Welcome to The Writing Coach. On this podcast, I speak with the instructors, editors, coaches, and mentors who help writers and authors create their art, build their audience, and sell their work.
In episode #113 of The Writing Coach podcast, I speak with editor and author Cassandra Lane.
Cassandra is the author of We Are Bridges: A Memoir (Feminist Press, 2021), winner of the Louise Meriwether First Book Prize, and editor-in-chief of L.A. Parent magazine in Los Angeles.
She formerly worked as a newspaper reporter, senior communications writer, and community relations manager for the LA. Dodgers. Her stories have appeared in The Times-Picayune, Atlanta Journal Constitution, Everything But the Burden, Writers Resist, the NYT “Conception” series and elsewhere.
During our discussion, Cassandra describes:
- How her mother’s passion for reading inspired her to become a writer
- What it was like being the first Black and first woman editor-in-chief of her university newspaper
- How being part of NOMO – a group of black poets, novelists, and artists – influenced her non-fiction writing
- What excites her about her role as editor-in-chief of LA Parent magazine and how she approaches collaboration with her team of editors, writers, and designers
- Why she chose to write a memoir that covers not only her story but also explores the inter-generational trauma resulting from the lynching of her great-grandfather
- And much more!
Listen to the full podcast episode:
Watch the video of the conversation:
The Writing Coach Episode #113 Show Notes
WE ARE BRIDGES is now available in softcover, audiobook, and ebook!
Visit Cassandra’s website for updates
Read L.A. Parent magazine
Episode Transcript
Today on the writing coach podcast, I have Cassandra Lane. Cassandra, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much, Kevin. I’m excited to be here.
I’ve read that when you were about 11 years old, you said to your mother, I want to be a writer, but I want to be behind the scenes. I’m curious, where did that desire to be a writer come from, but also why behind the scenes?
Yeah, so I think writing was because I loved reading so much. I loved, and I think I fell in love with reading, watching my mother read first. She was so she worked so hard. She would come home and just hole up in her room with her romance novels, and just her experience of being in. It just felt like she was somewhere else and the way her body moved while she was beating, I was fascinated by the vision of her reading. And it’s just, you know, as a child, we, as children, we do what our parents do. And so at first I started kind of sneaking into her romance novels until I found my own authors. I remember, you know, loving Judy bloom Nancy drew, and I just loved being in those worlds. I was a very timid child. I had, I was I’m the oldest of five. So I had lots of kids around lots of cousins, but I was kind of a loner I liked to daydream. And I think those two things loving reading and being very timid to me to writing. I want, I felt seen when I read books that, that spoke to me and I, I fell in love with that and wanted to create that for, for readers myself.
Well, parenthood is obviously a topic that you’re very interested in a, on a number of levels, both the magazine, you edit LA parent as well as your new novel or it’s touching on these themes. It’s interesting. This show is called the writing coach, but perhaps for so many of us, our first writing coaches are really our parents reading.
Yeah, absolutely. I love that. And I remember reading to my son when he was still in utero, my husband and I both did. And you know, he loves language. He doesn’t read as much as I’d like for him to right now. And he’s, he just turned 14 and he’s thought a lot of other things, but we have to start early. And I thank my mom for giving me that exposure. She wasn’t, she didn’t necessarily read to us at night, but just again, watching what she was doing and woman wanting to mimic that had its impression.
Speaking of childhood, you’ve said I grew up poor in the south, but rich in experience, can you speak a bit about that?
Yeah. I grew up in an intergenerational household. It was at one point when my great-grandmother was still living my great-grandmother, who was in her nineties. My grandparents and this is on the maternal side, my grandparents, Papa and grandma, my mother’s parents and my mother and her children and her children. There’s the 17 year difference between myself and my youngest brother. So I kind of look at that five generations cause he’s totally not, you know, gen X. And they tease me about being sold. So that, that in and of itself was very rich being exposed to, you know, the cultures and the history of my grandparents and my great-grandmother. My mother is a musician. She plays the electric guitar gospel. And so we would have church services and prayer meetings at my home. And there was always, you know, some jam session with the musicians.
The land itself was very rich. Despite our financial struggles, there was always food on the property, fig trees and peaches and plums, and just, it was just written my, my, the garden that my mother started there was a wood, the woods behind our house. So, you know, let the imagination run wild. So those are things that maybe I didn’t appreciate as much as a child and especially as a teenager wanting to be away from that small tomb. But I definitely look back on those experiences and see how they’ve influenced me as a person, as a writer. And they were, they were very rich experiences that are still fertile in my imagination. I think for
A lot of families growing up with maybe a lot of siblings or not a lot of wealth university, isn’t always on the radar. At what point did you decide that was the path you were going to take was that you were always headed to school?
I think so. And I was the first in my I had one cousin who had been an older cousin who had, who had been but other than that, there was, there were no other examples. So I applied not knowing what to do. I apply to the school that he had gone to and only one application remember filling out that financial aid application, which was a monster in and of itself. But yeah, I just saw it as a ticket out. Hopefully out of poverty, I was, I’d loved to learn. I love to read to study. I knew that I wanted to be a writer. I didn’t have any examples of that, but I thought I’ll choose journalism and sure enough, he was a photo journalist. So I had some, you know, example of that. And I said, you know, I don’t want to be a photo journalist, but I want to be a print journalist.
And that’s what I did. I majored in. I got into that school and majored in print journalism with an English minor became later the editor of the campus, these paper did an internship in, at the local newspaper and the rest was history. It was, it was just a kind of vision that I had for myself. My mom was like, how are you going to be a journalist? You don’t talk to people. You’re so afraid, but it worked out because when you’re a journalist, you’re listening and I had gone so such strong listening skills by taking you in and observing all the people around me who were much more just, just more out there. And so I think as journalist people want to tell their stories and they saw that I was interested in them and I had a fun time in my twenties working as a journalist.
You mentioned you made it sound that like a simple process. Oh. And then I was editor in chief, but in fact, it’s my understanding. You were the first woman editor in chief of that paper. You were the first black editor chief of that paper. What is, what was that experience like? Did you encounter challenges or, you know, tell me about that experience of being, not just the first black editor, but the first woman editor as well.
Right? Absolutely. I think the first challenge challenge was with them. I remember a professor that I got close to. She was a journalism professor and she loved my writing and she would invite us up to lunch. We went over to her house. She was the one who first put that seed in my ear. You should apply for the editor in chief position. And I was like, yeah, I could see myself doing freelance writing or being a staff reporter, but the editor, I don’t, you know, I just, I wasn’t necessarily interested in that or thought that I was ready for that. Which again goes back to self worth self value things that I needed to work on then, and years later, but she pushed me. I remember her pushing me to go and apply. I had to sit before the board and go through the interview with all these adults.
It was very intimidating. But they did hire me and it was a great experience. I think it was from my junior tonight, like the second half of the duty here and all of senior year, I lost a lot of sleep. We had a sofa in the newsroom, so a lot of sleepless nights and just falling asleep for a couple of hours on the sofa because, you know, we were handling a full schedule, especially that senior year. And then trying to get out, put up a newspaper, which was, yeah, it was, it was a lot working with back then, the apple, Adobe. And then I had another, I had a campus job again, my family was struggling and so I needed to work. So I had a campus job actually, too. And I worked off campus as well. So at one point I was kind of navigating these, all these little part-time jobs. I worked at a radio station. I worked at the front desk in my dorm and I was the editor in chief of this newspaper and I was a full-time student. So it was, it was the deaf for, at first, the struggle was just internal self-worth and then trying to do it all.
I edited and wrote for a magazine while in university as well. And that was one of my first experiences editing other writers. And I remember coming in pretty heavy handed and editing stuff, pretty harshly, and then getting these people who so hurt. And that was really, you know, today, these days, all I do is work with writers. But I th I, you know, I’m glad I had those experiences early on editing people and to understand how to do it in a way, empowers them and makes them feel proud of their writing, as opposed to perhaps the hacking slash tech week I started editing with. So was this the same for you? This, tell me a bit about this experience of first working with other writers, not just writing yourself.
Yeah, well, the internship helped me and I think my personality is more let’s work on this together as a partnership. So really I loved my writers. They seem to love me to love me the photographers and designers as well. So it was really, it felt very collaborative to me for my memory. I don’t remember necessarily slashing stories, but just sitting down and saying, you know, how can we make this better? Here’s some examples. And I had had that internship experience where there was some really great editors and there were some not so great editors. And I want it to be more like the editors who that’s kind of just my personality, more diplomatic. And so maybe I was probably not as strong, you know, when I needed to kind of bring down the hammer as I needed to be, because I w I err on the diplomatic side. And I, I did a lot of some rewriting, but I think the writers felt more nurtured and saw, oh, this story came to life in this way. And they still had their bi-lines, you know, which they were excited about. So that’s how I remember it.
Not to jump too far ahead in your narrative, but I believe you worked in journalism, but tell me about this group. You ended up as a part of in New Orleans.
Yeah, so I was working at the newspaper, the daily newspaper in New Orleans called the Times-Picayune, which is now bought out by the advocate. And, you know, it was great. I was learning so much on my different beats and working with so many editors, but I still wasn’t fulfilled completely because remember when I was a child, I wanted to write books, I wanted to write creatively. And so I of course hit certain walls in the newsroom. I wasn’t necessarily covering what I wanted to cover. I wanted to go deeper and spend, you know, much longer time on research and stories. And that’s just not where I was on the ladder. And I came across this black creative writing group called NoMo literary society. And it didn’t stand for anything, but it was all caps in a kind of, you know, it was kind of tongue in cheek, no more that literary BS let’s get in here, let’s do the work.
It was founded and led by poet Columbia salon. And we met on Tuesday nights and I would jump out of my, you know, newsroom, get there kind of late. So I was depending on what I was covering. And I think the workshops started at 6:00 PM and they would go to midnight and later. So it was just really no nonsense. It was filled with lots of poets, spoken, word artists, people writing, novels, everything by another journalist. And it was just so much richness from their dress and speech to their work. I loved hearing the poets, read their work out loud, that musicality yet. I know it seeped into me and Kalama, the founder would make, he forced us to get out to the community and read our work at bookstores at the Tennessee Williams festival. So it just was really affirming to me and gave me that creative outlook that I craved the cultural community that I craved and eventually helped molded me to leave the newsroom. Full-Time.
And where did you go from there?
Well, I crafted a freelance writing career still, so that’s what paid my bills. It was a huge pay cut, but I was married at the time and my husband was very supportive. He’s a photo journalist and we were fine. And then eventually we decided that we wanted to move. We love new Orleans, but we want it to move on professionally kind of felt like we had gone as far as we could go. And I applied to start looking at MFA programs and that’s how we ended out here in Los Angeles. He came to work for the associated press as a photo journalist. And I went back to school to major in creative writing.
As someone who already had an education in journalism and then a ton of experience working in journalism and then rubbed shoulders with all these poets and novelists and other artists, what did you, what were you looking for from an Emma MFA and what did you take away from that program?
Ah, I was looking for time, well, not having a lot of money, but I had saved a lot cost of living. We had a decent salary and cost of living was really low and, you know, I don’t buy designer anything. So I saved a lot knowing that I was going to make, we were going to make this move. And so while I was in the program, I didn’t work full time. I worked part-time at one point at one point at at a bookstore and did some tutor, a little bit of freelance, some travel writing, but for the most part, I was able to really focus on my manuscript for those two years. And I’m learning, you know, working with my professors, needing other writers from all over, from all walks of life. It was a low residency program. And I just wanted to really hone my chops, do a lot of readings do a lot of writing and workshopping. And it was, it was some of the best two years of my life. It was, it was wonderful. And I’m still in touch 20 years later. This is the 20 year anniversary actually with so many of those writers.
The manuscript you mentioned you were working on in school then, is that the manuscript that eventually grew into your book?
Yes. So many integrations, but yes.
Okay. All right. Well, I want to get into the book, We Are Bridges, but first I want to hear a little bit because selfishly I’m a parent of three daughters and a writer, but I don’t feel like cross paths at all. Cause I feel like I’m the last person who should get parenting advice. I feel like I don’t know what I’m doing half the time.
You never write about parenting?
I write “Help, help! What should I do?”
That’s about right too.
You know, seriously though, I’d love to hear a bit about LA Parent magazine, how you got into that magazine. And you’re now the coeditor in chief, the editor in chief energy. It gets yours to tell me all of it. Tell me all about your Magazine.
Okay. That’s brand new. So I started in 2017 and it’s funny, I’ve kind of moved around in different careers, but they all have that thread of writing and editing in some way. And I was at the Dodgers, which was kind of my oddball career. I was at the daughters from 2016 to middle of 2017. And this is the baseball team, the Los Angeles Dodgers. Yeah.
Yeah. I’m from Canada. It’s like, if it’s not a hockey team, I’m like, wait, which way, which sport is that?
Yeah, they would just scream if they heard that it was a great experience, but very demanding. I was working sometimes six, seven days a week. And when I found out about this opening up at the time I was managing editor I jumped, even though I was going to take a big pay cut at the time I jumped at it because I just was looking forward to going back into writing, you know, and editing full time. I loved as a parent. You know, I loved what they did. I had used the magazine when my son was younger. I had also met one of the publishers in a previous job, the one that I had before the Dodgers and we really hit it off partnering on some things. I was working for an early childhood nonprofit as a senior writer and she, of course, was always looking for stories and we met to talk about education and covering education.
So when the person, when I found out about the position, I reached out to her and she told me to apply, I did, I went through all the interviews and I was hired that summer 2017 as managing editor. And I worked under the editor then editor in chief, who’ve been there off and on like 20 years. So just knew that magazine in and out, she’d been there far longer than the publisher who bought it about seven years ago. So it was just, it’s been an amazing experience. I was named editor in chief this January. Thank you. Thank you. So it’s, it’s, it’s a lot, we’re doing a lot and you know, of course that happened the pivot that we all had to do during the pandemic. So we’re, we were already digital. We have a digital magazine, but we’d been forced to, to expand, you know, in those realms.
And because we didn’t print for a year about a year because of the pandemic. So really letting people know, Hey, we’re still here, we’re still here to provide you with information. We were talking to experts, medical, et cetera, just to try to get parents information that they needed. And also, you know, entertainment and joy and, and ideas on how to keep the kids entertained while you’re all at home. We were jumping on, on Instagram live more, which is something that we hadn’t done much of. We just started a podcast. So on the podcast we’re in you know, interviewing all kinds of people in the community from celebrities. Like we had Debbie Allen on the actress dancer and we’ve had radio show hosts. And so they’re all parents and they bring, but they’re bringing their own unique perspectives to parenting for our audience.
You’ve got your magazine, you’ve got years in all different aspects of working in writing and publishing, but all the while in the background, there was a memoir churning. Tell the listeners about your award-winning book.
Yeah, all my notes here. So this is where your bridges and you know, it’s been a labor of love. It is a book that I started once I left LA Louisiana, but other LA and moved to, to the big LA and it was my first time moving away from my home state and I didn’t have any blood relatives out here. And I think that caused me to look back on the past in a different way and with deeper appreciation. And also with curiosity, I was looking at doing a lot of self-work therapy, looking at some of the issues that I had around romance and marriage and race and wanted to understand that in a larger context. And part of that was, you know, understanding where my family came from. So many black Americans can’t trace their lineage. And as far back as we could trace were my great friend parents.
And the story was that my great grandfather was lynched in 1904. And my great-grandmother his, the love of his life. He was still the love of her life when she was in her nineties and on her death bed, because she was still crying about him and how much she loved him. They had one, she had one child and that child was for him. She did remarry. They moved from Mississippi to Louisiana and that’s how we all ended up in Louisiana. But I wanted to know more about that story and the impact of that kind of racial trauma on not just that family, but on the instant generations on me. You know, I, at one point said I was never going to become a parent. I associated, you know, parenting with so much heaviness and burden. And so there was a lot of fear around that.
So again, as I was doing that work, that self-work, I just started asking all of these questions. And since there wasn’t much on him in terms of records, I wanted to create a story for Bert. His name is Bert bridges, thus the title we are bridges. I wanted to create a story that humanized him. And so there are parts of the book that are fictionalized. And then when I did change my mind and become a parent. So the book looks at my great grandmother during her pregnancy, the love that they had, of course the lynching as well as my contemporary story of becoming a mother and it weaves those. So it goes back in time, weaving those two stories together. And
I know intergenerational trauma is one of the topics addressed in the book. Could you speak a bit to that topic, but also I’m curious, does, is, is it the healing process investigating and writing about these things or is it just more painful, moving more right. The big question and a very difficult topic,
But yeah, yeah, that’s a very important question because no, it was very painful. Lots of tears, lots of, just a lot of pain and, and writing it. But for me, you know, I’m drawn to what’s dark and heavy in terms of my creative work and psychological work. So that’s something for me that while it might not feel good, it feels necessary. It’s just, how am I, I love to laugh. I love to go out. I love to dance. All of that is part of me, but I’m also very much drawn to you know, secrets and and trauma. And why, why did this happen? Why did, why did this happen to this man? And why did great from on Mary, you know, not want to talk about it. And what did that silence do to the family? And I was thinking also about more modern, you know, traumas within the family and two done to the family in terms of racism and looking at what’s happening, you know, today in the 21st century.
So I wanted to look at all of those connecting dots and I just, for me, I just feel like even though it’s painful, if we continue to avoid it, that’s not helping in any way. So for me, the healing is in at least trying to understand there’s, if not complete healing, there’s some satisfaction in that for me. I wanted to have something I just wasn’t satisfied with knowing in my mental capacity, my mental space, that this had happened. A lot of my cousins didn’t know about this story. I wanted to get it down on paper. That’s that’s the most substantial, you know, I could, could make it given the lack of records. Although I did hire a researcher who believes she found the same bird bridges on a us census report, it doesn’t make it in the scope of this book. That’s something that I’ll continue to work on and have written some on that. But yeah, for me, at least this is something that humanizes them that acknowledges why we are the way we are perhaps and makes, makes all of those different connections.
When was the book released in April of this year? Just this year, right? Yeah. So how was that doing obviously in the middle of a pandemic book launch?
Yeah, well, I had seen last year, several friends, you know, have to do a book launch when it was all still so new and it’s, we’re all like just still in shock. And so I had watched with compassion and as much support as I could and, you know, getting sharing out their books and posting about their books. And so I had a year or a lot of Outlaws authors this year had a year to kind of watch that process. I saw also how creative people were given the restrictions. And so I was, you know, inspired by that. And so by the time I finished a book production and editing, revising, and started talking to the marketing and publicity department, or I had some ideas on, you know, who I would want to be in conversation with what bookstores or institutions we would want to partner with for virtual events, maybe, you know, broaching the subject of some quote unquote hybrid events.
So it was, it was fun putting it together. It’s been a lot of work and I’m still doing some things around it. But yeah, April and may were, and then in early June two were packed with virtual events and interviews. And so it’s, it’s been fun. I think the reach might’ve been greater in some ways, because, you know, everybody can jump on a zoom. Not that we’re not sort of fatigued online, but it’s been, it’s been great seeing the names and faces of people who wouldn’t have been able to show up at an in-person event
As a writing coach. I primarily work with fiction authors and something I’m often working with them is this idea that the book is not you, this is a work of art to you’re putting out into the world. I don’t work with very more, I’ve never worked with any memoirs. Well, a little bit, but I’m curious in your case, the book is you, it’s your memoir, it’s your family. So what types of emotional, how do you stay connected to that, but also disconnect from it in a way that’s healthy and doesn’t define your entire self-worth on a book you’ve written.
Oh, I love that. I think I had some early, you know, experience with that because I started writing about myself a little bit and family a little bit when I was in my twenties and at the newspaper at the first newspaper where I had my full-time job, they gave me a biweekly column and I wrote of course about the community and things happening, but there moments where I wrote personal columns and I loved the personal essay so that I have practice, people would write, you know, letters about what I was writing. I got letters from so many different people, prisoners as well, you know, telling me their stories. And I loved how, by my sharing my story, it would open up, you know, this avenue to hear other people’s stories. And that’s what I also loved about reading personal essays. So by the time this came out all these years later, I was, I’ve had some experience with publishing personal pieces.
Of course, it’s they weren’t, it wasn’t a whole book. But I was able, I think by the time I write a piece and I revise and revise and revise, there’s some personal, there’s some emotional distance already. And I, I, by studying, writing, studying fiction poetry, the I third person, whoever it is I’m able to craft and separate that emotional self from the person that’s crafted on the page. That doesn’t mean that family has done that, but me as a writer, I’m able to do that. So there are things in this book that I did that I’m, that I write about that I did that I’m definitely not proud of, but again, you know, I’m able to see myself as a character. I’m able to see myself as a fallible human being and to craft it in a way that I hope connects with other people.
Most of the feedback from family has been positive, but there was at least one that was not. And so I’ve had to kind of, I’ve had to grapple with that, the fact that this person is upset and it’s two or three lines that are not specific. I intentionally worked to revise that and to pull out any identifying characteristics, but it’s a reference to the fact that there was incest in the family and she really was upset and reached by that. So just because I’ve done that work doesn’t mean that, you know, other people are not going to take it personally. And I understand that that’s a risk.
Yeah. It certainly obviously applies to memoir, but I think if you create anything and put it out into the world, especially these days, you’re going to upset someone.
You’re talking about them. So yeah, you can’t win everything. And I understand and accept that.
Can you tell me a bit about the award that the book won? Was that validating? What was that experience like? It’s certainly exciting.
I remember I was at the magazine at LA parent and the office was this before the pandemic. So it was the end of 29th and I had sent off, I was still revising and I had sent off the manuscript to this contest and just forgot about it. It was just one of those things and kept working on it. And I got, I think it met in September of 2019 and email that I was a finalist I of a five finalists. And I was like, oh my gosh, this is amazing. And then in December I got the call from the publisher that I was the winner and yeah, I wanted to scream much louder than I could, like as I was, but I was at work. It was, it was very affirming. It was very exciting. It was emotional.
I remember my mom was the first person I called and she cried. And she was like, this has been your dream for so long. And I’m so happy for you. And then I cried hate. And yeah, it was, it was so great to, to be connected to the woman who’s still alive, Louise Merryweather. Who’s 96, I believe an author and activist black woman who, you know, who wrote novels, children’s books fought for civil rights. So this, this award is named in her honor and to be connected to that legacy is invaluable to me. And I feel so honored and humbled by that.
Beautiful. Well, the book is We Are Bridges. We’re gonna post on the show notes for this episode, all the links to your website, as well as to the bookstores where folks can pick up their copy. Anything else we want to let the listeners know about the book or we have upcoming?
No, you know, I’ve had all of the links to my launch events are on my website. So if someone wants to listen to a recorded interview or reading a lot, a lot of that is on the website, Cassandra lane, that net, and you know, I’ll be doing some library interviews Q and A’s just still out there talking about the book because it’s hopefully going to live beyond that lunch, that launch.
I know my listeners will. I do what they can to get some CA get some copies purchased and give it a read because I know they’re going to find it a worthwhile experience. Good. Kevin, thank you so much for taking the time to be on the show today.
Thank you so much. This was wonderful.
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