Meet the Author: Lena Ziegler

Today's interview was a particularly exciting one for me, because Lena and I shared an office during our time as PhD students. I've already spent many hours talking with Lena about life, creativity, writing, and beyond, and so I already knew she was a brilliant and empathetic thinker. Now, I get to introduce her to you!

Lena Ziegler is a multi-genre writer with a special interest in hybrid work. Her writing has appeared in Split Lip Magazine, Indiana Review, Literary Orphans, Miracle Monocle, Duende, Dream Pop Press, Anti-Heroin Chic, Gambling the Aisle and others. She is a co-founder of the literary journal and press The Hunger. She holds an MFA from Western Kentucky University and a PhD from Bowling Green State University. She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband. You can find her online at www.lenaziegler.com.

Order your copy of Lena's book, A Revisionist History of Loving Men (affiliate link*).

Please note that this interview contains discussions of rape and sexual violence.

Tell me about A Revisionist History of Loving Men. Who should read it?

This has been a long journey. A Revisionist History of Loving Men is a title I've actually used multiple times. I used it, first, for a chapter I wrote for an edited collection when I was in graduate school, and then for my dissertation, and now for this book.

It's kind of evolved in each iteration, along with my own focus and processing of it. So, essentially, this is a book that stems from my own struggle to understand experiences of sexual violence that I've gone through my life.

I say this in the book, and this is in the book description, so you know openly what it's about. But when I was 23, I was raped by a stranger. It took three or four years after that for me to recognize that it was not the first rape I've ever experienced, and that I had, in fact, experienced rape and different forms of sexual abuse and violence in three out of four of my romantic relationships at that point in my life.

That made me think, okay, I need to revisit and maybe revise my view and understanding of what has actually happened to me. The thing that I kept coming back to, and this was really the crux of the dissertation research, was one of the many reasons it was so hard for me to identify and name those experiences is because the language didn't fit for me.

I always thought about rape as something that happens by violent, monstrous strangers, you know, and and it's statistically that's nowhere near true: 90% of rapes are by people that you know.

That’s sort of a known fact, but it's still not how we think about rape. We still gravitate toward these images of a brutal stranger, stranger rape, and that's just not the reality of what most sexual violence looks like.

That made me really dive into, what's the issue with the language? Why is the language such a problem? There were many factors that I identified, one of which included that the language itself is so associated with a specific type of perpetrator that we simply can't apply it to the people that we love and the people that we trust. It doesn't matter how they hurt us.

We don't feel comfortable applying it, and so we can't own our reactions to it, how much we protested or didn't protest, how we responded afterward, how traumatized we felt in the immediate after-effect. So many different things, which all come down to the cultural representation of what we understand rape and sexual violence to be.

The project itself stemmed from dissertation research where I was trying to answer those questions. I wanted to do this in an autoethnographic way, because my whole reason for doing it was my own extreme discomfort and inability to live inside of my own skin with all of these truths floating around in me and not really knowing how to quantify them.

Once I knew I was going to tackle this in the most personal and kind of raw way I possibly could for my dissertation research, it also involved doing interviews and conversations with a community partner and women who were advocates for victims of sexual violence, but who would also experienced it themselves.

For the final book that's being published, this is straight memoir, so it does not include the community research element of it. It is the first half and then some of the dissertation. It's a revision of the revision, so to speak, where the primary focal point is my own journey. It’s told in three different parts.

The first part is the most comfortably analytical and scholarly, and it kind of devolves as it goes forward into a more disjointed narrative, a more troubling, struggling narrative into the final third of the book.

It’s a piece I never had the time to finish for my dissertation, but was very meaningful to me, which was revisiting every place that I had experienced some kind of sexual violence, and writing through my process, revisiting those places after I had done this kind of revision of what I believe happened there. The book really comes full circle from my life, but also my academic career up until this point. It kind of covers everything.

In terms of who I think it's really for, I feel like it's for everyone, honestly. But I really feel like it's for every woman, especially women who feel that things have happened to them that they can't name or who don't know if they have the right to say something happened to them. Women who feel ashamed, women who feel complicit in their own sexual violence or abuse history.

I would also say, though, that I would love a very brave man to read this, because every man who has read this has told me that it messed them up in terms of their own ideas about what consent is and looks like from the female perspective.

I would love everyone to read it, obviously, but I really think I wrote it for women like me who were desperate for something to ground them and make them feel like it's not their fault and like they're not alone and that they're not they're not the problem, but it's the larger culture.

I remember you working on this project. How did you decide what to keep and what was going to stay in the dissertation?

That's a great question. I think that part of it was the publisher. I had the opportunity to publish with Autofocus Books, and this is a publisher who—it's probably obvious by the name—publishes crafted or artful memoir or personal writing.

There is a research component to my book, there is scholarly data, there are sources. I like to think of it as a hybrid of memoir and personal writing and more academic or critical writing. That works because of the nature of how I explored the topic, but I removed the part about the community research, in part because they weren't my stories to tell.

If this is meant to be a book about my experience with this, then I don't want to kind of co-opt the voices of these other people who are not consenting to it being published in this format under my name.

Now, obviously they did for my dissertation, and I think if it were to be published in an academic setting, I would feel a little bit more comfortable with that, because it would be consumed with an academic mind.

If I'm going to bare it all, so to speak, in this kind of format where the main readers are going to be people who appreciate memoir, then I want to make sure that I'm doing that in a way that's really just to them also. That was the biggest decision. I would say they were the biggest factor in the decision.

How do you see revisionist history in the context of knowledge construction, of personal history and healing, and for people engaging with history?

I've actually grappled with this a bit, because when I've told people the title, some say, “Well, isn't revisionist history bad?” And I'll say, “I mean, it can be! Just like anything can be if it's used in such a way, or if it's weaponized somehow.”

But revisionist history is sort of the opposite of that. We're returning to establish ideas of what happened, and we're reevaluating them with our new understanding of the world. I think that could apply to both the historical context—people researching history and culture—and it can apply to our personal lives.

I think all of us have experienced when we get five years older, we look back at something that happened that's now embarrassing that wasn't then. That's like a light version of what we're talking about, where you revisit your past and you see it differently now, because you know differently now.

Yhe same could be applied to culture. We look back at narratives that we've had about people, about events, how we got to where we got in this life, as people and as a society, and we can see things differently. We have the hindsight to understand that the way things were progressing, you can't really completely see when you’re in the thick of it.

I see revisionist history as extremely important on a cultural level, so we actually understand the reality of what happened. We're using our constant creation of knowledge to benefit our understanding of the past to benefit our future.

With this book, on a personal level, I think that revisionist history is actually really important, because you're not meant to linger and live in the past, but the past is inescapable. Can you confront it constantly in your daily life? If you're in denial about that, you're going to have a very difficult life.

If there are things that are clawing at you, it's important to understand them, to turn the lens backward and take a look and and understand how they happened, especially when it's trauma-based, like when I look at my own history.

If I had not done a revisionist history, both the book as well as my own attempt to understand myself, I would probably be in a very dark, bad place. Still, I might be in an abusive relationship at this point. Still, I might be addicted to something. I mean, with the direction my life was going, I could have died or been killed.

I was truly in such a bad state that doing this work saved my life. I genuinely believe that it did, by disrupting the path I was on, because I thought to say, “Wait, I need to reconsider what's happened. Is it actually my fault? Is this actually because I'm this monster that I think I am? Or is it this culture around me and this world that I am just a part of that created this mess that was my life at that point?”

So because I revised, I feel like I was able to move forward, and I now have a completely different life that I never thought I would have, and I'm incredibly grateful for that. It's because of the work that I did. Nobody gave me that new life. I did, by doing the work.

That is an important thing for anybody who's experienced a trauma, especially, to do.

How did you protect yourself during the writing?

Oh, god, Bailey, I didn't protect myself at all. Let me just be honest with you. I started writing this in the summer of 2020, because I defended my dissertation in March of 2021.

Let me just say, first of all, I planned to and I did write this in chronological order of how I came to terms with what had happened to me—so not the chronological order of my life.

The first incident that had happened to me, I’d just turned 23 and I was raped by a guy that I just met, and that was the first incident in my life that I recognized as rape. I recognized it as rape in the moment it happened, but it still took me three years to say out loud that it had happened.

Because of that, I have been processing that much longer than anything else. So that was the first thing I wrote about, because it made sense to me that the incident that I had to first recognize to see the glimmers of it all everywhere else was this incident. I wrote about it first, and then I kind of worked through chronologically after that, because of how it all kind of came to terms for me, and that was very difficult.

I would say that in the process, when I first wrote it, I wrote that chapter very quickly, and then didn't write again for two or three months. During my dissertation process, I didn't write for two or three months, and I was very stressed out about this, and I felt very guilty about it.

I think a lot of it was because, and this is the irony, and I reference this many times in the book: even now, writing about it, I diminish how much these things have affected me. Even now, with everything I know, I still do that.

I think, “Oh, I could be fine. There's no reason I can't write all of this in the same timeframe that Bailey writes her dissertation,” which was never going to happen, no matter the topic. But you know, I felt this real shame that I couldn't keep up with my cohort members.

I thought, what's wrong with me? I never really gave myself a break to think that this is fucking traumatizing to write about, it's terrible.

So needless to say, I got through the first draft. I would say the first two thirds of this book are from the dissertation, or some version of that. I got through that in about six months, which is now, in retrospect, incredible. It was very hard-won, and there were things I was not ready to write about, but I felt boxed in.

My therapist recommended embracing being disjointed as part of my process and as part of the way I present it, and I did. The more traumatic an event is for me, and the less time I've had to process it, the more disjointed the narrative in the book is.

I actually like that as an effect, because it's kind of showing the nature of how this works. My first chapter is an immersive narrative, but it's also this detached analysis, and I can't do that as I go forward. It's impossible as I go forward.

But then I didn't work on it again for a couple of years, and then I found a publisher, and I was talking to the publisher, and I said, “Listen, if I'm going to publish this, I need to write the final section, which is me revisiting all these different places.” And he was like, “Yeah, that sounds fantastic.”

So I went on this trip. I was like, “This will be fine. I'll go on a trip, and I'll write this essay, and I'll be done at the end of this summer.” And that's not what happened. I went on this trip revisiting all these different places where things happened to me, and I was so deeply re-traumatized. I had nightmares for months. All my PTSD symptoms flared up, and I didn't write again for a year.

And then when I wrote after that year, it was so difficult. There was no way for me to process it in a way that was really self-protective. I don't have a lot of practice in being self-protective. It's kind of a new skill I'm learning.

In the process of writing, I've always felt like the writing should take precedence, but it can't. That's not how I teach and that's not how I talk about writing, but it's how I've always expected it for myself, of course.

This is part of the root of what I'm writing about. When you don't take your own trauma seriously, then you also can't take self-protection that seriously either, and that's really what happened for me.

I will say, though, that the final section is one of my favorite parts of the whole book, because it shows the living, breathing experience of revision in real time. I'm making commentary on how embarrassing this process is, and how I'm going to regret what I'm writing in six months, and how I wish I could be there with the reader and tell them everything I would change. There's a lot of meta-commentary interwoven throughout the whole travel narrative, because that's how I experienced it.

It was terrifying to end this book, because I thought, I don't want to give anyone the impression that it's over. That was something that when I first started writing, I thought I'd be able to do. I came to the notion by the end that that was never the plan, and it never could have been, and people shouldn't expect it to be.

What is coming up for you as you get ready to release this book?

I think any kind of writing is vulnerable to publish, first of all, but when it's a highly personal narrative and there's revelatory stuff… My aunts and uncles and my mother and father have preordered it, you know?

When you know people in your life who you're going to see at Christmas and otherwise are going to know very intimate details about your life and decisions you made, not just things that have happened to you, decisions you made that you would not make today, there's this sense of fear. Did I do a good enough job in making it so they will see where I was coming from?

When it's published, it becomes the world’s. I can't protect it anymore. I can't frame it for people anymore. They have to read it at face value, and wherever they're at in their life, in their own processing of these issues, they're going to read it that way. And I can't do anything about that. It's my life that's on display to do that with. There's a vulnerability there.

I would say also, I'm many years out from the last relationship I'm really referencing. It was 10 years ago at this point, which is an amazing thing to be 10 years out from. But it is also weird, because there's this part of me that's like, “Wow, first of all, it still affects me, and that's strange.”

But maybe now I'm reaching a point where I can actually write more about this. And I didn't expect that. I told people for a long time that when I've published this book, I'm completely done. I'm never writing about sexual violence again, but now I don't know.

It's a fear, I guess. Is there more I have to say? I haven't figured that out yet, but I would say for now, I'm legitimately proud of it.

Every time I kind of go back to it and think, “Oh god. Should I be doing this? What have I done?” Every time, I think “No, this is exactly what I should be doing,” and I'm extremely proud of that.

I could care less and less if people judge me. Like, okay, if you judge me, you're part of the culture I'm talking about here. So, who are you to me?

What has your publishing experience been like?

It's been very interesting. It’s been this publisher, Autofocus, which is this fantastic independent publisher. They used to have a journal, but it was a literary journal, and they had a podcast and all that, and now their full focus is publishing and creating this online writing community. It's very cool.

The process has been incredibly flexible in a way I wasn't expecting. Because of the nature of working with a small press, I've been able to ask for extensions when I needed them, when I had panicky experiences.

I've been able to have a lot of input into what I'm comfortable with editing. I went through several rounds of editorial feedback, and I was told every single time, “This is your story. So if you feel strongly about something, you can keep it. You're the final call on what stays and what goes.”

Now, I appreciate anybody that can tighten my prose. I took almost every bit of feedback I was given. But there were a couple of points where I was like, no, I really needed this to be said in this exact way. The freedom for that is really meaningful for me.

What was also really special for me is that the editor is a man, and he had suggested a couple of times, “I can get a female editor to work on this. Maybe it would be better if I did.” I was like, “Yeah, if you want to.” But deep down, I was like, “I don't think I need that. You're a good man, you're a good, compassionate man, you're a man that wants to put this story out there.”

I really want men to be a part of telling these stories. Also, I don't want it just to be women uplifting women. Obviously, that's wonderful, but I like to see men uplifting women's voices, and doing so with a tenderness and honoring why that voice needs to be uplifted.

Michael Wheaton, he's the publisher. He's fantastic. Just a great person, a great editor.

I am also super laid back. It helps that if he had the deadline come up that he couldn't meet, which didn't happen a lot, I was like, “All right, whatever.” And if I had something come up, he's like, “All right, whatever.”

It was originally scheduled for spring 2025, and it got pushed to fall because of my needs, to take longer than I meant to. Every time I went to reread this, to do edits, I had a hard time. I would have PTSD issues, It's a difficult book for me.

I've always written creative nonfiction in memoir, but I published many little essays and things that I have this total, tight-knit control over. This is a book, and it's my baring of most of the things I'm most kind of ashamed of in this world.

I have a whole new appreciation for the people who have come before me, especially the women who have come before me, who have published and written about these topics in ways that have been so instrumental to me doing what I'm doing now. I have a totally new appreciation for it. You know?

What’s coming next creatively?
​You may remember this about me, I always have 1,000 ideas and I do like 1% of them, because I don't have great follow-through. As soon as I get excited about life, yet another one takes over and I lose my mind.

I will say I have not written fiction in, honestly, five or six years, and I wrote some fiction recently that came out of nowhere. I took a walk without headphones, and in 20 minutes, I had a whole novel idea. Apparently, unplugging really does something. I should listen to everything I've ever heard in my life about that.

But anyway, I came up with this whole novel. I’m actually extremely excited about this project right now. I've been spending time outlining this novel and I've never done that before, because I'm always just off the cuff. So in this case, I'm trying to mitigate that, and so I'm planning.

My biggest fear in life is that I'm going to have too many ideas and never actually complete any of them. Hopefully, mentioning this novel that I'm working on is going to make me actually do something with it. To just be completely immersed in fiction would be a real relief after the last couple of years.

If you had to give a piece of advice to another writer about a practice, about telling personal stories, about any aspect of the creative process, what would you want people to know?

I don't know that I'm the person to talk about process, but I do think I can say something about telling a personal story. Something I have learned in my own process of doing this, as well as something I have told students, is that you don't have to gut yourself to write effective personal writing.

You don't have to like fillet yourself in front of the entire world and spill every single heartbreak and pain. There's this tendency, especially when we write about personal stuff or trauma, that we have to justify ourselves constantly. Is this worthwhile to write about? Is this something that matters, especially when other people had it worse?

Everyone thinks that everybody else had it worse, but somebody had to have it bad at some point, right? We all think that, and it doesn't matter what it is. You don't have to sacrifice yourself. You don't have to sacrifice your well-being, your dignity.

I often tell my students that you don't have to sacrifice your dignity to tell a good story. I had to learn that. I learned that ironically, from my therapist, who is not the person who's coached me in writing in my life, but she's the one who taught me that. Sometimes the product can reflect the challenge of the writing itself. Sometimes that itself is enough. It's more than all the details that you have to give.

Now, obviously, being vulnerable is important, and finding a way to tell that story, but you don't have to sacrifice your mental health for it.

I think that, especially for young writers, there's this tendency to glamorize trauma as part of what makes you valuable as a writer. “I'm young and I don't come from whatever, but I do have these experiences I can exploit for my own writing.”

And if you want to do that, you should. If it would be healing for you, if you have a story you need to tell. But don't feel like all you are is your trauma.

I received advice like that about and I talk about this in my book, actually, about types of advice and feedback I've received on writing that, in some cases, on the writing part, I agree with, but on the human part, I don't.

I won't tell a student to spend more time writing about their rape. Don't ask for more detail if they're not ready for that yet, you know?

I mean, ironically, I said I'm not good at self protection, but this is something that I do want to share with people. I think it's really important to know.

I'm not good at talking about the process. My process sucks. I'll write in a fury for like two months and I won't write again for five years. I can't talk about process, but I can talk about the emotional journey attached to it.

I'll add one more thing to that. Perfectionism is part of the problem. My perfectionism also stems from trauma. I think that's true for a lot of people, but if you're a person who has that, you have to be aware of the ways in which your mental health is affecting your writing process. You have to figure out how to work with that.

I don't think I am ever going to be a person that can write the way somebody else might write in terms of their process. I need to find my own pathway.

What's the best book that you have read recently?
​I recently read a book called The Power of Positive Thinking, by Norman Vincent Peale. This is a book that came out in 1952 and I'll just be honest: it came out in 1952. There's some commentary in there that I'm not okay with, but let's set that aside, because it's 1952. I got a lot out of it. I really enjoyed it.

I am a person who thinks very positively generally anyway, but it made me think about it from a more spiritual and religious perspective, that for me, is where I'm at right now in my life. I'm spending a lot of time exploring my own spirituality right now.

I have always been into that, but right now I'm really invested in that, and it's been really enjoyable. That was a book where I didn't necessarily agree with the religious take. I don't necessarily see it myself, but it was educational.

It really was surprising, because despite being kind of out of date with some of the social commentary, it was actually in a lot of ways, very reflective of progressive ideas about more Eastern philosophies of meditation and mindfulness and things you would not expect in a book based in Christian ideology written by a pastor.

If anything, it made me think, well, I judged this book harshly for a year before I read it. I bought it years ago, and I only just read it. I was like, I'm just going to read it, and I'm not going to judge it. And I got a lot out of it.

Meet the Author interviews are lightly edited for clarity.

Closing thoughts

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