Many essays in Once I Was Cool were first written as performance pieces. Now I sit down with the intention of the words just living on the page, which hasn’t always been the case. MS: I think every piece is a little different. When you’re writing do you think of it more as an essay or do you think about it like a rant? Grace Montgomery: Thinking about how your title came from sort of a conversation, the Los Angeles Review of Books said your prose “reads like something your friend needs to tell you right now.” I think that’s the most perfect explanation, but it makes me wonder about your process.
It was one of the last essays to enter the book. So I wrote the other essay with that grammar in mind. I was hearing it like, once I was cool I’d be able to listen to cool music, once I lose twenty pounds I’d be able to do this or that, once I read enough bell hooks then I can do this. I didn’t want a comma in the title, but if you read it without the comma it’s once I was cool. You have to tell him that once, comma, I was cool. What I’d said aloud was once, I was cool. But then I was walking around, and the grammar of it was bugging me. You have to tell him that once, I was cool.” He said, “You have to go write that down because it’s an amazing line.” I said, “You’re right, it’s fantastic.” So I put it on a Post-it note and it was up on the wall in my apartment for a very long time and, there you go. I called up my best friend Jeff and said, “This is your job. Knighted them, you know, swords on the shoulder. I don’t have any brothers or sisters, so I nominated certain friends. This is the reason why we have aunts and uncles. I remember going through it with my parents and my parents are amazing, but there was definitely a phase where I was thinking you two are not anything at all. That’s not the way we roll with our parents. But I know that my kid-he’s seven now-is going to get older and he’s not going to think I’m cool anymore. I’m sorry-I love all you moms in your Gap logo sweatshirts and your helmet hair! I think you’re awesome!-but she was there and I was like, that is not who I can be. In front of my apartment there was this incredibly suburban boring mom, like the kind of mom that I would never ever, ever, ever want to be.
Megan Stielstra: It came from the line at the end of the first essay. I know your essay “Art of the Excuse” starts with the line “Once I was cool…” Why did you make that the title of the book? Sophie Coats: My first question was about the title. During her visit, The Interlochen Review editors Sophie Coats, Mickayla Noel, and Grace Montgomery sat down with her to discuss her new book Once I Was Cool and her process as a performance essayist. On February 5, 2015, Megan Stielstra visited the Writing House to give a Q&A and reading for Interlochen Arts Academy creative writing students. She currently teaches in the MFA Program at Northwestern University. A longtime company member with the 2nd Story storytelling series, she tells stories for all sorts of theaters, festivals, and bars including the Goodman, Steppenwolf, Museum of Contemporary Art, National Public Radio, and regularly with The Paper Machete live news magazine at The Green Mill. She’s a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times and her work appears in The Best American Essays, Chicago Tribune, Poets & Writers, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Megan Stielstra is the author of the essay collections Once I Was Cool (Curbside Splendor, 2014) and Come Here, Fear, forthcoming from Harper Perennial.