With a “C”: A Conversation with Catie Disabato
by Gemma Brand-Wolf
Catie Disabato, author of The Ghost Network, has a powerful and intimate voice, both in person and in her writing. When she speaks, it is with confidence and fire, with passion and compassion. In the small Starbucks of the Santa Monica Barnes and Noble, Catie considered buying an interesting, eccentric drink, like a Berry Sangria Herbal Tea. “Of course,” she said, “When we get up there, I’ll just end up buying an iced coffee,” (which she did). As we waited in line, I asked her about her experience with the spelling-challenged stereotype of Starbucks baristas. She laughed and explained the many different ways that people attempt to spell her name — with a “K,” with a “y,” but never correctly. With my own unusual name, I completely resonated with Catie’s resigned and humorous reaction to the complete lack of spelling abilities that so often butcher the unusual. Catie herself is much like the spelling of her name in that she is unapologetically unique. In The Ghost Network, Catie seeks to represent the underrepresented, to expose the insecurity and doubt behind obsession, and to illustrate the many levels of pop culture. In our world of social hierarchy and convention, Catie Disabato unravels the pecking order and describes the necessity of being able to understand and love yourself in the face of disconformity.
SOD: Why do you think storytelling is important?
CD: F**k. Okay, let me think for a second… I think storytelling is important for a lot of reasons. I think one, it’s our way of passing cultural information to each other. But I think it’s also a way of changing, sort of, the cultural landscape. The most obvious example that I always think of is that we had a lot of black presidents in movies before we had a black president in the White House. See what I mean?
It’s our way of kind of projecting a world that we want to live in into our world as a way to influence it. That, I think, can be a really important aspect of storytelling. Basically saying, “Some things that are going on right now in our world are f**ked up and we can actually, universally work toward it so that this isn’t happening.”
So my book is about two women who are lesbians and they fall in love with each other. I’m a queer writer too. [There are] always stories about women disappearing and men trying to find them. And I wanted to specifically queer that narrative and have it be a story about a woman disappearing and women finding her. And having these women be queer. So that’s one way that storytelling can be important. But also I think it’s our way of passing on knowledge to each other.
It can be a way of caregiving between people; being able to entertain someone. That’s very important for happiness. You know, when there’s things going wrong in our lives or in the world, you want to focus on that, you want to focus on radical change, but you can’t be angry and sad all the time.
I mean, it’s destructive. And storytelling is a way to make other people happy and kind of give them a reason to have happiness in their lives.
SOD: How did you find your voice? How did you decide what you wanted to write about?
CD: I always had a hard time in college writing short stories because I always thought in bigger, longer narratives. I tried really hard to write a short story. A lot of the way that writers are trained at a university level is learning how to write a short story. And I had a really hard time with that.
So a part of finding my voice and by journey was stopping beating myself up about that and coming to terms with the fact that that wasn’t natural for me and that just because my writing doesn’t work that way doesn’t mean that I’m a bad writer.
And I know that I could have gone to grad school, gotten an MFA, and spent two years working really hard and learning how to write a short story, and I would have probably had enough raw talent to be alright at it. But it wouldn’t have made me happy. I figured out that it wouldn’t have made me happy. And it took me a long time to, one, come to terms with the fact that it wasn’t my right style, and two, to understand that it wasn’t going to make me happy. And to accept both of those things. So sort of by the end of my college career, I thought I was going to start writing a novel during my senior year. So I sat down and started writing it, and I was having a really hard time with it because a lot of the writers that I knew in school, a lot of my friends, were writing about themselves. And I write about myself too, but they were writing literally about, if something happened at a party, they would write a story about something happening to them at a party, right? And I didn’t want to do that. So I was radically writing about things that weren’t about me at all. I was reacting against it. And the problem with that was that I wasn’t putting any of my emotional truth into either. It wasn’t things that I cared about, it wasn’t situations that moved me. So when I started writing The Ghost Network, the reason that I started writing about it was because I love pop music, I love pop stars. I was writing about something I care about, and I was also writing about obsession, and what pop culture means, and how it can enrich but also destroy, and all of those things. I was so passionate about it that my real, emotional life was being put in my work for the first time. Luckily, because I had good teachers and I was in a good program, I was able to recognise that, even though I wasn’t writing about my day to day life, I was writing about myself, I was writing about what I cared about, and what I thought, and what was important to me. And that was how I found my voice. I realized that I’m never going to be that writer that writes about what she did last Thursday, but I need to find those things that I care about, those things that really move me.
SOD: Sometimes I have all these little, tiny ideas that I really like, and I want to pull them and turn them into something. But how do you choose which ones you take and turn into something bigger?
CD: For the little ideas, it takes a long time, but you learn to distinguish between what can be the idea for a short story and what could be the idea for a novel. I think it’s hard to figure that out. The way that I think about it is that a short story is about one problem, one question, one topic. And a novel is about a lot of interrelated problems, questions, or topics. So if you’re thinking about a little idea that you have, and it seems like that one question, that one problem is blooming into a lot of different ones, then it seems like you have an idea for a novel. But if it seems like “I have this one thing, this one problem, this one question, this one topic,” and actually, in your mind, you’re zeroing in on it, you’re focusing on that one thing, that that might be your short story. That being said, I wrote my book over five years, and I just kept putting stuff in it that I cared about and that I liked. If I would get kind of obsessed with something or interested in something, I was spending so much time thinking about my novel that usually it would end up being something that would work in relatively easily. So my book is about a pop star that disappears, but it’s also about trains in Chicago. I had just moved here and I was missing Chicago so I was thinking about it all the time. And I wanted to return to it in my work, so that got in there. You know, I was basing it on a pop star that didn’t live in Chicago, and I could have very easily set the book in LA, where I was living. But, you know, I was thinking about Chicago, and I wanted to put it in. There’s probably a million other examples. If you’re working on a big thing, usually the things you’re thinking about are interrelated and it can all be brought in.
SOD: How do you weave all of these little things in, all of these things that mean so much to you, into a piece of work so that other people can understand an overarching theme?
CD: I think that the answer to that is that you find that in revision, not in your first draft of writing. If you get a sense that something fits in the novel, something you’re interested in, just put it in. I’m trying to think of a good example from my book… When I was starting to write this book, I was obsessed with pop stars, but I was also reading this nonfiction book that I just picked up about the advent of surgical medicine in London. Which is a crazy, weird, off-the-wall topic, right? But at the time that people started doing surgical medicine in England, was also the same time as the Age of Exploration, when, you know, they were sending Columbus out on ships to go find America, and people in continental Europe were discovering other nations and doing their colonialist thing that they did. So the people that were going on these expeditions in ships were bring back all of these really interesting animals. You know, dead animals that’d they’d never seen before in England. And the people that were examining those animals were the surgeons. So that’s how these surgeons were connected to the Age of Exploration. The Age of Exploration is about ships and map-making, so through that, just using the internet, I got interested in ships and map-making. And at that time, maps were very trendy, and people were posting them on Tumblr all the time. Then that, somehow, on the internet, connected me to Guy Debord, who is a French philosopher that was very concerned with art and the city. And I realized that he wrote a lot about celebrity culture. So that brought me back to the pop star, and that’s how I ended up weaving this element of a French philosopher from the sixties into a book about a pop star disappearing today. But it wasn’t like I knew from the very beginning that French philosophy was going to work with my story. But I knew that the pop star needed a secret and that Guy Debord was going to be part of that secret that she had. I just tried it. I was just like I’m going to try this and see if it works. Take a leap of faith. And luckily, in that case it did work. It ended up working really well that he was incorporated into her secret. But there were other things that I tried that didn’t work. When I was reading through it and revising it, I found a lot of tangents on things that I was really interested in at the time, but just does not work with the overall themes of the story. So then you just have to cut it out. And that can be really painful. You know, there is good writing, good pages, stuff you’re really interested in that just doesn’t work for the book. So you have to revise and get rid of it. So my suggestion is always to try and if it doesn’t work, get rid of it.
SOD: Do you think there are any advantages to being a female author in the literary business?
CD: Advantages is a difficult word. Advantages, maybe? But what really you get to have, in so many areas of the arts, not just in writing, women are doing a much better job at carving a space out for themselves. They’re finally able to become more interconnected because of the internet.
I think that I’m enriched by being a female author in this space because there are so many other young women working and writing now, and I’m able to connect with them. It’s not a physical space, but it’s a space to ourselves. So that’s incredibly enriching, if not necessarily an advantage or disadvantage.
Other female writers I know have had more bumpy experiences with the gender stuff. They might have gotten a cover of a book that they didn’t like, that felt gendered. You know, the color pink, or the trend of the headless woman. I, luckily, was with a publisher that I didn’t have to go through any of that, but there are still disadvantages to being a woman, just like in any space. But it’s getting better, it’s getting easier. There’s lots of women writing about really interesting things that are really speaking to the female experience. There’s a lot of stats that say that most of the readers out there are women. And I think that a lot of women are really interested in reading female writers and stories about women. So maybe an advantage is that you can find an audience that is not just interested in your work, but can connect with it on an emotional level about femaleness and womanhood.
SOD: How did sexism/ageism affect you when you first got started writing?
CD: I felt that if I just did interviews over the phone, people would take me more seriously because they weren’t seeing me look younger or be a woman.
SOD: Do you have any advice for the Doodle community?
CD: Yes, I do. One is, you’re doing it right already. You’re on the right track. Stay on the right track, don’t deviate from your path. You’re here, so you know what you want, and you’re prioritizing it. Keep doing that in college. There’s a lot of talk about, you know, “If you’re going to do a creative writing degree, also do something practical.”
Don’t do something practical. Don’t do it just because you think you should. Take that time to focus on your creative pursuits because what’s more important is becoming a smarter version of yourself, a more realized version of yourself, a version that understands yourself better.
And you’ll do that through your artistic pursuits, and when you go out in the world you’ll be able to find that balance between getting a job and having enough money. You can get the job, you can make the money, and then you’ll have this enriched foundation of arts education that will help you to be a creative person out there in the world. So don’t split your focus when you have the opportunity. And also, don’t be afraid to make bad art. I was scared for so long of being bad, but some of the art that anyone makes is gonna be bad. Some of it will be better, and some of it you’ll throw away. But the only way that you can make good art is if you make bad art too. So don’t be scared of that and don’t let it stop you.
SOD: What’s up next for you?
CD: I’m working on a new novel. I’m about one hundred pages into a new novel, I’m really liking it, and hopefully I’ll be done with a good draft by the end of the year, we’ll see.
SOD: Since we’re in a bookstore, what is your favorite thing about bookstores?
CD: Oh my God, I just like browsing. I like finding new books in bookstores, I like touching the books. That is my favorite thing, is just walking through the aisles and reading titles and reading back, and just seeing how many stories are out there.
I am comforted by the fact that I am never going to be able to read all the books, see all the TV, watch all the movies. There’s always going to something waiting for me.
I’m never going to left alone without something new to read.
