Ladies and Gentlemen of Shanti Town…you are in for a treat.
It was my great honor and privilege last week to sit down (well, I sat down in Los Angeles, she sat down on Bainbridge Island) with
Claire Dederer, author of the book
Poser; My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses, and all around amazing woman (and yogi). We talked about her book, her practice, and the irresistible quest for perfection. Check it out my friends, and see if you don't just fall in freaking love with her (as I have).
P.S. I've already had a podcast listener point out to me that my interviews aren't so much interviews as "dialogues" (since I can't resist talking endlessly about myself) and I'm going to say that, unfortunately, this is no exception.
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Lia: When you first started talking to me about how the book began, you said that you felt that you experienced your practice emotionally and physically through the poses?
Claire Dederer: I think that the relationship that I had to the poses was so emotional and so visceral, it had to do with—you know I can only really describe it in emotional terms. The arguments that I would get in with handstands, the big crush that I would get on various poses, like splits. Or, “monkey”. I’ll call it monkey. As we’re talking yoga-ish-ly.
Ha!
I realized that my relationships with these poses were really heated. I mean who hasn’t been heated in reverse triangle? Every pose seemed to have its own personality and its own test for me. I realized that, the more I read of this yoga philosophy through the books I was reviewing [for
Yoga Journal], the more I realized that my own relationship with yoga was really deeply physically grounded in these poses. And I became fascinated with this idea—where did these come from? Poses themselves are a kind of intellectual property that comes from somewhere, that means something, that was made up, that’s a story.
Right. Well, I love so much the structure of the book—chaptering the book pose by pose—often you start each chapter sort of literally, with the pose or your relationship to the pose, and then we travel really far afield, and after awhile the resonance of the pose comes back again in this very, maybe not even in an overt or stated way at all—the fierceness or the courageousness of Warrior II, suddenly you feel the resonance of that in the story you’re telling about some moment of your life that doesn’t have anything to do with being in a yoga class. I love that so much.
Well, that was one of the really cool things about the book, finding different ways of approaching the problem of how you weave these poses in. They’re all dealt with differently—there’s not one way that I do it. Some of them are just puns. Some of them don’t really have any deeper meaning except that they’re just…silly connections. And some of them are intuitive. And there’s things like, you know, Lion—I just realized that there was all this stuff about lions in the book. I didn’t think I was going to write about Lion Pose. It was an experience of becoming alive to what was actually in the book, and how that could overlap with the poses. There was a really fun puzzle-solving element to it that I really liked.
And it feels like the practice. It feels like a class in that way. Here’s this—here’s where we’re putting our attention, we’re framing it with this pose or this part of the body or whatever. And then, maybe we travel really far out and then we come back again and it…changes. When you come back. Good yoga teachers do that with their classes.
I know exactly what you’re talking about. And you’ll have a class like that and you’ll be begging the teacher to do that class again and she’ll say, “I can’t do that class again.”
Right, yes—because it just comes…who knows where that comes from?
Huh. Yeah, I hadn’t even thought about the structure of the book as relating to a yoga class, but that’s a real compliment.
There’s this transformation that takes place for you, at least it felt to me, during the course of the book. You sort of get more okay with a bunch of things in your life. When you sat down to write the book were you already at that place, already transformed, or did the writing of the book begin the transformation?
Well, I had started writing the book before I realized what the yoga story was. This idea that I went to yoga for one thing and I ended up with something else. I went for more of that goodness and perfection that you and I were talking about, and I ended up with yoga telling me, you’re never going to be perfect, you might not even ever be very good at this. And I remember figuring that out.
The end of the book happened as I started to write the beginning of the book. So, I was exploring—where is the end? And there was that really interesting thing from a writing perspective of, how do you order events in your life when you write a memoir? And how do you make event into story? And as a teacher, I work with students, and that has become really interesting to me.
How do you make order out of things?
Right, and do you have to be chronological? One thing people really deal with when they’re trying to tell their story is—they say, well, this is what happened. And it’s like, well, that’s fine, but it’s not a story. It’s not interesting to a reader. So what I’ve been really thinking about a lot in terms of how memoir works is this idea that you have one character, an earlier you at the beginning, and then a transformed character at the end. And what are the elements of the story—what are the events that support that story? Story is not the same as what happened.
So I try to think of memoir as these pillars of events that hold up the story of personal transformation. And those pillars may not even be about you, they might be something larger—it doesn’t have to be totally self-involved, it could be looking at the larger culture. But how do you support that story? Of course this isn’t the only story of what happened to me during those ten years. There were many other things that my life was about during that time.
I can see that, especially as a young person or as a person just starting to try to figure out how to write a story about themselves and their own lives, that there would be this allegiance to the facts. Where you’d feel like, well, doesn’t my reader have to know this and this and this in order for them to understand this event?
Yes. Sometimes when my students say that to me I’ll just look at them and I’ll say—and they hate this—well, what’s in it for me? As a reader? I’m your reader, you’re telling me about this event, what’s in it for me? Why do I care about that?
Why should I have to slog through all these details in order to get to the interesting stuff?
What’s in it for me is a good question to remember. So that part of it was just hair-tearing-ly difficult for me.
Trying to figure out what the actual story is?
Yeah, and plus, it’s such an ordinary life. My life is so—it’s just an ordinary life, there’s not a lot of real events in it. So then you look at it and you go well what…what are the scenes and the events that are sort of emblematic of my experience at that time? And how can I take that idea of, “oh, Bruce is getting sadder”…how can I take that out of an idea, and turn it into a scene? So, in my book, it’s not even events that occur, it’s more like scenes that dramatize a continuing state of being.
That’s my experience of reading it too, that it’s an emotional journey. It’s a very deep, quiet, but incredibly engaging, emotional journey.
The other thing that I’ve been dying to talk to you about is—well, when I first started practicing yoga, I was having this mid-twenties anxiety meltdown, and I just needed—
Your quarter-life crises?
Yeah! Why don’t they warn you about that?
I don’t know—I was just talking to someone about this. Terrible.
It was really rough for me, in a way that I had never experienced before, and when I was going through it, all these people who were older than me were all like, “Oh yeah…how old are you? Oh, yeah, I’ve had that.”
Right, but it’s one of those things, like so many things in life, that you sort of forget about as an older person. You go, oh my twenties were so fun, and you sort of forget the, oh my god I didn’t know who the hell I was and it was awful and super stressful…
Yeah, so my then-boyfriend, now-fiancé was like, just go to a yoga studio—at that point I was doing yoga like once a week with a tape—so he said just go every day. Just do something physical everyday.
Wow, what an excellent then-boyfriend, now-fiancé.
Yeah, he’s very good. So, I found this studio in New York, which was a Vinyasa studio, and it was very—wild, great music, creative movement. Very devotional and lovely. At that time in my life it was exactly what I needed. I just needed to be moving ceaselessly for an hour and a half. But now several years later, I’m in a completely different place—my practice has really slowed down. And there is that section in the book where you talk about finding Vinyasa and you were like, “Yeah! I’m just gonna move and do lots of crazy shit and I'm gonna be so good!”
Yeah, I’m gonna be SO good. God.
I would just love to hear about—where is your practice now, in terms of that, and how has it evolved?
Well—I moved to this godforsaken island, and there was a lot less yoga on it. I mean, I was coming from Boulder, where—the wheat has truly been separated from the chaff. There’s so many truly great teachers there. And I got to Bainbridge, and it wasn’t just that there were no great teachers, there were no teachers. So I was like okay, I guess I’ll go to the gym. I couldn’t find any yoga. And I ended up doing some kind of yoga with the old folks from the senior center—I couldn’t find a class. Which was fine, but I was also trying to write the book so there was this weird thing happening where I wasn’t doing any yoga while I was writing the book and that was super depressing.
But then I found Jen, who I mentioned at the end of the book, who was a woman that I went to high school with who teaches a hot yoga Vinyasa style class here on the island, and it’s very physical. And there’s a lot of sort of—alpha mom types who take her class, and that’s not at all her fault. She doesn’t teach it in that way, it just happens that there’s a lot of Type A personalities on this island and she teaches a very difficult class, so they all go and try to kick each other’s ass.
So I started taking from her, just because she’s a brilliant teacher and she was the only one—that’s what there was. There was Jen’s class. So it was a really interesting experience to try to go to this class that was very difficult, it’s hot yoga, it’s Vinyasa, it’s super difficult—and how do I keep from getting back into that trap, while I’m at this class? And I was noticing that she would—if the ladies were starting to get competitive with each other, I would notice that she would start just making us jump up and down in the air, like: I will break you. I will make you be humbled before this practice, and not try to show off for each other. She’s a really special teacher. So I feel like I had this really cool gift of getting to do that kind of practice, but without the, "RAWRR! Go for it!" attitude.
But, a month and a half ago, I was exhausted from being on book tour—which was so great, even to get to go on book tour, let alone be exhausted from it—and I fell down my basement stairs.
Oh no!
And dislocated my shoulder. Brutally. Like really, really, really bad. So I’m not doing yoga at all right now. And I think in a way it’s been really nice for me, because my yoga has become just a little bit professionalized through the experience of doing this book—it’s sort of nice to get a little space from it.
That’s an interesting thing, with things that you love—
Right, you do everything you can to make them your job and then they’re—you’ve killed them.
Right! You’re like “oh, I want this to be a bigger and bigger part of my life!” and then it gets to be a certain size in your life and you’re like, oh god—this again!?
It’s so true.
My yoga has become more and more professionalized in the last year or so, too—now that I’m teaching and writing a lot more and that’s great, but I’ve really had to give myself a break about, what is my practice? Is it just the physical practice, or—what else composes my practice right now? That can be a challenge, though, all by itself—going back to that “perfectionist” thing. It can be a challenge to say, okay, I need a break from this for a day or a week or whatever it is.
Right, and then the fear of—am I still going to be good at it? How is that going to work out?
I read this thing recently—I hope I didn’t read it in your book! I don’t think so. But I wouldn’t put it past me to quote you your own book! But I read this thing—someone said—Krishnamacharya or some old yogi said, that the poses are designed to be more and more humbling, the more advanced your practice gets.
That’s interesting. I was just talking to a teacher about that yesterday.
About it getting harder as you get more advanced?
And that weird thing where—in our culture the idea that physical and spiritual advancement would go hand-in-hand is a really weird idea. That’s something that is very mysterious about yoga. But in fact, it’s the case. Right? You become more spiritually advanced because you’re spending more time doing it. And I think also there is something in the physical practice that is spiritual.
I think so too. I’m stealing this idea from someone else, but I think that part of what it is, is that your body is always present. The physical form of your body is not able to, via the laws of physics, exist in either the past or the future. So I think just the simple act of getting your attention in your body, grounds you in the present moment. And that is, I think, an undeniably spiritual experience.
It’s not something that I think people necessarily—I don’t think that you have to accept that idea in order to benefit from it.
No! No, you don’t. That’s the magic thing about it. People go for all kinds of wacky reasons, and then they end up, if they keep at it—they end up—something changes. It just does.
Yes, something changes. That’s the phrase that keeps coming up: something’s changing, something’s changed in me.
There's a section in the book where you talk about your teacher who encouraged you to “husband your gaze”—I love that so much! Who uses the word “husband” in that way?
It’s so great!
I was talking to a friend about this today—we were just talking about career angst—but this idea of, how do you train yourself to keep your eyes with you. How do you train yourself to keep your focus on where you’re at. On your path.
Oh god, I’m so struggling with this right now.
You are?
It has to do with writing. I’ve been doing so much support for the book, and there’s a lot of feedback that’s coming back, and—you can’t write like that. You can’t write when you’re so externally focused. The only way to write is to allow things to be really small and focused. And, I’m thrilled to have all that interest, but in my case I’m trying to remind myself—okay, but don’t mistake that for work. That’s not the same thing as the work.
I think that struggle is present in so many fields. I mean, when I was acting a lot more, I would mistake all the time the publicity/marketing part of my job for actually doing my work. But you’re right…that’s not the work.
It’s part of it, you need to learn how to do all that stuff. But it’s not the work. I think everybody has their reasons that it’s difficult to do creative work. Also, when you’re starting a project, you’re not—you start small, right? You’re just rooting around in the ground, trying to find what’s interesting. And you can’t do that if you’ve got a bunch of booming crap in your head.
Oh my god, well—I’ll occasionally publish outside my blog, and I wrote an article that got a lot of attention and I found myself, instead of doing anything creative or productive, I was just obsessively refreshing, you know, to see if anybody had left comments on it.
It's the evil of the Amazon reviews! You can not read those! And it’s the same thing—commenting—no! It’s okay to interact with readers, but the anonymity of the comment board is not a reader dialogue.
No. And it’s just fanning the flames of the worst parts of anyone’s personality.
Totally. Like the crummiest egotism, but it’s not a good kind of egotism, it’s just ego-ness. That’s the pits.
The other thing I relate to in the book is this idea of perfection. What else can I do to make myself perfect? And, I was thinking about it this morning and I thought, oh yeah right, the secret is you don’t have to be perfect. And then the very next thought was: yeah, if I can just figure out how not to be perfect…then I will be perfect.
I literally was exactly having that same thought about an hour and a half ago myself. I have got to lay off myself and stop being such a nut and such a perfectionist, it’s driving me around the bend, if I could only do that—right. Again…then I would be so perfect.
And it’s so easy to feel like, okay, now I’ve found this thing. Now I’ve found this thing that makes me a better person, that whatever—if I can just master this thing or even this pose, then I will be just a little closer to this ideal thing.
A little bit closer to that spot.
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Claire Dederer's bestselling memoir,
Poser; My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses, is out now.
Claire is a longtime contributor to
The New York Times. Her articles have appeared in
Vogue,
Real Simple,
The Nation,
New York,
Yoga Jornal, on Slate and Salon, and in newspapers across the country. Her writing has encompassed criticism, reporting, and the personal essay.
Claire's essays have appeared in the anthologies
Money Changes Everything (edited by Elissa Schappell and Jenny Offill) and
Heavy Rotation (edited by Peter Terzian).
Before becoming a freelance journalist, she was the chief film critic at
Seattle Weekly.
With her husband, Bruce Barcott, Claire has co-taught writing at the University of Washington. She currently works with private students.
A proud fourth-generation Seattle native, Claire lives on Bainbridge Island in Puget Sound with her family.
