In Conversation: L.I. Henley and Marin Smith on Writing the Family in Nonfiction

In this conversation, Marin Smith and L.I. Henley discuss writing the family, writing rituals, the writing life balance, and Smith’s piece titled “The Open Heart” , published in 2025 in Calyx Journal.

Marin Smith lives in the Columbia River Gorge in Oregon. She holds an M.A. in English from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, where she taught Writing and Rhetoric for nearly a decade. Her personal essays and poetry have appeared in print and online publications, including CALYX, Literary Mama, and Split Rock Review. She is a communications and content strategist at Grow Schools and serves as a co-editor-in-chief of Abraxas Review. Her essay “The Open Heart” appears in CALYX 35.1 (March 2025).

L.I. Henley is an interdisciplinary artist and writer born and raised in the Mojave Desert of California. She is the author of six books, including Starshine Road, winner of the Perugia Press Prize, and the novella-in-verse Whole Night Through. Her poetry, prose, and essays have appeared in The Adroit Journal, Brevity, The Cincinnati Review, The Southeast Review, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere. Her personal essays have received recognition including the Arts & Letters/Susan Atefat Prize and the Robert and Adele Schiff Award. Henley is also the creator of Paper Dolls & Books, a series of jointed paper dolls inspired by books, and teaches online creative nonfiction workshops.

L.I. Henley: Marin, thank you so much for coming and doing this for us. We're so appreciative, and I'm thrilled that my students are reading your wonderful essay, “The Open Heart.” I've loved this essay for a long time, and I've loved your work for a long time. We've known each other for a while, too, so this feels like a cool little reunion.

Marin Smith: I'm excited to be here.

L.I. Henley: I want to start with your connection to Cal Poly. You're an alum, but would you tell us a little bit more about your various connections to Cal Poly?

Marin Smith: I considered going to Cal Poly as an undergraduate because I am a horse girl. But my high school boyfriend was going to Cal Poly, and I kind of needed to get away from him for various reasons. So I ended up going to Texas A&M, which is another large agricultural and mechanical institution—and another place for horse girls, incidentally.

I wound up studying English because equine science turned out to be pretty boring for me. I love literature, and I've always loved literature. I've also been a writer for as long as I can remember. So I studied in the humanities department at a big engineering school.

When it came time, years later, to apply to graduate school, Cal Poly was still on my radar because I loved the Central Coast, and I still felt a little sad that I hadn't gone there for undergrad. I applied to the master's program in 2013 and was accepted.

It was a rigorous, challenging program that involved a very long reading list and a comprehensive exam, along with a TA-ship where I taught English 134. After I graduated, I stuck around and taught English 133, the multilingual version; 134; and 145 for almost a decade, somehow.

I also had the pleasure of being a faculty editor for Fresh Voices and Byzantium, as it was called at the time, which is now Intertidal.

I never took creative writing classes during that time. Texas A&M wasn't really a creative writing school, and the master's program at Cal Poly was very literature-focused. But I was always writing. I was always journaling on the side, and I had a little bit of success with poetry here and there.

I also spent a long time doing academic writing in graduate school, after which there was a long period of convalescence, in a way, where I had to fight my voice again. It took a long time. I got married, had two kids, moved to Oregon, and did a bunch of other things before I came to the genre we're looking at today.

L.I. Henley: I'm so glad you came to Cal Poly for your master's because I got to meet you.

Marin Smith: I know. That's the real reason, actually.

L.I. Henley: Because you knew I was there.

Marin Smith: Exactly.

L.I. Henley: I can attest that it was a very, very rigorous program—and so rigorous that I did not continue. I love that you did. And the students are really lucky that they got to have you for that ten-year period.

Marin Smith: I really loved teaching Cal Poly students. They’re hard workers.

L.I. Henley: Yes. They’re hard workers.

Marin Smith: All my engineering students were great because I would say, “Hey, this assignment—you didn't fulfill what you needed to do here,” and they were just like, “Okay. I will go do it.” And then they would go do it.

L.I. Henley: Exactly.

The students I work with often ask me, “Okay, so let's say I did get a degree in English, or I pursued a degree in creative writing, or I got an MFA in creative writing. What would I do for a job?” I've heard that a lot over the last several years.

My answer, after a very heavy pregnant pause, is usually, “Well, you can do whatever you want for a job.” You don't have to be a writer for a job, or an English teacher, or a creative writing professor. You can do anything. Plenty of writers throughout history have had day jobs. I always think of William Carlos Williams, being a pediatrician and writing at night.

So my question for you is: What is your day job, and how do you keep writing in your life while also earning a living—and, I'll just reveal, being a mother?

Marin Smith: Absolutely. I always resented it when I was an English major as an undergraduate and then as a graduate student when people would say, “So you're going to teach.” That was just their assumption. And I was sort of like, “Well, yeah, but it's because I like teaching, not because that's the only thing I could do.”

And incidentally, I really do adore teaching. That's what I did for many years.

Currently, I work remotely as Director of Communications and Brand for Grow Schools, a company that helps schools across the country with funding, facilities, and enrollment challenges. Because I taught for many years, overseas and stateside, and because education is obviously really important to me, when I pivoted to work for the corporate overlords, it was important to me to stay within that space and keep connected to the mission, rather than working for, say, a software company.

I started out as a copywriter when I first went corporate, so I did start out writing. A lot of those roles are being eaten up by AI at the moment, but copywriting gave me the stepping stone to move into marketing and strategy, which is basically writing and rhetoric at the end of the day. It's just different language to describe the same thing.

The company I work for is essentially a finance company, so I work with finance people. In that sense, I work in essentially the equivalent of the humanities department at a large engineering school. There's a through line somewhere.

I'm trying to remind corporate people how to sound like human beings. That's most of my job. Having a humanities degree and a background in research also helps me make sure my team is being ethical in the way we're presenting our unique value propositions to the market. I think I use the skill set I got from studying English, literature, writing, and rhetoric every single day in some way.

In terms of the writing part of my life, because my job is remote, it does afford me the ability to slip away if inspiration strikes randomly and it works with my meetings. But as you alluded to, with two young children, still being a horse girl, and having other interests, I find that most of my writing is done early in the morning before everybody else wakes up.

That being said, I was just watching the beautiful documentary on PBS about Mary Oliver that came out. Mary Oliver has this idea—and a lot of writers have this idea—that you should set aside a time every day to write at a certain time, and if you meet yourself there, the creative part of you will show up.

That's great if you're Mary Oliver and you don't have children and you're only being a poet and you don't have other things and you don't need to make money to afford your life. Although I agree with Mary Oliver on so many things, I have to disagree with her on that one.

I've found that writing asks me to be spontaneous and asks me to answer the call. If I feel the tug, and I can trust it, I'll tell my husband, “Hey, I need an hour,” and go into my basement. Usually something comes of it.

But it can't be every day. It just can't.

L.I. Henley: I'm so with you. I don't have children, but I teach five classes on the semester system and have my dogs and house stuff. I have a ton of children.

Marin Smith: A hundred and twelve children.

L.I. Henley: All delightful, as we mentioned. But you just have to make it work. I'll carry journals with me, and if I have an idea for a poem and I'm waiting in office hours and no one has shown up, that's the time. You've got to do it right then.

I'm always curious about what is happening in people's lives while they're working on particular pieces. Do you remember the timeline of “The Open Heart”? What was going on in your life when you managed to sneak away to the basement—or wherever—to work on it?

Marin Smith: I can definitely remember because it was COVID, so it was a very memorable time for a lot of reasons.

I guess I started working on this piece as it exists now in spring 2025, but there were earlier versions of it that explored having psychologists as parents. I'd also written a lot about my dad's history, and I hadn't really figured out how those two things merged together.

During COVID, I got really interested in reading writers who do a skillful job of weaving research into personal essays, particularly nature writers who weave research into their personal essays. People like Helen Macdonald, Annie Dillard, Pam Houston, and all these wonderful women writers whom I adore.

I really wanted to emulate that technique.

For this piece, I did a bunch of research about the heart. I fell down this rabbit hole about the heart—what it symbolizes, how different cultures have treated the actual organ of the heart after burial, during certain rituals, and how people think about it.

That's where the Carl Jung quote at the top came from, because he did some thinking about the heart with the Indigenous cultures he worked with.

Ironically, none of that research ended up in the final version of the essay. But I still think it was a worthy rabbit hole to fall down because it helped me frame and really think big-picture about what I was trying to think through and feel through about what my dad went through.

The open-heart surgery had happened several years prior, even before graduate school. I've been at my dad's bedside for many things. He's a pretty healthy guy, but for some reason he's had a series of these things happen where I've been with him at the hospital. So I was also drawing on some more recent experiences when I approached this.

L.I. Henley: Thank you for mentioning that you did all of this research and let your interests guide you. You weren't afraid to just go off and say, “I'm going to follow that and see where it leads.”

Even though the research didn't make it into the final essay, it gave you a background, an atmosphere from which to write. I think that's always worthwhile. You can do all that research and still decide, “You know what? I'm not going to use this for this piece. I might use it for something else.”

That's a great lesson for students.

Would you read “The Open Heart” for us? We'd love to hear you read it.

Marin Smith: I sure will.

[Marin Smith reads “The Open Heart.” The essay appears in CALYX 35.1 (March 2025).]

L.I. Henley: Thank you so much. I love the opportunity to hear you read that out loud. It's such an incredible essay. And I know, as a fellow writer, how many drafts and how much time can go into creating something short and powerful.

I include this essay in my writing-about-family module. I really think writing about family is such great practice in restraint—eventually, at least, when we're getting closer to the final draft. Not at first, but eventually.

In order to make it a gift, we have to get to a place where we're writing with restraint. There are so many pitfalls in writing about family. It's easy to villainize people. It's easy to put people on a pedestal, to make ourselves out as victims and other people as victims, and to flatten people.

That's not a gift, because people are complex. Showing people in their complexity, to me, is the greatest gift we can give our readers.

We also have to leave enough room for the reader to have their own emotional experience. You do that in this piece. But I'm sure it was probably hard at first.

So my first question is: What was the drafting process like?

You mentioned that you originally imagined weaving the story together with research. Did that help create the tone and the stance, because you were entering the piece with a more analytical mind? Was it your father's matter-of-fact approach to what happened to him that helped?

Marin Smith: I love how you phrased that—that we need to let the reader have their own feelings. I think that's really important with endings, especially, because there's such a temptation to tie things up in a nice, neat bow. Really, we just need to be asking some questions a lot of the time with an essay.

There was a whole middle portion of this essay that had to do with the effects of open-heart surgery. All that remains of it is me Googling, in the lobby, the emotional effects of open-heart surgery. That's a true thing and something I found in research, and it made sense of why my dad was so emotionally available after his surgery.

But I didn't want to come out and say that. I found myself wanting to show it.

That also confirms the backstory I explained about my psychologist parents. We were very analytical, but not necessarily super warm and fuzzy with each other. I needed to be faithful to the true dynamic of my family.

The other thing I had to weave through was that my dad has this really interesting life. In a previous version of the essay, I wrote about how he was an Air Force pilot who became a psychologist, which is a pretty strange career trajectory.

I struggled with wanting to paint a clear picture of who he is and do him justice. I didn't want it to seem like I was painting a caricature of him.

But reading biographies that are full of facts can be relatively boring. That's not what creative nonfiction is setting out to do. It's like the Wikipedia article of someone's life. That has a utility, and it's important to have that, but that isn't what we're here to do as writers in the creative nonfiction space.

So I had to find ways to show who he was.

I remember when you read an early version of this. I'll never forget this. You made this comment in the margin for the opening section. You said, “Let us see him.” You said it twice. “Let us see your dad.”

That was so helpful because I realized the opening scene could just be that one in the kitchen, where I'm describing his hands stacked on top of each other and what it felt like to be in his presence.

Sometimes describing the vivid details of what it's like to just be with someone in their kitchen is much more interesting and human than telling readers how they worked as a weatherman, or whatever else they did.

Those details are important if they serve what you're trying to achieve in the piece. But I think it's really easy to get derailed and feel like, “Well, I have to put all these biographical details in there,” when what you're actually doing is giving a little slice. It's like a little peek.

My dad's whole life couldn't fit into the essay, and that made the essay, I think, more effective overall.

L.I. Henley: I just love knowing that something I said was useful.

Marin Smith: It was. It was great. It really helped it come together.

L.I. Henley: Humor.

Humor—I mean, even the driest of people we know are at least accidentally humorous sometimes. I feel like part of really showing somebody is showing those moments of levity that we have with each other.

Humor and levity are even more important, I think, for essays in which we're writing about difficult things. I've read personal essays by people who went through absolutely horrible, seriously traumatic things, but they're able to find little moments of levity that let the pressure off.

I really appreciated the flashback to the college zoology lab, with the warning “DO NOT OPEN.” Then it's, “Who would want to open a heart?” But later, when you leap forward in time, you understand why that warning is important.

And then there's the dream interpretation from your dad: you're a little girl telling him this wacky, surreal dream you had, and your dad gives you this very matter-of-fact psychoanalysis. It fleshes out the relationship and the father-daughter and family dynamics, but it also lets in some light.

Can you talk about the role of humor in your work? Maybe not even just in this essay, but in general. Do you tend to bring in a little bit of humor?

Marin Smith: I tend to. I think having psychologists as parents in particular is one of those things that—I was trying to get at this a little bit in my portrayal of what breakfast-table conversations were like—you never know what's normal when you're growing up.

You don't know what might seem weird to somebody outside your family. It's not really until you go to college and start becoming your own adult that you realize, “Yeah, I guess that's not what normal people consider a normal level of conversation.”

I actually had the opportunity to do an online reading of this piece with CALYX when the issue first came out. I read that opening portion where I'm describing my dad sitting at the table.

I was watching the Zoom chat afterward as people were commenting, and somebody wrote, “How is this the most dad character ever?”

And I think those are moments of humor that point to this monolithic dad experience that at least one reader in the room could recognize.

I think humor is a big part of that.

The most powerful humor—and really the most powerful writing—is writing that helps people reflect on their own experiences.

I'm always delighted when someone reads something I've written and says, “This made me think of this thing that happened to me.” I'm like, “Great. I love that.”

I love that it's making you think about yourself, because that means something resonated and there was some exchange that happened.

That's not always the case. Sometimes we're reading World War II narratives, and that's so far beyond our own experience. But we're still having empathy with that writer in a similar way.

Any time my writing is making people reflect or think about what it means to be alive or to be part of a family, humor can be an important piece of that puzzle.

L.I. Henley: Definitely. Writing and reading are just so incredibly powerful in regard to relating with others, but also getting a glimpse into people's lives—people who are so different from you—and still feeling something close to what they went through just because they're another human being.

To close here, do you have any parting thoughts—things you've learned about writing about family or writing about difficult situations? Not just parents, but children, too. What takeaways have you gathered over however long you've been working on these personal essays?

Marin Smith: I love this question.

What first comes to mind is Philip Lopate's book To Show and to Tell. He has a short chapter about writing about real people in creative nonfiction. His basic advice is, “I don't know how to deal with this, so hopefully you don't have any friends or family who have enough money to sue you.”

So, obviously, that's a humorous response to the question. But I think there's some truth in there.

Writing and life are constantly in discourse with each other. With this essay, being able to share it with my dad actually enriched my relationship with him. Being able to pass it back and forth and see him see it come out into the world was really special.

That works particularly well with the subject matter I'm dealing with here, which is mostly positive. I'm not portraying him in a negative light.

It gets more interesting and difficult when you're doing that, and I've dealt with that too—writing about someone you maybe don't have the best things to say about, the way they treated you, who they were, or what they struggled with.

But I think holding that person in your mind as you're writing is a useful practice. Even if you think about the ways they might react to what you're writing, even if those reactions are negative, I don't think that's necessarily always a voice to silence.

There are voices we need to silence—the inner critic that tells you your work is no good, for example—but I think writing about real people challenges us to be constantly empathetic and to make sure we're being fair to our creative nonfiction characters.

That builds better credibility and ultimately sits better with readers because we show that we're human and that we're able to see and hold multiple perspectives at once.

I think about a friend of mine who has this story about her mother. She grew up on a farm, and when the family was about to leave the country, her dog had puppies. Her mother had to drown the puppies. She had to hold them underwater.

My friend told this story to a friend when she went to college, and the friend said, “We can't be friends anymore. This is so disturbing.”

My friend was shocked by that response.

But I was like, “I would love for you to write about this.”

I'd be interested in portraying her mother as a complex person. She's not a sadistic, evil human being. She cared a lot about them. In her mind, those puppies were going to die because they were leaving the country.

Even when something is so unpleasant or unfathomable, I think it's worth trying to be empathetic toward where another person is coming from.

But it's tricky, and it's individual. I ultimately side with George Saunders, who says that reading and writing expand us.

And I guess that's my way of not answering the question. I don't actually know. It's very tricky.

L.I. Henley: I don't know either…My dogs are barking.

Marin Smith: They heard me talking about drowning puppies.

L.I. Henley: They did. They heard that story and they're very concerned.

Marin, it's been so fabulous talking to you. Thank you so much for taking the time. I feel like I either need to go run—which I probably won't do—or I will go write and make art.

Marin Smith: That's wonderful.

L.I. Henley: That one I'm more likely to go do.

Marin Smith: This has been so enjoyable. And I wish the best of luck to your students. I'm sure they're writing amazing things. It's been great chatting with you. We could talk all day.

L.I. Henley: We could. But we won't. We have to go back to our lives.

Marin Smith: I have to go back to my corporate job.

L.I. Henley: I'd much rather stay here and talk with you.

Marin Smith: I know. Me too.

L.I. Henley: I'll catch you on the flip side.

Marin Smith: Sounds great.