'Stay Brave' with Claire Comstock-Gay
‘Stay Brave’ is an interview series by woman-identifying creatives for woman-identifying creatives to inspire bravery in the creative life. [Created and curated by Leah Umansky]
💫This month’s Substack is our ‘1-year’ anniversary post! Thank you for subscribing to Stay Brave! I hope you have been inspired! Keep reading and keep sharing! Thank you and here’s to a happy 2024 around the corner! 💫
How do you interpret the phrase, "Stay Brave?"
Hold out against the forces—external or internal, real or imagined—pressuring you to go against your gut, your principles, your joy, your truest desires.
As a woman-identifying writer, what are the ways that you “stay brave” in your life?
I find that being intentional and being brave almost always work out to be the same thing. It’s easy to make un-brave choices when I’m just passively letting the current of life just carry me along; it’s when I start trying to actively decide what I want my life to look like that I act with any nerve.
Who is someone in your life who models “staying brave” for you?
The flip side of living through a time of unimaginable violence and suffering is that we’re also living through a time of ordinary people, all around us, acting with unimaginable courage and integrity. From the clinic escorts at the Planned Parenthood in my city, to the forest defenders in Atlanta, to the people of Gaza caring for each other in impossible circumstances, every time I see something in the world that makes me want to despair, I also see somebody teaching me what it looks like to stay brave.
What writers, artists, and/or musicians do you look to to foster a sense of “bravery?”
Writers are often convinced that we “have to” do certain things in order to have a career: we have to make certain kinds of work, appeal to certain publishing world decision-makers, avoid being too weird or too loud. Sometimes these compromises are necessary—it costs money to live!—but they inevitably diminish the work itself. I get courage from the artists who are stubborn about doing things on their own terms, even (especially) if that comes at a risk to their career. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about Arundhati Roy, Anne Boyer, Sinead O’Connor.
What’s a piece of advice you would pass on to your younger self about “staying brave?” What’s something you know now, that you didn’t know in the past?
Avoiding a difficult task or intimidating conversation can seem like a clever move in the moment, but ultimately it will never ever ever ever be the right call. (Like all the big lessons, this is one that I have to learn and relearn over and over and over again.)
Can you remember a time in your life where you realized your own bravery? How did you use it to propel you forward?
I never feel more brave than I do when I’m quitting something—a job, a relationship, whatever. Especially when I don’t have a plan lined up yet for what’s next, but still know with total clarity that leaving is the right thing to do. When I was in my 20s, I had the vague idea that quitting wasn’t really acceptable except in the most extreme of cases, and stuck around in unsatisfying situations for way too long, simply because I didn’t think I had a strong enough case for leaving. The first few times I got up my nerve to just walk out, I felt like the bravest person in the universe. Now, of course, it feels like nothing—I’m like that meme with the skeleton (“If it sucks, hit da bricks!!!”)—but figuring out that you’re allowed to take ownership of your own life and just quit opened up the whole world to me.
What do you do when you aren’t feeling brave? What inspires you or motivates you?
Bravery creates more bravery. The more I act with courage, the easier it is to keep at it. The reverse is also true: each time I act with cowardice, or hide from a problem, or make a bad decision just because it’s the easy one, the easier it is to continue being unbrave. When I’m not feeling brave, it’s almost always because I’m avoiding something I don’t want to deal with. Taking on tiny challenges (sometimes as small as, like, going to the grocery store when I don’t want to) can be enough to lead me back to bravery.
In what ways would you like to be more brave in your creative life?
In my personal life, I’m confident (most of the time, anyway) in doing what I want to do, without worrying too much about pleasing everybody else. In my creative life, however, I still depend way, way too much on external validation. I worry constantly! I need so much to be told my work is good! And while on the one hand, this is natural and fine—we’re creating our work for the express purpose of being read, so of course it matters what others think!—it has also made me less brave. Less interesting, too, at least to myself. Before I had ever published anything, when nobody knew I was a writer and I was secretly writing short stories at work, I wrote with an absolute (and maybe a little delusional) freedom and courage, and I’ve been trying to get some of that back.
What is your proudest moment of bravery?
I’m struggling to think of any individual moment, but overall, I’m proud to be unafraid of interpersonal conflict. If someone is repeatedly rude to me, I’m not scared to say something directly. I’m a pretty quiet and even-tempered sort of person, which I think people think means I won’t stand up for myself? But surprise: I will!
What are you currently working on?
Publishing my first book was, for many different reasons, an incredibly negative experience, and for a couple years my only real project was getting my confidence back and re-learning how to write without shame and anger and fear breathing down my neck. Now I’m working on a novel!
Thank you, Claire, for being our year-end feature and celebrating ‘1-year of STAY BRAVE’ with us!
Claire Comstock-Gay is the author of Madame Clairevoyant’s Guide to the Stars, and she writes weekly horoscopes for New York Magazine’s The Cut. She currently lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
Leah Umansky is the author of three books of poems, most recently the forthcoming OF TYRANT, (The Word Works in April, 2024.) She is currently working on a memoir Delicate Machine, an exploration of womanhood, hope, and heart in the face of grief and a global pandemic. She earned her MFA in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and has curated and hosted The COUPLET Reading Series in NYC since 2011. Her creative work can be found in such places as The New York Times, POETRY, The Bennington Review, Minyan Magazine, The Academy of American Poets' Poem-A-Day and others. She can be found at www.leahumansky.com or @leah.umansky on IG.