Rita Arens: The Project She Couldn’t Quit

photo via Rita Arens

I met Rita Arens at the 2012 Book Blogger Conference, when we both spoke on a panel about monetizing your online writing. She had a lot of great advice about taking things that other people might not see as a very lucrative publishing prospect and putting it out yourself as an e-book—if you know the audience is out there, and that you’ve got something they’re looking for, and you’re willing to put in the work to connect with them, you can do it. (Which is not to say that you’ll get rich doing it, but that’s a separate issue.) Now Rita has released her first YA novel, The Obvious Game, and I thought I’d ask about how her previous self-publishing experiences prepared her to take this next step in her writing life.

Around the time I started working on The Obvious Game, I had just recently really embraced writing publicly about my own experiences with eating disorders. I was a hardcore anorexic from about 17-19 and a disordered eater until about 26. The people in my life at the time knew about it, but it’s not something you could tell from meeting me—I’m a pretty average height and build now for a 38-year-old. I had been really nervous about publishing an essay called “Nicole Ritchie Has Nothing on Me” in my parenting anthology, Sleep Is for the Weak, which came out from Chicago Review Press in 2008, but nobody really said much to me about it, good or bad, and it felt good to just acknowledge I’d been sick for a pretty long time.

Then Dr. Phil said some stupid stuff on a show and I started getting more and more annoyed about the way anorexics were portrayed in the media—either as glamorized starvers who felt no pain or as vain, stubborn crazy people—so I started blogging about anorexia on my personal blog Surrender, Dorothy and on BlogHer.com, where I work as a senior editor.

There was quite a response. I put my email address in my posts and created a category for eating disorders on my blog, and I invited people to email me if they needed to talk. I got tons of emails—about half from the sufferers and about half from their stressed-out families. I titled my young adult novel, which I was about 20,000 words into by then, Empty Plate. I was ready to write down what it really felt like to be anorexic. It’s not a memoir, but my experiences definitely informed Diana’s inner monologue. This book is extremely personal.

It’s been interesting to read the early reviews, because I think the ugliness came through the way I wanted it to—but that garners a different response than a funny parenting anthology like Sleep Is for the Weak.

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11 February 2013 | guest authors |

Susan Richards Shreve & The ’70s from Here

photo: David Carmack

The material that got sent along with my copy of Susan Richards Shreve’s new novel, You Are the Love of My Life, mentions that the story is “inspired by Shreve’s personal connection” to its setting in early 1970s Washington, D.C. So when it came time to suggest possible guest essay topics, expanding on that personal connection seemed like a good choice: What was it about that time and place that Shreve drew upon in telling the story of a children’s book author who brings her son and daughter back to her family home in D.C., then finds herself caught in an emotional tug-of-war with a neighbor that threatens to reveal the hidden shames of her past? Shreve was happy to explain.

Oh, by the way: When she mentions having started up an alternative school with her husband? Folks who’ve been reading Beatrice for a long time might recall that her son, Porter Shreve, wrote about his side of that story in another guest essay…

On January 28, 1973, the Paris peace accords were signed, ending the war in Vietnam. My husband and I had turned thirty and were living in north Philadelphia—three young children in a big, old house shared with a facsimile of a commune. That night my husband took our five-year-old son to the candlelight gathering in honor of the end of the war. It was a moment of victory that over the years has faded to defeat but at the time for young men like my husband who had been waiting to be dispatched to southeast Asia, the spirit on the streets of Philadelphia was joyous. And the spirit in our house was one of adventure bordering on chaos.

The commune had been travelling in a VW van from Colorado to Vermont by way of Philadelphia and was delivered to our doorstep whole cloth by my younger brother. They never made it to Vermont and so we lived in relative harmony with a large vegetable garden in the yard, pot luck parties every weekend, daily hikes along the river, a general sense of satisfaction. Or malaise.

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21 October 2012 | guest authors |