Patricia Pasick is an Asian-American writer based in Ann Arbor who, after decades of non-fiction writing, is now venturing into long and short form fiction. Formerly a clinical psychologist and family therapist, she began her publishing career with Almost Grown, published by W.W. Norton, which has sold 25,000 copies to date. Other pieces have been published in The Sun. After ten years working in Rwanda, a collaboration with a Rwandan survivor, Celestin Zimulinda, became “For Gloria,” a creative nonfiction story in “Memoir (And).” Her themes are almost always about the intergenerational legacies of translocation and trauma. She has drafted one novel, about a romance between two cousins in Nashville, ruptured by an accidental shooting, and is at work on a second, about the deportation of an intermarried Filipino-American couple in the 1920’s. A proponent of life-long learning, she workshops with the former editor of TriQuarterly and his students in Chicago.
Interviewer
Until recently, when you focused full-time on writing, you were a licensed psychologist, family therapist, and trainer. When did you know that you wanted a career in the field of psychology? How did your practice change you?
Patricia Carino Pasick
I come from a family in which “being” was all about “doing.” I opened up to our parents only twice in my childhood. Once, to report a bad dream about falling into quicksand, and, another time I tipped my head against my mother’s shoulder and told her that kids in my school were making fun of my Asian features. Talking about an inner life, or expressing feelings was forbidden. So becoming a psychologist was almost inevitable.
And it changed me, absolutely. Not only because I undertook my own therapy in order to be a good therapist but also because I seem to have no difficulty with interior plots, now that I’m a writer. Characters, like my clients, have wishes and frustrations, secrets and shame, passions and drives. In other words, the people I invent, like the people I saw in therapy, have internal lives. Most of time, they are open to me knowing them.
All this ease with interior plotting has a downside. I have to work harder to get my characters off the proverbial couch and make sure they live their physical lives too. It isn’t all about their thoughts and feelings. It’s about mowing the lawn and riding the bus!
More personally, I have a deeper awareness about my emotions and my identities because I’ve been a therapist, and lots more curiosity about the way the past has affected the person I’m still becoming. That has brought more confidence, more risk-taking, and a kind of boldness. I’m sure there are writers who spend very little time figuring themselves out. They just invent, invent, invent. But I do believe writers benefit from self-knowledge. It’s a backstop against making yourself a character in every story you create.
Interviewer
As a psychologist and therapist, what did you learn from your clients—children, teenagers, parents, couples, LGBTQ, elderly—about humanity?
Patricia Carino Pasick
Pretty much everything I’ve learned about humanity, in terms of stretching myself, comes from being a psychologist. Where else would I get such access to the inner lives of thousands of people? I owe a tremendous debt to my clients who entrusted me with their stories and secrets.
Interviewer
Your first nonfiction publication was Almost Grown: Launching Your Child from High School to College. What was the impetus to write it? Who was your audience? What did you learn about yourself and your career as a psychotherapist upon writing this book?
Patricia Carino Pasick
One day, driving home from the dry cleaners, I unexpectedly started to cry while looking at my older, knuckled hands gripping the steering wheel. Time, my hands said, was passing quickly. In fact, our oldest child would be leaving home for college in two years. Two years!
I began to journal daily and found it relieving. Writing about his leaving home begat writing about anything that came to my mind. A friend sent me Natalie Goldberg’s book for writers, Writing Down the Bones, which completely fired me up. Anne Lamott’s Operating Instructions, her journal of her son’s first year of life, inspired me to write a journal of our son’s last year of living at home, and I encouraged him to do the same. Shockingly, he agreed (and is now an editor).
The result, two years later, was my first book, the nonfiction Almost Grown, for people like me with children leaving the nest, mothers and fathers who had invested in parenting.
What I learned then was that writing would become another place for my heart and soul. I also learned it was possible to write and publish about people I know and loved and still keep a relationship with them. That, I hope, will hold true with the story you recently published, “Not Mom.”
Interviewer
You are the founder and director of the program Stories for Hope Rwanda. Why did you start this program? Who was involved in it? What inspired you to write and teach about the genocide in Rwanda?
Patricia Carino Pasick
Being a writer means opening yourself to experience, and Rwanda’s people and history are now part of me. In 2006, I tagged along with my husband, an executive coach and psychologist, on a leadership program he developed for its top government leaders. The timing for me was perfect.
First, I had just recorded a conversation for StoryCorps, with our second-born son, about my Filipino American identity. StoryCorps is an amazing, ever-evolving project, which, in its earliest iteration, encouraged family members to record important historical legacy conversations for the Library of Congress.
Second, I knew about the mental health problems that can occur from intergenerational silences after severe trauma. I also knew that an untold story tends to repeat itself, and future violence was possible in Rwanda. In 2008, survivors were still finding bodies or their family members. Over a million people had been murdered.
I proposed to one of Rwanda’s ministers that to break the silence they could have young people select elders to tell positive stories about the departed and make recordings for their National Archive. We recorded hundreds of stories for Rwanda, I published excerpts in a book, Stories For Hope, and colleagues in Rwanda report that the government has “mandated” that people speak openly about their family members killed in the genocide.
Interviewer
When did you publish Preparing the Way: Raising Strong Children in a Still-Racial World? Describe the incentive to write this nonfiction book and how it is different in form and content from Almost Grown.
Patricia Carino Pasick
This book never got off the ground. Instead, I published chapters for several books about Filipino-Americans.
Interviewer
You have also written the creative nonfiction piece “Memoir (And).” Describe how the story “For Gloria” was an experiment with creative writing.
Patricia Carino Pasick
“For Gloria,” published in “Memoir (And),” was an experiment with creative nonfiction. I met a Rwandese Tutsi, Celestin Zimulinda, during my work in the country. He had returned to Rwanda from Uganda where he was raised after his family fled Rwanda in the 1954 Genocide Against the Tutsi. Celestin told me an incredible story.
His sister Gloria had moved back to Rwanda for schooling, in 1990, four years before the genocide, and was rumored to have died. Searching for her body was arduous and dangerous, since her village was largely Hutu. Celestin got nowhere fast. Then one day, sitting on a hillside, he heard her calling him. Doubling his efforts, he found her remains at the bottom of a deep toilet pit behind a house owned by a man who later confessed to killing her. I accompanied Celestin to her reburial in a memorial tomb. Later, he asked me to help him write his story.
Interviewer
In 2013 you began to write stories and longer fiction. Describe your journey from writing nonfiction to fiction. What did you learn specifically from workshopping your fiction?
Patricia Carino Pasick
Academic articles aside, my nonfiction projects have borrowed from the craft book of a fiction writer. I use descriptive details to place the reader in the experience of the story. Voice and tone are important, pacing and rhythm too. I use an arc which builds toward a crescendo.
After many years of serious work in the interest of clients, I surprised myself and moved to fiction; I needed space to breathe, and play, I told myself.
What was daunting was finding the mojo for invention after decades of digging out facts. To be sure, I already had confidence in instincts; after all, I was a therapist. But writing down something that never happened to a person who never existed, and then nudging her through a plot, was hard.
Becoming part of a fiction workshop was critically important, not just because of procrastination but because I knew nothing about plotting. Writing draft after draft to “find” the internal or external plot was foreign to me, especially for someone who used to write by outline. Sensory details were sparse in my early stories. Endings were baffling.
Most, the workshop was and still is a haven. The feedback I get from others keeps assuring me that, even in a story I might dash off too hastily or overwork, I am capable of writing sentences and phrases that ring true.
Interviewer
In the May 2024 issue of The Write Launch, we published “Not Mom,” your short story. A scenario: You are invited to give a workshop to an audience of college students about the process of writing “Not Mom.” How would this scenario differ from the actual workshopping of “Not Mom”?
Patricia Carino Pasick
For starters, the talk would be personal, about the roots of “Not Mom.” I would describe my writing process and describe the challenges, which were many. In workshopping, by contrast, the only topic is the work, not the author. In fact, in my own, led by Fred Shafer, the author stays completely silent when her work is being discussed. Only the words on the page are the focus, even if there are broad hints that a short story or chapter is drawn from the writer’s personal experience.
Interviewer
Describe the process of writing numerous drafts of “Not Mom” before it was published on The Write Launch.
Patricia Carino Pasick
It took me a long year to write this story, which is a letter to someone who dies. First, I had to believe the letter would reach someone who dies. Having been in Rwanda after the Genocide Against the Tutsi (1994), I drew from the belief that a dead person’s spirit roams restlessly, until family finally lays her to rest. Why wouldn’t the spirit of a relationship roam as well, when one of the pair dies, and the relationship has been ruptured or broken?
Many scenes are drawn from my own life, although the characters are not replicas. First, I had to write down everything that moved me, without editing. Emotionally, that was hard. It meant taking myself back through a difficult time, again and again. There were at least six drafts, several of them workshopped.
Next I had to create characters different from the real people who moved me, without straying too far from the truth embedded in each scene. That commanded another set of drafts.
Finally, I couldn’t get the ending to work. Because the story is told in the second person, as a letter to a dead person, I had to have an ending for the letter itself. Otherwise, what was the point of the story?
Interviewer
You are giving a talk to a group of high school seniors who aspire to be writers. What do you tell them about your own career as a psychologist and writer of both nonfiction and fiction?
Patricia Carino Pasick
I would not presume to give the usual direct advice to would-be writers, certainly not to young people getting ready to separate from their families, kids whose sights and sounds are already tuning into the future. Instead, I would simply tell them my story, hoping that a couple of them would remember a few tidbits. Like seeds, some little details might find the right nutrients, or catch the right light and take root in someone imagination. That’s what any good story does.
