot of the music of the time that was kind of angry and aggressive. Maybe it's not surprising that that appealed to me. Nine Inch Nails is still one of my favorite bands to this day and it was almost a kind of a lifeline thrown to a kid. To have a song like Head, like a Hole to thrash around to and to get out some of the angry energy really was a kind of a gift to me. But yeah, it absolutely brings me back to that time period.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and even now, when we wear a t-shirt with a band name on it, it is an invitation for a conversation, right, yeah, and it's a statement of who we are Now in Possible Happiness. Are there any other similarities that Jacob shares with you? Yeah, I mean quite a lot. Is this a memoir, david?
Speaker 2:Right secretly, I mean, it's not right In the sense that I manipulated anything I needed to in order to make it work as a story. I combined people, I added people who didn't exist at all. I gave my my straight father, gay husband. You know, I like I did all kinds of things. He hasn't gotten his copy yet, so we'll see how that goes.
Speaker 2:So you know there's so many things that are changed and yet, you know, he went to the same school as me, at the same time I did. He listened to the same music. He had friends who were very similar to the friends I had. He had a very similar family situation. He lived in West Philly, just like me. He had a great sister, just like I do.
Speaker 2:There just were all sorts of similarities, but I think the most important one is that and this is really at the heart of the book is he discovered something in high school that I discovered also, which is, even if you're kind of a melancholy person, you can draw people to you through a sense of humor, which turns out to be both good news and bad news. So he discovers that I discovered it that if you draw your friends to you in that way, it's exciting and fun, but what about when you are sad and they're not prepared for that to be a side of you? Then what? And I think the book is to a certain extent about how you move past that first thing to something more complex.
Speaker 1:You must have had so much fun contacting all your friends from back at that time and just having conversations about life back then.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Let's go back to what you're talking about earlier with Jacob's father. He's a gay man living in Philadelphia. It was a complex situation in the 80s, perhaps not as complex as it would have been in San Francisco or in the middle of New York, but from your book I'm gathering it was a little different. For a businessman it was probably uncomfortable to be in a public situation and kiss another man or hold their hand, and this was dependent on where you were in the world.
Speaker 2:I think even in parts of New York, and I think even, as you say, to this day. I mean, I'm not sure I would walk all around Staten Island and hope for the best, but yeah.
Speaker 2:I misspoke earlier when I said gay husband. I mean, he has a partner who would be a husband in this day and age, but of course they couldn't have been back then. And that is one of the things that I'm definitely trying to do in the book is to give people a kind of before, after or, more likely, a before, during. So you see what it's like to be queer in the late 80s. You see, there's a lot about race in the book and gender religion In particular. There's a lot about mental illness and sort of not having the words for it because people weren't talking about it. And then here we are now.
Speaker 2:And like I say it's not after because, none of those things have really been dealt with in society in a fully meaningful way, but I do feel like we're in the conversation more than we used to be about race, about mental health, about sexuality, etc.
Speaker 1:Yeah, now possible happiness follows Jacob navigating through his junior year of high school and what he calls bad feelings or self-loathing. On page 209, you wrote quote Jacob felt like everything inside him was crashing together, end quote. And on page 213, quote how much the air weighed on him, end quote. The story leads up to a few pivotal moments that show Jacob falling into depression when you initially had the idea for his story. Was Jacob's depression at the core of the story, or was it more a coming-of-age story?
Speaker 2:Well, it started, as I say, with that sadness around the music, but I didn't know what that was and I didn't know if it was something about now or about then or both. And so I just started writing my way into the situation and I, like Jacob, had this moment in junior year where, all of a sudden, there was this social life and I had been, you know, not a loner quite before that, but just had maybe these couple of close friends, and now there was this big group and I thought, well, that's the heart of the action, so let's start talking about that. I realized that one of the issues was that you have this kid who has never been asked to think about mental health and yet has stuff going on. He doesn't have words for it, he doesn't really have a framework. He doesn't really have a framework, he doesn't know if it's acceptable to have a range of feelings like he does, and he doesn't really know where to turn. His mom is struggling, his sister is off at college, his dad's out of the house, his friends maybe don't want to hear it.
Speaker 2:So who do you talk to about this, and how much is this a thing that should be seen as normal, and how much should this be seen as a sign that he's broken? So that quickly became the focus of this book. It was really helpful for me to look back at those times through that lens of what did I not know then. That would have been so helpful to know, and I think people are much better young people are much better in this day and age and they know a lot more and they're more able to talk about things. There's less stigma and so on. But I hope, if young people do read this book, that there'll be some encouragement there of like, hey, you know, you're not alone. A lot of people go through stuff. It doesn't mean you're broken, it just means you're complex, and everybody's complex.
Speaker 1:Having taught AP art and theater to high school students, I've seen how important the liberal arts are in developing and supporting teens. As a university professor, what are your thoughts on the ever-decreasing funding of arts programs in education, and how do you see this affecting young adults?
Speaker 2:I mean it's terrible. I imagine you didn't expect me to say I'm all for it. No, it's atrocious. I saw a meme on Instagram that I thought was really funny and sobering at the same time. It said science without humanities makes Spider-Man villains and humanities without science makes Batman villains, which, if you spend a couple minutes with it, it kind of plays out. But I think the larger point being partial educations warp us and if you want to have a heroically whole personality that can understand not just how a thing works but also whether it should work and what it should be used for and who it affects and why we should care, if you have all of those pieces, then I think you can move in a really positive way through the world. And if you have some of the pieces, you know it's like having just a hammer and you're just going to hammer everything everywhere you go and it's a real shame. So I think the liberal arts should be understood the foundation for people growing up today.
Speaker 1:Well, I'm sure you and I could talk about this subject for hours and hours. One thing I will say is that I do believe that with a background in the arts we become better problem solvers for sure. When my students used to come into the room, especially in the art department sometimes they just didn't feel motivated to paint or draw I used to say to them look, whatever you're feeling, it's better out than in. I don't care if you write a word on the canvas, if you splash a color of paint, pick a color that goes with the mood you're feeling right now, but it's better out than in. Do something, just write that one word, anything. And nine out of 10 times it worked and they felt better. And, honestly, if they don't have that, I don't know how they cope.
Speaker 2:Right, you have to let it out somehow and I think things come out sideways, which is almost always destructive. I have done this assignment in my fiction class before. I do it pretty deep into the semester because we have to trust each other a lot for this to go well.
Speaker 2:But it's called Write the Story You're Not Allowed to Write.
Speaker 2:It's not, you know, something where you're giving a secret away from your family, unless you want to, I suppose.
Speaker 2:And it's not necessarily sex or violence, it's whatever would make the student nervous if their name was attached to this. It's like you know, I'm writing sympathetically, from the point of view of a character that I theoretically don't approve of. Or I'm this cynical person and I'm going to write this really earnest story that shows I actually do believe in some things. You know, whatever it is, and I give them an option that they can, a very benign alternative option, so they don't have to do this and I say and you can just hand it to me, or you can just write it for yourself and give me the other one and never have to look at it. But of course they produce some of their best writing that they've produced all semester long. They usually choose to bring it to the workshop and share it with everybody and they discover that shining the flashlight around in the dark places doesn't actually hurt you and in fact it makes you safer, because everything comes out in an intentional, constructive, productive way, and that's one of the ways that these outlets are crucial for people.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I have friends and relatives in the UK and they are concerned because so many of the creative programs, the liberal arts programs, are being pulled from universities.
Speaker 2:And all of the languages are getting hit pretty hard. You have a language that the school decides is not an important language, whatever that means. You know you're out. Schools are suffering serious budget crunches so I know they're facing some difficult choices, but you know we don't want to make choices that actually harm our students.
Speaker 1:That's the most crucial thing and those decisions are crucial to the stability of our communities, our society. Right, quite right. Let's go back to possible happiness. In the story, jacob is lucky in that he meets Leah. She sees the shadow of what he's dealing with daily depression. Sadly, many teens and young adults never feel seen and fall into the cracks of society, never getting the help they need. Did you witness these scenarios in your personal story of growing up in Philadelphia?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I certainly did. I mean, I saw the one case of it in the mirror, you know. And then I saw other cases of it in my family. I had friends at school who in retrospect were clearly dealing with eating disorders or anxiety and again, there just wasn't a way to talk about it where people were expecting to hear about it, thoughtful about it. You know you had to be tough, you had to be normal, whatever that means. So a lot of it slips through the cracks and I think some people manage to get through that, you know, and they're okay. But then they're going to need to hit therapy at some point to deal with all the stuff they've tucked away and all the scars that have happened.
Speaker 2:And I think it's great that we're in an era that normalizes talking about these issues. The only flip side to it is I was looking at some studies that show that if you give more attention to your anxiety or depression than it really needs from you, you can actually in a way, make things worse. So there are folks who are saying, let's say you're just a little sad one day, you don't have depressive disorder, but if you start thinking of it as depression, you can kind of get a cycle going there. So I feel like we're in stage two of a more than two-stage process where eventually we'll be able to get some nuance, like yeah, you're just sad and I'm here for you. The fact that you're sad, tell me what you're sad about, and someone else may be. Okay, there's something maybe a little more intense going on here. How can we be helpful with that?
Speaker 1:I'd love for there to be room for all the ways that people can be. I love what you said about putting the flashlight on and looking into all the dark places, but it can also mean looking into the lighthearted places too, the places of love and compassion and kindness. And, as I've said so many times, I truly believe that reading well-written fiction helps us become more empathetic towards others, because we're experiencing another's life through their eyes.
Speaker 2:I really agree. There's even some research to show this. So in my fiction writing class I share some of that research with my students and interestingly, it's really good writing that does that. You know, know, if you have very flat writing, if you're doing a lot of telling instead of showing sort of she was great, he was bad that people don't tend to the parts of their brain that would really feel that don't light up. But if you start describing textures and smells and things like that, then you will have the empathetic experience. So it's a real call for all of us to write more sensitively and to make it so that these lives are really palpable on the page.
Speaker 1:That's so true, david. Now tell me what are you currently reading?
Speaker 2:I'm reading a few books. I'm reading a book by Asha Tonki called A Thousand Times Before. She was a former student of mine at Georgetown and she's a wonderful writer. This is her debut novel and it's about a sort of multi-generational epic about women living in India and the United States and there's a kind of a magic realist element. I'm only partway through, but it's lovely so far. And then, weirdly, I'm reading two novels from the point of view of insects.
Speaker 1:Two books from the point of view of insects, yeah two at the same time.
Speaker 2:There's this book, les Faux-Mis, by Bernard Werber. It's a French novel about ants, and a lot of it is from the point of view of some ants. And then there's Laleen Paul has a book called the Bees, and all of it is from the point of view of bees, as far as I can tell, and I don't know how that happened, but I'm enjoying them all. And here we are. I do like to be in the middle of several things at once, if I can be.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't know why that is, but I'm the same and it's kind of exciting. Maybe it's the way our brains work, I'm not too sure. Someone mentioned the other day on the show when I asked her this question about what she was reading. She said in the morning it's always poetry, because that's how I like to start my day. She said it's like a tonic for her. She explained that she reads fiction in the evening, reads nonfiction during the day, because she doesn't want to read it at night, which makes perfect sense, right? Oh God, yes, especially these days. But I found it interesting about her little journey during the day, what makes her feel good and when she can cope with the daily news and all that kind of thing. Isn't that interesting?
Speaker 2:It's like a wine pairing. It's like it. Do well with this. Yes, it is, but probably better to do a book pairing than a wine pairing in the first thing in the morning. So I think the next book I read is going to be Ada Limon's Collected Poems, so I'm going to get back into poetry with that. I love her stuff.
Speaker 1:Yes, and I love Anne Carson too. My daughter-in-law turned me on to her and I love this book Glass, Irony and God. Oh yeah, she's great. And see, you know exactly where they are. Yes, I do Exactly. See, you know how much I love your poetry, David. Are you still writing poetry?
Speaker 2:I wrote one the other day. But just as things come up it's funny With fiction I'm pretty disciplined I sort of get my butt in the chair, work steadily. You know I have a whole system and with poetry I just try to provoke them to come out by reading poetry or living an interesting life, and then they come out. Whenever they come out, and sometimes I'm walking to work kind of writing them into the notes app on my phone, knowing I'm going to have to clean it up later. Other times I'm repeating the lines in my head if I can't even get to my phone. Yeah, it's much less predictable with the poems.
Speaker 1:The last time we spoke, David, the blossoms were out in DC. What's flowering out there now?
Speaker 2:There is always something flowering in DC. I mean, maybe not always, but yeah, the crepe myrtle in front of my building has its black grist hanging in it.
Speaker 1:Ours are flowering too, and they are absolutely stunning. Yes, fantastic.
Speaker 2:And then there are a ton of things where I actually just don't know the species but bushes and trees of various kinds, and some folks have some flowers going in their gardens as well, in the neighborhood DC. For all the problems we have here, most of which are imported from the people that you know, the people that get sent to us from other places as representatives and senators as tough as all of that is, it's such a beautiful place, the most beautiful place I've ever lived, I think.
Speaker 1:Yes, dc is a beautiful, beautiful city and you have the Library of Congress, so that's a plus. David, congratulations on your book Possible Happiness. It's a wonderful, wonderful story and I wish you all the best with it, thank you.
Speaker 2:Thanks for talking to me about it.
Speaker 1:It was tough for me to read in places, but it brought me home to times in my own teenage years that were extremely complicated. But it's a beautiful story, thank you.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much. That means a lot to me, frankly.
Speaker 1:And you take care of yourself over these next few months. You, like many other parents right now, are experiencing that emptiness syndrome and you're going to be okay. It just takes time. You're going to experience every emotion under the sun and that's okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah, here's hoping and I'm also going to not be okay and that has to be okay too.
Speaker 1:You've been listening to my conversation with author and poet David Ibenbach about his new book Possible Happiness. To help the show reach more people, please share episodes with friends and family and on social media, and remember to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to this podcast. To find out more about the Bookshop Podcast, go to thebookshoppodcastcom and make sure to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to the show. You can also follow me at Mandy Jackson Beverly on X, instagram and Facebook and on YouTube at the Bookshop Podcast. If you have a favorite indie bookshop that you'd like to suggest we have on the podcast, I'd love to hear from you via the contact form at thebookshoppodcastcom. The Bookshop Podcast is written and produced by me, mandy Jackson-Beverly, theme music provided by Brian Beverly, executive assistant to Mandy Adrian Otterhan and graphic design by Frances Farala. Thanks for listening and I'll see you next time you.