Sasha LaPointe is from the Upper Skagit and Nooksack Indian Tribe. Native to the Pacific Northwest, she draws inspiration from her coastal heritage as well as her life in the city. She writes with a focus on trauma and resilience, ranging topics from PTSD, sexual violence, the work her great grandmother did for the Lushootseed language revitalization, to loud basement punk shows and what it means to grow up mixed heritage. With strange obsessions revolving around Twin Peaks, the Seattle music scene, and Coast Salish Salmon Ceremonies, Sasha explores her own truth of indigenous identity in the Coast Salish territory.
She is the author of the memoir Red Paint: The Ancestral Autobiography of a Coast Salish Punk. Her collection of poetry, Rose Quartz will be published by Milkweed in Spring, 2023.
EB: How did you begin writing nonfiction? What drew you to the genre?
SL: I fell in love with writing—I knew that I had to write—when I was really young. It was when I was running away from home a lot and was this goth baby teenager. I discovered poetry—Sylvia Path, Anne Sexton, I know it’s cliché, but I really related to it and was drawn to poetry. I remember learning Sylvia Plath’s quote, “I write because there is a voice inside me that won’t be still.” I couldn’t get it out of my head. And then I was on this long Greyhound bus ride—I’d run away from home and was on an hour-long trip to Seattle—and I started having what I now realize was one of my first panic attacks, and the only thing that would calm me was writing. I didn’t have a notebook or a laptop, just my backpack, and I remember tearing through my backpack and finding a napkin to write on and so I wrote on every side of this napkin for the entire hour-long bus ride. It calmed me down, and I was like, Oh, I think I love writing.
I came to writing nonfiction through poetry—I wrote some really bad poetry as a teen—and then it morphed into weird essays. I think that’s why my work exists in between, because it started rooted in poetry. And then many years later, during my undergrad, I knew I wanted to write but I also was dabbling in studio arts, which I was really bad at, but I just wanted to make art. Then I started taking creative nonfiction electives, and I fell in love with that form. I discovered I could write these really poetic personal essays.
EB: It’s funny, I feel like there is such a big overlap between people who write both poetry and nonfiction. I had a poetry teacher once who told me that the “fence between poetry and essay is very low to the ground.” So how is your writing process for essays similar or different to your writing process for poetry? Do you know ahead of time if something is going to be an essay or a poem, or does the form takes shape as you go?
SL: I’ll start off thinking I know the form.
EB: [laughter]
SL: I’ll sit down thinking I am going to write a poem and it becomes an essay and vice versa. The writing kind of steers me in a different direction. And that worked when I was writing Red Paint because I was also working on my poetry collection, Rose Quartz, which will be published by Milkweed next spring. I’m still a baby writer, figuring out what works for me. Though right now I am working on a collection of essays, and I’m trying to be more disciplined in knowing I have to finish these. Even if my brain starts to go off on a poetry direction, I have to tell myself to put it on the woodpile and come back later for it.
The process is different in that when I write an essay, I know I eventually have to get to a point, while poetry can be a series of images that are meaningful. So I have to keep telling myself, no, this is an essay about licorice fern, you can’t write a poem about it. Yet.
EB: Fair—though I think one of the biggest things I realized as a writer was that I could keep writing about the same thing in different forms, or even multiple essays on one topic. Before I used to think, okay, I wrote about my grandmother already, that subject is done, but, no, so many writers just write about like the same five things over and over and over in different ways.
SL: Yes! It’s very liberating as a writer to accept that. For a long time, I was self-conscious about it. I’d be like, alright, girl, you’re gonna write about your grandma, you’re gonna write about salmon and your heritage, you’re gonna write about punk music. I want to write about so many other things, but at the root of it, even an essay about the pandemic or an essay about my identity survivor, they’re all in the same world. Once I accepted that, it was like, very freeing.
EB: What was the origin story for your incredible memoir Red Paint? How did the book come about? And you were writing it at the same time as Rose Quartz, or before? After?
SL: Well, like a typical Gemini I couldn’t decide between creative nonfiction and poetry.
EB: [laughter]
SL: I ended up double-majoring in my MFA program. For two years I worked on creative nonfiction with amazing professors like Melissa Febos and Elissa Washuta, and then I tacked on a third year and studied poetry with Joan Kane.
The book I refer to in Red Paint (the project called “Little Boats”) was what came out of those first two years, but then I put it away when I turned to poetry and worked on finishing a skeleton of the poetry collection that third year. After I graduated, I went back to “Little Boats” but also kept adding poems, and then I went back and just focused on the poetry collection when “Little Boats” was getting rejected by everyone.
EB: Ugh, so much of writing is getting rejected.
SL: Right? And when you’re writing nonfiction, it’s hard not to be connected to that rejection. You’re not like presenting this world you invented, right? I wasn’t trying to sell a book about dragons and mermaids, though I’d love to if I could do that. Instead you’re thinking, “oh, they’re literally rejecting my life.” So, I went back into the poems to self-soothe and finally abandoned “Little Boats” entirely. I realized I did not have the tools to deal with everything that I asked myself to deal with.
EB: That’s the worst (and best?) part about writing nonfiction––sometimes you have to stop writing a memoir to just live your life a little more to figure things out.
SL: I took a two-year break from the memoir and wrote poems and dabbled in spoken word and writing lyrics, and then after that, Red Paint just came to me really quickly. I realize now I needed to go through that process of healing to come to Red Paint. And then my poems continued to grow and evolve as I was writing Red Paint—I’d take a break from a chapter and go and mess around with the poems. I feel like in some ways the poems are the same story as Red Paint, just told in a different language. My editors might hate me for saying that. [laughter]
EB: Well, I loved how Red Paint turned out and am glad you finally got there! I especially loved how you wove in the stories of your ancestors alongside your own history. When did you decide to do that? And what was your research process like to learn more about your ancestors? I love hearing about how writers do personal/family research for their books, and I loved those moments in Red Paint where you directly describe visiting places or reading things about your ancestors. How much, if any, of “Little Boats” ended up being part of Red Paint?
SL: To answer your last question first: close to nothing. “Little Boats” was 470 pages that read like a sad catalogue of all the bad things that happened to me. [laughter] There was, of course, stuff in there about my connection with my grandmother even at times when I was a runaway and I was homeless. And some of the things that happened do show up in Red Paint, but I realized those things are just this small nugget of my life. What prompted me to write “Little Boats” was that I wanted to share my story as a survivor, the story of a woman who grew up with mixed heritage on the reservation, but it was missing something. Though I know I had to write “Little Boats” to get to Red Paint. I would not have come to it without that first excavating, just putting down on the page huge chunks of memory, pain, and anger. As a result, I got diagnosed with PTSD and left my marriage, and I realized I needed to do more healing—that writing alone wasn’t doing it. And only after all that, I realized what “Little Boats” had been missing which is all the stories of the women who came before me.
Before Red Paint, I had never taken myself for a researcher, but I fell in love with the process. Things like walking though Chinook and going to the historical society and having my mom send me these huge envelopes of old family records, letters, newspaper clippings. I pored over family trees and made timelines, and in the process, I realized how much I love to research. But “Little Boats” needed to happen first to get me there.
EB: Do you have advice for anyone who is doing their own research? Like how to wrangle tons of material and keep it organized?
SL: I’m still very new at it myself, but I think it’s important to be aware of how easy it is to fall into a nonproductive rabbit hole.
EB: Oh my god, story of my life.
SL: I spent like eight hours in this huge book where all of a sudden I was just reading all this Lewis and Clark bullshit, and it was fascinating, but I wasted a whole day and I only had so many days to do research in Southern Oregon with this grant money. So, what I found really helped me was to make checklists: checkboxes highlighting things I needed to figure out and find, what research needs to be done for this particular book. Like, sure you’re going to discover some really fascinating nuggets along the way, but it really helped me to have a physical list and be like, okay, I researched Captain James Johnson, and check it off.
EB: That is so simple and so smart. I need to do that.
SL: It’s just so easy to fall down a rabbit hole, because history is fascinating, especially when research can be a distraction to keep you from writing. I found the lists kept me focused in a visual way.
But in true Gemini form, I’m going to now completely contradict what I just said: yes, keep your lists, try to stay in your lane, but allow yourself to find other interesting things and keep notes on them, because maybe that’s the next project, right? So, I tried to focus on gathering what I needed in order to complete this project, but also gathering what I was interested in that I could come back to.
EB: Such a good point. I weirdly get in this mindset where I think, “Right now I am working on this project so everything I am researching right now has to go into this project or I can’t use it” and that’s just not true.
SL: It’s also so interesting to see how folks apply the material they find researching in different ways.
EB: Right, like you can give two people the same list of facts and they will take totally different approaches on how to write an essay about them. I always have writing students who get so nervous about someone else writing about the same thing they are, and I feel there are infinite ways to present research and tell a story, and no one can write the exact version that you can.
SL: Exactly. My friend who is a writer and researcher comes from an academic background, so when she applies research she presents it in a much more traditional, academic way than I do. I gave her a copy of Bad Indians by Deborah A. Miranda, but I love how experimental she is with how she incorporates her research. There are so many ways to approach it.
EB: Adding that book to my list now! So, feel free to speak about writing Red Paint in particular or writing nonfiction in general, but what do you think is the most challenging part of writing nonfiction? And what do you think is the most rewarding?
SL: I mean, with nonfiction most of the challenges are pretty personal. The research part was all just fun, but then the challenges would be when I would not feel particularly prepared to unearth a certain memory. And as nonfiction writers, often the memories we feel most compelled to explore are the ones that are really hard. So, a big challenge is figuring out how you can access those memories in a strong and safe way and not just force your way through.
It’s also challenging to keep in mind how the historians in your life—by that I mean my mom, my friends from childhood—all have different perspectives. Figuring out how people’s memories work differently and wanting to be as accurate and as close to the truth of my memory as possible. You can be at the same event with a friend and they’ll remember it differently.
And there is also the challenge that when you’re writing about your life you’re roping in other people, and figuring out how to deal with that. I try to tell my students not to worry too much about that when in the creative process. When a student tells me they’re writing about family stuff and want to ask for permission first, and I always say, do what you need to do before you publish, but nobody should be hovering over you when you’re in that raw, creative state. You have to kick everyone out of the room in your head.
EB: And the rewarding parts?
SL: Having completed something. It is really rewarding to feel, oh, I’ve taken some of my experiences and wrestled them onto the page into art. Storytelling is very important to me—I come from a storytelling background—and figuring out like how to tell my story in a way that will hopefully reach people is the most rewarding. Getting those emails from people who have read Red Paint and saying how it has helped them reminds why I wanted to do it.
EB: I love that part of nonfiction. Sharing personal stories is the best way to connect with others. I mean, obviously, you can have that connection through fiction too.
SL: But there is something special about saying, this actually happened to me.
EB: So, relating to that experience of connecting with others, personally I feel that writing can often be a super solitary task. Who or what do you turn to for support while writing? Who makes up your writing and artistic community?
SL: I hang out with a lot of musicians and artists. They are my constant support blanket. It feels really powerful and beautiful to be able to connect with someone whose world is painting or sculptures or beadwork or film, but still being able to relate to them. They’re also storytelling, just in a different way.
I’ve also met writers in Seattle through Hugo House, where I had an emerging writers fellowship, and a several of us got really close. A couple months ago, one of my friends from that fellowship came over and we made a big salmon dinner and she shared with me part of her novel that she was working on. Also, there are my former professors. Joan Kane the poet has become a great friend, and Melissa Febos is a freakin’ angel. She was my professor and mentor and now I consider her a friend, and she’ll answer the phone any time to talk through a writing issue. I’m convinced she’s not of this world.
EB: Finally, what is a favorite passage of nonfiction by a fellow “non-man”?
SL: From Body Work by Melissa Febos:
Writing is a form of freedom more accessible than many and there are forces at work that would like to withhold it from those whose stories most threaten the regimes that govern this society. Fuck them. Write your life. Let this book be a totem of permission, encouragement, proof, whatever you need it to be.