Interview by Beth Kephart
A CONVERSATION WITH CLEAVER EDITOR-IN-CHIEF KAREN RILE

Beth: I hear myself through the years asking you questions. About violins and Mozart’s sister. About trapeze art, birds, organs. Rhubarb. The New Yorker. “Hansel & Gretel” (the play version, in which your children starred). How to fix my bum knee. How to file grades at Penn. How to wrangle online teaching platforms. How to master the pink glory of borscht. How to cure a ballot. How to survive embarrassment, or fury. How to manage a stellar, multi-disciplinary, immaculately designed literary magazine like Cleaver while teaching yoga in the evening, while learning everything one humanly can about how the body works. Or how the body and the mind work. Or how those two things (if in fact they are two things) somehow work together.

Today I want to learn more about your Substack, Embodied Resistance. It’s a gem of a thing, Karen, with a wow-range of topics. There’s neuroscience and artificial intelligence, musculature and metabolism, literary arts and a primer on gratitude. There are family histories and memorable meals, hysterical mis-directions, and quiet discoveries. It is informed, it is personal, and it is gorgeously written. As if that’s not enough, it features footnotes, an added touch that makes me feel entirely silly over there on my own Substack, The Hush and the Howl, where I do, in fact attribute my occasional quotes, but never in any Chicago Style fashion.

Karen: [interrupting] I’m a bit sloppy and capricious with citations—I use one of those online wizards and you get to choose the style you want: Chicago, MLA.

Beth: I refuse to believe you, about the capricious part. But, to go on: You recently told me that you’ve been writing thousands of words a day for years, and keeping most of those words in private journals. How does the very act of writing teach you about who you are and what matters most in the life that you live?

Karen: I believe in practice as a way of life—I know you do, too, so preaching to the proverbial choir here.

But I wasn’t always like this. I grew up as an un-self-disciplined child. I showed up completely unprepared for my piano lessons, was never on any kind of sports team, and blew off my math homework in favor of writing poems and reading novels. I lazed my way through school, doing the minimum to do well enough to please my parents and get into an okay college.

Beth: Okay, just for the record, I’m not telling anyone at the University of Pennsylvania that you think of it as an “okay college.” But, again: Go on.

Karen: In my late teens, I started running for fun, and before I knew it, I was doing marathons, which required a lot of consistent training. That was more of a compulsion and a social activity than a practice. I didn’t have a true practice ethic until I became a parent, and my small children were all suddenly studying Suzuki violin. And then—bad news!—I learned I was required to be there beside them, helping. Every day. I was already familiar with the well-worn concept that consistent practice builds skill, but I’d always coasted on whatever native talents I possessed. If I wasn’t immediately good at something, I dropped it. (For example, I managed to get through high school and university without ever taking calculus.) Working day-in, day-out with my young kids on violin taught me the value of daily practice in a visceral way.

I didn’t use to have a disciplined daily writing practice. For the first half of my adult life, I wrote only when I needed to, for freelance gigs and assignments. The act of writing was always filled with the anxiety of deadlines and my guilt about not writing enough. I began to resent it, even though I also believed that it was meant to be my life’s work.

Developing a practice of twice-daily, no-pressure writing has changed that for me and shifted me out of stress mode. I do most of my writing on a keyboard, always have for the obvious reasons—it’s fast and easy to edit. Yet, I also understand and value the tactile process of writing out words by hand on paper. I keep a morning journal, typed, of at least 750 words, which is about three pages. I do this online at one of my favorite websites, 750words.com, a simple, plain text repository.

My night journal is handwritten, one single page a day. I try not to be precious about it—no line editing, and I rarely glance back at previous entries. I use this writing, as you say, to help teach me what’s important, and what I’m thinking about. Sometimes the entries are journal-like commentary on my own life or larger events, such as the political; other times, it’s the ideas buzzing in my head that need more definition before I’m ready to write about them publicly. Writing teaches me what and how to think.

Beth: This 750words.com is new to me. But your response here reminds me of Ongoingness: The End of a Diary, by Sarah Manguso. The author’s struggle both to record her life and to release herself from the record. When did you decide to formalize your thoughts via Embodied Resistance, to make them public? What about your voice, your tone, your motivation shifts when you move from writing for a journal toward writing for others?

Karen: Your comment just sent me to my bookshelf for my copy of Ongoingness. I love that book; Manguso’s diary is high art itself. Mine’s a big mess, like a disheveled underwear drawer. I would faint from embarrassment if anyone got a peek at it—even I never look at it.

I’ve done other kinds of public nonfiction—journalism, often in the form of profiles or arts and culture pieces; book reviews; a long series of essays for the Philadelphia Inquirer; and one of my favorites, a parenting column for an international violinist website. I loved writing that column because I poured all of my philosophy on life into an unlikely container. For me, having a formal structure or blueprint is always liberating and conducive to creativity.

Beth: But why this series, now?

Karen: I’ve been studying movement, anatomy, and the mind-body connection. I feel a strong mission and sense of responsibility to help others learn what they deserve to know about their own bodies. We did not evolve to write symphonies and sestinas; we evolved to move. Everything else we do is just a happy byproduct of movement. For most of my life, movement has been secondary to the work of the mind; I see now that the two are inseparable. I want to share this knowledge.

Beth: Embodied Resistance is an alluring title. Where did it come from? What do those two words together mean to you?

Karen: Resistance is essential in politics and in the body. Recently I’ve been leaning into resistance training (you know, weightlifting, pushups), but also into resistance on the level of politics and media. I used to view the life of the mind as separate and superior to the life of the body. I could not have been more wrong. I understand now that physical strength isn’t a luxury. Sarcopenia (age-related muscle loss) is a completely preventable disease that begins as young as thirty or forty. Resistance makes us strong; we need strength in order to resist.

Beth: You’ve been developing some really interesting graphics to help tell your stories—not a surprise, given all the graphic work you do on behalf of Cleaver the magazine as well as Cleaver’s writing workshops. You have a long history in graphic design—in seeing the world through a visual lens. I wonder if you might tell us something about that.

Karen: I come from a family of visual artists. My father, John Rile, who died in 2022, started studying type design at Carnegie Tech (before it was Carnegie Mellon; he was there at the same time as Andy Warhol.) He spent most of his career as an art director and graphic designer. The highest compliment he paid me was to say I had a “good eye.” He met my mom when he was finishing up his BFA painting degree at Penn, where she also studied painting and history of art. My sister Kathryn is an artist and professional graphic designer, and my daughter Madeline is a glass artist, so it’s in my blood.

My degrees are in English and creative writing, but I’ve been doing graphics quasi-professionally most of my life. My aesthetic is a bit quirky—you see it all over Cleaver (our social media is the work of our social media director, but all the cover images for the literary pieces, craft essays, and interviews are mine). Creating the oddball graphics is one of my favorite things to do—it’s a process that involves an entirely different part of my brain than writing or movement.

Beth: Who is your ideal reader? How do you hope to be read?

Karen: For most of us, an ideal reader is a person adjacent to ourselves who thinks just like us. Or at least someone who shares our values or has the potential to be persuaded towards those values. Of course, I lap it up when people appreciate my literary efforts.

But Embodied Resistance is a different sort of project. I want to connect with any person who can benefit from my words. Years of teaching college students have taught me that there can be a shockingly long interlude between your message landing in someone’s head and becoming truly meaningful. Like when I was a young person hearing about “the value of daily practice, yada yada.” It took decades for the message to land, and when it finally did, I was a changed person.

When I teach, I often imagine I am speaking to my students in their future, ten or twenty years from now. It’s the same with writing. I sometimes see from the comments that a few readers completely missed my point, maybe because they read too superficially, or maybe because they aren’t ready to hear it yet. That’s okay. When it does eventually sink in, my message will have value.

Beth: Which Substacks do you recommend?

Karen: Well, yours, of course! I have an eclectic group of favorites. The usuals, like Heather Cox Richardson, Robert B. Hubbell,Jess Craven, and Joyce Vance. I also like a Substack by Katherine Needleman. She’s an oboist in the Baltimore Symphony who writes bravely about abuse and misogyny in the classical music industry. A refreshingly charming and sardonic prose stylist. I love Night Owl, by Heidi Jon Schmidt, a terrific literary novelist who writes urgently and searingly about contemporary politics. And The Etymology Nerd, about linguistics and culture—so good, so nerdy!

Beth: What is your experience of writing and posting for Embodied Resistance? I have found, for example, that I suddenly need my own Substack, that it calms me, grounds me, fortifies me in ways that most other things don’t. I never knew that I needed this, but suddenly I do. What about you?

Karen: I like to reinvent myself every five or ten years, and I get a tremendous energy boost from new endeavors. I love figuring out systems, so yes, I feel excitement and grounding from this project. To create space in my life for this writing, I’ve needed to make some long-overdue choices in outsourcing a chunk of Cleaver’s admin work. I kept the magazine humming for over a decade by spinning plates in the air seven days a week behind the scenes.

Beth: Finally, the last time we were on the phone, you mentioned how important nonfiction has become to you—that is harder, in this era, to concentrate on reading or writing fiction. I’d love to hear more from you on this.

Karen: Fiction was my first love—fiction and poetry. I embraced those genres as a very young person, and for a long time fiction fed my soul—I used it to learn all the truths of the adult world. After 2016, something shifted, or maybe broke in me. I’ve long believed that all writing is political, even when it is avowedly apolitical, but the acceleration in dark forces in the past eight years has taken the wind from me. I find myself reaching more and more for nonfiction, even when the fiction I encounter is quite fine, well-crafted, and morally astute. That’s my mood for now—but like I said, I reinvent myself every few years, so maybe I’ll morph again. If I had unlimited money and time, I’d go back and get an MFA in poetry.

Karen Rile is the author of Winter Music (Little, Brown), a novel set in Philadelphia, and numerous works of fiction and creative nonfiction. Her writing has appeared in literary journals such as The Southern Review, American Writing, Creative Nonfiction, Other Voices, Superstition Review, Tishman Review, and has been shortlisted among The Best American Short Stories. Karen has published articles and essays in The San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and others. She is the founding and chief editor of Cleaver and the Director of Cleaver Workshops. She is also a Level Two, 500-hour certified instructor of the LYT Method, the only yoga system created by physical therapists. Karen lives in Philadelphia and teaches fiction and creative nonfiction at the University of Pennsylvania. She holds a BA from the University of Pennsylvania, an MFA from Bennington College, and a certificate in satire from The Second City. She is also the mom of four adult daughters with more interesting careers than her own: an aerialist, a glass artist, a violist, and a playwright. Subscribe to her newsletter, Embodied Resistance, to read about stuff we humans deserve to know about our own bodies, with a focus on functional movement and the brain. Follow her on Instagram @whatkindofdog.

Longtime frequent Cleaver contributor Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of nearly 40 books in multiple genres, an award-winning teacher, co-founder of Juncture Workshops, and a book artist. Beth’s newest book, the acclaimed My Life in Paper: Adventures in Ephemera, sprang from her own obsession with paper. Beth’s most recent craft books are We Are the Words: The Master Memoir Class and Consequential Truths: On Writing the Lived Life. More at bethkephartbooks.com and bind-arts.com. Find her on Substack at The Hush and the Howl. Join Beth for her two-hour masterclass FIRST PERSON: Writing About Yourself with Complexity and Power on Sunday, February 25, 2025.