“How to Act” by Victoria Mack appeared in Issue 38 and can be found here.
We’d love to hear more about this essay.
I almost never write memoir. It’s just so damn exposed. In my other life I’m an actor, and so I’m comfortable being honest within a fiction. I might pour my heart out on stage or in a story, but usually, no one knows I’m revealing anything about the real me. But on a whim I took a memoir class at The Writer’s Studio, and this piece, “How to Act,” poured right out of me.
The piece is about a sad and strange time in my life. I was playing a homewrecker-type in a show at the Denver Center. Up till then, I’d always felt totally embodied in the characters I played, as if I stepped inside their skin once I stepped on stage. But then I had a miscarriage. After that, for the first time in my career, I felt disconnected, as if I were floating above my character like a balloon. My character cared about stealing husbands and getting rich, and I only cared about my loss. When I exited the stage, the audience would boo me. Usually that’s a compliment to any actor playing a villain. But during this experience I felt too raw. I wanted to turn around and scream, You have no idea what I’m going through right now! Be nice!
What was the most difficult aspect of writing this piece?
This was a pretty easy piece to write. This story was a weight inside me, and I needed to put it down.
Recommend a book for us which was published within the last decade.
Cursed Bunny, by Bora Chung. I loved every word. Read it immediately, but be warned: it will mess up your head. Whether that’s for better or worse, I can’t say.
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be? Why?
Cristina Rivera Garza. I want to know what kind of brain comes up with books like The Illiac Crest and The Taiga Syndrome. I suspect it’s not a normal human brain. (I suspect it’s better.)
What are you working on now? What’s next?
Recently I wrote a rough draft of an adaptation of “The Little Mermaid.” My story explores the way that the mermaid is, in a sense, “passing” as human, despite terrible pain, since in the original, every step feels like she’s walking on knives. I’m interested in the way that we’re sometimes complicit in our own abuse, and I want to find out why I and others make that choice.
Our thanks to Victoria for taking the time to answer a few questions and share this essay. Read “How to Act” here: https://www.sequestrum.org/nonfiction-how-to-act.
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Victoria Mack is a disabled writer, actor, and teacher who splits her time between Savannah and Brooklyn. Publications featuring her work include Minerva Rising, Papeachu, Oyedrum, Kitchen Table Quarterly, Oddball, and Flash Fiction Magazine, and has an upcoming piece in Hippocampus. Her short play “Three Women” was produced in Philadelphia. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net Award, and she is a fellowship recipient from the Catwalk Art Residency. As an actor she has performed in film and television, on and off-Broadway, and all over the country. Her MFA is from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and her BA is from Barnard College. www.victoriamackcreative.com.