Poet and exurbanite Philip Schultz’s book Failure won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Schultz has said that some of his work was inspired by a sense that his father was a failure (scroll down to read the title poem from the book). Here, Exurb contributor Donna Raskin has a conversation with Schultz about poetry, his dedication to teaching, delayed success and exurban life.
Donna Raskin: Before we talk about Failure, let’s talk about where you live, East Hampton, New York. How long have you lived there and how often do you go into New York City to run your school, The Writer’s Studio?
Philip Schultz: We got the house in 1991 and moved out here after we were married in 1995. New York was impossibly expensive and my wife was making a living as a graphic artist, although she’s a sculptor. This house was small at the time. It was inexpensive. That’s why we moved out here. It’s 120 miles from New York City, so it’s a commute! At one point I was going into New York every week, which was really hard since we wanted to start a family. Then, over time, I started to leave my wife with a baby here. That was difficult. When Eli, the first-born, got older, he didn’t like the fact that I wasn’t home for dinner. So then I shifted over to going into the school every other week for a solid week or 10 to 11 days at a time.
Now, we both work with The Writer’s Studio and I do e-mail classes. I teach master classes and I’m able to run it from out here. We have 28 teachers, with branches in Tucson and San Francisco. It’s online, so it doesn’t need me. I can do things from out here so I have a family life. We’re part of the community, the kids are in Little League. I go into New York to see my editor and I see writer friends; I keep a connection but it’s harder for my wife, who is an artist and would rather live in New York, though more and more artists are here.
Raskin: You didn’t have the typical “writerly” childhood, really. I know you suffered from learning challenges even. Can you tell me a little about the road you traveled to become a writer?
Schultz: My father, who was a janitor, died when I was 18, although I was making my own way even a couple of years before that. I had struggled in school, especially with reading, and I had a tutor who was exasperated. He was a retired elementary school principal and he wasn’t getting anywhere teaching me how to read. He was a big, fat guy and he couldn’t fit under the table where we worked. One day he said, “Well, what do you want to do when you grow up? What are you going to do if you can’t read or write? Are you going to be like your father?” I remember I said, “I want to be a writer,” and he laughed until his belly shook.
Once I learned how to read, though, I read voraciously. I had to read every sentence two or three times. It sustained me, this appetite for the creative process and writing. Of course, I had no back up. I was on my own in terms of school. Later, I found great helpers and teachers. I was cleaning out stalls at Churchill Downs and hanging out at the local school when I ran into a guy who looked at my writing and gave me money to go to Louisville, and then I went to San Francisco State with Wright Morris who took me under his wing. SF State sent me to Iowa where I met other writers. I was friends with Normal Mailer and I stayed in his house. John Cheever invited me into his family. I had a career long before I had one only because I was entertaining and I sang for my supper. I made them laugh. I was very adoptable, I suppose.
Raskin: Is this why teaching is so important to you?
Schultz: I was very lucky in terms of having wonderful teachers in and outside of school situations. I met these people who in a sense saved my life. Not even in a sense, in reality. Herb Wilner–I was his T.A. and I babysat his kids and had dinner in his house. I had first-hand experience what a teacher meant and I had the highest regard and respect for what teaching is. It’s generosity.
So, yes, I think teaching is something that’s essential. It’s essential to someone’s development, not only as a writer, but also as a person. A lot of writers see teaching as a kind of indignity. There are many accomplished writers who are quite open about not liking teaching. I always like it, though. When eventually others saw that I did, they made deals with me to help teach their classes. I quickly accumulated a list in my head of all the things not to do and all the things to do and I applied that list at my school.
Raskin: Tell me about the evolution of The Writer’s Studio.
Schultz: Before The Writer’s Studio, I started the graduate creative writing program at NYU. It became a large program and it was a lot of work. Most MFA programs are a star system: You hire well-known writers to attract students because it’s a business. At the same time as NYU, though, I would do my own thing at home with a private class. I reached a point where I decided to branch out at home full-time. That’s how The Writer’s Studio started. I knew how to run a school, so I started my own. Jennifer Egan and Walter Mosely were two of my early students. All the teachers now are people I trained. We hire no one from the outside. They all are wonderful, gifted teachers.
Raskin: In your book, Failure, you write about your father’s failures. Tell me more about it.
Schultz: My father worked as a janitor in the night shift at Kodak. My father’s failure was so shameful in a way that his family basically disowned us. My mother and I were on our own. We really lived in her mother’s house, in the nooks and crannies. We never ate at the same time as the other people. She wasn’t allowed to feed us at the kitchen table. We ate in restaurants or on the run. There is something about failure; it’s almost like a disease that people want to stay away from.
Raskin: Many people think of success as the trappings of success rather than success itself, i.e., they are concerned with money, houses, and things. What is success to you?
Schultz: My family is success; my wife and two boys. It’s a source of happiness I didn’t think I’d have and I’m most surprised by it. Everything else is icing on the cake. At a certain point in my life, things looked kind of bleak. I lived a life that was almost entirely about writing and that got me nowhere personally. It even got me nowhere with the writing because I was trying to write fiction and I wasn’t doing a good job at it. When I finally had others to live for, everything kind of happened.
I went 18 years without publishing in book form. In that time I met my wife, Monica, and made my family and made a life where I didn’t have one before. Out of that happiness, I had new things to write about. My family life now gives me a comfort zone to write about darker things.
There are romantic myths about writing, certainly associated with poetry, that you have to die young and you have to publish by 30. It’s just the opposite: It takes a long, long time to learn a trade and put wisdom together with emotion.
Raskin: Whom do you read?
Schultz: I love Joseph O’Neill’s Netherlands. The writing is just so beautiful. He’s taken on quite a big subject: Expatriates in New York, so the reader is looking at his own city with a fresh perspective. I like Sebastian Berry and The White Tiger by Adiga. I read Yehuda Amichai, who was a great friend of mine and another father figure. The two poets that I read most now are Eugenio Montale and Zbigniew Herbert. Herbert perhaps is the poet I am most inspired by.
Raskin: To what do you attribute the success of Failure?
Schultz: I was invited to Ireland for a poetry festival because the book is popular there. A reporter explained that men whose fathers were drinkers and failures identify with it. That might be part of the reason.
THANKS, Philip!
Listen to Philip Schultz read Failure, the poem, on Slate
“Failure”
By Philip Schultz
To pay for my father’s funeral
I borrowed money from people
he already owed money to.
One called him a nobody.
No, I said, he was a failure.
You can’t remember
a nobody’s name, that’s why
they’re called nobodies.
Failures are unforgettable.
The rabbi who read a stock eulogy
about a man who didn’t belong to
or believe in anything
was both a failure and a nobody.
He failed to imagine the son
and wife of the dead man
being shamed by each word.
To understand that not
believing in or belonging to
anything demanded a kind
of faith and buoyancy.
An uncle, counting on his fingers
my father’s business failures—
a parking lot that raised geese,
a motel that raffled honeymoons,
a bowling alley with roving mariachis—
failed to love and honor his brother,
who showed him how to whistle
under covers, steal apples
with his right or left hand. Indeed,
my father was comical.
His watches pinched, he tripped
on his pant cuffs and snored
loudly in movies, where
his weariness overcame him
finally. He didn’t believe in:
savings insurance newspapers
vegetables good or evil human
frailty history or God.
Our family avoided us,
fearing boils. I left town
but failed to get away.
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