Liz Your Best Life

Bio: Elizabeth Taddonio is a speech therapist living in Athens, GA with her husband, two dogs, and (pretty soon) their baby (untitled, forthcoming April 2017). Her chapbook, Stone Boats, is available from Spooky Girlfriend Press and you can read some of her thoughts at tinyletter.com/yrfriendliz. 

What’s your favorite swear word or insult?

“Take a hike, PAL!”

My best friend used to call people “drips” when we were in high school (e.g., “Oh that guy? That guy’s a drip.”) and I loved that. I can’t use it as well as she does.

What do you do for money? Feel free to list all the day jobs you’ve ever had.

I’m a speech-language pathologist. During the week I work full time in an elementary school, and I work in the acute care setting at our local community hospital on weekends and holidays. I’ve worked a lot of jobs and this is my second career but it is, to me, the best job in the world.

When did you first start thinking of yourself as a writer or poet? 

Oh I’ve been writing compulsively forever. I started to identify as a writer in college when people I didn’t know would send me criticism or praise for the stuff I would publish in our paper or in our alt magazine. Also honestly being around so many other writers in my journalism classes or otherwise helped with that confidence to say “yes this is just what I do.”

Has writing or research ever led you into a weird situation? If so, do describe.

Before I working as a speech therapist I worked full time in online market research, so I talked to the public A LOT. One time I did some research for a fast food chain and a woman’s answer to a question about a menu item was literally just, “too many diseases, not enough cures” and I think about that a lot. I don’t know, I have a real high tolerance for weird and I hope it stays that way. I met my husband while I was getting a masters in comm studies and he was getting his MFA and all the people in that program were lunatics. Our friend pulled a raw deer heart out of his backpack at a bar once and ate it like it was an apple, but even that just feels kind of heady. Who’s to SAY?

What’s the worst advice anyone ever gave you about your writing or otherwise?

In a journalism class I took my freshman year of college, a professor quoted someone who said “the good stuff sticks” (does anyone know who said this?) and I love the sentiment of it but it’s not true. My brain has a lot to deal with! I need help every now and then and when I hear a good sentence in my head I need t write it down. Or if I get a joke just right, you have to write it down to preserve the wording. I riff a lot with friends and am constantly taking notes on phrasing because it really matters. Being pregnant, my memory is just awful. Also, when you’re pregnant people want to give you a lot of advice so I try to just kind of listen and be kind. I like advice, it’s people opening up about what has been important to them and most of the time it’s not actually about you at all. We are all just doing our best.

What’s the quickest way to get you to lose interest in a story or book?

Arrogant men talking about it.

What were you listening to when you wrote this?

I remember walking with Mark Baumer in Providence to get a juice. I remember his quiet height and his goofy eyes and his careful listening. I remember him telling me the story of how—on his first walk across this ridiculously big country—a camera crew from Dairy Queen made a big show of giving him a coupon that didn’t work when he tried to use it later, off-camera.

We all have our own ways of seeing the world, but I’ve been thinking all day about what made Mark so special, and I think it was how his way of seeing the world found such joy in the strange roots and reaches of everything, how he was so fearlessly weird and defiantly kind in blinking big enough to send his vision over. I imagine him running down the street in a huge parka with the stew of the world sloshing in a plastic yellow bucket, and he’s balancing it on top of his long hair, and it’s splashing everywhere, and he’s laughing and we’re laughing and everyone is hanging on.

He was one of the funniest and least alienating people I’ve ever known, even though his style of being both those things was so hummingly the opposite of the usual versions. And I feel such vivid grief to think about—like his parents said in their post—just the simple fact that we won’t be able to talk with him again. To say something and hear what he says after, to see something and point to it and hear what he calls it. Like how he told Claire about wearing sunglasses when he meditated. Or how he told Blake “You’re more likely to mistake a rock for a bear than a bear for a rock.” Or how he wrote missed connections for his housemate.

I remember reading passages to Jenelle from the book he made out of his first walk across America, I AM A ROAD. Everything was a person; everything was feeling and eating. Mark didn’t eat animals. I remember one time I emailed Mark for a project where people wrote about short stories, and I just found what he wrote back, and I want to put it here and have it stay here, in whatever kind of staying this serves as.

So many knew and loved Mark, and my thoughts are warm and wide for them, and I hope all the stupid, beautiful twists of the world—a tiny person who wants a raisin, a long hair in a shower nozzle, an away message that says “Brb I’m moving the moth back"—brings some memory of something funny and brilliant Mark said or did that they’d forgotten about, or they can’t forget about, and I hope all of this time and light around us knows how good it is to have all of that Mark. (for those who didn’t know him, Mark was walking barefoot across America to raise money for climate change // he was on day 100 // here’s a good place to start to get to know him: http://thebaumer.com/)