Zoe Whittall’s Quick Lit Q & A with author Rhiannon Argo.

Rhiannon Argo is a writer and artist from San Francisco whose debut novel, The Creamsickle, won the 2010 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Debut Fiction. The Creamsickle is about a group of young queer skater girls and dudes living in The Mission district of San Fran. It’s narrated by an andro sweetheart of a skater named Georgie who works in a peep show and is busy getting her heart broken. It’s funny, tortured, fast-paced and experimental in tone without abandoning an engaging plot.

I recently caught up with Argo to talk about The Creamsickle, writing and winning the Lambda.

Zoe Whittall: How did the character of Georgie come to you? She is such a gentle hero, and so finely drawn, I’d love to know how she came to be in your imagination.

Rhiannon Argo: Like the other characters in the book, Georgie is a reflection of a handful of queers I’ve known in my community.

I had this girlfriend while I was writing the book who is somewhat similar to Georgie. She was often my muse. Ha — except I know how to skate and she doesn’t. I did take her to get a pedicure once and she was so uncomfortable that I remember jotting down notes about it and later writing that scene in the book.

“Everyone calls our house ‘The Creamsickle’ because it looks like an orange Popsicle that has been dropped in the dirt a few times, since it’s painted a splotchy orange with a white trim that’s splattered with pigeon shit. Cruzer likes to also insist that the house especially deserves the cream part of the name because of its long-standing reputation as a queer bachelor pad. The house had been passed around and handed down like a good dirty joke, revolutionaries trampled its floors for twenty years, a slew of hippy fags and fairies lived there in the late eighties, and the grunge lesbians overran it all through the nineties.”
– excerpt from The Creamsickle

Whittall: How long did it take you to write The Creamsickle? What was the writing process like?

Argo: It’s hard to quantify the time it took. I ruminated and wrote short snippets to read out at open mics for at least a year. When I got invited to tour with Sister Spit for the first time, I made a little chapbook of some of these pieces and realized I had a nice little collection of stories. After coming back from tour, I decided to write a book. I wrote all summer.

My process was to play a sort of connect-the-dots game with the collection of short pieces I had and structure a plot around that. That was a headache, but it came together eventually. So when I sat down to write the book it took about three months of working on it daily. Then another three to four months of revising and editing, which I only worked on part-time because I had work and school.

Whittall: Has your writing process changed dramatically now that you’re writing your next book?

Argo: Yes, it has changed dramatically. I mentioned how I formulated the story around a bunch of short spoken-word pieces I had already written about different characters and from different perspectives. This way of writing a book was a pain in the ass.

In writing my second book, I got to start off with a blank page and thought about the entire plot before I wrote the scenes. This makes for a less meandering story line, and I get to have more control over the direction that things are going in. I love it. I don’t ever write short pieces to read out at open mics anymore. It distracts me from the novel-writing work to write for the stage instead of the page. I miss reading out, but I know I will get to do that plenty when the book is finished.

Whittall: What is your next novel about?

Argo: It’s called Electric Feel. It’s about a girl named Lo who is in her later 20s who is kind of stuck in a rut. She gets this phone call that turns her life upside down. She ends up travelling across the country on a wild goose chase in search of her first love.

She has all kinds of crazy adventures while staying with a DIY queer community in the Midwest, visiting an abandoned amusement park, discovering a modern-day witches’ coven and more. She meets an assortment of colourful characters, ranging from Greyhound bus tweakers to queer elfin girls who live in tree houses.

Whittall: How has touring with Sister Spit and performing in general influenced your creative work?

Argo: I was first invited to tour with Sister Spit in 2007 before I wrote my first novel. The tour was so inspiring that I immediately went home that summer and wrote The Creamsickle. On tour I discovered that I truly had a fantastic audience for my work and it felt important to get it out there. This was especially apparent when touring the Bible Belt.

I was also incredibly inspired by my fellow Sister Spit tour mates. Ali Liebegott, Michelle Tea and Eileen Myles were on the tour, and it was awesome to look to them as sort of role models, like they were evidence that living the lesbian writer lifestyle was possible.

Whittall: Did winning a Lambda change your career or how you think about your career?

Argo: Winning a Lambda motivated me to write another book. I will never stop writing because it’s as necessary to me as breathing, but it requires hard work and determination to write and finish books — a ton of time and energy that is not compensated for monetarily. It’s a labour of love. Since queer writers rarely or never get fat advances or a chance at being a NYT bestseller, it’s important that we get recognition from our community.

Whittall: And because it came up so much at the Lambdas — how do you feel about being a queer writer versus a writer in general? Do you care about how you are referred to? Is the queer writing community important to you?

Argo: I feel strongly about being a queer writer. The queer writing community is fantastic and an exciting, supportive group to be part of. I think it is important to identify publicly as a queer writer because it’s important to me to be a role model for younger queer writers who don’t get many literary role models.

In high school I didn’t have any modern-day female writer role models that I related to. I got into the Beats and they were all men. Later I discovered Sister Spit, and they were awesome literary idols. Being an out queer writer means I get to show the next generation of emerging queer writers that there is a place for us, and it’s a fabulous place.

→

In conjunction with the release of her novel The Creamsickle Rhiannon Argo collaborated with photographer Amos Mac to shoot fifty photos of queers and Creamsickles:

Rhiannon’s main site can be found here, and the Facebook page for The Creamsickle can be found here. You can order a copy of The Creamsickle directly from Bela Books.

→

Tags:Amos Mac, Books, Creamsickle, GenderQueer, Interview, Interviews, Lambda, Quick Lit, Rhiannon Argo, San Francisco, Sister Spit, Skateboarding, Zoe Whittall