Design Your Life Around Writing: An Interview with Guinevere Turner
Turner is a screenwriter, film director, actress, and now author of a debut memoir, When the World Didn’t End.
Tamara MC interviews Guinevere Turner
Turner is a screenwriter (American Psycho, The Notorious Bettie Page), film director, actress, and now author of a debut memoir, When the World Didn’t End. Turner spent the first eleven years of her life (1968-1979) in n urban hippie commune with approximately a hundred adults and sixty children. Like other cults, there was an “Us versus Them” mentality, medical care was restricted, children were homeschooled, and girls were chosen to be brides by thirteen or fourteen. The group was apocalyptic and believed the world would end—members would be taken to Venus via UFO.
Like Turner, I grew up in a community with similar cultic thinking, but mine was Sufi. I sat down with Turner over Zoom and asked her craft questions.
Tamara MC: What’s the definition of a writer to you?
Guinevere Turner: I always ask people who want to be a writer, “Have you ever written anything?” All you have to do to be a writer is write a bunch of stuff down. Ta da, you’re a writer. What do you need to do to be a good writer? Who knows. One of the many things you must do to be a successful writer, whatever success means, is never to stop. You have to know there will be times when you feel like you have nothing to say, that people are ahead of you, that people don’t understand you, or that you’re uninspired. Or blah, blah, blah. But it doesn’t matter. To be a real writer, who lives the writer’s life, is to know you’ll never quit. And that’s hard. It’s hard for me.
TM: What does the “writer life” include or look like besides writing?
GT: I have an excuse to do anything in the name of experience. By anything, I mean engaging with other people’s work, visual and in all forms of writing, television shows, and movies. It’s all inspiration. I laugh because Proust famously locked himself in a room for 15 years to write Remembrance of Things Past and wasn’t engaging with other people’s work. He was aggressively not. And he wrote a good series of books. So, to each his own, but it’s crucial, and I wish someone had told me this when I was younger. It took me until my 40s to realize this.
TM: What’s your advice for creating a writing life?
One, you can’t wait for inspiration. You have to design your life around writing. So you’re always writing, not saying, “Oh, maybe I’ll write today. I should put on my beret and smoke in a café.” Inspiration, as a concept, is sabotaging because we think there’s this elusive thing we can’t control. Give up on the idea of inspiration. Just always be writing.
Two, this is the one I really wish someone had told me. Half of your job is to find your practice. My friend Don does a thing with a timer, which sounds crazy, but he writes for one hour daily. I have other friends who can only write with music on or can only write in a loud cafe full of people, which is unthinkable to me. I’m way too much of a distracted monkey.
Figure out who you are. What does the writer need? When is she most creative? What disrupts her writing? Then build a life around the writer. Treat her like she is the moneymaker of the house. What snacks does she like? Will she feel rewarded by a hot shower? But she’s only allowed one if she writes x number of words or gets to a certain goalpost.
Half of the writer’s life is finding your practice. Then the rest is that when you’re not writing, you’re setting up your life so that you can have everything you need when it’s time. There are no excuses, like, where’s my chair? Where’s my coffee? Where’s my pen? Treat the writer like another person. I didn’t know that. I realized I’m the best and most clear-headed in the morning before speaking with anyone and before any practical thing distracts or frustrates me. I wish someone had told me that when I was 20. I spent a good 20 adult years being all over the place, often being late on deadlines or spending half of my writing energy stressed out because my circumstances weren’t right. If you’re committed, you’re committed.
You must figure out who you are as a writer. Part of that is letting go of romanticized ideas of how writers you love wrote. I was very interested in other people’s processes, and it was fun to try them on. But you need to realize you’re unique with your unique processes.
TM: You said in your memoir that you dreamed of becoming a journalist. You were also good at spelling. Can you speak about those two things?
GT: Spelling came naturally to me, so I focused on it. It’s a compulsive thing to be good at and to get right. But it was also easy for me. My 11-year-old self wanted to write books, like those I loved at the time, A Wrinkle in Time, Little Women, or The Chronicles of Narnia. Then I realized that if you become president, you make little money. And it’s a tough job. I also started to realize I wanted to be on TV. That’s how I landed on journalism because you can be a writer and be forward-facing. As a teenager, journalism sounded like writing with the most integrity and the least self-indulgence. You’re doing something for and about other people.
TM: In the opening of your memoir, you wrote about the power of writing.
GT: Writing to me is like breathing. It’s a survival tool. To paraphrase Joan Didion, We write to discover what we think. Writing brings clarity. So it’s a friend, a blanket, a compulsion. It’s therapeutic, but I’m hesitant to say that because there was a lot of trauma in writing this book. People said, “This must have been cathartic.” I don’t know. It may be, so I’ve kept an open mind. But in writing this memoir, I re-traumatized myself but with purpose.
Writing is the one thing I’m good at, aside from crocheting. Writing isn’t even my profession. Or my art. Writing is an extension of me. But because it’s so automatic, it’s organic. It was a happy accident I was introduced to writing early on because I took to it like a fish to water.
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Tamara MC is a cult, child marriage, and human trafficking survivor/activist and cheerleads worldwide for girls and women to live free from gender-based violence. Her Ph.D. is in Applied Linguistics, and she researches how language is used to manipulate vulnerable populations. Tamara attended Columbia University for an MFA and has been published in New York Magazine, Salon, The Independent, Food 52, Parents, and Thrillist.
Feng-Feng Yeh became passionate about Chinese chorizo during the 2020 pandemic shutdowns. “Food is a carrier, a message to speak to people,” says Yeh, a multidisciplinary artist in Tucson, Arizona who previously worked as an executive chef in New York City. Some two years after she started exploring culinary historical records, she founded the Chinese Chorizo Project, a food festival and multicultural movement devoted to this distinctly Sonoran delicacy.
So, what is Chinese chorizo, exactly? A fusion food created by immigrant groups in the Sonoran desert from the 1880s to 1960s, Chinese chorizo is ground pork flavored with spices designed to appeal to Mexican clientele and sold by Chinese grocers. It’s related to Spanish chorizo, but is considerably spicier, uses Mexican chilies in place of smoked paprika, and is usually sold in bulk rather than links.
“Chorizo is a working class food made from the remains of whatever beast you’re getting your meat from. Whatever was discarded such as entrails or intestines, glands, liver parts, tendons, and tongue is ground into a meat-looking product,” explains Carlos Valenzuela, a Mexican and Indigenous Tucsonan mosaic artist who collaborated with Yeh during the festival.
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Yeh believes this sort of ingenuity is an important part of Tucson food culture. Born in New Mexico to Taiwanese immigrant parents, she moved to Arizona when she was four years old. One of few Asian American students in her school, she felt her childhood education had a Eurocentric lens. Through her own research, she learned that there were 100 Chinese-owned grocery stores in downtown Tucson in the 1940s. She believes those immigrants’ impact on local culture was largely ignored when the city was named a UNESCO City of Gastronomy in 2015. “The branding of Chinese food still has a stigma,” Yeh says.
Through her work with the Chinese Chorizo Project, Yeh aims to demonstrate how immigrant communities influence food and culture. It’s part of a larger movement to reclaim narratives about heritage cuisines, ranging from Chef Sheldon Simeon in Maui to Indigenous chef and activist Sean Sherman. It’s a powerful moment for historians, food professionals, and anyone who cares about the story behind what’s on their plate.
Jackie Tran, a food writer, photographer, and chef, created a signature Chinese chorizo for the inaugural Chinese Chorizo Festival in Tucson in October 2022. The sausage is pork-based, but Tran “omitted the filler from the original recipe, such as spam or hot dogs, and included guajillo pepper, chiltepin, and other complimentary spices, such as coriander seed and Chinese five spice,” he says.
Other local restaurants and chefs participated in the festival, too. Each received 15 pounds each of pork and vegan sausages to create one-of-a-kind recipes. Chef Miles Bartlett of 5 Points Market and Restaurant crafted a charred tamal sticky rice cake with a satay sauce made of burnt green chilis, Hibiscus tea, baby bok choy, and Maggi sauce. A Japanese-inspired food truck, Fatboy Sandos, served Chinese chorizo between two pieces of fluffy milk bread, perfectly halved and vacuum-sealed. They sold out before the first night of the festival ended.
Yeh developed a vegan Chinese chorizo with BOCA chef Maria Mazon, who was born in Tucson and raised in Sonora, Mexico. “I thought it would be really cool to have something accessible for most,” Yeh says. The vegan option gets its kick from Mexican chilies and Chinese hot mustard, and is made with ginger, garlic, black vinegar, fermented tofu, and ingredients sourced from local purveyors, including Sonoran sea salt from Desert Provisions plus mushrooms from Fungirls Fungi and Spencer’s Shroomery. Japanese sweet potatoes provide heft.
In advance of the festival, 600 pounds of chorizo, evenly split between pork and vegan, were processed at Forbes Meat Company, a local butchery shop that donated their space and equipment—another effort that Yeh appreciated. Part of the mission of activists like Yeh includes demonstrating the ways food helps create and sustain communities.
Art is another important component of the movement, says Yeh, who received a grant for the Chinese Chorizo Project from Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts. Valenzuela will build an 11-foot sculpture depicting two Chinese chorizo sausages made from cracked pieces of ceramic tile, glazed in red hues with names like Hot Tamale and Ruby Slippers. The individual links will represent the Mexican and Chinese communities, joined together to form a heart, and decorative details throughout speak to cultural ties, like Chinese calligraphy and the hummingbirds of the Yaqui people. “Mosaic murals are very interactive,” Valenzuela says. “You may see two big sausages from far away, but when you get closer, you’ll see symbols.”
The Chinese Chorizo Project plans to host a festival in Tucson later in 2023, as well as exhibitions and outposts in New York City and Los Angeles, Yeh says. Although there is no current date for when the sculpture will be built, the vision has now expanded to revamping a park as a sustainable space using native species of plants and desert materials like adobe. The sculpture will be the centerpiece of the park.
In Tucson and beyond, community is key for these culinary activists.
“In the last few years, the Chinese people took a real hit because of rumors spread about them,” says Valenzuela. “Mexican people have always been described as rapists, drug dealers, and gang members. This project will introduce people to our cultures and help them understand, we’re human too. The message here is that we’ve been interacting long before this mania.”
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