MS: Thanks for agreeing to do this.
HE: Yeah, no worries.
MS: You got your MFA in fiction, but wrote a nonfiction book. Was that something you were always intending?
HE: I didn’t go into my fiction program thinking I was going to publish nonfiction books. But things happen pretty haphazardly when you’re actually out, both in the writing and publishing process. When I finished my MFA I was kind of burned out, so I went from hating my thesis and never wanting to look at it again to moving to Los Angeles and trying to start over, working in restaurants like I had my entire life. That led back to writing and then to the nonfiction project. It definitely wasn’t by design. You write about whatever sets your mind going. I got really obsessed with the bar world and that translated into a freelance career and the book. Fiction requires, for me, more self-discipline to finish, because you mostly have to write it on spec. There’s something really gratifying about being able to send a pitch to somebody and them saying, “Yes, that’s a good idea, you should write that.” I’d always written both genres; I think most writers do. They might not publish in more than one, but if you’re a word person, you write about everything. That’s how you process the world.
MS: When you’re writing nonfiction, you have to use your imagination in a different way. You can’t invent anything, but at the same time, you want it to be interesting and gripping and not just, “I met this person and here’s all the things she told me.” What techniques did you use to make nonfiction pop?
HE: It’s something I struggled with. You do have to craft some sort of narrative and connection. Some people are masters at this; that’s why they’re superstars. Michael Pollan is amazing at taking all of this research and weaving it together to make a cohesive fabric. That’s the skill, that’s how you’re using your imagination. Write as you go along and have an idea of how you’re going to get to your thesis, before you start your research. That may change through the course of the research. The material will inform the structure. But you get to shape that.
MS: You mentioned Michael Pollan; I’m curious if there were any other food writers you looked to for inspiration during the process.
HE: I have recommended reading at the end; people like Sarah Bowen who wrote Divided Spirits. She took all of this extremely academic research and found a really interesting way to tie it all together. Alice Feiring was another one. A lot of the people I drew inspiration from are people I wound up interviewing because of that. Even people who write about the hospitality industry in fiction format; I read Sweetbitter and that’s like pure crack, cotton candy, but it was a great cherry picking of the best parts of this industry. I liked that guideline; what’s interesting to people who don’t care how rum is made?
MS: What made you want to write this book in the first place?
HE: My undergraduate studies were English and Women’s Studies and I’ve always been trying to tie a feminist angle into everything because it’s always there. There’s always an element of, “This is why it’s harder for women. This is why it’s harder for people of color.” That’s always been in my mind, as well as looking at the cocktail renaissance, which is an outcropping of the slow food movement, which is so tied to the environmental movement. So I was in this very niche place where I was making cocktails and just nerding out about it and calling up my parents and saying, “Did you know that this cocktail was invented in 1850?” So wanting to take that and tie it into these other things that I was interested in and at the same time, meeting my editor from Unnamed and her saying, “Hey, I have this idea and I want someone to write it.” It was really serendipitous in that sense, of just meeting a publisher who had the same interest and ideas I did.
MS: From when you first had the idea to submitting the final manuscript, how long would you say that was?
HE: It was about two years.
MS: That’s a lot shorter than I thought you would say.
HE: Yeah, you talk to most people and they say, “I spent ten years writing this book.” This was a personal narrative with research kind of project, which I think this is an appropriate timeline for. I did interviews for about six months and then I wrote for about six months. I quit all my other jobs and lived in a stress bubble all the time. From my first meeting with my editor to submitting the manuscript was almost a year. Which was not enough time.
MS: You wanted more?
HE: Everybody always wants more time, but definitely, I would have less grey hair now if I’d had a year more to do it.
MS: As I was reading, I wondered how you go about starting to write a book like this. You interviewed Teri Fahrendorf, from Pink Boots Society, and she talked about trying to find other female brewers and it made me wonder how you found any of these people, because the industry seems like such a boy’s club.
HE: It’s fitting that you started with Teri because she’s part of one of the largest professional associations of women in brewing in the world. I knew about the Pink Boots Society from the local craft beer brewing community, so I shot them an email asking, “Hey, who wants to talk to me?” I already had people in mind, even from the beginning. The cocktail community is not that big. I went to some organizations and really sought people out. Sometimes people were in the news and I would track them down. That was the case with L.A. McCrae from Black Star Line Brewing because I saw that Vice article. Being in that freelance-y, clickable headlines world, you think, “I could see how that would happen and it might not be totally insidious, but if I have a platform to tell a less clickbaity story, I would like to do that.” I went to Tales of the Cocktail, which is a giant convention with lots of events full of people in the business in various capacities. I would walk in ask, “Where are the women?” Most people were really receptive. Although I will say, I did meet some resistance from people who were like, “I am so tired of these segregated lists, I’m tired of segregated spaces.” They don’t want to be in the book of all the women.
MS: Right. I did want to ask about that, because there’s a quote from Neko Case that I always think of, where she says, “I’m not a woman in music, I’m a musician in music.”
And I was wondering if you had encountered that resistance from women or if women cooperated but gave the impression of, “We’re tired of being a spokesperson, we just want to do our job.”
HE: Absolutely. Pretty much across the board, everybody I spoke to had that sense of “I’m tired of being the girl bartender.” There’s a huge sense of wariness about that. There were definitely people I approached to be in the book who didn’t want to be part of it for that reason and I can’t blame them. But on the other hand; I was talking to a bar director named Gaby Mlynarczyk who just wrote a book called Clean and Dirty Drinking. I had mentioned this to her at an event and she said, “Well yeah, you don’t want to be recognized because of your gender. You don’t want to be singled out for that, for good or for bad. You don’t want to get special attention or to be discriminated against; that’s two sides of the same coin.” But because there’s a lack of representation, the people that were part of this said, “We don’t want to be segregated but there needs to more representation and if this is how that happens then…” And it appeals outside of your own industry, because it’s something that people who are interested in feminism will take notice of. That was the point of Speed Rack too. They said, “We’re not trying to see who’s the best lady bartender, we’re trying to show the skills of people who are really good at this.” Having a bunch of examples of people who are like you and are doing something you want to do is hugely relevant. If you’re the only woman or the only queer person in a completely male, bro-ey environment, there might not be anyone around you who you can bring your concerns to.
MS: Was there was a subdivision of the wine and spirits industry that had the least women?
HE: Definitely alcohol distribution. It’s definitely the area where I encountered the most dudes in suits who are just now learning that you can’t approach a female bar director and talk down to her about whiskey.
MS: I was struck by how much food science there is in this book. Did you find that tricky to write? How do you take industry terms and break them down for the layman?
HE: How did I do with that? Because I have no idea if anyone could understand it.
MS: I was getting it. And I’m a person who enjoys drinking alcohol, but if you ask me what I know about it — very little.
HE: That’s the adjunct professor in me. I got into the alcohol space because it was becoming really fun if you were interested in science but not that good at math. It’s fun to learn about all these things and that’s why I included so much of it. That’s why it worked, because I wrote it from a layperson’s perspective; I took things that I think are interesting as a person who listens to a lot of Radiolab and then I asked actual professionals if I’d gotten it right.
MS: There’s a lot of discussion about the obstacles these women faced to get to where they are. Did you find that they’d faced similar issues or did it depend on the specific part of the industry they were trying to break into?
HE: There are the same stories, over and over again. Lots of people being underestimated or having to pay their dues harder than their male colleagues. I interviewed the head of a tequila company and she was talking about people being blown away that she had such knowledge and she was like, “I make this!” It was the same story again and again, trying to be taken seriously, trying to have your credentials affirmed. Sarah Bowen talked about how sometimes, that really helped her. She was researching regulatory corruption in the tequila industry and these officials would just talk to her like she was dumb, they’d tell her things that were really incriminating, not ever thinking that she’d understand them.
MS: When you were working on this, it was pre #MeToo movement, and you mention in the book that, after a famous man in the industry retired, a significant number of women came forward with accusations of misconduct but that ultimately, nothing really happened. Do you find that, in the midst of the #MeToo movement, that’s changed?
HE: For sure. The emphasis now in the bar industry on preventing harassment and creating safer communities has become huge, and I think a lot of it is due to Me Too. If you harass someone, you’ll get called out and people will believe the accuser. We’re talking about the hospitality industry here, which is famously sexualized. A lot of the workforce is part time, it’s entirely at will, there’s no job security and it’s famously top-down. There’s no bartending school like there’s culinary school. It’s still something that’s based on mentorship and who wants to train you. It does open the door for a lot of abuse. But I think we might have a leg up; in our space, there’s an intoxicating element by definition; the industry has been thinking for a really long time about how to keep the consumer safe because, at the very least, we’re liable. If you see something shady happening, it’s your responsibility as a human being, but also because you could be sued. That’s already been firmly ingrained in the culture and I think spreading that same sympathy to your staff is a recent development, but is something that’s happening.
MS: Mary Bartlett has an all-female team and she mentioned that whenever they meet, they talk about the business side but people also ask about what’s working, what’s not; this idea that women are raised to make people comfortable, to be amenable — in the hospitality industry, it’s exactly what you want.
HE: That was her point too; my job is to make people happy. It’s something that people are discovering now, not to look at these other approaches as a sign of weakness. Looking at a more “feminine” approach, which is stereotypically more group based, where there’s sussing out. The bar community in the early 2000s was top-down; this is the boss, what they say goes, there’s no room for discussion. If you have more women in the room, the culture shifts, and for the better.
MS: You touched on a lot of really intense social issues; sexism, which is to be expected, but also ageism, white nationalism, homophobia. Were those things you were expecting to tackle when you started this?
HE: I hope so. I didn’t want to write a book about all the challenges straight, cis, white ladies face. I was seeking out a variety of experiences, because I knew that that was going to lead to a greater diversity of stories.
MS: You can’t talk to a writer and not ask about process; do you have a schedule? What does an ideal day of writing look like?
HE: I’m still trying to figure that out. I really hate those writers who are like, “I wake up at 7 and I write for three hours and then I go for a run and then I eat papayas and I have amazing self-care.” My process is to go on a blitzkrieg of research and read everything and have lots of conversations with people who don’t care about the topic. That’s stage one. Stage two is transcribing and trying to synthesize. Then, when it actually comes down to putting the prose on the page, yes; getting up, having breakfast, sitting down at the computer, shutting off the internet and writing for about ten minutes, getting up, stomping around my bedroom in a state of angst, thinking I can’t do it, making frustrated exclamations to the dog, then sitting back down again and doing it for another few hours. It’s very stop and go. And trying to find the earliest possible time where I can justifiably take a break. Getting really into it by mid-afternoon, like three or four, getting in the zone. And then yelling at my partner when he wants to talk about dinner because I’m so in the zone that I’m not ready to leave it yet. I guess that’s a good day of writing.
MS: Is there something you wish you would have known while you were getting your MFA?
HE: I wish I’d had a more cohesive final project in mind. I know people who went into the program with their novels locked in and finished them. I did not do that. I went in with a vague notion that I wanted two years to figure out who I was as a writer and I did, or I figured out who I wasn’t; I wasn’t an academic. You’re there to cocoon. Be in the community and make connections, that’s very important. But it’s also very important to stop talking about what you’re working on and just work on it. I wish I’d answered less when people asked me what I was working on. As I do more projects, I find that overtalking things kind of kills it for me.
MS: So I won’t ask my next question, which was, “What are you working on?”
HE: (laughing) It’s fine. I’m back to having four jobs because that’s the norm. Myself and three business partners are launching a brand of canned cocktails. I’m researching sustainability in the spirits industry to try to develop it into a longer project, but we’ll see how that works.
MS: I’m excited about the canned cocktails. I always think, they have canned beer, they have canned wine. Where’s the canned cocktails?
HE: Exactly! We’re trying to remedy that.
MS: You bartended in New York City so I was wondering if you could recommend a bar in NYC and also some female-made booze.
HE: Leyenda, which is Ivy Mix’s bar.
MS: I love Leyenda.
HE: I mean, she’s just so cool. And Lynnette Marrero’s Llama Inn; grab a Pisco sour there. Natalka Burian’s bars, I think, are tremendously underrated. Natalka wrote the forward for my book and I realized that my first life-changing cocktail experience was at her bar, Elsa. And her bar Ramona, in Greenpoint, is one of my favorites. That’s the stop whenever I’m in Brooklyn. Women made booze; definitely Montanya rum, it’s super tasty and their commitment to environmental responsibility is above and beyond. There’s two piscos everyone should try; Macchu Pisco and Capurro. Yola mezcal is amazing… there’s lots. It’s become a selling point, it’s something that these brands will tout instead of burying. It’s front and center because people are looking for it.
Masha Shollar is an MFA candidate at The New School. She loathes writing about herself in the third person, and loves puns, useless trivia, and independent bookstores. Her work can also be found in GRLSQUASH. She lives in Brooklyn with a thousand books and, sometimes, a dog named Lily, who is a very good girl.
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