Margo Steines does not spend much time browsing the poetry aisle at Antigone Books. She normally heads to the nonfiction section, instead, but she knows all about Robert Frost’s road less traveled.
She has lived on it most of her life.
By the time she was 17, Steines had moved out of her parents’ home and dropped out of school in New York City. Soon, she became an addict and a sex worker. The thrill ride continued for years, taking her from high-rise construction in Manhattan to an organic farm on Oahu.
Fortunately, both for her and for us, Steines is now on the sunshine side of those difficult times. She teaches writing at the University of Arizona. She is a freelance copywriter and writing coach.
Her first book, “Brutalities: A Love Story,” was released Oct. 3 by W.W. Norton, and Steines is one of 17 local authors who were selected to appear onstage at the Tucson Festival of Books this spring.
The list of homegrown presenters will include a number of familiar faces, including Manuel Muñoz, Jillian Cantor, Adam Rex and Lori Alexander. There are new voices, too, none newer than Steines.
Ordinary people, extraordinary lives
Memoirs are big today, the genre being driven by celebrities eager to tell their own stories their own way. Memoirs by Britney Spears, Matthew Perry and Barbra Streisand rank Nos. 1, 2 and 4 among all nonfiction titles on this week’s bestseller list in The New York Times.
The more traditional memoir comes from ordinary people who have lived extraordinary lives. “Brutalities” is one of those, 274 pages of shock and aww that begins and ends with the inner thoughts of a woman about to meet her first child.
In the pages between, we follow Steines down that road less traveled.
“I was pretty uncomfortable from a pretty early age, profoundly uncomfortable,” she said. “I was depressed, distant from my parents …. As I got older, my problems sort of metastasized into discomfort and despair. Now, mental illness is in the cultural conversation in a different way. Back then, I was just a troubled kid.”
She bounced around several public and private schools, growing more and more restless at every stop.
“I was wild,” she admitted. “Underneath it all, I think I was looking for some peace I had never really known … and was very bad at it.”
Finding her voice
At the time, she wanted to be seen as strong, hard, in-charge. She was a professional dominatrix for a time. She became a journeyman welder who worked on high-rises in New York City.
“When I look at pictures of myself in my 20s, there was a fixedness in my jaw, a scowl,” she admits.
Not all of Steines’ trauma was self-inflicted. On Sept. 11, 2001, she was a 19-year-old who watched the World Trade Center go down from a window in her apartment in Greenwich Village.
Years later, she worked at the Trade Center site during construction of the Freedom Tower.
It wasn’t until 2014, when a longtime boyfriend left her, that Steines decided to pull off that road she was on.
“As I got older, the dropout-to-sex-worker-to-construction-worker pipeline wasn’t one I had a lot of pride in,” she said. “I also realized it wasn’t getting me anywhere I really wanted to go. I decided I needed to leave, to go somewhere far away. I had a friend who ran an organic farm in Hawaii. It definitely qualified as far away, so I went.”
She lived in a shack without plumbing or electricity. She worked on the farm to pay for food. She decompressed.
“After I got myself together a little bit, I went back to school,” Steines recalled. “I had some credits from CCNY. I enrolled at the University of Hawaii in Manoa.”
Remembering that she had escaped into books as a girl, she decided to major in English.
“I had a professor who saw something in me I’d never seen in myself. He told me I had a voice, and I needed to write. To borrow a little of that esteem did a lot for me. Writing wasn’t easy, but for the first time in my life I felt I was swimming with the stream. For the first time in my life, I began taking myself seriously.”
Five years ago, at the age of 36, she received her degree. Three months later, she moved to Tucson — sight unseen — and became part of the graduate program in creative writing at the UA.
“I’d never been here before, I’d never been West before,” Steines said. “I didn’t know anyone in Tucson, but I thought the writing program would be a good fit. Luckily, I was right.”
She began writing “Brutalities” while pursuing her master of fine arts degree, playing with pace and form as she went. One innovation: she used first-person reflections of her life here in Tucson to cushion each chapter detailing her past.
“The essays aren’t standalones, but they could be,” Steines said. “I wanted them to be in conversation with one another.”
For her thesis, she defended a late draft of “Brutalities.” The narrative is told from her midtown apartment. Even the cover, with graphics of desert plant life, illustrates how far she has come from those years in Manhattan.
With the success of her book, Steines is now peppered with questions such as “What’s next?” and “When will we see it?”
The answers: “Creative nonfiction, a collection of essays or a book-length memoir,” and “There’s no timetable. I have a toddler now. She sets the timetable.”
FOOTNOTES
Robert Frost closed his famous poem, “The Road Not Taken,” with this stanza; “I shall be telling this with a sigh, somewhere ages and ages hence; two roads diverged in a wood, and I — I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”
The Tucson Festival of Books released its author list for the 2024 festival this week, and it is viewable by visiting tucsonfestivalofbooks.org.
Matthew Desmond, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller “Poverty, By America,” will help the Primavera Foundation celebrate its 40th anniversary here Tuesday, Dec. 12. Desmond will discuss the findings for the book, which centers on a central question: Why does the richest nation in the world still have millions of people living in poverty? The program will begin at 6 p.m. at the Fox Tucson Theatre downtown, 17 W. Congress St. For ticket information, visit foxtucson.com.
The 2023 Tucson Festival of Books brought hundreds of authors and large crowds to the University of Arizona Mall March 4-5. Here are some highlights from the festival. Video by Aidan Wohl / Arizona Daily Star
