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Q&A: Merritt Tierce

Merritt Tierce waited tables for a high-end Dallas steakhouse for years before obtaining a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her debut novel, “Love Me Back,” set amid the sordid world of restaurant life, was just published in September and already is a smash in the literary world. The book has received accolades from the New York Times, the New Yorker and celebrities including Carrie Brownstein. Tierce lives in Denton, but she wrote key parts of the book during the six years she lived in the M Streets. The book’s main character, Marie, lives on Lower Greenville, and Tierce portrays Terilli’s as “Valentino’s.”

I was just going through your press, and it’s very impressive. Even Carrie Brownstein recommended your book, which must be the height of coolness.

Yeah, I didn’t know what to expect because this is my first book. You know who St. Vincent is? She even mentioned it in British GQ. That was amazing.

What was your path to becoming a writer?

I was just waiting tables and doing anything I could to make money. Part of that was intentional, and part of that was inertia. I probably could’ve gotten a job doing something that had to do with writing. I don’t know if that would’ve been teaching high school English or trying to get into some kind of journalism or technical writing or what, but I definitely did not want to be any other kind of writer. I just wanted to write what I wanted to write. I didn’t want to write for anyone else. So instead of doing things to make it as a writer, I tried to make money. I’m really glad I did it that way now. I wasn’t writing toward anything for a long time. I just was living, really. I wrote the first story I ever published while I was waiting tables in 2006, and that was just the beginning of it.

That was the story “Suck It”?

Yes, and that is now the middle of this book. It wasn’t with any sort of intention, like ‘OK, now I’m going to work on a book because I have all this great material.’ I just kept writing.

You were accepted to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop

I decided to get an MFA not to learn how to write but just so I could have a couple of years to focus on writing instead of trying to make money. So for two years before I went to grad school, I worked two full-time jobs. It was really, really stressful, and I don’t think I realized until I got to Iowa that I hadn’t been getting enough sleep for about three years. For the first six months, I slept a lot. But then I actually worked at a steakhouse in Iowa City, and I also flew home often, at least once a month, and worked a long weekend at the restaurant here.

How did you get this book published?

I won an award that a lot of agents and publishers pay attention to, so that’s how I got an agent. I had a really anomalous path from then on. I expected to have to send my stuff out to a lot of people and get a lot of rejections, and that wasn’t the experience I had. I had agents contacting me and asking if they could take me to lunch, and that was really great and weird. My route to getting a book published was much different from what most writers expect. My agent sold my manuscript within two weeks. The whole publishing process has been really, really great.

A lot of the book is connected to Lakewood.

Yeah, I actually wrote “Suck It” on Lower Greenville in a coffeehouse that’s not there anymore called Gachet. Lakewood is sort of an invisible character in the book. Most of the book happens inside a restaurant. But the little bits of life she talks about outside the restaurant take place in Lakewood because that’s where she lives.

You received death threats after saying that you gave part of $4,000 in tips from Rush Limbaugh to a nonprofit that helps women pay for their abortions. What was that like?

When it first started happening, there were a couple of days when I was disturbed by it. The people who are most vehemently anti-abortion are also the same people who are most vehemently pro-gun. And all of these people who are heaving this violent language I would look at their Facebook page, and it would be this white male holding a gun automatic weapons. That’s really frightening. And they have proven repeatedly that they will be violent against people who support abortion. To my knowledge, there hasn’t been an incident of someone who supports abortion rights killing someone who doesn’t.

—Rachel Stone

Niles is a 14-year-old bichon frise mix who loves nothing in this world more than accompanying owner Julie Goff to work at Operation Kindness animal shelter. Niles is famous around East Dallas, Goff says, “because he loves to stick his head out the window on our many car rides around town. I will always see someone laugh, point or smile, and I love that it brightens their day. He certainly has brightened mine for the last four years that I have had him.”

Lights, camera, action … sit, stay, fetch!

Professional pet trainer (and pet-trainer trainer) Tia Guest had a solid plan for an online dog-training venture, but the logistics were tricky. She needed a studio for filming the first series of training videos, and she needed untrained animals to star in them. She wanted people to watch dogs learn, “to demonstrate on camera, in real time, how our training methods work,” she says.

Luckily she discovered Squash Blossom Studios in East Dallas, which happens to be owned by Karen Fling, arguably our area’s most prolific pet doctor and advocate.

Fling, founder and owner of Lake Highlands’ East Lake Pet Orphanage and The Cat Hospital, is exceedingly creative about raising money for East Lake so that she might treat every sick pet, whether someone pays for their care or not. For example,

Fling owns a thrift store, Second Chance Treasures, and 100 percent of its profits benefit the orphanage.

In 2011, while looking for a warehouse to store excess inventory, Fling discovered the 18,000 square-foot studio, which was for sale. Now, anytime a photographer or moviemaker rents it, the profits benefit East Lake pets.

Not only was Squash Blossom the perfect location for filming PetFuntastic training videos, but its connection to Fling also brought the unexpected benefit of canine students to star in them.

“It was a win-win situation, really,” Fling says. The dogs could learn basic behaviors that make them even more adoptable, and East Lake gains exposure as the videos are viewed and used by PetFuntastic subscribers.

For Guest’s part, she and her crew procured the perfect pupils — about 10 dogs of varying breeds and ages who were eager to learn.

“For seven straight days volunteers from East Lake brought the dogs to the studio and stayed with them,” Guest says. “They were great.”

She says they learned quickly, a fact she attributes to the “quick and easy” positivereinforcement-based methods taught in the videos.

“It is amazing what you and your dog can accomplish in a week,” she says.

And the dogs loved the experience, it seemed.

“When it was their turn, they would run down the hall. They were so excited to get in the studio, and they were so focused once we got going.”

The whole idea behind PetFuntastic, she says, is to make dog training accessible by making it convenient and affordable. Subscribers will be able to choose a training path that suits them using a large collection of videos and resources. “The basics will come very quickly,” Guest says. The next step is “strengthening videos,” which offer more-advanced lessons. A threemonth subscription will cost less than $15 a month, Guest says.

Christina Hughes Babb

SUBSCRIBE TO PetFuntastic or learn more at petfuntastic.com.