1. Bird Gotta Land was inspired by your experience in graduate school. What propelled you to write it?

 

I wanted to tell a real story about how psychologists learn to do therapy. That process is shrouded in mystery. Depictions of psychologists in popular media (e.g., “The Sopranos,” “Good Will Hunting”) show a wise old therapist spouting brilliant, or sometimes not so brilliant, insights. No one has told the story of how young graduate students learn to practice therapy: the academic classes, the research projects, the graduate student's own therapy, the clients who come our clinics and serve as guinea pigs while we are observed behind a one-way mirror, and our challenging community assignments in prisons, psychiatric hospitals and emergency rooms where we get thrown into the deep end of the pool. I wanted to show the drama, the comedy and the general messiness of that process. I wanted to show that professors and mentors are flawed humans, too.  I also wanted to tell the origin story of my relationship with my wife.

  2. Because the book is based on real life, why did you choose a fictional approach versus memoir?

I fictionalized this story because I wanted to protect confidentiality. It’s pretty risky for a psychotherapist to reveal too much about his personal life so I told a fictional representation of my journey.

  3. The main character, Stephen, is a young man in his 20's floundering through life while in graduate school for psychology. What about his experience is universal?

 

The 20’s are a time when most of us are trying to find direction – when we experiment with different jobs and explore different relationships. Through this process of trial and error, we home in on who we really are. For many of us, like Stephen, the process is messy as we separate from our families while bringing with us the "scripts" and beliefs that defined our childhood. These days especially, there is tremendous pressure from parents for young people to have it all figured out before they have had enough life experience for these answers to emerge.  

 

My 20’s were about experimenting and seeing what felt wrong and what felt right. I stumbled around without much direction at all, trying to land on the right career path and the right relationship. I went to three different colleges and in the middle took a year off and worked in a Harley Davidson shop after my best friend was killed in a motorcycle accident. I impulsively married my girlfriend in college and we had a child a couple of years later. First, I was a Theater major, switched to Political Science focused on the Middle East, and eventually decided to become a psychologist! (All of that would be an entirely different novel.)  Bird Gotta Land picks up after all of those adventures.

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  4. Tell us about the meaning behind the title. What about Kurt Vonnegut’s quote inspired you?

 

The title comes from Vonnegut’s poem that explores the innate needs of every animal: “Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly, man got to sit and wonder why, why, why.”  At the beginning of Bird Gotta Land, Stephen is lost (why, why, why?), but as he works through his challenges and gets himself in a better place, he learns to be present, trust and manage and express his emotions, and understand what it means to have a beautiful life. That’s when he lands. 

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  5. As a psychotherapist, you help clients “re-write their personal narratives, recognizing that the stories we tell ourselves limit our ability to love and thrive.” How did this impact the writing of your novel?

My clients are represented everywhere in the novel’s characters. We all get stuck in patterns or stories that limit our lives, and for the most part, those stories exist on an unconscious level. That’s, of course, where the work is.

 

Stephen’s professor, Ed is stuck in a pattern of having short-term relationships with younger women because he tragically lost the love of his life. Consciously, he might say to himself, “I’m trying to get close to vibrant women and have a thriving relationship.”  By having relationships with younger women who will eventually leave him, he unconsciously protects himself from the pain of losing another deep relationship to death. The cruel irony is that his avoidance of the deeper pain of loss results in him living through the chronic pain of repeated rejection!   

 

Ironically, much of the pain in our lives is caused by our attempts to avoid imagined pain. We have become very good at numbing ourselves through our addictions to work, booze, food, sex and our phones. Sadly, these means of avoidance generate their own pain, even while they are in service of numbing us to deep fears or imagined worst-case-scenarios.  Avoidance and addiction cause us to live smaller and more difficult lives. Good psychotherapy uncovers the pain we are avoiding and the fears we don’t think we can face.  We learn to open our eyes and trust our own capacity to handle the ups and downs of our lives without using self-destructive means to numb ourselves and make our lives small.   

   6. Did your psychotherapy practice guide the way you drew your characters?

 

Yes. I wanted my novel to address each character the way I would a client:

• Understand them in the context of their lives (so I provided that context where appropriate).

• Clarify their struggle. 

• Show love and empathy for them. 

• Show how they change through their struggle and get to a better place.                                                                                                                   

 

  7. You hope to reach young students and professors of psychotherapy with your novel. How do you think they’ll benefit from reading Bird Gotta Land? 
 

I hope they will understand that helping people involves more than offering a different way to think and, thus, behave differently. For instance, cognitive-behaviorism tries to change limiting beliefs, which is certainly helpful. But there is an underlying, unconscious holistic story that shapes a person’s way of interpreting his or her experiences and ultimately all of their choices.  Ideally, therapy will address the client's story in order to help them transform their life.

 

  8. What do you hope readers (in general) take away from your novel?

 

I hope readers will appreciate the art of psychotherapy, the work that goes into plumbing the psyche of people in a lasting, meaningful, life-changing way.

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  9. What books inspired you during the writing of Bird Gotta Land?

 Jerome Bruner’s “Two Modes of Thought” has inspired me as a psychologist.  He suggests there are two modes of cognitive functioning: one is rational and focused on empirical truth; the other focuses on stories and how we give meaning to our experiences.  Academic psychology has directed psychotherapy training toward the former and tends to neglect the latter. 

The novel Good Benito by Alan Lightman inspired me as it tells the story of a physics professor as he reflects on his grad school experiences as a young, “lost” student.

I also listened to Leonard Cohen’s music throughout the writing of the book.  His soulful storytelling was inspirational.

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   10. Why does becoming a healer require “facing and addressing our deepest wounds”?

If a therapist has not explored and addressed their own issues and potential blind spots, they may steer a client in the wrong direction.  Therapists have our own histories and wounds that will inevitably be “triggered” by the stories and personalities of our clients.  While our life experiences can make us more empathetic to our clients' experiences, at the same time we need to guard against projecting our own experiences and feelings onto our clients.  We need to be aware if a client reminds us, for example, of a difficult parent or a controlling ex-spouse.  We would need to process these feelings outside of the therapy office with our own supervisor or therapist.  Otherwise, we can unconsciously enact our own dramas in the therapy office by either checking out, giving bad advice, or changing the subject, rather than being present and available for what the client needs from us in that moment. 

 

   11. Your main character, Stephen, is often referred to as having a poet’s heart. Do you yourself have a poet’s heart?

 

I aspire to have a poet's heart. I love to be present, deeply connected to what I'm doing, and have empathy for all living things. But life occasionally gets in the way. I can sometimes get stuck in my head and miss the beauty and joy in front of me.

 

  12. How have your experiences as a supervisor of young psychologists influenced your novel?

 

The character of Ed is a combination of my two favorite supervisors in graduate school (Bob Heckel and Herman Salsberg). That character also serves as a model for how I aspire to relate to my supervisees. I focus on two realms of the work: the quality of the relationship with their client and the story the client is telling about their lives. Ed is very gentle in helping Stephen understand his own impact on the therapy process. Like Ed, I try to remain aware that the work young therapists are doing is important and difficult.

 

Ed also helps Stephen learn that humans are not rational: we make decisions based on emotions, fears and desires that are below the level of conscious awareness and then we create a story that makes it all make sense to us. Ed guides Stephen to listen deeper than the face value of the client’s story and to recognize that when clients appear to be acting “irrationally” that at some level what they are doing makes perfect sense.  Part of the therapist’s job is to help solve the mystery: why do we humans act in ways that appear to go against our own self-interest? 

 

For example: while Darnell is always talking about wanting to get out of prison, why does he consistently sabotage his chances for freedom whenever he comes up for parole?  While Frank, Stephen’s father, claims to want closeness with his children, why does he avoid this connection? (Why does Stephen/Gerald avoid finishing his dissertation/novel when he claims he wants to graduate/get published?)

 

Once the unconscious narrative is revealed, it can be re-written.