If you haven't done so already, check out Betsy's award-winning essay "My Marriage, in Five Tables" and then return here for a chat with the author.
WOW: Congratulations on placing second in the Q2 2025 Essay Contest! How did you begin writing your essay and how did it and your writing processes evolve as you wrote?
Betsy: I’ve known I needed to write about the first table for over ten years, when I first realized I saw myself in it. As a new wife and then mother, I developed a strong empathy with these fundamental objects of daily life—they stood at the center of community, rituals, meals, creative acts, yet went largely unseen. But the tables’ history was so entangled with my own, it seemed too daunting a task to write the story. The small container WOW offered—1,000 words, and about ten days—was what I needed to finally get it down on paper. I gave myself even tighter boundaries: five tables, 200 words apiece. Suddenly, writing about this huge, difficult thing seemed possible.
WOW: It’s fascinating to hear how constraints can actually open up a world of possibility in our writing. What did you learn about yourself or your writing by creating this essay?
Betsy: I reconnected with the joy I find in lyrical writing that’s concise and true to my experience. I learned I can write—on a short deadline—an essay that resonates with readers. I was reminded that I work well with tight boundaries. I tell my art students every day that boundaries are their friends, but it’s easy to forget it in regard to my own seemingly enormous projects. When I discovered Maggie Smith’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful a few weeks after writing the essay, the sentiment in the title made me think of my last few lines, and I realized how widespread that urge and that belief are, among women, among humans—to make our place beautiful. And so, creating this essay strengthened my sense of community, and belonging.
WOW: The graphic memoir you describe in your bio sounds exciting! Please tell us more about that project and your process. I’m interested in learning more about your sculpture journal and how you draw story ideas from it.
Betsy: Thank you for this question! Aside from entering a series of the sculptures in a gallery exhibition, I’ve only shared them with friends and fellow writers/artists, and students of my Journaling in Clay workshops, which they inspired. I’ve recently begun in earnest to focus on the graphic memoir based on photos of them. The journal began as a way of processing the cognitive dissonance around my attempt to remove myself and my children from an unhealthy marriage. There was so much uncertainty, so much to fear. The State and my husband were telling me it would be safer to go back. Everyone and everything else was telling me it would be safer to keep moving forward. The stakes were so high, and of course, I’d learned so well not to trust myself. Before I'd married, I'd been a professional magazine writer for a decade. I scribble down all the funny things my sons have said over the years—piles and piles of scraps—and writing has always been a part of how I make sense of myself and the world. But through the course of my marriage, I lost my words. I lost the ability to write about my emotional reality. I was overwhelmed. But I’d become an art educator, and I had clay. One night, ten weeks after the boys and I had moved out, I sculpted a little figure with its legs wide in an attempt to keep its balance, and its arms thrown up as though to protect itself from an invisible hurricane. That’s how I felt. It was hugely therapeutic to see it—to give literal shape to my internal reality, to give literal weight and space to something that I was being told didn’t or shouldn’t exist or if it did, didn’t matter. In making the sculpture, I literally made it matter. Creating a small, expressionistic sculpture—often a self-portrait—at the end of each day became a moving meditation, and eventually led me back to words. Now, as I manipulate clay, or wire, or beads, or magazine scraps or half a plastic Easter egg, the work of my fingers connects my thoughts to experiences, relationships, gives me time to mull over strong emotions, fears, helps me connect with my body—many of the sculptures reflect my posture, which I’ve learned is a physical manifestation of deep emotions and beliefs. And they’ve allowed me to connect to possible futures that were so long hidden from me.
WOW: Thank you for sharing an intimate part of your process. It’s so wonderful to hear how it has helped you to find your voice, your confidence, yourself, again. This is very powerful. Which creative nonfiction essays or writers have inspired you the most, and in what ways did they inspire you?
Betsy: Oh, so many! I’m a huge fan of great science writing—I discovered Stephen Jay Gould in high school and marveled at the precision, humor, refusal to accept preconceived notions, and the sheer joy he expresses at truth, whatever it may be. I love the beautiful, probing essays of Jill Sisson Quinn, and essays that distill wisdom from widely disparate sources, like those of Maria Popova. Leslie Rubinkowski, a mentor in grad school, was famous for asking, “What’s it REALLY about?” But it was ten years after I met her that I began figuring out what my personal writing was really about. Only when my marriage had deteriorated so badly that the only way out was through a door marked “self-awareness: enter at your own risk.” The poet, essayist, and activist Diana Hume George, another mentor, taught me that it’s okay to write and choose to not publish. So, while I thrive on connecting with others through writing, there’s great liberty in recognizing I have a choice.
WOW: That’s such an excellent point – there are so many purposes for writing that don’t relate to or lead to publication. If you could tell your younger self anything about writing, what would it be?
Betsy: Oh my goodness, so much. But she wouldn’t have listened! Or rather, she wouldn’t have been able to hear. I would have said: you are stronger than you think you are. You are better at taking criticism than you think you are. Say yes to opportunities, even if they’re not in exactly the direction you think you want to go. I would say: make choices and take responsibility for them and move boldly forward through the consequences. And most of all, nurture friendships with those whose paths you cross. Because one plus one is always way more than two. Now, these things may not seem to have to do with writing. But for writers, everything has to do with writing.
WOW: Thank you for that advice! And yes, writers do seem to be able to equate anything with their writing. Thank you for sharing your writing with us and for your thoughtful responses. Happy writing!
Interviewed by Anne Greenawalt, founder and editor-in-chief of Sport Stories Press, which publishes sports books by, for, and about sportswomen and amateur athletes. Engage on Twitter or Instagram @GreenMachine459.
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