On Influence: A Conversation with Edward Schwarzschild
Brian Phillip Whalen: You were such an influential mentor to me, so naturally I’m thinking about things my mentors and teachers have said to me over the years. You always told me, “no news is no news,” which kept me in balance as I was submitting work, waiting to hear from editors/publishers, or applying for academic jobs. Of all the things we talked about over the years that probably doesn’t seem like the one that would stick with me. As teachers I think we never know what our students will remember, what will help them—and when. Is there any advice your own mentors told you that has stuck with you?
Edward Schwarzschild: I feel blessed by the teachers and mentors I’ve found—or did they find me? The circumstances seem so improbable. I was fortunate to meet Grace Paley several times, to study with Tobias Wolff, to teach alongside John Gregory Brown and Carrie Brown. The wisdom they offered almost always applied both to writing and living. Paley saying, “You know more than you think you know, you know?” Wolff speaking of how you don’t get over certain struggles; instead, you learn how to carry them with you. The Browns demonstrating daily how two writers can get married, build a family, and continue to craft beautiful fiction.
Even when you were a student, you struck me as a teacher. You were already teaching me, that’s for sure. What have you discovered about the subject of mentors now that you’re leading more workshops full-time?
BPW: I still get a magical feeling in the workshops I teach, if there's a particular quality to the light one day or if it's raining and we're all wet and drinking hot coffee, huddled together around a workshop table, reading and sharing stories. I tell my students, "This moment is something you'll remember 20 years from now." I don’t recall what I learned from any particular workshop I’ve been in—nothing I could put my finger on, I mean—but I still feel the camaraderie and support. I often think about Paul Cody, my first writing teacher, sitting at the head of a conference table with a scarf wrapped around his neck, on the second floor of Demarest Hall in college. Paul once had us sit on the floor in a circle, and he read us a fairytale, pausing to show us the pictures like a kindergarten class. It sounds ridiculous, but it was amazing, an homage to the way we first hear stories. That experience was more powerful than any writing lesson. The magic of story-telling.
ES: I was a pre-med student at Cornell. One of my friends was taking a creative writing workshop, so I signed up for it, too. The professor, Dan McCall, saw something in my stories and I saw something in him—a kind of life, a devotion to writing, a way to be in the world that wouldn’t involve medical school. More than particular words he said or wrote, I remember the encouragement he offered at a crucial time in my life and the reverence in his voice when he talked about the books—Melville, Hawthorne, Fitzgerald, Hemingway— that had changed his life.
BPW: That passion is contagious. I still teach authors I first read back in Paul’s workshops. There’s something special about that cycle. Sharing the gift of life-changing stories that were once shared with us.
ES: I remember a seminar during your time at UAlbany in which we wrestled with the poetry and memoirs of Nick Flynn. It was an inspiration to see his influence on your writing unfold in that space. When I think about my own responses to Flynn—especially Some Ether, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, and The Ticking is the Bomb—what I’m drawn to is how powerfully his work shaped my writing of nonfiction. I found something in his fragments, his swirling chronology, his weaving together of voices that I couldn’t help but incorporate in the essays I wrote about myself, my family, and, in one instance, about Flynn himself. It was the kind of influence that felt conscious—I was very aware that Flynn had inspired what I was doing—and unavoidable. Finding him and being influenced by him was very much a joyful experience. It felt like a gift that you and I shared.
And yet I don’t feel Flynn’s influence on my fiction, even though I was writing fiction while reading him. It feels to me when I’ve tried to draw upon Flynn’s work in my fiction, it hasn’t worked out so well. In those instances, I’ve had to retrace my steps and return, in a somewhat mercenary way, to other voices. In the case of my latest novel, In Security, those voices came from various genres and forms, from Richard Russo to Ted Conover to Franz Wright to Peter Orner to Elmore Leonard and on and on. It wasn’t that I needed to be influenced by fiction writers in order to write fiction, but the qualities in Flynn that fed my nonfiction—the nonlinearity, fragmentation, and polyvocality—stymied my fiction, at least so far.
BPW: You have such a wonderful ability to tell a linear story in your fiction, weaving in backstory to achieve the depths and multi-vocality you mention in Flynn’s nonfiction. I think there are writers of fiction who certainly play with form and time in successful ways, but it seems to me that Flynn’s distinctive style—fragmentation, collage, achronology—lends itself especially well to the telling of true stories. Rita Dove once wrote that life is “ragged” and “loose ends are the rule”—which is to say, there’s often a lot of stitching and sense-making to memoir because the material is endless, endless ways to put it together. And often not putting it together beautifully—ragged ends, visible seams—can be the most evocative way to tell a true story. I learned that from reading Flynn.
But Flynn’s influence on my own writing is less about imitating him than it is about the ways in which reading his work has allowed me the courage to experiment with my own voice—to take risks in my writing. He gives me the courage to “follow my own weirdness” (to borrow a phrase from Annie Dillard) because of the risks he took—and continues to take—in his writing.
ES: What you say about my ability to tell a “linear story” cracks me up a bit. I mean, yes, it seems that’s what I aspire to do, yet the process couldn’t be less linear. How did you go about making the structural decisions in your collection Semiotic Love [Stories]? What do you see as the chief influences for those risky, brief stories?
BPW: For the micro fiction in the book, it was Lynne Tillman telling me to “start small again” after I wrote a few short-shorts for her workshop. I don’t think I’d have tried those shorts if I hadn’t been reading Lydia Davis (who taught my first PhD workshop) and Michael Martone, whose work returned me to the pleasures of re-reading Borges and Barthelme and certain Oulipo writings—and Yasunari Kawabata, who I read in college. I think of Jim Harrison’s prose poems, too, and Mary Robison’s hilarious, and devastating, novel Why Did I Ever, composed of mini chapters/fragments that she originally wrote on postcards (to overcome writer’s block).
Anne Carson’s book Short Talks was influential on the book, structurally—and formally. Her way of taking something singular, small, and turning it, like blown glass, into something so deeply meaningful, and how all her prose poems stand on their own while thematically binding the book as a whole. Semiotic Love [Stories] opens with a story called “The Father Bell,” about death and memory. The rest of the book explores a variety of losses and regrets—but it’s the ringing of the bell in the first story, the incipient loss, that sets the tone for what follows, that resonates with the themes and storylines in the rest of the book. I’d like to think my reader still hears the echo of that opening bell when they read the final line of the last story in my collection.
I know you have a manuscript in the works, and that you’re doing extensive research for it. How’s it coming?
ES: I can’t talk in detail about the new novel-in-progress (superstitious, I suppose). I’m more than a few years in and the work doesn’t feel linear at all, though I wish it were and hope the final product will be. It’s at a stage now where it feels capacious enough to include everything—black hole science, World War I history, the trauma of exile, whatever I see at the dog park in the mornings, and more—but, at its heart, it’s inevitably a novel obsessed with brotherhood and loss, as I am these days.
Some of the writers who inspired my foray into somewhat immersive research were Ted Conover (Newjack), Barbara Ehrenreich (Nickel and Dimed), James Agee and Walker Evans (Let Us Now Praise Famous Men), and maybe most of all John Berger and his Into Their Labours trilogy (Pig Earth, Once in Europa, Lilac and Flag).
BPW: Your inclination to do research is inspiring—and what you consider as research, letting dog parks and your brother’s death influence your work. Your essay about moonlighting as a TSA agent to research In Security is delightful, and other autobiographical elements worked their way into that novel (like your tennis hobby). Are you going to do some radical thing with the new novel, or a future book, like Denis Johnson did in Seek: Reports from the Edges of America and Beyond, and become a literary investigative journalist?
ES: I definitely like that idea—but at the moment, the answer is no. Aside from a fellowship I did in Germany that made important research for the project possible. Would I take a parttime job in an observatory for a while if I could? I’m sure the answer is yes, but there aren’t too many functioning observatories around Albany these days, and I’d really need to spend time in an observatory from around 1910, not 2021. I wouldn’t mind working in a painter’s studio for a while. That might actually be do-able.
BPS: You and I are both comfortable allowing our experiences, and our fascinations/obsessions, to influence our fictive imagination. I wonder if that’s another reason we got along so well as mentor and mentee, even though our prose, the way we tell our stories, is so different. The novel I’m revising takes place in a homeless shelter in the Midwest. It’s based loosely on my time working with AmeriCorps, after I got my MFA. There’s also stuff about the arctic in the book, because I’m obsessed with the far north (maybe because I moved not long ago to the deep south, a kind of reactive longing) and what it would be like to be an explorer or a scientist, to live that life. I recently read Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez. I’d gladly hop on a schooner and sail to Melville Bay with you if you’re looking for your next research adventure.
ES: We all know on some level that an understanding of working lives is essential to so much great art. Working for the TSA at Albany International Airport as a Transportation Security Officer-in-training was fascinating, and inspiring. I may not have appreciated work experience when I was younger, taking odd jobs that ranged from gardener to gravedigger to kennel cleaner to file organizer to knife salesman. Later in life, with a stable career in place (fingers crossed), it’s a blessing to step into another work space for a while. It offers extraordinary material, day after day of telling details. Such experiences might also function like meditation. For me, stepping into another job lifted me outside my patterns of thinking, encouraged me to focus on and appreciate anew the present moment. Of course, a job in the security realm heightens one’s attention to the “now” to an extreme extent, but I think stepping into other jobs would still have a similar meditative effect.
In other words, I’ll keep you posted about the schooner.
