Describe your latest book.
The Thick and The Lean follows a young woman, Beatrice, who is growing up in a cult that believes abstaining from food brings you closer to God. But Beatrice longs to become a chef, and following that longing will lead her to a life unrecognizable to her parents. Meanwhile, Reiko, a brilliant artist and computer science student from the poorest part of the stratified city, is struggling to fit in at university. When Reiko, through no fault of her own, loses her full scholarship and is forced to either take on debt or return home, she decides to forge her own path — outside the law. These two women are connected by a mysterious cookbook written 1000 years ago by a kitchen maid, which may hold the secret of their oppressive society.
The Thick and The Lean is a speculative novel that examines both diet culture and purity culture, before expanding into larger questions of Big Agriculture, land rights, and body politics. It's heavily inspired by my own history with disordered eating.
My debut,
The Seep, a slim novel about a benevolent but paradigm shifting alien invasion. It came out from Soho Press in 2020.
What was your favorite book as a child?
My dad used to read to me from
The Golden Book of Poetry at bedtime. My favorite poems were: "The Tale of Custard the Dragon," "The Highwayman," and "The Owl and the Pussycat." I loved the nonsense language of Edward Lear and the epic dark romance of
The Highwayman. In third grade, I brought photocopied pages of "The Highwayman" into class for show-and-tell and got into trouble. I remember reading it out loud and subbing 'heck' for 'hell.' It didn't really help.
When did you know you were a writer?
I've had a stutter since I could speak, so when I was young, writing became an important way for me to communicate with ease. But even before I was able to write, I remember telling myself stories. Pirates, mermaids, castles in the air. The unseen world was always there. Still is! The stutter didn't go away either.
Even before I was able to write, I remember telling myself stories. Pirates, mermaids, castles in the air. The unseen world was always there.
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What does your writing workspace look like?
Currently I'm writing to you from a comfortable chair in my living room. I ping around our house, from the kitchen table to a desk in my bedroom and several comfy armchairs. But I'm in the process of turning our garage into a space of my own — I'll have my drum kit, my painting supplies, a weight bench, maybe a little couch. Something to look forward to!
What do you care about more than most people around you?
I consider timing a lot and try not to beat myself up when I don't immediately do something. When I was younger, I would try to push everything through and I often felt blocked, frustrated, or stressed. So I try to collaborate with the moment instead of forcing my will upon it, or letting my To Do list run my life. This might look like going back to bed after I get the kids off to school if I feel worn out, or working after dinner when I feel an energy surge. Right now, my stepson is playing basketball on a mini-hoop in his bedroom. It creates a series of slams and bangs every 3–5 seconds. So this is not the correct moment to write, or meditate, or read a book. Instead, I'm answering this interview. When he's done playing, we will both be happy, having done something we wanted to do. And I will appreciate the silence when it returns.
I try to collaborate with the moment instead of forcing my will upon it, or letting my To Do list run my life.
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Share an interesting experience you've had with one of your readers.
Once a reader wrote to me and said that the words
The Seep came to him in a dream, and so he googled it and discovered it was a book. He read it, and had a lot of great questions. That interaction kept me going for months — the magic and the mystery of it. I loved it.
Introduce one other author you think people should read, and suggest a good book with which to start.
Rachel Pollack was my mentor in writing
The Seep, and I am forever grateful to her wisdom. She's one of our great speculative writers. If you want a taste, start with the short story collection
The Beatrix Gates. Her novels
Unquenchable Fire and
Temporary Agency are big influences for me.
I made a
The Thick and The Lean companion reading list of selections that I feel like are in conversation with my book. Check it out at the end of this interview.
Besides your personal library, do you have any beloved collections?
My grandfather, Joseph Shulman, was raised in an orphanage in East New York, a part of deep Brooklyn, in the 1930s. He was self-educated and loved reading classic literature, particularly Dickens. I have a few special books from his personal library, including his copy of
Moby-Dick. I treasure it.
What's the strangest or most interesting job you've ever had?
I was an art model from age 18 to 33, in between other jobs and life pursuits. I started meditating around age 27. I didn't realize it at the time, but all that art modeling was good groundwork for meditating. I was also a receptionist, a bad bartender, a babysitter, and a yoga teacher.
What scares you the most as a writer?
This is a little embarrassing but sometimes I feel like books are alive, like they're portals or doors to parallel realities. Sometimes I believe you have to write the thing so it does
not exist — like a banishment or an exorcism. But other times, I wonder if the act of writing does actually conjure or connect to this reality somehow. I just reread
The Man in the High Castle by Phillip K. Dick, one of my favorite writers. Spoiler: in the final scenes, those characters peer into our world and realize that they are living in an alternate reality. I think about that a lot. The peering out from the pages.
Sometimes I believe you have to write the thing so it does not exist — like a banishment or an exorcism. But other times, I wonder if the act of writing does actually conjure or connect to this reality somehow.
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A creepy example: when I began writing The Thick and The Lean, I imagined a pill that would take away people's appetites, causing food to taste bad to them. This seemed monstrous to me — what a dark trade, to lose your joy in eating in order to be thin. Now we see the rise of these weight loss shots that make food unappealing. Now I know I didn't conjure this! But the timing is uncanny. I started writing this book in 2016. Just before it's published in 2023, Ozempic is making all the headlines.
Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage?
Recently, my two dear friends ray ferreira, Meghan McNamara, and I journeyed to Octavia Butler's grave. We all taught at the
Octavia Project together and we took a pilgrimage to The Huntington Gardens in hopes of seeing her papers. Her collection is currently closed but we were able to see some early drafts of
Parable of the Sower. They have a great map of Pasadena that highlights special locations — her school, her favorite bookstore, etc. While we were looking at the map, Meghan said, I wonder where she's buried? Then ray found it, and I drove us to her graveside. It was a beautiful moment. We started the Octavia Project nine years ago, as a space for teen girls and trans and nonbinary youth in Brooklyn to imagine greater possibilities for themselves and their communities. Octavia Butler has inspired so much and created so much joy and connection in our lives.
If someone were to write your biography, what would be the title and subtitle?
I like this line from the end of the novel —
if I too am mostly water, which direction should I flow?
So how about:
If I Too Am Mostly Water: The Work and Life of Chana Porter. But give me many more decades please; I'm just getting started.
Offer a favorite sentence or passage from another writer.
I adore the opening of Claire Lispector's
Near to the Wild at Heart. I hope one day I write something so beautiful.
“Her father's typewriter went clack-clack... clack-clack-clack…The clock awoke in dustless tin-dlen. The silence dragged out zzzzzz. What did the wardrobe say? clothes-clothes-clothes.”
Describe a recurring or particularly memorable dream or nightmare.
When I was a small child, I had a reoccurring nightmare that I would look out onto the horizon and realize that the mountains were alive. Then the mountains grew larger and larger and closer and closer, blotting out everything else in my vision. I think this was early inspiration for Horizon Line, the antagonist in
The Seep. It still creeps me out.
What's your biggest grammatical pet peeve?
My biggest pet peeve is other people being too intense about grammar! I make lots of mis-takes. I try to catch them, and then I have excellent editors who help me. It's awesome to be great at the English language's bizarre rules, but not everyone's brain works the same way. I have a weird brain. Also, great thinkers and cultural innovators, be it Shakespeare or TikTokers, create their own vocabulary and syntax. It moves the conversation forward.
Do you have any phobias?
I used to be afraid of heights, flying, speaking in public, and driving cars. Happy to say I'm over those, but you couldn't pay me to jump out of a plane. I don't even like imagining it.
What's the best advice you've ever received?
Comparison is the thief of joy.
Here's a selection of books that I consider in conversation with The Thick and The Lean.
First, two fiction selections:
You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine by Alexandra Kleeman
Reality TV, bizarro cults, the deadly pursuit of perfection. So hilarious and strange.
Milk Fed by Melisa Broder
A woman struggling with disordered eating falls for a fat Frum (Orthodox Jewish) woman who works in a frozen yogurt shop. Surprisingly tender.
And three nonfiction selections:
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, Kimmerer listens to the language of other beings. This is a wisdom text. I return to it often.
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff
A powerful examination of corporations attempting to predict and control human behavior.
What's Eating Us: Women, Food, and the Epidemic of Body Anxiety by Cole Kadzin
Moving intersection of a personal recovery story and top-notch journalism. I found this all too relatable. It helped me feel less alone.
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Chana Porter is a playwright, teacher, MacDowell fellow, and cofounder of The Octavia Project, a STEM and writing program for girls, trans, and nonbinary youth that uses speculative fiction to envision greater possibilities for our world. She lives in Los Angeles, California, and is also the author of
The Seep, a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award.
The Thick and The Lean is their latest book.
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For more, check out the original essay Chana Porter wrote for us upon the release of
The Seep:
In Praise of Attentiveness, Not Apocalypse: Imagining Freely With Chana Porter.