“There is no human experience that cannot be described in literature.”
Inside a Eugene Lang College classroom, students prepare to brave the world outside, armed with stories.
By Stephanie Leone, BA Literary Studies + BFA Communication Design ’15
In Reading for Writers: The Contemporary Short Story, “students will read and engage with the work of some of the best living practitioners of the short story and bring five of them into the classroom for in depth conversations on their writing, their methods, their influences, their intentions, and their lives as writers.” So begins the syllabus for a dream course taught by Eric Simonoff, acclaimed literary agent and new professor in the Literary Studies department at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts. Simonoff represents writers of incredible calibur, including Jhumpa Lahiri, Jonathan Lethem, Philipp Meyer, Stacy Schiff, Edward P. Jones, Nam Le, and Chris Adrian, among others. Although he is characteristic of faculty at The New School, shaping his classroom and his field of work simultaneously, he is not a typical undergraduate writing instructor. In granting his students access to brilliant, contemporary writers — Phil Klay, Daniel Alarcón, Maryse Meijer, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, and ZZ Packer in the Fall 2018 semester — he is demystifying perhaps the most frightening aspect of writing: how to get someone (like Simonoff) to read your work.
“Our Literary Studies program is unique in that it combines Writing and Literature in a single concentration,” says James Fuerst, Assistant Professor of Literary Studies, who recruited Simonoff to teach the course. “For instance, Writing concentrators take courses in Literature in order to graduate, and Literature concentrators take courses in Writing. This helps our students to develop knowledge of and facility with various literary traditions and to engage in a robust conversation about numerous forms of literature and writing from diverse critical, intellectual, and artistic perspectives. As a result, they are firmly grounded in critical reading and creative writing throughout their time here.”
Having graduated from Lang’s Literary Studies Writing track, I can vouch for this firm grounding in critical reading. Lang introduced me to incredible writers—contemporary, classic, and canonical—(Roberto Bolaño and Haruki Murakami in Reading for Writers; Silvia Plath and Ariana Reines in poetry workshops; Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov in a single-text course; James Baldwin, Thomas Pynchon and Ben Lerner in fiction workshops, to name a few) but I did not get to ask any of these writers about the moment in which they thought they were “really a writer” while they sat three feet in front of me, looking just like a regular person. This is the reason, Simonoff says, it’s critical for students to read living contemporary writers: “The air they breathe is the same air these prize-winning writers breathe. The students have at their disposal the exact same tools (all the words they can get their hands on) as these writers. Once upon a time, even the loftiest writer was in their seats — taking their first tentative steps as writers of fiction.”
And yet it’s almost impossible to imagine any successful writer having once stepped tentatively. As a reader, you accept this: you’re not supposed to see an author’s effort. As a writer reading, you long to find the clues of battle, as if any beautiful work also contains the secret of how to win a war against yourself. As Simonoff puts it: “In class, we are looking at the best of best of short fiction and taking the texts apart like watchworks to see how the gears make the hands go around and from this close examination to discover the nuggets of technique and craft they offer to student writers.” In undergrad, the space between a polished Baldwin story and the one you’re submitting for peer review can appear so wide and bleak that you want to quit entirely. Reading “Sonny’s Blues,” as I did in my first fiction writing workshop, and then tackling a short story of my own, didn’t make me doubt my ability to write, but it did make me question whether such an ability mattered at all. Listening to Phil Klay, Daniel Alarcón, Maryse Meijer, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, and ZZ Packer talk about their writing — watching their words embolden Simonoff’s students — I was reminded that it does.
“Once upon a time, even the loftiest writer was in their seats — taking their first tentative steps as writers of fiction.” — Professor Eric Simonoff
Daniel Alarcón, a Peruvian-American author and the second of Simonoff’s five visiting authors, talked about the pain and difficulty of writing early in his session. “I have yet to finish a story in New York,” he said. “I mean, you only have, like, four hours a day when you’re smart.” This is funny because it’s true: trying to write despite the economic demands of the United States, and, in particular, those of New York City, is absurdly difficult on its own, and hearing Alarcón reference the brain’s short peak writing window was comforting.
In preparation, the students had read some of Alarcón’s short stories. A translator and journalist (he recently published a piece in The New Yorker on the suicide of Alan García, former president of Peru), Alarcón imbues his fiction (which he no longer writes) with Peruvian dialect and details that verge on the autobiographical. While adapting real life to stories is no strange concept, the question of ownership—who has “a right” to tell a story?—is an unsettling one to new writers, particularly as universities are at the center of the Safe Space vs. free speech debate. One student asked how to write “about” or “around” yourself in fiction, to which Alarcón replied, “All of your characters are versions of yourself you didn’t end up being.”
What about the ethics of writing a story about someone you know? Maryse Meijer didn’t need to consider this at all — her collection, Heartbreaker, has little to do with her real life. It is, she says, mostly inspired by other works of art and trying to recreate the sensation she had while reading/watching/hearing/seeing such works.
“All of your characters are versions of yourself you didn’t end up being.” —Daniel Alarcón
The students came to each session having prepared specific questions about the structure and craft of the visitors’ stories. Theoretically, this could be done in any college literature course. The critical difference here, according to Simonoff, is that “we ask the students not only to engage with the texts as literature but to put themselves in the position of the writers of the texts and examine why the writers have made the decisions they have made. Ideally, it is empowering the student-writers to approach everything they read as a lesson in craft.”
This lesson in craft is intensified by hearing the writers speak to theirs directly. Meijer, who uses dialogue sparingly, rhythmically, and effectively in Heartbreaker, spoke to the struggles many writers have creating “good dialogue”—or, dialogue that seems “real.”
“There’s this thing about realism, as if any art approximates reality in any way,” she answered. “Think about… writing about how it feels to drink a cup of coffee, and then actually drink a cup of coffee. You realize that there’s a huge gap between those two experiences. The representation of reality is extremely artificial, and it should be. Nothing should approximate life but life.”
A similar question cropped up for Alarcón, whose stories are sprinkled with whole chunks of dialogue in Spanish — specifically, Peruvian dialect. There is, Alarcón said, a difference between domestic and quotidian language. In including Spanish in his stories, he was “trying to offer the reader access to the absolute poetry of the way people talk on the streets of Lima. There are lived experiences that are bilingual.” After a pause, he made a remark not dissimilar to one Meijer would later make: “I wouldn’t do the toggling between Spanish and English now. It doesn’t make sense [to me anymore.] It feels like I’m trying to spice it up. My fingerprints are all over it.”
But what I found infinitely more valuable than the writers’ (incredibly smart) explanations for stylistic choices were the stories of why they write. When they answered, the energy of the room changed. It was charged with clarity, as if, suddenly, that space between first tentative steps and a debut collection was something we could all see and imagine having ourselves.
“Nothing should approximate life but life.” —Maryse Meijer
For Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah—whose debut collection, Friday Black, received the prestigious PEN/Jean Stein Book Award—writer was not something he grew up longing to become. “I’m not from a literary community, per se,” he said to the class. “I didn’t grow up around a lot of writers. I didn’t know any writers in the sense that I think people mean when they say ‘writer,’ so it wasn’t really a thing I thought I could be. But reading was cool in my house.”
Conversely, Meijer, who is an identical twin, grew up with a regular audience for her tales—tales that her sister encouraged her to write down. In fact, she attributes much of her ability to observe people and art to her twin. “We think that the only way someone can truly know you is in some sense to be you,” she said. “We have this obsession in western philosophy with the liberal notion of the self as isolated, selfish, alone. That’s how we constitute our notion of humanity — that we’re all inherently selfish, that we’re not knowable by someone else. And an identical twin knows from the time that they exist that that’s not true. They know that to be human is to be co-constituted by the other. The other is not distant from you. The other actually makes you who you are. That overlap of you and others — that’s what existence is, and as a twin, you’re hungry to replicate that connection all the time.”
When asked if there was a particular moment wherein he thought to himself, I must be a writer, Adjei-Brenyah replied, “I’m still waiting for it.” All of us laughed, including Adjei-Brenyah, who was at once insouciant and fierce throughout his entire session. He regards writing as sacrosanct, but wants to break down the fear that academia can foster. “On some level — and I tell my students this a lot — to feel like you’re perpetually aspiring means that you are a writer. It’s an evolving, learning, feeling process. Just trying and going for it means that you’re doing it. And I feel that very profoundly now because the thing that I had months before anyone cared about [Friday Black] is the same thing people care about now. You kinda can’t wait for the rest of the world to confirm you in that way. If you’re doing it, you’re doing it.”
And why? Why write? Alarcón writes for himself. Meijer writes to find out—it’s the not-knowing that excites her. Adjei-Brenyah finds the ‘why’ less important than what he feels he owes to himself: “It’s dope to feel like you are who you thought you were.”
“To feel like you’re perpetually aspiring means that you are a writer. It’s an evolving, learning, feeling process.” —Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Outside the sacred classrooms of Eugene Lang College, where discussions like these take place, I see the world differently than in my days as a student. Yes, I can think. I can read and I can write. But these days the world is a terrifying place, with every corner of it threatened by extraordinary crisis and destruction, and so why? Why attend an expensive institution to study an art form when financial struggle is the only certain outcome? Why write at all?
“Literature and writing matter and continue to matter because human beings are fundamentally storytelling animals, and that’s not going to change any time soon,” said Fuerst. “The vicarious experience of other minds, other ways of thinking, feeling, and acting, of other times, places, and worlds that we get from fiction keeps us open to possibilities beyond ourselves, beyond our own circumstances, communities, and social media feeds, possibilities that allow and encourage us to imagine ways of life not necessarily our own.” And, he continued, “If we are to confront the multitude of serious challenges before us, we’re going to have to be creative about it, and there are few areas of study as well suited as literature and writing in training us to be precisely that.”
For his part, Simonoff replied: “I was recently on a panel for LGBTQ pride month at WME/Endeavor representing parents of trans-kids. When asked what we allies could and should do I said, ‘Read, read, read.’ There is no human experience that cannot be described in literature. The best literature is both extremely specific and deeply universal. And at its heart lies empathy and empathy is the one thing of which we are in greatest need facing these crises and which is in shortest supply.”
“If we are to confront the multitude of serious challenges before us, we’re going to have to be creative about it.” —Professor James Fuerst
At the end of Simonoff’s very last session, almost all the students approached his desk to thank him. One student barely got her words out before beginning to cry. She was transferring at the end of the semester, and the class had changed her life. I barely knew her, or any of the students, but I understood. Lang is magic like that. You forget you’re in a classroom. You’re so incredibly close to all the things you’re learning that you don’t realize how powerful your knowledge is until you get out. Not knowledge, as in, Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” is about a black man from Harlem who in the 1950s is arrested for drugs. Knowledge, as in, it is a beautiful thing to burn with a fire to create something in this world. As in, to treat your art seriously, as you would your health or your income, is a difficult but worthy life. As in, it takes heart, and you have it. ●
Eric Simonoff will teach RFW: The Contemporary Short Story again this Fall. Maryse Meijer and ZZ Packer are making return appearances, and will be joined by Adam Haslett, Chris Adrian, and Edward P. Jones.
For Further Reading:
Works/authors that inspired them to write:
- The plays of Eugène Ionesco and Samuel Beckett
- The complete works of Jorge Luis Borges
- Toni Morrison
- Dostoevsky
- Anton Chekhov
- Zadie Smith
- John Cheever (specifically, the story “The Death of Justina”)
- George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo (“It killed me. I had to read it in slow increments.” — Daniel Alarcón)
Recently published by or about the writers:
- From The New Yorker, “What led Peru’s former President to take his own life?” by Daniel Alarcón
- From New York Times Magazine’s interactive literary supplement, “July 30, 1866” by ZZ Packer
- From The New York Times, a review of Rag, a new and “disturbing, forceful story collection” by Maryse Meijer
- From The Guardian, “Black people being murdered has become palatable. I want it to be less so,” an interview with Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
- From The Atlantic, “Stories for Life After War,” a piece on Phil Klay’s Redeployment
