Novelist, essayist, poet, short story writer, and translator Lynne Sharon Schwartz sat down with me to talk about her newest essay collection, This Is Where We Came In: Intimate Glimpses (Counterpoint), but we talked about a lot more in our hour! Listen in to learn how she and her husband began recording literary readings by authors like James Baldwin, Philip Roth, John Updike, William Styron in the '60s, and how they've re-launched those recordings. We also discuss how second-wave feminism convinced her to pursue a writing career, how her ear for music influences her writing, why she swears by audiobook reader David Case, and how Margaret Atwood once dropped the boom on Norman Mailer.
The Virtual Memories Show
Season 4, Episode 16 - Euphonic Sounds
[MUSIC] Welcome to The Virtual Memories Show. I'm your host, Gil Roth, and you're listening to a weekly podcast about books and life, not necessarily in that order. You can subscribe to the show on iTunes, and you can find past episodes, get on our email list, and make a donation to the show at our website, chimeraabscura.com/vm. Actually, I'm working on another website with an easier URL, but I haven't finished moving all the podcasts over to that one yet. Still, if you want to be a beta tester, then go visit VMSPod.com, like virtualmemorieshowpod.com. VMSPod.com, and let me know what you think of the layout, and the accessibility, and all that other user experience stuff. In the meantime, you can also find us on Twitter at VMSPod, at facebook.com/virtualmemoriesshow, and at virtualmemoriespodcast.tumblr.com. Now, this is the last episode going up in April 2014, and I was actually thinking of skipping a week and posting this the following Tuesday in May. It's not because I'm burned out or anything, but no more burned out than I usually am. The thing is, I was actually going to bump this into May because we're currently having the most successful month the virtual memory show has ever had in terms of total downloads. I mean, we broke the previous record with a week left in the month, and it's still rolling along, and for that, I give all credit to my wonderful guests this month. D.G. Myers, Caitlin McGurk, Daniel Levine, and Tova Mervis. You guys did a great job attracting the audience. But, like I said, thought about taking a week off so I could just let the numbers settle down and save this one for May, but then I thought, screw it, I am going to strike while the iron's hot, so here we are. My guest this week is Lynn Sharon Schwartz, an essayist, novelist, short story writer, translator, poet, and a whole bunch of other things with a pretty amazing history. Now, Lynn's written more than 20 books, including "The Memwire, Not Now, Voyager," "The Novels," "Rough Strife," "Disturbances in the Field," and "The Writing on the Wall," and "The Poetry Collection in Solitary," and she also added a collection of essays called "The Emergence of Memory," "Conversations with W.G. Seabald." And now she has a new book of essays out called "This is Where We Came In" from Counterpoint Press. I read it and enjoy the heck out of it. The opening essay, which is an extended meditation on Lynn's heart surgery from a few years ago, is just an amazing piece of work, and there are a lot of other good pieces in the collection, too. But we actually start off the conversation by talking about a project that began more than 50 years ago. See, Lynn and her husband Harry are the co-directors of Calliope Author Readings. They made recordings in the early 1960s of great American authors reading excerpts from their work. And when I say great American authors, I'm not messing around. We're talking about like James Baldwin, and Bernard Malamood, and Updike, and Philip Roth, and more. And they marketed those as single-play records, I guess, seven inches, we call them, in our hipster age. But they recently decided to get them out of storage, get the recordings digitized, and now they have them on CD and for download at calliopeauthorreadings.com. And I'll give you that URL again at the end of the episode. But I was just, in addition to the essay collection, really interested in how this project came about and what it was like to get those authors to record sections of their own stuff. So that's where the conversation begins, and it's kind of abrupt. Anyway, our backstory is that I met Lynn in June 2013 when I visited Bennington College's Low-Residency MFA program to interview David Gates. David took me to lunch after our conversation, and I met a number of really good writers who were on the faculty there, including Lynn. And she consented to record when she had her new book coming out, and this is where we came in. I mean, that's a new book. This is where we came in. So I hope you enjoy the virtual memories conversation with Lynn Sharon Schwartz. Well, I know that feeling because when we made our original recordings in 1963, we did some in a basement studio of an engineer in Boston. But there were a few people who they didn't want to come to Boston. They invited us to their house like Roth, Malmud, and who's a Styron. And Harry and I went together. We had a partner, and we went with a traveling engineer who was Peter Bartok, actually the son of Bella Bartok, became a recording engineer. And we just, you know, these four kids, literally, we were barely out of college. We arrived in a van with stuff and more, you know, not such nice looking stuff. That's a big reel to reel recorders. How did the literary recordings idea begin? Well, everybody asks us now, and we hardly remember, but we were living in Boston. I was working as an editorial assistant at a place called the Writer magazine. It was right in on the Boston, the park, the public garden. And Harry was there. It was also one of his first, one of his earliest jobs as a professional planner at the Boston Redevelopment Authority. And we were very, we knew people in, so we knew a guy from folkways, with pathways and sound, and the literary recordings we just beginning, a cabin was one, and they did the child's Christmas in Wales, Dylan Thomas. And there was another called Spoken Arts. In fact, I still have some of our old Spoken Arts records with T.S. Eliot and somebody reading Renaissance poetry. And I, we just somehow got the idea that we should do this. I mean, I had always, you know, I had studied literature and had just gotten a master's in comparative literature, so it wasn't far cry from reading, or it was the same as reading. And Baldwin was coming to MIT. Baldwin had just published the fire next time in the New Yorker, and I think they devoted a whole issue to it. And I had read it. It was just stunning and startling. And he was coming to MIT to give a talk. So the three of us, Harry and I, and his friend Howard Kahn, who's now gone, we went to see him, and I don't think I did this. I wouldn't have had the nerve, but the two guys went up at the end and, you know, said, "Hi, how would you like to record for us?" To our great surprise, he said yes. And he was a young man at the time. He was just hitting, you know, becoming very well-known. But, you know, as young people are always eager to do anything they're asked to do, and maybe old people too. So he said he would do it, and we made a good point, and then we had to hurry and find this wonderful engineer who would, you know, done major recordings who had a house on Beacon Hill with a beautiful living room on the third floor where people read, and this ugly little dark basement on the basement where we sat and recorded. This was before, you know, he would take spice with a razor and put it together with spit or something. And I used to sit down there with him and edit. You know, I'd make a log of when everybody coughed or belched, and, you know, we'd take it out. Anyhow, so Baldwin came. He worked very hard. He did a wonderful, two wonderful recordings. He read from Giovanni's room and from another country, and it took, I think it took two days, you know, to get, you must know this, to get a good commercial recording of a passage read, it takes hours. We had 15-minute passages mostly, and it took hours to get them to read it just right. When writers give readings, you know, they just get up there, and however it comes out, it comes out. But we wanted something we could sell. And then Baldwin, then it took off. Baldwin referred us to William Styron, who was a friend, and Styron referred us to James Jones, who was his friend, and on and on. We got John Updike before he was not quite 30. Yes, and he had just written about two or three books. So it was a great lark, but we did a good job. We produced them. We had no money. We gave them $150 each, which they accepted, gratefully. There were a few people we couldn't get for that money, like Norman Mail, or 10 times that. But we did everything ourselves. We got the artwork done by somebody we knew, and I wrote the jacket copy, which is not great, but it's what a 22-year-old right? And it turned out to be done very professionally, and we got good reviews, and things went well, except it needed money, and investment, and we didn't have anything like that. And then Harry got a Fulbright to study urban planning in Rome for a year, so we left. And soon after that, it was over. See if you only had a pharmaceutical trade magazine to fall back on it. Exactly, exactly. But you know, you can appreciate this kind of, you know, jerry-built thing. You know, you just do it yourself, and it comes out as yours do. You know, they're very professional. Nobody would know that it's just one person doing the whole thing. Are there authors you've met through that process that you've stayed in touch with? Or that you had? I know some of them have passed on. No, we didn't really stay in touch with any of them, unless it is Baldwin, Styron, Jones. This is all my way of asking if you have an end with Philip Roth, which has always been part of my opinion. No. I saw him recently at a mutual friend's memorial service. You know, we just have the kind of relationship. We say, "Hello, how are you? Remember us?" And he was kind enough to intercede with his agent when we wanted to reissue them and cut a lot of red. Were there any issues with getting rights from... Oh, yes. We decided it took us a year. We started in February of 2013, and we really didn't know how to go about it. But friends kept telling us, "You just must do something with them." They were sitting at our shelves in the living room, and we'd play them for people and everybody remarked on how wonderful they sounded. And finally, oh, I know what got us started. I have a relationship with open road media. Do you know them? They do ebooks. And they took on eight of my old books and made them into ebooks. So we have a very good connection. I like them very much. And I read in the paper that they were re-issuing from here to eternity with a lot of parts about gay sex and violence and other things that when Jones first wrote it in the late 40s, early 50s, he was not allowed to have in the book. So now things have changed, and they're re-issuing it with all that stuff. So I thought, "Aha, we have this beautiful recording of Jones reading from one of the best parts where Pruitt plays the bugle." And I asked if they wanted to do something with it with their ebook, and they liked it a lot, but they said, "You know, the legal complications of something like this made so long ago with the authors did, they're just too much." Okay. And then we thought, "Well, maybe they're too much for them, but maybe they're not too much for us because we had a real personal interest. You know, they're running a business." So we got started. And yeah, there was some big hurdles with getting rights. We were advised by our lawyer to just get all new contracts. Our old contracts didn't even know about anything electronic. They didn't cover anything that is of importance now. So we did, and that took a good while. I wonder, your relationship to, well, to the spoken word, as opposed to the written one. Within your new collection, this is where we came in. You have an essay about listening to Anthony Paul's "A Dance to the Music of Time" over a far shorter time than it took me to read it, and that experience of listening to a book versus sitting down and reading it, which you did subsequently. Do you have any thoughts on, you know, basically your relationship to, again, that idea of the spoken word versus the written one and how each one plays off for you? Yes. Well, I also, you know, I played the piano all my life, and I love to read my work aloud. I'm a good reader. I love the idea of the human voice as an instrument. You know, sometimes I can listen to the radio. I'm not really paying attention to what they're saying, but I'm listening to the ups and downs of the voice and how it goes. And if there's a dull voice, you know, monotone, I just can't listen. I have sensitive ears of much more than eyes. So I was very interested in how they sounded. I'm also a big listener to, I listen to audiobooks on an MP3 player. When I go to the gym, I listen to stories. So I've read, I feel like I've read many more books that way. But every now and then, I feel I have to see the actual book, and that happened, as you mentioned with the Anthony Poll. It's a different experience. It depends on the reader. The reader could make the book fascinating for you, or the reader can spoil it. And I was listening to a Patricia Highsmith book that I had never read her. And I just, I knew the reader was not appealing because of the reader. There's a wonderful reader whose name is David Case, and he was the one who read Anthony Poll's book. I think he also did Orwell's essays, which turned me on to Orwell when I was a college student, much more so than the fiction. But yeah. He's such a good reader. I don't know where he is now. I hope he's alive. But he did all of Trolop and all these classic British works. I don't know. He does them so perfectly. But one of the, there's a British accent, the upper-crust British accent, the BBC, who used to be the BBC. It always sounds to me kind of like a sneer. In fact, the BBC, sometimes here in the morning, I always think of it as news with a sneer. Now, the Anthony Poll book is at times very satirical. And what I didn't know, I didn't know whether the satire was in the voice of the reader, David Case, that he was just adding his natural sneer. It's not a hostile sneer. It's just a sneer. What sort of knowing is? Yes. To everything that he read, or whether it was in the actual text, and it is in the actual text. Whereas when he reads Trolop, I should have known that Trolop is not sneering, usually, and he doesn't do his British sneer. So there's a great deal that the reading can add or subtract from. Right now, I'm listening to a Walter Mosley detective story, which I'm enjoying very much. I never really read detective stories until I was, you know, when it's except until since I was, you know, a kid in 10 or 12. But now I find they're wonderful for going to the gym because they keep you, you know, the gym is so boring and they keep you going. You know, you want to find something out. So, yes, I'm very interested in the spoken word. How does that play into your own writing? Basically, the recitation of your own work? Do things have to sound good spoken as opposed to imprint? Yes, I usually, well, my first drafts are very, very rough, very rough just to get down what I have in my head, and I wouldn't show them to anybody. But when I polish them up, I figure out what I really want to say. Yeah, I kind of, you know, mutter the sentences aloud. I use the old ladies on the street muttering to themselves. I do that and see how it sounds. And I also, I don't like to have words repeated. Flaubert was, you know, fanatic about this. They couldn't have the same word, you know, within three pages. I'm not that bad. But I, and I don't like unintentional rhymes that you sometimes have in prose. I really watch these things very carefully. And when I teach, I mark up my students' manuscripts this way, and they probably think, "What's wrong with this?" But I think, you know, you just use the word string two sentences ago. You can't use it again. Because the ear, you know, I just live by the ear. And that sense of musicality, also, the presence of music in your life? Yeah, the music is important. I started, I played the piano by ear when I was very little. My mother was even better at that. She could play piano, the accordion, the mandolin, all by ear. She could read music, but she could pick up a string instrument and just find it, which I can't do. But yeah, I could play by ear first, and I could hear when I was young. I mean, I can still do it, but I have an amount of practice. Like if you would sing a tune, I could reproduce it. So I still play as you, there's an essay in there called the piano. So although I don't play enough to you know, get the kind of pleasure I would like to get. I also saw your drum down the hall on the other side. Oh yes. I take class as an African, African gym based drum. You're very observant. Some people use it as a coffee table. Yeah, I noticed where it was located right next to the cell. Yeah, that's the drum. Well, let's talk about the new book. This is where we came in. Intimate glimpses is the subtitle. What does the subtitle in reference to in particular? Oh, well, the subtitle is I think because the publisher did not want to say essays, because you know, that's a killer in the market. So they were, we consulted on like, what should we call it? And you know, we brainstormed and threw out these phrases like this. And this was the one that it does begin with the most intimate glimpse of all of their take on your your heart, physically, your heart condition. I wouldn't have called it anything. I would have called it essays, but, you know, you can't. Only there are a couple of Philip Lopez who's a dear friend. He might have did you meet him up there? We recorded actually. Yeah. So Philip and there are a couple of people in the country who can do essays and call them essays. And they it's okay. But otherwise, when I asked Philip, if he considered himself a success, he said, I can get a book of essays published in America. And that that was basically indication enough. He is a success. Yeah. Yeah. What's your your favorite form in which to write? He do essays, novels, short stories. I think I like short stories best. And it's funny because I haven't written any, well, I have one coming out soon at a little magazine, but I haven't written a lot of short stories lately. But that's what I began writing. Well, I actually I began at seven with what would be called essays. And I tell this somewhere in some book that I used to write these, you know, dreamy seven year old things about how the world began. They're very philosophical. I mean, brief, two pages. But I guess when I really start, I started when I read, I wrote all along, but I never took it seriously. And I would just write a story and put it in a drawer. But then when I was close to 30, the women's movement began and I sort of woke me up and I had always worked at editorial jobs and I went to grad school. But I realized if I want to be a writer, I had to do something about it. I had to be active on behalf of my own life, which is really had never occurred to me before, strange to say. So I did. I wrote things and I sent them to editors. I was very frightened to do that. I called them up and said, "Did you get my manuscript?" And that's how it began. But I did start with stories. Then I wrote a novel. The first novel I wrote was never published and it's lost. It's in the... Is that a good thing? Probably. Although I would like to have it just to maybe pull out a few good passages. It was not bad. Nobody wanted it. I went to the final publisher. It was a big one, maybe Simon and Schuster or something. And they lost it. I didn't have a copy. It was all typewriter. So I don't grieve over that. But I like short stories best. There's a kind of a tightness about them that I like. I like a lot of discipline in writing. I'm not a sort of free spirit spilling all over. Although within, when I've got the form and it's tight and then I can spill all over like the heart stuff. It's very revealing. But it's restrained in a way. I don't go into... I had such an awful year. That would be a killer for the reader. Let the reader figure it out. And what's your writing practice like? I guess practice is the best word. Well, I can just give you an idealized... Because I don't usually live up to it. I have a studio I work in. There's a little back room there where I sometimes work. It's very small. But when Harry is an urban planning consultant and when he had a firm for a long time and other things he did. But there was a point when he began to work from home. And I thought we could not both work here together. Because we talk and it's a refrigerator and it's a constant temptation. So I got a place on 96th Street. I rented a studio from a very nice place from friends who have a brownstone and they rent out studios. So my ideally I would get there sort of mid or late morning. I'm not an early morning person. And stay there most of the day until four or five or so. But that's ideal. It doesn't always or lately even often happen because this past year I've spent a lot of time working on Calliope, the spoken audience. But that's really what I would do. For example, when we're done and I'm not in any rush, I have a couple of errands and I'm going to go there and sit whatever time it is. I'll try to put in, you know, three, four hours. I try, but... You find it easy to be distracted at this point? Well, once I get there, I'm not distracted. Except I'm addicted to computers solids here. That's better than the internet. But no, once I get focused, I can focus, but I've written less this year because of the CD business. I'm also, when I have had time to write, I'm writing very short things. I'm writing a lot of poetry now. I've done two poetry collections. What led to that? What's led to that? Well, I always wrote poetry, you know, as an adolescent. I wrote this kind of mock Whitman-esque type of stuff, horrible to read now. But now I always, I always read poems, but I never... I didn't take them seriously as the way I did fiction. But then I did. I think the first collection, I had poem, I just have, you know, I would sometimes write one and I had a bunch, but I remember writing it in a kind of bitter mood because it was, came around in 2001, in the 90s. It was getting harder and harder to publish fiction, which, what I did, and fiction was less and less noticed. I just felt, you know, things happened with agents that made me kind of feel sour. And I thought, I'm going to do something where there are no commercial possibilities whatsoever. I'm not in it for fame or money. I'm just going to do it because I feel like it and nobody can impede my doing of this because it's poetry who cares, you know, except for a few thousand people. So that's how the first book came about. I'm not getting the habit of doing it and I wrote another book. And now I, because my time has been very fragmented, that's why I have a bunch, I have about 35 poems now, and a few very brief essays, it's going to take me a while to get back into writing, you know, long and deeper. What challenges do you set for yourself in terms of writing nowadays? What do you mean by challenges? Given that you've had a lifetime of writing, do you find particular, you know, obstacles or just ideas that, you know, I want to try and work this out, which I've never worked on before. Yeah, I think about that a lot. For example, sometimes I think I don't want to do a straight, realistic, psychological novel. Again, I've done it. I don't want to do it. And one of my, well, the first published novel, which was very successful, it was nominated for National Book Award, rough stripe, was about a marriage. And it was, I think it was 1980, published in 1980. And the women's movement was at its height, or at least in the 70s. And everybody was writing about, you know, women were leaving their marriages to go, you know, find themselves. Well, I don't want to treat it with, I don't want to sneer, but they were leaving their marriages. And I wasn't, I mean, we were just so busy who had time to even do that. So I wanted to write against the grain. So I wrote about a marriage that lasted a long time, you know, with all the stripes and stresses. And then there was a, I wrote a novel, Leaving Brooklyn. This is really ironic, Leaving Brooklyn came out in 1989. I wrote that very quickly. It's a short novel. And that was also nominated for a pen fall and a reward in fiction, but Dr. Row 1. Leaving Brooklyn, well, the point I was trying to make about it was, that was a period when I wrote it when there was a lot of talk of child abuse. And there's still is, but it was at its height. And there were these stories going around about kindergarten, you know, there was the fabricated memories. Right, exactly. And children, you know, young, young children giving testimony and so on and so forth. And I thought, well, all right, I'm not a believe me. I'm not an advocate for child abuse. But I thought, right, one in which the abuse was very ambiguous. So I had a 15 year old girl who is very eager to find out about the world. And she goes to an eye doctor. And this is very part of it is autobiographical, but not the key event, which is this affair with the eye doctor, which I did not have. People always ask me, you know, did you sleep with the eye doctor? I was happy to be able to maneuver the some ways of myself. But she gets involved in an affair with the eye doctor. You know, he makes a move and she doesn't, she's curious and she doesn't repel repulse. She doesn't push him away. And he makes another, not before you know it, they're involved with something. But the, of course, doctors doing wrong. I mean, there's no doubt about it. But she is also, they're mutually exploiting, he's getting what he wants, which is clear. But she wants knowledge. She wants the big world. She finds Brooklyn very provincial and dull and she can't wait to escape. And she feels, uh-huh, this is real life. This is what grownups do and have. And so there's kind of a mutual exploitation. So I got a lot of, not a lot, but I got a lot of flack from that. I mean, don't you think the eye doctor is doing wrong? I mean, there's a whole other, yeah, yeah, he's doing wrong. But that's not the point. What is ironic about leaving Brooklyn is that when I wrote, well, I grew up in Brooklyn in the 50s, 40s, late 40s, 50s. And it really was the dullest, most provincial place you can imagine. And so when I got to writing the novel, I portrayed it as such and portrayed this young girl, Igor, to get out and find out about life. But now, you know, Brooklyn is now, it's a hip place to be. It's cool. So it's like a historical novel. Anyway, so challenge, I sometimes said for myself, like, everybody's doing this, I want to do it, but I'll do it in a different way. But I'm getting tired of these, you know, straight, realistic stories. I don't plan to do anything like fantasy or science fiction, but well, I got very interested in the writer W. G. Seybald, and I edited a book of essays and mostly interviews and essays with him. Well, I have a quote from it, actually, that I was going to say, because you had a line in it saying the emergence of memory was the name of the book. "As a rule," you said, "I don't cherish interviews. I find writers explaining themselves and their methods not only less interesting and polished than the works themselves, but also less trustworthy." So, you know, thanks for sitting down. Yeah, I haven't said, I haven't told you any gross lies so far that I can remember. Seybald is a very interesting and strange writer, Seybald. Isn't he wonderful? Yes, and I, yeah, I can read him over and over. So I got very interested in the kind of thing that he does, and I think one of my books called "Not Now Voyager," which is a book about how I hate to travel, I think you mentioned you haven't read it, but I had a question about it. Yeah, I mean, there's no way I can compare it with Seybald. It's a light, in spirit, a much lighter book, but the idea of moving by digression, I'm fascinated by that. I love digression. You go from here to there, there, and there, and nobody knows why you're going there next, and somehow you manage to arrive at a piece that coheres and the digressions all fall into some pattern, which is what he does. And I did that book in that way, although nobody would ever read this book and say it's influenced by Seybald. The theme is nothing like it. So if I, what I write in the future, may have a lot of digression. The heart, the heart essay, that's a good example, and you've read that, is I wanted to bring in everything, but the kitchen sink, you know, it has so much in it, you know, Yeats and people I knew at graduate school, and I can't remember, there isn't many other things in it, and I wanted to find a way to, it's like you let out a string and pull it back, like in a, not a yo-yo, you know, there's leashes of dogs that are on that kind of thing. Yeah, you have two gray hounds, and you can't really do that with them, because in the time it takes to extend, they can probably hit 35 to 40 miles an hour, so we really just keep them on a fixed leash that works better, so. Yeah, well that thing, or those rulers, or rulers that pull out the tape measures. So I think like that, you pull it, you let it go, you pull it in, you let it go, pull it in, something like I'm interested in that, kind of thing, I mean, that's a little vague, but, and, oh. I'm sorry, well, besides Sabalt, who did you find as influences for your writing? I know that's a later influence, obviously, but who were the influential writers for you when you're developing, and nowadays, who do you still want to be? Well, when I was developing, you know, the usual Henry James, George Eliot, who still is a marvelous writer, I just reread a book of hers. My wife's working on Middle March now, so. Yeah, she hadn't read it before, and is, you know, inching along in the Kindle, getting through Middle March as it goes. Well, I read it about five times, and I also wrote an introduction to it, and it was a noble addition. Oh, really? Yeah. I was persuaded to get a Kindle by a young friend of mine, a former student. We were going on a trip last year, and she said, oh, you must have a Kindle, because my initial reaction was, you know, oh, terrible, terrible idea, you know, destroying modern civilization. But anyway, she said, well, look, we're right in front of Best Buy, let's just go in. I came out with a Kindle, so I got a few books on it, but the complete works of George Eliot were available for a dollar, the complete, so I thought, oh, here, wherever I am, the plane gets stuck somewhere, I can always read that. So I read a book of George Eliot's on the Kindle that I had never read, Go Felix Holt. It was a good book, not one of her best, but because I don't know how to work the Kindle that well, and because the complete works were, you know, how it goes by percentages. You never know how far along you are within a particular. Yeah, but it was, I thought the Felix Holt was going like it had its own zero to a hundred. So I was, you know, like about 30 or 20, and I don't have a long way to go, but it wasn't, it was part, the whole work. So I was so shocked when it ended, my conception was that the plot would go on, and I didn't realize that-- To a lesser extent, I had that with the first Elmore Leonard book I ever read, the only one so far. I read it on a Kindle, and it turned out that the last third of it was like supplemental material, an interview with Martin Amos and all this other stuff. I didn't know that, so at one point, major character is killed, like, my god, how are they going to keep this thing going for another 30, and then it just ended right after. I'm like, oh, okay, that makes much more sense. It's very disconcerting, isn't it? Yeah, the non-physicality of a book is a real strange thing to get adjusted to. And then I read a book I liked, and then I thought, oh, I really have to read. This is a book by Alexander Heman. He's a new young writer. Well, he's not that young anymore, but from former Yugoslavia, and he has an interesting story. He came here, I think, on a trip, or a student visa, or for a brief period, and while he was here, the war broke out, and all hell broke loose, you know, in the '90s, and he just couldn't get back. Well, maybe he didn't want to. I don't want to. And they'd be like those guys at the Olympics who have no country of their own. When they do the opening ceremony, and they always have the four or five stateless people, that's, oh, that's my favorite part, because I have some artistic inclination about this. There are a few countries that either don't exist, or they didn't send an official delegation, but a couple of Olympians make it anyway. So there's just people who have no country affiliation in the Olympics. It's an neat image, isn't it? It is, but if they win something... That, I don't know. They get to run off with a medal, and have to share it with any country. But Heman was... Anyway, so I read a book, I had read a couple of books of his in book form, and I read one on the Kindle, and it was very interesting. I really have to read this book, because I couldn't remember the title. Anyway, it was hard for me to relate. It had many sections, and it looked the same material was looked at for many different angles, and I just couldn't find it all on a Kindle, so I have to see it in its form. So yeah, but the Kindle was not bad. I can take it on the subway, and it's okay. For me, it was a benefit with the sheer amount of travel I did for work. It was either that or carry-all, which in fact is actually how I read "Middlemarsh" the first time. I was in Milan for a trade show, took two books with me, finished them both within the first two or three days of the week, and my hotel was not in a great section of town. There was one bookstore I could find that was open. They only had an English language section that was maybe one shelf, two feet long, and it was all old Penguin editions, and I thought, "I gotta start "Middlemarsh" someday, dude," and just picked up the... I've read about 300 pages over the next few days, kept it going on the flight home, and hopefully that'll lead to a podcast with Rebecca Mead and her "Middlemarsh" book down the line. But that's one of those things with the Kindle. It's like, "Yeah, yeah, I feel kind of bad not being able to just flip to a particular page that I remember something on, but at the same time, when you're traveling, carrying along five books is not really." No, it's very good. It's worth it, so... So who do you find as an influence nowadays? Oh, an influence. Well, I guess Alice Monroe, I think Alice Monroe and Liam Trevor are, to me, the two the best short story writers, and most writers would... You know, I'm not... She... So many writers, like me, would cite Alice Monroe. Seebald, who else? This is the kind of question that always makes my mind go blank. That's gonna come later when I ask, "Who you're reading right now?" So we may as well jump those together. Who are you reading? Oh, my reading. See? It's easier for me, because I just finished your book and I'm working on James Salter. Those are the only two things I have going. I read... These are recent. I don't know who I read last week, but I read that... Usually, I don't read a lot of the young authors, because I find they're... You know, they don't have enough wisdom to offer me. But I listened to Taya Albrecht, the tiger's wife. Is that what it's called? The tiger's wife. I think so, yeah. And I admire that very much, at least through the ear. I recently read a book by Janet Frame, New Zealand, which I had never read before. Accidental... An accidental man, or I don't know, you might have to check it. Yeah, I'll give it a look. And I read a book by Rebecca West called A Fountain Overflow, which is a wonderful book. I'm reading a nonfiction book now about capitalism written by a friend of ours. Well, his name is Jerry Mander, strangely enough. Why not? The arguments against television? Yeah, you really are quite well-read. That was a college-y thing. I think that came out of the whole earth catalog for me back in college. Really? Jerry is a very old friend. And that's really his name? Yeah, it's really his name. Wow, I always assumed it was an apoploom. No, it's really his name. His latest book, we just saw him in California, so he gave us his exchange books. And it's not usually a kind of book I read, and it explains why capitalism is not going to work for very long. But I usually read fiction. What else am I reading now? Oh, what I'm going to start very soon. And I read Volume 1 of the Carl Ove now scarred the Norwegian. Oh, my struggle? Yeah, my struggle. So I recently read Volume 1, and I now bought Volume 2. And I'm going to start that when I'm done with capitalism. Are you like every other writer and just completely in awe of him at this point? It was wonderful. It really was a very good book. Because I read the first 30 pages and thought, "Yeah, I sort of get why this has become." A very, very good book. I'm friends with the publisher of Archipelago, Joel Sculman, she used to work at Seven Stories Press, and I did a couple of books, one or more, two books with them, Italian translations. And she was my editor there. I translated an Italian Ginsburg. Do you know about her? I know the name, but I don't know her book. Oh, I'm glad it's something you don't know. I can't stump you. I love Ginsburg. She is actually an influence on me now, too. Well, she's been dead about 10, 15 years. But I discovered her work in the '60s in Italy, and I began translating it because my Italian was then very rudimentary, and she was so easy. She writes very simply. I don't mean simple-mindedly, but it's simple. But the prose itself, you can. Yeah, Clive James keeps talking about that. I was reading cultural amnesia, this big Clive James essay collection, and he just keeps referring to authors who, oh, you can learn German very easily by translating this person. He can learn Spanish. It's just about five or six of these languages that he seems to have picked up solely by reading an author who's not particularly difficult in that language. Which, again, I figure I'm just stuck with English and a little smattering of Hebrew, ancient Greek, and Russian, but there's all kind of- Well, that's a lot, ancient Greek and Russian. Yeah, they all kind of tie together in a weird, Cyrillic, Hellenic thing. It's, trust me, it's been a long and strange history I've had, but... I was learning Russian. In fact, I may go back to it. I studied it pretty hard, but didn't get too far with the Rosetta Stone. Yeah. And I did it for about a year, and then I was interrupted. It was just about two, three years ago, because I became the president of the building's board, this co-op, and it was one of the worst nightmares of my life, and I really had no time to do so I stopped the Russian, and I really... Why did you take it out? Why didn't I? Why did you? Well, I just like to learn languages. You know, I'm good at it. Yeah, because of the ear, you know, I have a good ear, but Russian was very hard. I think when you get older, it's much harder. We went to... we spent a week in Lisbon last year, we were traveling around Europe, and I got the Berlitz book, you know, with "Hello, thank you. Where's the bathrooms?" kind of stuff. Usually, I can do this stuff in a day. I couldn't remember most of it. I think it's, you know, the mind changes. Well, I only had that with Hungarian the one time I was there. Yeah, that one. That was my first exposure to something that had no Indo-European roots, and I always joke, etymology is my strong smooth. But yeah, seriously, a week in Budapest, I picked up maybe five words total, and that's really not a good record for me. That's related to Finnish, isn't it? Yeah, it's Finnish. It's Finno-Ogric is the language group. It's Hungary, Finland, and some little tribe in the Ural Mountains. So the only three places where this language group works, presumably because they were unable to communicate with anyone else in the world, and they couldn't really, you know, exchange anything or growth. I didn't know about this theory. Do you know these books by a man and guy Deutsche? No, no. They're very interesting. Yeah, Deutsche, just the way it sounds. It's this, I don't remember the names of like the story of languages. I read two of them. One is just how, you may know this already, but how the whole tree of all languages developed and what came from what? I know this is fascinating. I'm interested in this stuff. And then the second one was odd cases of like some little tribes, somewhere that they don't use left and right and up and down. They use north, south, east and west instead, but they can do it as fast as we do left and right. Like the little children say why by the time they're six or seven can do left and right, they can do north and south. And they, you know, I would say the book is north of the table and your feet are south of the table. Fascinating things and other things. And he talks about whether, well, this is always discussed, whether or not this changes their basic thinking and colors. It seems that in the Iliad Homer talks about the wine dark sea and everything. Oh, what a wonderful epithet and all that. Well, this is not anything like wine dark, it is just not. People have questioned what are the Greeks mean? And he talks about different languages and culture's perception of color. And he also shows traffic lights. Most of the world has red and green, but green, say in Japan, might be, oh, I don't see anything green here, but it's not quite what we call green. You would like this book. Yeah, to give it a look. Now, what did translation teach you about writing yourself? Well, I guess to be meticulous about words, but I am that way anyway. But what I love about translation is you don't have to think about content. The content is there, you don't have to make it up. So it has all the pleasures of writing. You just play with the words and the arrangement and the order in which they should go, and which ideas are subordinate and whatever the opposite is subordinate or predominant. That's what I really like. I don't really care so much about the content, but because you have to write about something. And lots of writers have said, there's a great poem that Adam Yagajevsky, Jagajevsky, the poem Polish, starts with the J. A lot of poetry is really about nothing. The subject doesn't matter. It's just the arrangement of the words, and that's what matters. So I really love to do translation because somebody has done all the hard work for me. And I think with the Ginsburg, well, I feel a real affinity with her. I really found a way to make her into, you know, it's a good translation. So you mentioned traveling to Lisbon and going to California and other places. So you're not down on travel per se, right? Well, I just find it hard. Before we went to Lisbon, I hadn't been to many places. I just, I find travel difficult. I'm very impatient with the nuts and bolts, you know, waiting on live. The airport drives me wild. And some people don't mind that. And then the new, I don't like, I mean, to get used to new things. I don't mind going to Italy because I do know Italian. I've been to Italy a lot of times. We stayed there. We lived there for a year when Harry had the Fulbright and we've gone back. So as long as there's something familiar, I guess it's a kind of inner timidity, which is not usually my way, but maybe it's inherited. And my mother was afraid to go to a new place. I mean, she wasn't, if she went out of the house, she wasn't agoraphobic. But you didn't want to travel far. She just wanted to go places she knew, like the Catskills. There's an excitement about it. And then what I don't like anymore is being a tourist. I don't, as I said, I'm not that visual. And while I certainly, if I'm in the same city as the Louvre, I'll go and look at the paintings. But I don't want to get up and, you know, what are we going to see today? I want to have a life. I want to participate. I want to be with people. I'd like to, I like meeting new people and new places. But I don't ever want to take another trip where we go and see sites. Although I'm sure we will, because last year we decided it's time to I think this surgery I had was 2009. Oh, I didn't feel good for several months. And after when I got myself back together, I didn't feel, I felt like getting back to work and not traveling. Anyway, we hadn't been on a real trip. So we went to four places, you know, Rome and London and Paris. But we thought, well, let's do something new, Lisbon. And that was fine. I liked it. But Harry, he's a wonderful traveler. He loves to travel. He loves cities. So that's his field. So I never plan anything. I'll go wherever he wants to go. And I just hope it's not, you know, too many sites. So Lisbon was new. And if we travel anywhere else, it'll be somewhere new. Do you think of literary pilgrimages at all? Do you go to authors? No, well, I never have set out on a literary pilgrimage, but we did go to Dostoyevsky's house in St. Petersburg. We were, I was teaching. I've done a lot of this traveling for teaching. You know, they're all writing workshops abroad or conferences. So I did something in St. Petersburg in the summer of the late '90s. And Harry came because he will always go if I'm going somewhere. I've also done Prague. I did that one on my own. And a very good friend came with us. So in St. Petersburg, the workload was light. So we were going around to museums, and we decided to find Dostoyevsky's house. And some people on the street helped us. They were so nice about it. And I thought they would want money. We tried to give them money. But no, they were just helping. And yes, that was very exciting. They have his desk and his pipe and his ashtray. So I've done that. But I've never known. I've haven't gone to the Bronteys where people go. The way we met was up at the Bennington Low-Residency MFA program. And some of the other writers I met there were Philip Lopez. Peter Trachtenberg is another one whose essays remind me somewhat of what you were talking about in terms of the string, the throwing something out. And sort of, you know, we had a good conversation about his last two books. That I think both fall into that mold. Do you find other writers that you're peers with in that vein? Do you compare yourself to other guys who are currently practicing? You mean, as friends, or just think about their work in relation to mine. I had two very good friends who died in the past six years. I don't think you probably won't know their name. Rebecca Cavalier, who was a short story writer. And Glinda Adams, who was a novelist and a short story writer. Glinda was Australian. In fact, she won that Miles, frankly. So these were the two people I was closest to in terms of writing and would show them work. Now, I think of myself in terms of, well, I don't really know how to answer that. I don't think of myself when I think of the whole generation of younger writers, like Nicole Krause, I've never read her. But I think I ought to read her to, you know, young woman who's supposed to be very good. My contemporaries are, I would say, Joyce Carol Oates, Gail Godwin, who else, you know, serious women. Again, it's the kind of question where your mind goes blank. I knew Grace Paley, I knew her pretty well. But I didn't think of my stories. My stories are so different from hers. No, I don't remember that answer. That the feminist wave was sort of what brought you to the notion of writing. Yeah, I feel very sympathetic and allied with that. I was not an activist. But I just want to do you find yourself relating or identifying, particularly with female authors? Oh, yeah. Oh, yes. A very close friend is Alex K. Shulman, who is a major activist. And, you know, I see her, you know, we see each other all the time. And she was, oh, she's also a novelist, who was most recent novel called Meinage, is a comedy, it's a social comedy. It's not really, you wouldn't call it a feminist. I mean, if you really carefully, you can see the little, but it's not, you know, it's not a novel on the march. So, I definitely am more interested in women. Yeah, I find, I keep track of their women's websites. One is called VITA, the IDA, you know, they, you know, they, you know, they tally how many women are reviewed in the Times Book Review as opposed to men. Even the Times Book Review is not, not even so important anymore. And who are the reviewers? And, but that's fine. And I think they're right. And it's still very, very inequitable. But we were doing this 30 years ago, you know. And when I got, I was on, I still am, but I was an active member of Pan in the '80s. And when they had their first international congress, I don't mean the kind of thing they hold, do now, you know, this four-day blitz of whatever. But it was Congress and, you know, lots of panels and serious discussions. Not, you know, holding places where you can make your confession. And they're, a women's committee came out of that because we noticed that of the dozens, dozens of speakers over the two, three days, only two were women. And I think they were Susan Sontag and Nadine Gordimer. Yeah, it was horrifying. So we staged a protest. It was a lot of fun. And we sat, we got for the plenary session. We got there very early and sat in the first 10 rows facing Norman Miller, who was in the prison, and we asked him, you know, we all were very, at that time, you know, loud and all that. What do they call it? Let's say women are shrill. So, you know, why they're no more women? He said, because there are no other women intellectuals in the United States. So then we prepared, we have prepared an answer. And our spokesperson was Margaret Atwood, who is really terrific. And she said something like, although she cannot compare in beauty with the other, one of the other representatives from her country who was Robertson Davies. Did you ever see what he looked like? Oh, I love Robertson Davies and the beard. And she said earlier, she yields to him in beauty, but she does want to say that she has a smattering of intellect having gotten her PhD at Harvard. And she went on and on this vein. Very funny. So then there was a women's committee. And we did a lot of this keeping track of stuff. And I think we made some strides. We had to put on public programs of what we called lost women writers. You know, important women writers who no longer heard of. And we dug them up and read from their works. But what I was saying was even before this women's committee, there were women who, there was a group before I was even associated with it. Led by Marilyn French. Do you remember her? Yes. They went to the office of the Times editor and Times Booker, who I think Mike Levitas. And you know, with their spreadsheets, whatever, and demanded to know, you know, why two and 20 books reviewed are by women and why two of the reviewers are by women. So yeah, I feel very strongly about all that. And I don't like the idea that there are women's subjects. You know, the domestic life and so on. I read more men than my feminist friends. In fact, they kind of scolded me. It's just the question of, you know, coming from the era in which you did, which you came up, that sense of, you know, women identifying with women as authors, but also looking at a bigger picture, like you said, looking at, you know, male authors also in trying to not pigeonhole yourself. It's really not, I would say my tastes don't divide into men and women. It's the ones who are concerned with language and a sort of delight in language and kind of beauty of language, more that than whether they're men or women. I'm thinking of a, and I like minorities, I mean, I, you know, identify with black writers or men or women or I haven't read Chang-Rae Lee, for example, who is, but I would be, I guess I'm interested in more writers on the edge or not mainstream. For example, Edward P. Jones, I discovered, you know, you must know him. And he's a marvelous writer and I not only like his books, but I like the fact that he, you know, he didn't come up in the academic world. He just, and he wasn't famous, he just wrote these great things. And finally, people began to read them, that kind of story intrigues me. And I never even knew that I would teach in a writing program. You know, I never went to one and I deep down, I think the way to learn to write is to read and talk to writers, which I do a lot. But I do teach at one and I can't, you know, I do it sincerely and students learn, but I basically, I don't like the idea of writing or any kind of art being part of the academy. To that question, do you teach writing or are you teaching reading good reading at that point? Well, I try to teach reading, you know, I talk a lot, I have a book called Run By Reading, so I talk to the students a lot about reading reading. And this particular program, Bennington Stress is reading and they have to write about, they read five books a month and they have to write about what they've read, write a few pages on the three books. So that's, that's how I learned to write. I think that the programs have value, they come out better, they learn, they learn quicker. I mean, I learned a lot of things, well, I learned how to write, but it took me a long time. Whereas if somebody tells you, look, explain some principle, you can get it faster. And it's certainly an interesting body of teachers up there. Yeah, well, sure, we have a very good faculty, I like them and it's very congenial. It's really a nice, it's a good place to work and people are kind to each other and interested. And you don't feel like you're, well, because there's low residency, you don't feel like you're, you know, in an academic program where you're in a department and backstabbing. I don't, there's very little of that, at least that I am aware of. You know, people doing each other in, like they say, they do in academic departments. I have to say, if I get Sven Berkerts on the show at some point, I'll find out if there's some, you know, deep dark secrets of the program that, you know. Maybe was Sven is, oh, I don't think Sven would reveal any secrets. You'll find Sven, I mean, he's very open, he'll talk about his work, but you have to pry secrets out of him. I have a strange ability to do that with something, you know, as long as we take out any of the mean comments you made. That's, that's, that's... Yes, I really... Besides, this is where we came in. What else are you working on now? What do you have? Well, I have the poems, which I hope will become a book. And also, my agent has something that I'm really eager to sell. It's, it's an anthology I've put together. It's not my work, but it's an anthology of stories that are all based on the theme of translation, because you know, I'm interested in translation. And translation is also a hot topic now. You know, America has a terribly low proportion of translated literature, and maybe we're getting a little better. So I found, oh, about 15 or 20 stories that use, but by some well-known writers and some not well-known, that use translation as a metaphor for something or other. Some of them are about war and, you know, interpreters who they miss the point. There are some wonderful stories. It's one by Joyce Carol Oates called The Translator, about somebody who, an American scholar who meets with a Czech scholar, and they have a translator. And he's, he thinks he's falling in love with his Czech counterpart, but one day when the same translator can't come, they send a new translator, and the Czech, his Czech counterpart, suddenly he doesn't love her at all. He realizes it was all the translator, not the translator herself, but the way she, for anyway, wonderful ideas. So I want to do this with kind of some kind of essay introducing it, and I have it all set, but my agent is having a difficult time finding a publisher, because I can't sell it for, you know, some pittance, because I would like to pay these people, so that's what I hope to have in the works, and finish the poems, and after that, I, I don't know. We'll leave you to it. And I'll let you get on with the errands and get back to your new workspace. Lynn Sharon Schwartz, thanks so much for coming on The Virtual Memory Show. Thank you for having me, I enjoyed it. And that was Lynn Sharon Schwartz. You can find her books at better bookstores and e-bookstores. Her website, Lynn Sharon Schwartz, has a lot more information about her work. I'll spell that out for you. It's L-Y-N-N-E-S-H-A-R-O-N-S-C-H-W-A-R-T-Z. Her new book of essays, this is where we came in, was published by CounterPoint, just came out recently, and you can find that in your favorite bookstore too. You should also check out the Calliope Author Readings website to find out more about those audio recordings that she and her husband did with James Baldwin and Philip Roth, and all those other great writers. And that site is Calliope AuthorReadings.com. You want me to spell that too? Okay, it's C-A-L-L-I-O-P-E-A-U-T-H-O-R-R-E-A-D-I-N-G-S. And that's it for this week's Virtual Memory Show and Spelling Bee. Thanks so much for listening. If all goes according to plan, we'll be back next week with a conversation with Lynn Ulman, author of the weird new novel, The Cold Song. She's also the child of Liv Ulman and Ingmar Bergman. But I probably won't ask her too much about that stuff, but you know, it'll probably creep in. Which is to say we haven't recorded this one yet, and that's why I'm not guaranteeing it's going to be next week's episode. Meanwhile, please head up our website, chimeraobscura.com/vm, and make a donation with this ad-free podcast. You can also get on the show's email list from there, or you can visit that work-in-progress, vmspod.com, and do the same. And if you've got ideas for guests, drop me a line at growth@chimeraobscura.com, vmspod on Twitter, or our Facebook page, facebook.com/virtualmemoriesshow. And do me a favor, go to the iTunes Store, look up the virtual memories show, and leave us a nice review and rating. Apple seems to like that. Until next time, I am Gil Roth, and you are awesome. Keep it that way. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]