Washington Square. On air is the audio town square for the Washington Square Review, Lansing Community College's literary journal. Writers, readers, scholars, publishing professionals, citizens of the world, gather here and chat about all things writing.

Hey there.

This is Melissa Ford Lucken, editor for the Washington Square Review. I'm here today with author Michelle Slater, who's going to talk a little bit about her debut fiction work and her nonfiction. So, hey there, Michelle.

Hi, Melissa. Nice to meet you.

Nice to meet you, too. So your book, the Lunatic, is your first work of published fiction as a novel. Tell us a little bit about it and how you came to write it.

Yes. So the Lunatic takes place around the Occupy movement in 2011, and it follows the protagonist, Nell, who is a rare books librarian in Manhattan. And she starts to become very wary about Internet surveillance, hacking, the way that people are tracked on the Internet. And in addition to that, her relationship with her smartphone and the fact that she has a hard time getting absorbed in a book like she used to. And so she decides to take some radical measures, leave her life, Manhattan, and move back to the Berkshire woods of her childhood, where she seeks to answer this question, whether absorption is still possible in this great age of distraction. And the novel then develops her answer to that question through her own experiments on herself. And I would say that a rich new life unfolds for her.

Beautiful.

I came. Thank you. And I came to. It's interesting. I have been an avid reader of fiction since the time I was a small child. It was. It was my world. I loved it. I was always thirsty to read, but I never saw myself as writing a novel. And I was always writing literary criticism, but not a novel. But I was always writing. I was always wrote in journals. I always had scraps of paper. Some pretty word or phrase would come into my mind and I would write it down. And then one day, this whole novel just kind of came into my head and it wanted to get out. And I was so astonished by it that I, you know, I started writing. And there's more to it. I could. It's. It's kind of. That part of the story is kind of interesting, if you would.

Yeah, let's hear it.

So I started writing and it was so delightful that this. This guy had the characters and they were. And I could see them, and it was so astonishing to me. And then I got very sick with what took a long time to diagnose as late stage Lyme disease. So I stopped writing it. And, in fact, I very sadly had to stop teaching at the university. I had to stop Reading friends would come over and read to me and I would fall asleep while they were reading. But I kept telling myself the story of this night novel while I was sick. And when I miraculously got well, the story was still in my mind. And when I finally went back to my laptop and I opened up the document, it was like I couldn't stop. It was like a great flood was happening inside of my mind and I just. I could not stop writing. One weekend, I wrote 17,000 words on the rough draft.

That is a lot. That's a lot. A lot.

It was a lot for me, too. And so that's how it happened.

Do you think that while you were sick, it was floating around in the back of your mind?

Well, it was. Because when I couldn't write and I couldn't read, I couldn't even watch a film because I would. It hurt to watch a film. I would tell myself the story of the novel when I had enough lucidity to do so. And so I felt like, alongside the illness, in those years when I was largely bedridden, it just kept getting richer in my mind.

Mm. Can I ask, how long were you bedridden?

So with Lyme disease, it's not always linear. Like, you have moments where, like, oh, I think I'm better, and then I would fall back down again. It was a process of about six years that I was. I was quite ill, and towards the end I was pretty bedridden.

I have someone in my life who had Lyme disease, but fortunately it was caught early. And I think it sounds like yours wasn't caught soon enough.

That's exactly right. So I do. It's just off the. Well, it's not exactly off the topic of the lunatic. We don't see any ticks in the lunatic, but it does take place in the woods in the Berkshires, and my protagonist is always hiking in the woods. And so to be vigilant about the presence of ticks today, I think, is very important. And catching it early is key.

Yeah. Because the early symptoms aren't anything out of the ordinary. From what I understand. They're easy to kind of shrug off as something else, like, oh, it's just a cold. Oh, it's just a flu.

And some people don't have early symptoms and some people don't get that classic bullseye rash. And they're so minuscule, it can be very hard to even detect a tick. I had a tick bite in the Berkshire's, and I plucked the tick out of my shoulder and I sent it to the lab, and they said I didn't have Lyme disease.

Oh, wow.

And so there were just a lot of little things like that that apparently those tests aren't always accurate. It can be very tricky with Lyme disease.

To me, that kind of ties in with what you're saying about the lunatic kind of the way that technology does and doesn't serve us. And if you put too much faith in it, it can let you down.

That's an excellent correlation. And I agree. I think that that was it. I think that the character, it was like a watershed moment for her where she had some things happen in her personal life. She was accused of hacking, falsely accused. And then she just kept feeling very wary about this Internet surveillance and like I said, feeling like she was addicted to her smartphone. And when I've mentioned this to people, people say, what's your novel about? Well, people who don't really want to get into it. I'll say, well, in some sense it deals with smartphone addiction. And so they're like, oh, I can relate to that. But it's true. Then on the other side, when she does start to her, you know, her objective is to cultivate a meaningful life off the digital grid, she finds the challenges in that too. Because just as you were saying, it serves us and then it also doesn't service. But those ways in which it has become efficient and useful to us are also hard to get away from.

When you talk to people about the premise of being addicted to their phone, do you find some people just don't want to talk about that?

You know, the people who do want to talk about it will have follow up questions or comments and I guess the people who don't want to will just nod their head because that can.

Be a touchy subject. I found, you know, people and the connection to their phone can be very wrought emotionally.

Yes, I think that, you know, I'm in no way evangelistic about anything in my life. So as a writer, I was observing something that I noticed back when I started writing this in 2011 and after that, these are my observations. And then this character took on a life of, you know, a life of her own and in my imagination. And so I do think that, you know, we all make our own choices. I have not, you know, ditched my smartphone, by the way. I also don't think I'm addicted to my smartphone. I can say, yes, I think that it is a touchy subject today.

It's amazing that back in 2011 that was what you saw and it really just intensified over these, you know, past decade and a bit, it really has.

And I think. I think I saw it too, with friends who would complain about wasting time on Facebook at the time. It was before Instagram was so popular. And so I was just observing all of that, taking it all in.

Mm. You raised another point about writing fiction is that oftentimes people will think that you're writing yourself, even when you're writing fiction, and then they kind of assume that you are your own character. And of course, as writers, we put pieces of ourself into everything, but it's not a biography.

No. I'm so glad that you pointed that out, because in that regard too, I have had some friends who have thought that I cast myself as the protagonist. And people protested because it is not at all the case, nor should it be. Nor should it be. And there's a reason why it's. It's fiction. There are some instances where I do love nature, I do love literature. I have experienced grief. The main character goes through assimilating grief that she. Of losses that she experienced when she was a child, that she had never really fully grieved. But we've all experienced grief. And even the ways in which she processed her grief in no way corresponded to my own. So I was a little surprised that some of my friends thought that I had cast her as me. But I suppose that my literary voice is going to, of course, be in some sense my own voice.

So that is. That can be confusing for non writers.

I sympathize with that.

As you're talking, something I'm thinking about is the creative process for creating fiction is in some ways really different from the scholarly work you've done. Because with the scholarly work, your intent is to create your point and your perspective and to make it very clear. But as we're saying with the fiction, it's more to invite the reader to think about their own perspective. How did the creative process feel internally, like, emotionally, for you, writing the fiction versus writing the scholarly work? Did it feel good? Did it feel like invigorating? What did it feel like that's such.

I really love that question. Thank you. I would say that I have such a passion for academic writing on literature. I have an idea and then I really want to expound on it. And so I feel a passion when I'm writing and when I'm creating an argument. But also I love words. I love images, words, beauty. I also felt very passionate when I was writing fiction, but there was something living about it, like I wasn't writing A someone else's work I was in. The muse was guiding me in that sense. What I do think could be sort of a commonality is that people have asked me if I did a lot of literary research for this book. And I didn't do any literary research for this book. It's just that my head is full of literary references. So this protagonist and the characters around her. I'm also a classically trained musician. So there's a lot of music, there's a lot of poetry. The protagonist's grandfather was a writer. There are a lot of literary references from Montaigne to Mallarme, Baudelaire, Emerson, Thoreau that just naturally come out of me when I'm thinking about something. So I felt like, if anything, it was enriching for my literary process to have this background. But I didn't feel like I was doing any sort of academic writing. Like it was not the same thing. And it was also helpful for the editing process. I felt like I had the advantage of just really loving to edit and work on a manuscript. And so I felt like that was maybe easier for me. And I'm not invested in a certain paragraph, even if it's really beautiful, if it is not pertinent to the line, then I just, you know, I make the cut. But it was. It's interesting to have both of those sites.

It's also really neat that after many years of studying the creative works of other people that you find you kind of flipped it and now you were the one doing the creation. So it probably will give you or hasn't given you new insights into your comparative literature work.

Absolutely. That's absolutely accurate. I just recently wrote an article on Milan Kundera and I found that the way that I approached his work had slightly shifted after starting to write fiction on my own. So what a wise observation on your part.

How did it shift? Do you remember?

I would say that I felt more of a. Not that I ever disrespected an author that I was writing about, but I had always taken this sort of Roland Barthes idea of the death of the author with put the other side. And I'm just going to look at the work. And I've always been pretty strict about that. Suddenly I felt that Milan Kundera always protests about, say, the political nature of his work or why anybody has to insist on translation or his language switching. And he talks about his sense of humor and thematically his wish to be light hearted. And critics always ignore that and insist on the political nature of Milan Kunder and I just. I felt far more sensitive to his own take on himself. So I found that interesting.

That makes a lot of sense to me as somebody who also writes fiction, because when you look back at each one of your works that you've done, you'll probably write more fiction. You're in a different mindset. Things are different about you, what you're up to emotionally. And it does go into your book. It sounds like pain went into your book, your physical pain. And it sounded to me like the way that you were describing her quest to go out into the woods and to leave her phone behind. That, to me sounds not like enormous pain, but pain that comes with the change. Pain that comes with knowing that you need to do something different. And your quest to get out of the bed. Obviously, you had a strong desire to get well and to get strong again and to tell the story. And that momentum, the way you described the character, showed up in the character because she went off by herself.

She did.

She left behind her communication, her way to connect with other people, and forced herself to go out and find a completely new way that. It sounds like she didn't know what it was yet. But that takes a lot of strength. And I think that the forerunner to strength sometimes can be pain or anguish.

That's really interesting that that's your interpretation. That didn't occur to me in my process. So I accept that as you interpreting my work in process and think that's very interesting.

It sounds really beautiful and strong the way you describe it.

Thank you. And yes, I do have. It's funny, I then didn't have any plans to write another novel. I just sort of accept what comes to me. And then, let's see, two summers ago, I was out running in the mountains in Switzerland with my dog, and it was like this second novel landed in my head. And I was again so astonished, I turned around, I ran back home, and I started writing out the character portraits, the plot, the theme. And then I noticed it was dark and I was hungry and my dog looked hungry. It just all came flooding out of me. And I've been pretty busy since then with. With the publicity for these books that have come out. My previous book, and then the Lunatic. But this summer, I am really getting down to work on it. And it's just interesting that once again, it just landed in my head. So I don't really know how that works. I respect the mysterious nature of the muse.

Absolutely. That sounds beautiful. You mentioned your other books, the nonfiction, so we could talk a little bit. About those.

Well, since we're talking about the Lunatic and if any of your listeners are interested in dogs, what is interesting between the Lunatic, my first novel that's just come out and my last book, Soulmate Dog, is that along with the protagonist of the lunatic, Nell, she's not entirely alone because she's accompanied by her German shepherd, Argos. And so in Soulmate Dog, which is a memoir, there is a German shepherd who really features prominently. He is the protagonist, Brady. And there are some commonalities in, for example, the subtle ways in which we are able to communicate with our animals that come into play in both Soulmate Dog and then in the Lunatic. I never described it or said what it was. It just happens that Nell and Argos are able to communicate with each other beyond the five senses. But soulmadawg really is about the story of my relationship with a German shepherd named Brady and how as someone who also has studied post humanism and animal theory at the university and written about it, I found that there was so much that I didn't know that Brady taught me. And so I use my conversations, if you wish, with him, to approach animal and non human animal theories in a different way. And it's also a love story. It's a love story between, between an animal and a non human animal and the lengths that we will go to, to help others. And so it's, it's, for me, it's probably the most meaningful book I will, I would ever write because it just. I learned, I learned so much about the way animals think and communicate from him and wanted to share that. I felt it was important to share with readers.

You mentioned doing some studies into the theories. Could you talk a little bit about that? Like what did you learn? What did you discover?

Prior to my experience with him or while I was with him?

Both, but particularly maybe like what it is that landed in the book.

Sure. In sort of broad terms, my philosophical training as a scholar involved in some sense the ways in which humans have denigrated and denied animals certain faculties. You know, Descartes is a prime example of thinking of animals as puppets and machines. And so, you know, post humanism of the 20th century would really think beyond that and look at the ways in which, going back to Jeremy Bentham before that, ways in which animals can suffer and really looking at the ways that they are differentiated and recognized for their own inherent values. And something happened in my life with Brady that challenged everything that I thought about animals and that is animal communication. And I was very reluctant to take it on. But A friend encouraged me to speak with an animal communicator who communicates with animals largely through telepathy. I thought that this sounded absurd to me and I would be laughed out of the university if I ever was caught talking to an animal communicator. But when I talked to her about Brady, one of the first things she said, first of all, everything she said was very accurate. And she showed me pictures of things that he was thinking and trying to share with me. And then he said to her that his lower lumbar was out and she recommended that I see an animal chiropractor. I had never heard of an animal chiropractor, but I went to see one that day and she said, oh, his lower lumbar out is. I'm just going to work on this. And I almost fell off my chair. And I really delved into it and took it seriously. And then I looked at the scholarly materials from William James and such that looked at telepathy and its intellectual value. And the more I delved into it. When Brady became ill, and it's also a medical memoir of how he overcame leptospirosis. We were able to use animal communication to tune into his needs and his symptoms and how he was feeling in his body. It became an instrumental tool in his recovery. And then it's like a muscle, it's like training for a marathon. The more that you do this animal communication, the more you can listen to the animal and actually hear what they're. Hear what they're saying. So I became pretty adept at communicating with Brady and realized that he was. He had all these, like, higher order thinking things that he wanted to share with me. And so I developed this whole philosophical argument around that in the book, which I shared with my PhD advisor, Johns Hopkins, who is, you know, never has encountered anything like that before. And he found it to be extraordinary and would like to have an in person conversation about it. But it really expanded everything that I ever thought I knew.

I imagine that book reaches a lot of readers because a lot of readers, you know, out there do have really strong connections with their animals, but don't have any way to express what they're thinking about or feeling in the relationship.

Exactly. And in fact, there is a way to do that. And I've now seen this with many people. And so I know that it's not just a fluke, but it is out there. But it was. So that was a memoir. And then before that I wrote Starving to Heal in my radical recovery from late stage Lyme disease. And how it could help others. And I guess that that memoir is also pretty radical and out there in a different way from Soulmate, Dog. And again, I never intended to write a memoir. I'm a very private person writing my literary criticism. But when I what happened was that I didn't think I could go on with the Lyme disease and I thought that I was nearing really the end of the end of my life. And so I did this last ditch effort after trying every medical center solution possible for years and alternative treatments as well as the conventional treatments. And I went to Siberia and stayed with a medical doctor at his rustic clinic in the mountains for two months and practiced a form of fasting, which is an extreme autophagy in which you don't eat and you don't drink and you don't take showers, you don't apply lip balms. And I did a one day, a three day, a seven day, and then a nine day with no food and water. And afterwards it was like I was back to my 17 year old body. I was running, I was riding, I was skiing, I was. My memory came back during Lyme disease. I couldn't finish a sentence, I couldn't find words for common things, let alone a PhD's vocabulary. It was impossible. And everything came back. And I have been symptom free now for, I think it will be eight years in September. And so I thought I had a moral obligation to write this book as there are so many people who suffer from not only Lyme disease, but autoimmune disorders. And I have, I'm so, I'm so grateful that I wrote the book. So it's a combination of my story and the medical science behind it. Then in an appendix I even include a protocol and recipes, etc. And so many people have gone to his clinic now and have had complete recoveries. And I have had received countless messages from people who tell me how grateful they are and I just break down crying. For me, it is so meaningful. So that's why I wrote the book. And it's a great joy to be able to have a solution for someone who had no solutions left like I did.

That's amazing. And I can imagine again how a lot of people would really appreciate reading something like that. It could be very validating because if they've gone to multiple doctors and tried multiple things and have them not work and not work again and again, you end up with that, you know, can feel very lost.

You feel very lost.

How did you find this doctor in Siberia?

I was, I was I was beyond my last, my blood, my last hope. And I was one day, I will never forget it. I was bedridden in my bed and from the antibiotics I had also developed an autoimmune disorder, psoriasis and candida. And so I wasn't even looking for Lyme at the time. I was looking for the psoriasis and the candida. And I was on some forum, it was in, I think it was in French. And it was about. There was a quote about this doctor who said that you could incinerate diseases through fasting. And that was so fascinating to me to incinerate, Incinerate a disease through fasting. And I'd been putting all these things in my body and I was like, wait, maybe the answer is what I take out of the body. And it was almost impossible to find him on the Internet. His name was Sergei Filonov. I finally found him in Russian. I have a moderate knowledge of Russian and so I found his website in Russian. And it just so happened that at the time I was married to a Russian man who I convinced to reach out to him and he didn't want to take me as a patient. He'd never taken an American patient, no one from the West. And he was like, this could be very tricky. And you know, I really convinced him. I said, I will do whatever it takes. I will not be a high maintenance patient. And so my ex husband helped me travel to Siberia because there was no way I could travel by myself. And so that's how I found him. And then he and his family and staff took exceptional care of me and we developed. I'm still very close with him and his nurses and family.

That is really beautiful. I would imagine those connections would be really unique from other connections that you've had with people because, you know, they're culturally so different. And to have such an intense experience.

And to know that they knew and I knew that my life was ebbing away. And I put so much effort into this. Everything, everything he suggested that I do, did, and to see me, well, I mean, we're all in tears. And what's so exciting to me is that through my book, there are so many people who are going to him now. And he's been able to develop a clinic outside of Russia in Montenegro, so that people would easily be able to get a visa or travel there without a visa. And so I just, Every time I see another testimonial from someone, I just. It's such a radical treatment and it's so different from anything that we've ever been taught.

Absolutely.

We'll all die if we don't drink water. But to see it working is. It's such a gift for me to see people get well.

That is amazing. Thanks for sharing that. I hope that someone is helped by listening to this conversation.

That would be wonderful. And again, it is so completely outside of and background but it has to be written. That one had to be written.

Awesome. Well, if people want to stay in touch with you or maybe ask you questions about that or just watch you online, where's a good place for them to find you?

So I am active on Instagram ichellebslater and I have a website michelleslater.com and I believe I have a TikTok account, which I can't believe, but I think I do have a TikTok account of Michelle B. Slater and my books are found where books are sold.

Awesome. We'll be sure to include the social media links in the show notes as well as the links for the books. So if people are interested they can find them easily there.

And thank you so much for having me, Melissa. I really enjoyed all of your questions.

Awesome. Well, you thank thank you for coming on and thank you for letting me talk about your books.

Thank you.

Thanks for stopping by the audio town square of the Washington Square Review. Until next time, this has been Washington Square on air from Lansing Community College. To find out more about our writers, community and literary journal, visit lcc.edu. wSR writing is messy, but do it anyway.