.jpg "Sarah Schulman")
In Conversation with Sarah Schulman: Writer, Educator, and Activist
A conversation with Sarah Schulman is more than a discourse on the written word. Her vibrant, expansive mind is a fireworks display of connections, digressions, tirades and treatises. You may begin discussing her latest novel and gain insight into the demise of the publishing industry as a result of the Bush era’s emphasis on the safe, the dominant, the anti-intellectual. You may ponder her influences and receive a lesson on marginalized writers worthy of an entire semester at your nearby MFA. Sarah Schulman is a writer of consequence but she is also at heart an educator and activist.
She is renowned for being prolific with ten novels, four non-fiction books, and numerous plays to her name (see sidebar for details). She has been called the lesbian Woody Allen. She began writing at the age of six and explains that she “can’t imagine what I would do if I didn’t write. It is biological. It is my calling.”
Our dialogue occurred over a number of months via the phone and email. We spoke at length about the chilling effect of the dominant voice on writers from marginalized communities and specifically, about lesbian literature. We also talked about her work as an educator and advocate of non-dominate voice writers. Finally, we talked about her work as an activist and her inability and unwillingness to separate the social and the personal.
Lisen Stromberg: On a recent visit to Mills, you shared that it took you nearly nine years to get your novel, The Child, published. You said, “Lesbian fiction is shrinking into oblivion.” Why?
Sarah Schulman: Lesbian literature in the United States is in a profound decline. It’s been made obsolete for many reasons. Number one is that it’s been profoundly defeated by these professional programs (MFAs). Students who focus on lesbian content don’t get supported in an intelligent way, and they can already see that there’s so much prejudice in the marketplace, that there’s a chilling effect. The young ones end up closeting their content so that they can have careers. They look at writers like Dorothy Allison, who doesn’t ever have lesbian protagonists, or Amy Holmes, who doesn’t have lesbian protagonists, and they see that those people are very successful. And they look for people who do have that content and those people are unknown to them, or can’t make any money. The chilling effect. They make the decision very early not to develop that content. So, that, of course, is a chain reaction. The industry receives less books like that and it becomes more comfortable to marginalize them.
It’s worse now than it’s ever been since the time of Virginia Woolfe and Gertrude Stein. Because in order for that truthful literature to be allowed to be an integrated part of the national discourse, the very individuals who currently are in control would have to allow information to come in that their position is constructed, not based on natural supremacy. And they can’t bear that thought. They can’t stand it. So they will mock you and marginalize you, and demean you and disrespect you rather than have to face that they are inflated.
LS: Can you talk about your own experience coming up against this?
SS: It’s so vast I can’t even tell you in one conversation. It’s like a thousand page book. It happens every day. I can tell you right now, I write plays of lesbian content, and there’s not one lesbian play – and by “play” I mean a multi-character world where actors play inside the universe of the author’s vision- in the entire American repertoire. There is not one play by a lesbian writer with a lesbian protagonist that has had a successful run in New York, that has had regional productions, that is used in acting schools for actors to study scenes, that’s read in classrooms. Not one. Not a single one. That’s what I’m writing against. So, how many times do I go to a theater and see a play about white heterosexuals in love? Over and over and over ad nauseum. I have gone to thousands of plays and it’s the same, stupid theme. Repetition compulsion. It’s not just me, there’s other people trying to do this, too, and they haven’t been able to succeed at this, and of course the official position is that all those hundreds of thousands of plays about the coming of age of the white male are well written, and that’s why those plays are produced. Never ever has there been one single lesbian play that’s well written, and that’s why those plays are not produced. That’s what they will tell you. Over and over. That’s the paradigm. They have to invest in the validity of their own supremacy. Because if they had to admit the truth, which is that they will not allow works of art that reposition their sense of themselves, ‘cause then they would be revealed. Their façade would be punctured. It’s ultimately the same situation in literature. There is no American lesbian novelist with lesbian protagonists whose books are treated like American literature. Not one who is treated with the same financial and social rewards, as any of those guys we’re always told are so brilliant.
LS: You said, “A writer is not telling their life, they are transforming it.” Could you explain?
SS: I see some of the ways people respond to the things that I write, that don’t understand how art gets made. So they’re like, oh, she’s fifty and here’s a fifty-year-old woman character, therefore that’s her. Everyone presumes it’s autobiographical. I mean things are profoundly autobiographical, but unless you know how to make art, you can’t see how. So the things that the person is really grappling with get expressed in all kinds of complex ways. There’s a transformative impulse. If you’re simply re-stating events then it’s more like journalism.
LS: I’ve read that there is a new trend in support of certain writers whose voices historically have been marginalized. We are now reading them and they are winning significant awards. Are they the exceptions?
SS: Jhumpa Lahiri won a Pulitzer Prize, and now Junot Diaz won a Pulitzer Prize. There are tens of thousands of mediocre white people who are published all the time. Every single day multitudes of bad novels and bad plays by mediocre white people are produced and published every day. That system has not been integrated at all.
Mainstream publishing is much more segregated now than it was in the past. When you look at the Seventies, for example, there were a number of prominent black women writers who were being published at that time. Not just Toni Morrison. Not just Alice Walker but also Gayle Jones, Toni Cade Bambara and others. A lot of interesting people. There was a community. There was a critical mass of people being published, that everyone was reading, or starting to read. Now, could you name four black women novelists that are being published regularly who everyone is reading? That was a period that was more open and this period is more repressive.
There might be some good news on its way. Personally I’m happy to see all those publishing companies collapse, because they were doing such a disservice to the culture. Basically they were just enacting the Bush doctrine internally. So let them go down, because there needs to be a lot more room and flexibility for people who don’t fit into the system to maneuver a little bit.
LS: So with this economy and with what’s happening in the publishing world, there may be room for a new Renaissance of voices?
SS: Well, it’s not going to come from above. It may happen because the systems of privilege are paralyzed. So people who are imaginative and energetic and are grappling with something that matters may have a chance to get their work elevated. But it’s not like these institutions are going to have a revelation of the difference between right and wrong and suddenly start representing the whole country. Don’t hold your breath for that one.
LS: You’ve said, “MFA programs and professional organizations are counter-indicated to art making.” MFAs have become big business. What are your thoughts on the commodification of the creative process?
SS: First of all, it eliminates people who can’t get into programs or find out about them, or can’t pay for them. The MFA takes people who do make it through all of those filtering devices and uniforms them. It gives them readings in common. They end up work-shopping, which is basically people conforming their writing styles to each other. And it ends up with a lot of homogeneity, which is not what writing is supposed to be. So, as a result, people who write from oppositional points of view do very poorly in these programs. And a lot of the teachers in the dominant culture do not know how to nurture non-dominant culture writers. They don’t know the literature and they don’t understand the falsity of their own sense of neutrality.
LS: How then do you nurture marginalized voices?
SS: I started something called the Satellite Academy, teaching out of my apartment, for queer girls in their twenties. Young women. They’re not all queer, but they’re all a little bit on a continuum, in a bunch of different ways. And none of them are enrolled in writing programs. They are just young people who are writers, who are not being professionalized, who are not being homogenized. We meet once a month. And they don’t have to defend their point of view, and they don’t have to defend their content. It’s entirely craft-based. They don’t chat. I don’t nurture them. They come on time, they do their work, they discuss their work from a craft point of view, and they get to become better writers without being put in a defensive position. It’s been so successful and they have enjoyed it so much that I realized that I plan to expand to two classes. A few people like me could run a couple of classes, and we could single handedly transform the situation for lesbian literature because a handful of people writing sophisticated work would make a difference.
LS: The challenge then becomes, while you are now nurturing and removing the chilling effect of content, there’s still the chilling effect of publishing. How do you prevent that piece of it?
SS: I just had a really interesting experience with that. I have a kid, a straight kid – he’s Puerto Rican – who is my student. (Schulman is a Professor of English at The City University of New York, College of Staten Island). He just came into Staten Island about eight years ago. Very talented. A natural talent. Being a writer was not a possibility in his environment. Most of the people he grew up with become cops and firefighters. I and others nurtured him for many years, and eventually we all talked him into going to an MFA program, and he got into Bennington. He got there and he was really kind of miserable, but we kept saying to him in the end it’s going to pay off because when you have that word next to your name the people with power will feel more comfortable with you. A couple years later he finished a book, which I just read. It’s really fantastic. He did a great job. It’s publishable. And he’s really at a place where he could have a career. But I wanted to try to get him out of these marginalized boxes. So I suggested that he go to the most mainstream teacher that he had in the program and ask him to refer him to an agent. So, this white, straight guy, very WASPy, said he would be happy to, and he referred him to a marginalized agent who represents marginalized work. The guy would not use his connections to let my kid into his world. He would only use his power to reposition this kid as marginalized. I said to my student, we are not going to let him play that game. Go back to him and tell him that you want a conventional agent. That you intend to have a literary career. So he went back, and the guy, this time, said, ‘Well, you know, there is so-and-so. Why don’t you call him and tell him that I said you should call.’ That’s the biggest trick in the book, right? Because that doesn’t help. “Call him and tell him I told you to call.” You pick up the phone and call him yourself. Obviously, this teacher was not willing to pick up the phone and call someone like him and let that Puerto Rican writer into his world, right? So, I said, okay, I’ll write to him. I wrote to the agent and I said, “So-and-so, name of famous white male writer, thinks that you are the best agent for this kid. Would you look at his manuscript?” I described the manuscript in enticing language, and now he’s agreed to read it. That’s the result of thirty years of experience on my part, to know the dynamic and use it.
LS: Let’s shift gears. What are you working on now?
SS: I have two non-fiction books and one novel coming out in the next year. In October, my new novel, THE MERE FUTURE, will be published in hard cover followed a year later by the paperback. This is conveys a futuristic vision of New York in which the only career left is marketing. It’s very funny and samples many different genres: Literary fiction, science fiction, mystery, true crime, political thriller and poetry.
In November, The New Press is publishing a nonfiction work that I have been writing for 13 years called TIES THAT BIND: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences. This is really the first book to theorize homophobia in the family and its effects on the individual and the culture.
Then supposedly in the spring of 2010 University of California Press will publish THE GENTRIFICATION OF THE MIND: Supremacy Ideology Masquerading As Reality, but they seem to be a bit behind. This book is not finished, but it histories Gentrification as a specific event starting in the mid-seventies and ending, I believe with the current financial crisis. My main focus is the interplay of AIDS and gentrification, its impact on how we think about ourselves. I focus on how homogeneity undermines urbanity.
After these are all put to bed I will return to two novels that are simply underway but not completed. One is called THE HEALING; a kind of riff on Balzac’s COUSIN BETTE and one is called, I believe, THE DEATH OF CARSON McCULLERS about authenticity in artistic production.
I also have about 70 pages of the closest thing to a memoir I have ever written, about the corrupting effect of MFA programs on the personal moral behavior of artists.
I’m also imagining a sort of novella collection called PLOT, kind of studies for novels that will never be novels.
That’s it for the books for the next 5 years. I also have a zillion plays in development.
LS: Who have been your influences?
SS: I love Carson McCullers, I always have, because she is able to inhabit any kind of person and make them be a protagonist with full humanity. I always found that very impressive. I love Edith Wharton, the way she lands her tropes. It’s kind of fun and wonderful to watch. I also love Jean Genet, Balzac, Jack Kerouac. Some recent novels that I have really enjoyed, Marriette in Ecstasy by Ron Hanson, I, the Divine by Rahib Almaddine, and I liked Martin and John, by Dale Peck. I like Caryl Phillips. Marylin Robinson’s Housekeeping. God, there’s so many.
LS: You are writer as well as an activist (see sidebar for Sarah’s work with the Oral History Project). Can a writer separate their social agenda from their work?
SS: Combining the personal with the social is inherent in all writing. However, if the work is based on the dominant viewpoint then it is assumed to be free of the political because it is the majority voice. Work that is called political is really only work that flies in the face of the dominant culture. When a white heterosexual male writes about his experience he is not considered to be making a political statement. However, when a lesbian writes about her experience, she is viewed as “political.”
I feel that I should have the right to be as truthful in my work as everybody else. Unfortunately, when I describe my actual experience there’s a punishment involved. If you are dominant culture and you describe your actual experience, there is a reward involved. But the gesture is the same. I’m not doing anything different from what they are doing. I’m doing exactly what they are doing. The exact same action.
And in terms of knowing what it’s like to be dominant. I’m bombarded with it all day long. It’s harder to know who you yourself truly are than it is to know who they truly are. Everybody knows what white men’s lives are like, because every thing is about that. Every book is about that, every TV show, every news program, every newspaper is about it; everything is about it all the time. So, if you are not a dominant culture person, you know how you live, and you know a lot about how they live. If you are person in power you only know how you, yourself live. So the people in power really have the least information. Unless you do the work.
