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.

Television producer and exurbanite Marta Mobley hopes to draw a comparison between what we watch and how we feel. She calls much of what’s offered currently on television junk food and says we all need a more whole foods television diet. Mobley is at work on a book, The New Media Diet, which details why what you watch is important and how you can help your family make better viewing choices. Her big idea, though, is The New Media Foundation. Through her foundation, this Oak Park, CA, mom hopes to change the world we see…

1. Developing a foundation sounds like tough work for a busy producer and mom. How did you come to view this as something you wanted to do? Why is it so important to you?

I’ve been a film and television producer for the last fifteen years and didn’t really consider what kind of content I was producing. Then after I had children, my perception of media changed. Along my journey I came to realize–as I watched and experienced media from my little children’s perspective—how scary and unhealthy the bulk of our current media choices really are. I found myself navigating through hundreds of television channels, then monitoring thousands of programs for what I thought would be appropriate for my children to watch. I wanted a whole foods media diet for my children to watch, rather than the fast food media diet, like the current McDonald’s or Burger King media diet, being offered today. I want television shows and movies that inspire, educate, entertain and provide insight that inspire and model for my children how to be happier, healthier and more optimistic human beings.

Not only do I want more whole foods media for my children, I need more for myself. I need and want to surround myself with more positive and inspirational references. We all need more role models that are happy, loving, kind and evolved human beings.

2. What are your hopes for The New Media Foundation? What do you see the foundation specifically doing and what impact do you hope it has?

We believe every individual has the power to make a difference in the world. Renowned anthropologist Margaret Mead once wrote, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful citizens can change the world; indeed it’s the only thing that ever has.” The New Media Foundation is dedicated to uniting thoughtful citizens to create positive, transformative, world-changing media. We believe that if enough people join together and shift their way of being and thinking, we will make a great leap for humankind; living from a perspective beyond the individual, recognizing that there is more to this world than what we know and that we are infinitely connected.

Entertainment can be a transformative tool to help people live happier, healthier and more effective lives. By the time a person is 60 years old, he or she has spent 15 of those years watching media. We believe that by creating positive role models, individuals will model the characters they relate to and be inspired to change their own lives. Our world needs life-changing, transformative media. Our world needs to see media role models of all races, abilities, disabilities, ethnicities and religious backgrounds. For a change it would be great to see others like us facing daily life challenges, what they learn from those challenges, and most importantly, how they can grow and overcome those challenges.

The New Media Foundation is dedicated to creating media that inspires viewers and reminds them of their better selves. Every choice an individual makes can affect everyone around them in addition to our whole world. We believe that by creating more positive media, which at its core shows a healthier way of being and thinking, we can change our world.

3. You talk about developing a “new media diet,” can you explain how this might look?

In the book I share with parents and families a new perspective and healthier guidelines to create their own family’s media guidelines. The New Media Diet will appeal to anyone who is interested in self-help, parenting, family guidance and media. My intention by sharing my story and mission is to inspire, inform and role model for readers a practical and fun way to access and possibly change their current media choices for the health and emotional wellbeing of their family.

The New Media Diet is NOT another angry activist book wherein I guilt parents into feeling bad about their current media choices. My goal for writing this book is to provide the key highlights for parents who are interested in how media may be influencing their families health and well-being, but who may not or don’t have the time or energy to read all the voluminous, self-help and scholarly books on the effects of media currently offered in book stores or libraries. I share this vast media and human behavior research from my own perspective, as simply a mother who found myself having a hard time navigating through today’s media offerings and discovering there were very few healthy media choices I would allow my children to watch.

The New Media Diet is based on a simple guideline I developed to help families view their media consumption in a new way. As my criteria, I used actual food items to represent what certain unhealthy and healthy qualities or human behaviors are portrayed in media. Then I took that criteria and matched unhealthy types of foods to unhealthy types of human characteristics and behaviors: For example, processed food is equal to disrespectful behavior or deep fried food is equal to violence. Then I matched healthy types of foods to healthy types of human characteristics: For example, vegetables equal educational or fiber equals encouraging behavior. I took those food and human behavior metaphors and went on to create an example of what an average person’s Old Media Diet would look like compared to The New Media Diet I am championing. In one chapter, I provide specific examples and guidelines as to how other parents might approach their own media choices. As an exercise, I put in a chart to list what media is viewed, for how long, and what the food equivalent might be. I also give positive role-model examples that are currently being portrayed on television.

Over the last twenty years, the self-help movement inspired humanity to become a more healthy, loving, compassionate and united human race. Indeed people want to change their own lives for the better. For a long time, we have been inundated with people talking about ways to save our planet and ways to save ourselves from terrorism, ways to eat healthier and to exercise, recommending that we practice yoga and meditation, and suggesting we should become good global citizens. One sees and hears it everyday in media on shows like Oprah and Dr. Phil, in films like An Inconvenient Truth and Supersize Me and in books like The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, The Secret by Rhonda Byrne and Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. Now wouldn’t it be great to see healthy human references as to how we can integrate these healthy behaviors into our day-to-day ways of being?

While all these inspiring words and messages are great to inspire change, we are missing one important step to creating concrete change in our every day lives—role models. In addition to all these inspiring ideas and sage advice, we need more practical ways role modeled to us by other people we admire and connect with to actually create this change. Not only do we need to know HOW TO DO IT, we need to see how people actually integrate these more affective behaviors into their own lives.

Part way through my journey, I began to believe it might be possible to inspire media writers and producers to begin to slowly integrate all these more effective and healthier human behaviors offered in all the bestselling self-help books and the teachings from leading inspirational leaders into the current media role models we see daily on television and at movies. I felt if we could at least start out by changing 10 percent of how media role models interact with each other in media, then viewers might not only be INSPIRED to change, but also learn HOW to change.

4. Some people are concerned about censorship or taking the art out of filmmaking when you clean it up. How do you address this concern?

As parents, why can’t we legislate and regulate media? We have regulated many issues to protect our children from harm, setting age limits on smoking, driving and drinking. As a parent, wouldn’t you rather err on the safe side when it comes to the role models that you allow to influence your children?

I support the first amendment and that everyone has the right to express themselves in their own way. But as a human race, we cannot continue to go through life concerned with only self-expression. For the last 30 years we’ve been creating our world primarily from a self-focused perspective, and that is a big part of why our planet and people are in sad state of depression and despair. I wouldn’t want to abolish anyone’s first amendment rights, but I do believe that those rights must be balanced along with our moral, social and global rights. We need to consider how media influences our society especially when such influential decisions and expressions are haphazardly exposed through marketing tactics to many different people of all ages, and especially when it comes to manipulating innocent children purely for profit.

I truly believe it is possible for all people to live more happy, healthy and respectful lives, and that we must create more media that considers and includes all three human perspectives: morals, the objective truth and self-expression, all at the same time. Or what is sometimes known as The Good, The True and The Beautiful. When the media industry only comes from one of these perspectives—self expression—it is like scientists who only consider the facts and not individual expression; religious groups who only consider their own beliefs and no one else’s, and individuals who express what they personally like or dislike, whether it hurts someone else or not.

Ken Wilber, a great philosophical thinker of our time, gives a good example of this principal. It is similar to how an engineer considers width, height and length when constructing a building. You must consider all three factors in your plans to insure a perfect measurement; it is impossible to leave out one of these three factors to insure your building is a strong and solid structure. The media business seems to care and support only the artist’s self-expression, THE BEAUTIFUL. The media business does not concern itself with whether it is healthy for viewers or their well being. They rarely concern themselves with THE GOOD, or the fact it has been proven time and time again that media influences viewers’ emotions and life choices. And THE TRUE, media producers are really not considering the scientific research regarding what truly happens to the viewers when they see, physically respond and are influenced by the artists’ creations. Such narrow perspectives as these are harmful and are not in any way creating a safer, healthier, compassionate and more united world.

5. Personal question: You moved from Culver City to Oak Park not so long ago. Can you tell us about this transition? Was it hard to get used to this area? Have you had reservations about the move or has it worked out well? What do you see as the benefits/drawbacks to city vs. exurban living?

I am so happy I finally moved out of a big city to the suburbs. The chaotic and fast-paced city is no different than the unhealthy and hard-to-digest media people are consuming everyday. The constant over stimulation of people and cars can take it’s negative toll on a person’s health, spirit and well-being. I love going to the grocery store and there are 20 cars in parking lot instead of 200. I love driving down roads filled with lushish green trees, bright blue skies and mountains as my backdrop…..it is so much more peaceful and relaxed. Much more inspiring than the city. I would never move back to Los Angeles….I prefer the suburbs. Oh…and did I mention the people are really nice too?

Up in the middle of the night with a newborn, suburban mom/writer Sarah Schmelling heard the siren call of Facebook. The way she answered it became the book Ophelia Joined the Group Maidens Who Don’t Float: Classic Lit Signs on to Facebook. Schmelling has taken characters from classic literature and given them Facebook accounts. They’re wacky! They’re mad! They use emoticons! Here, she tells us all about it…

1. I think we need more info on how you came up with such a brilliant/crazy/unusual idea as Ophelia Joined the Group Maidens Who Don’t Float…so how did you come up with it?

I joined Facebook a month before my son was born, so I think the idea came from a big mix of social-networking obsession and sleep deprivation. I, like so many people when they first join Facebook, got really into it—and of course I had way too much time on my hands. Then, in the middle of one of those crazy, newborn-centric nights, I started to wonder: what’s the strangest thing you could write in a status update? Somehow, the former English major in me thought of Ophelia losing her mind. And the idea to write a Facebook news feed version of Hamlet began. The piece was published by McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and it went viral—leading to the fantastic chance to give this “Facebook treatment” to other classics. That’s exactly what I’ve done: I’ve brought more than 50 works of classic literature, and its authors, to the wackiness of social media.

2. What is your background? Were you raised by two classic lit professors or somehow otherwise steeped in classic lit?

I was an undergrad English/Creative Writing major, so I think I had the standard literature curriculum. I went back to school for journalism and have worked many years as a journalist, while also writing humor pieces for places like McSweeney’s on the side. I’ve always been a voracious reader, though, and I think this Hamlet piece was a perfect combination of my interests. I’m actually nerdy enough to have loved being given the chance to immerse myself in all of these books—re-reading many of them that I certainly didn’t appreciate the first time around in school, and reading some for the first time.

3. How did you decide what was “classic” anyhow? Is there a real list somewhere or some other iron-clad criteria that I’m not aware of? (I understand that most people agree certain works are classic but I’m just wondering if there was any debate surrounding others)

I conferred with all of the former English majors I know, I looked at a lot of the lists various newspapers publish from time to time. But I mainly tried to stick to books I had to read in school or that I always think of when I think “classic.” I also had to include books that I thought I could bring to the Facebook world. I didn’t want to attempt any cult classics I haven’t read like the Lord of the Rings books, which would be a project in itself, and other books people suggested, like The Bell Jar were just too hard to make funny.

4. People might say that much of the book reads sort of like Facebook-style crib notes but you have to know the pieces to get (much less create) the jokes. That’s one thing. The other thing, though, is that you do such a brilliant job conveying tone with your entries. Many of us lament how emails and Facebook posts/replies can be misinterpreted because tone isn’t conveyed. Any tips, since you are a master at this, at conveying tone with e communication?

I agree tone can be really difficult. I try not to rely on emoticons or acronyms like LOL to show I’m joking about something, but I understand why people do it. I think it’s really important, especially on Facebook, to think through what you’re writing and how others might read it. I have one Facebook friend who writes every status update in all caps. This only says to me: “I’M CRAZY!” (So then I borrowed that technique for Miss Havisham’s profile page). Definitely read something two or three times before you share it with the world. Sarcasm unfortunately never translates well.

5. How did you do it? I mean the nuts and bolts: how did you juggle your child and whatever else you had to do and still get this done?

It was a tricky balance. My son was about 6 to 9 months old while I worked on the first draft. My husband was a huge help—he works at home and could often watch my son in the mornings. And we had a sitter come in a few days a week. When I was given the chance, I would just immerse myself in the books and, of course, the computer. I was often reading or going through about four books at once. I had a great time, but I think I was probably a very annoying person to talk to at that point—always going on about Jane Eyre or Dracula or Holden Caulfield.

(OKAY, WE LIED. YOU GET TWO BONUS QUESTIONS/ANSWERS!)

6. What do you hope people take away from your book? (For me, it’s inspired me to read some of the classics I skipped.)

First of all, I just want people to have fun with it. I hope it makes them laugh. But yes, if it encourages people to go back and read some of these books they never tried, or even to re-read some of them, I think that’s great. It’s wonderful, for example, to read The Great Gatsby as an adult; you just get to appreciate the story and language without having to look for symbolism or think about what you’ll be asked on a test. One thing I realized that may seem obvious is all of these books are truly called classics for good reason. They’re all worth revisiting, or visiting for the first time.

7. You said you live in suburbia…describe where you live, how long you’ve been there and how you got there (was it housing prices, close to somebody’s work, etc? do you like suburbia or does it grate on your nerves?)

I grew up in suburban Chicago—so I’m no stranger to suburbia. But I’ve lived in large cities for much of my adult life, so it was a bit of an adjustment moving to a suburb about a year and a half ago, when I was pregnant and we knew we needed a bigger place than we’d find where we were, in Washington, DC. I live in Rockville, Maryland, which even has the R.E.M. song “(Don’t Go Back to) Rockville” warning people about it, but I don’t think Michael Stipe and the boys had ever been here. It’s great for kids—there are so many parks and outdoor spaces, and so many families. Becoming a parent has helped me revise my idea of living in the suburbs. We always thought we’d miss all the access to great restaurants and theater and events, but so far, with a baby, we haven’t had much time for those things anyway. I sometimes hate having to choose between strip malls to go to lunch, but for right now the amenities and the kid-friendliness here really outweigh the merits of the city.

For four years, Brad Johnson, affectionately known as “Pastor Brad,” was at the helm of Calvary Community Church, a megachurch in Westlake Village, California, a suburb of Los Angeles.  Pastor Brad preached to more than 5,000 people each Sunday and was widely regarded as a gifted man of the cloth. Even those who are not his fans today admit that his weekly sermons struck a chord. In short, Pastor Brad laid it down. He was able to deliver a sermon and that sermon felt as if he were talking to you. Besides, he was nice looking, a devoted father and husband, and had been assistant pastor at Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church prior to Calvary. Cynics already know where this story is going, of course. Something happened. Pastor Brad’s oldest daughter went off to college; his youngest got her driver’s license. He started to notice how little he had in common with his then-wife Kim, who had been his high school sweetheart. He had an affair. Or maybe more than one. He abruptly resigned from Calvary, leaving the church in shock and hemorrhaging members. Yes, Swaggert and Haggard and dozens of Catholic priests have stories far more scandalous than Pastor Brad. But wouldn’t you like to know what a guy who used to preach to thousands is doing making lattes at Starbucks?

Ex/Urb’s Victoria Clayton sat down with Pastor Brad Johnson before one of his shifts at his new job. Here’s what they talked about...

Ex/Urb: Some people think it’s bizarre that you used to head a huge church and now, two years later, you’re a barista. Is there a reason you took a job at Starbucks, especially in the community in which you used to preach?

Pastor Brad Johson:  I heard that I could get health benefits with just 20 hours a week, which would give me a lot of flexibility to take other jobs. I provide insurance for me and my youngest daughter [20]. She’s a college student so she’s still on my policy. The health benefits Starbucks offers are really strong and it’s one of the only companies that offers health benefits for part-time employees. That’s what drew me specifically to Starbucks. I applied initially to a different store in another area. The person was very affirming and said, “I’d love to hire you. My store doesn’t have a position, though, but my friend’s store does have a position. Do you mind if I pass your name along?” It ended up being this Starbuck’s. I debated it, though.

 

Ex/Urb: What went through your mind?

Johnson: I didn’t want people to feel uncomfortable because I was here. I wondered, too, if God was trying to teach me something about my character or humility. I wondered if there was a lesson. There are dozens of Starbucks in this region, but this is the one that hired me. I wondered if there was a divine purpose behind it. And then, you know, I’m a man with bills and a daughter I want to care for and I think there’s something positive to working hard and trying to be a responsible person. It was the only job offered to me in a two-month period and so I took it. I needed the income and the insurance. And here it was…kind of with a grin and strapping on my apron, here I go!

Ex/Urb: What a big change. I imagine you were making a very good income in your old position and feeling powerful, right?

Johnson: Well, maybe not powerful, but I was certainly financially comfortable. I was in the ministry for 30 years. Anyone who sticks with the same profession for three decades tends to get more responsibilities and opportunities, and certainly there was a sense of financial security. I was making $10 an hour at a job in college in 1978 and now I’m making $8.25. Isn’t that interesting?

 

Ex/Urb: Yes. But what are the options for someone who has lead a huge church and had to step down? 

Johnson: You know, the career opportunities afterward are sometimes challenging. People have a perception of your skills as a minister. Public speaking is one and some writing, but they don’t see the business side. We had a 100 person staff and an $8 million annual budget. I led a fairly strong business, but that doesn’t translate well on a resume. People want me to be able to say I was CEO or president or a sales manager or whatever. But I was a pastor of churches.

Ex/Urb: Has your faith changed because of your circumstances?

Johnson: I do feel differently in many regards. I think my faith is stronger now because of it. I have a different perspective about God now. I always taught that God loved people, he created us, gave us the world that sustained life and provides for our needs. I taught that for years, but to be in a position of blowing it so badly, feeling so undeserving of love, and then, in many ways, to see that God was still showing love and compassion to me, that was a very profound experience. His love became real in a way I needed it to be.

Ex/Urb: That’s interesting. I could imagine going the other way too; saying after this you don’t believe in God.

Johnson: God didn’t do anything wrong. I did, and so to blame him would’ve been a cop out probably. With the church, I was never one of those preachers who got red-faced and pounded the pulpit and screamed. I’ve fairly much been a mercy-giver through my life and talked more about the love and forgiveness of God than some. Because of that there have been some who have been mercy-giving to me as well. That hasn’t been true across the board, though. There have been some who were so wounded and disappointed; which  I understand. They’ve been quite vocal in their opinions about my life and whether or not I should ever engage in ministry again. I know why it’s hard for people who fail to be a part of churches. Churches don’t do failure really well.

Ex/Urb: That’s a good point, but who hasn’t failed in some way?

Johnson: Right. And we’ll say that in the Christian community. You know, “We’re all sinners.” We’ll use these clichés, but it’s quite uncomfortable sitting next to somebody who you know the details about.

Ex/Urb: Even back before you were in the position, you probably knew a lot about others in the church who had failed. Did you feel uncomfortable previously with them?

Johnson: I didn’t. That’s what I’ve known about God. But, again, to say it and then be on the receiving end has been insightful. I try to teach and demonstrate and encourage that God does give fresh starts. It’s what he specializes in. Nobody is beyond his love, nobody is beyond his reach, nobody is beyond his forgiveness. And then I got in these circumstances and I thought, Oh, I found somebody who is and it’s me!

Ex/Urb: At least you have a sense of humor!

Johnson: I had to work through that.

 

Ex/Urb: Just to be a regular person and go through an affair and divorce, I suppose is terrible, but to be such a person in the community and then have it happen, that’s something else. Tell me about how your children handled this.

Johnson: Well, they were profoundly hurt, even though they’re older. I hear people say maybe it’s better when the kids are older or maybe it’s better when they’re younger but I don’t think there is a better. Divorce is just a very harmful and hurtful experience for everybody. Even when people come out the other side and feel better about themselves or their lives or futures. I haven’t talked with anyone who found it to be an easy experience. I never met anyone who was unaffected by it. My kids are no exception. And because my actions instigated the divorce, it broke my relationship with my children initially. They love their mother, as they should. They were very disappointed by me, as they should be. I just had to make a determination that I would do everything in my power, if necessary for the rest of my life, to rebuild a relationship with my girls [ages 20 and 23]. And, thankfully, I did. Now I talk to them or text them everyday. We’re at such a healthy, healed place now, but it’s two years later and it took a while.

Ex/Urb: And what about your ex-wife. Are you on speaking terms?

Johnson: Yes. She’s a gracious woman. She moved back to the Midwest, where we lived for 20 years. She’s close to her family and a good circle of friends. We talk about things related to our children. We’d been married for 28 years. We were high school sweethearts. So there’s a foundation there.

 

Ex/Urb: Where did you two grow up?

Johnson: Indiana. I moved there for high school and she was at the high school I attended.

 

Ex/Urb: What was your family background?

Johnson: My dad is a minister as well. He’s 75 and still pastors a small little Methodist church in Southern Indiana.

 

Ex/Urb: Were you always expected to go into the ministry?

Johnson: Not really. It was actually always the last thing I wanted to do. Growing up, our family was always criticized and scrutinized. And, you know, everybody else’s children could misbehave maybe but if we did…you know, an attorney isn’t going to lose his job if his kids misbehave but a pastor might. 

 

At about 17, though, I had this very, very deep sense that God was pulling me toward ministry. And I fought it. I pondered it and prayed about it and talked to a lot of people about it…they said I needed follow my heart if I really felt God was asking me to be in the ministry. So I gave my life to it at 17.

 

I went off to a four-year liberal arts college in Kentucky and they had a program in religious studies and also psychology, that’s my bachelor’s. And then in Louisville, Kentucky, the nation’s second largest theological seminary was an hour and half from where I was living. So I did a 91-hour masters program and then an additional 36-hour doctoral program. At the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Ex/Urb: You did get to this Starbucks in a sort of weird way but you also could’ve entirely left the area. Is there a reason you didn’t?

Johnson: Yeah, there are surface reasons but probably the deepest reason is that I’ve seen people run from issues and problems. Geography wasn’t my problem. Wherever I went, I would go with me. All my baggage was going with me. The Christian community is a fairly communicative network. I wasn’t going to go anywhere where my life and circumstances were not right there.

 

Ex/Urb: You didn’t feel you could be anonymous?

Johnson: No. And so why not try to stand back up where I fell? It hasn’t always been easy. There have been days I wanted to run. But looking back now I’m glad I stayed. It gave me the opportunity to talk to people I’ve hurt. I’ve had lots of conversations with people over the last two years. And I’ve tried to just be a good man, earn a living, help take care of my kids.

 

Ex/Urb: You do an online ministry now?

Johnson: Yes, it’s a daily video. It’s called  LIFECHANGECOMMUNITY.org. It’s a three to four minute video everyday that I write, film and upload. It’s mainly to provide encouragement and hope to people from a spiritual perspective. Right now I’m doing a series on 100 promises from the bible. I’m on number 75 right now. And it is that if you trust God he will take care of our needs. If you’re wrestling with fear, you can rely on his strength. There are a lot of wonderful promises in the bible. And I think with our world right now –not just financially but with everything – a lot of people need some encouragement. I know I do. The feedback I get is that it’s been helpful to people. I also teach a bible study on Tuesday nights to about 20 people. It’s open to anybody. Every month we move to a different home and people host it. It’s typically at 7pm.

 

Ex/Urb: How do people sign up for it?

Johnson: They can email me on the lifechange site.

 

Ex/Urb: You hope to have a church again, right?

Johnson: Yes. I was talking to a friend and he made a good point. He told me that people are considered accomplished in a field if they have 10,000 hours in that field. He said, “You started at 17 on a church staff. You have almost 90,000 hours. You need to be using that. You have something to offer.” So I would like to use what I know.

 

Ex/Urb: What’s the trick to being a great minister? So many people have told me that they felt like you were talking right to them when they attended your sermon. I haven’t talked to anyone so far who didn’t like you as a pastor.

Johnson: I don’t know if there’s a trick necessarily. But I genuinely cared about people. I genuinely cared that you were there, that you showed up on Sunday, I cared about the families and I wanted to be helpful from God’s perspective. So maybe just caring helped.

 

Ex/Urb: Were your sermons all original? How did you come up with those?

Johnson: Yes, they were all original. I would write a manuscript for a 40-minute teaching every week. I don’t want to sound simplistic but I just focused on what God put in my heart. A lot of it too came out of conversations I had with people…their hopes and needs and disappointments and dreams. God has a lot to say about all this. I always had way more ideas than I had time to teach.

Ex/Urb: What do you miss the most from the ministry?

Johnson: Well, I miss it now but I didn’t for a while. The hardest thing about here–

Ex/Urb: –here? Here is different from elsewhere? Why?

Johnson: Well, my theory, not to offend anyone, is that it has something to do with the affluence. There’s an entitlement that sometimes accompanies affluence.

 

Ex/Urb: And you felt your parishioners with largely affluent?

Johnson: They were. Someone said that to teach in Westlake is like auditioning for American Idol every week and its mostly Simon Cowell in the audience. That’s what it was. So if somebody didn’t like something I said or didn’t like a theological perspective or didn’t like a joke or didn’t like my hair, by Monday my email box would just have, like, people holding up their scorecards.

 

Ex/Urb: What was the score usually?

Johnson: Well, I would get far more positive but, like most people, I’d remember the negative ones better. I guess it’s just human nature.

Ex/Urb: Your other churches [including Rick Warren’s Saddleback] were also in affluent areas, right?

Johnson: Yeah, but it was different here.

Ex/Urb: Because it was outside of L.A. maybe?

Johnson: Maybe. I don’t know. I talked with ministers and teachers too who have worked elsewhere and they say that this is a particularly demanding place. That doesn’t make it bad. I actually think it indicates even a greater need for us to be spiritual and learn about how to do life and treat people right. On the flip side, there were also so many rewards to ministering in this area too.

Ex/Urb: Like?

Johnson: I met some wonderful friends here. My kids got a terrific education here. They went to Oaks Christian, mainly because Oaks is a neighbor to my former church. They’d always went to public before but when we moved here my oldest was a senior and she could’ve went to Westlake High, where there are 500 kids in a graduating class, or Oaks, where there are 100. We thought Oaks was her best bet. And my youngest went there for three years and just thrived. I think she might have also thrived in public school, too, but it’s a great school. They give kids a lot of academic challenge, but also a lot of exposure to different perspectives. They bring in speakers each week. My youngest was introduced to this lady who leads the International Justice League in Washington, DC, who talked about the dire plight mainly of children in many parts of the world. To hear a national leader address things already on my daughter’s heart was very reinforcing. The speakers are typically from a Christian perspective but they also have U.S. senators and others. It might not work for all kids but it really was a great school for my kids.

Ex/Urb: So what did you say you missed most about the ministry?

Johnson: Well, maybe the opportunity to help people….how would I say it? Well, I also think I have some influence here with coworkers and people who come in. So I probably have a little ministry of influence right now. But I guess if you want to be an influential person you want to be that as much as you can.

Ex/Urb: And that’s a desire?

Johnson: To want to be a positive influence? Yes.

Ex/Urb: What is your favorite drink to make at Starbucks?

Johnson: Hmmm…I like to make a London Fog tea with soy.

Ex/Urb: What do you think about Starbucks offering instant coffee?
Johnson: It’s awful. It’s a good idea with a bad result. The flavor isn’t there.

 

Ex/Urb has decided to show Pastor Brad a little mercy, too. Starting this Sunday, June 6, Pastor Brad’s blog Fresh Faith will make it’s debut here. Sign up for the RSS feed to get Fresh Faith updates plus notices anytime we post new stories, interviews or blogs. Also feel free to offer your comments below.

Nancy Spiller Speaks

 

Nancy Spiller’s first novel, Entertaining Disasters: A Novel (with recipes), uses an unnamed food writer living in Glendale as the narrator. The novel deals with suburban craziness in the 1950s/’60s, dinner parties and family. Spiller met for lunch in Malibu with Ex/Urb’s Victoria Clayton to discuss all this — plus writing, dog bites, making soup without uniformly cut carrots and Nancy’s junk mail art.

Ex/Urb: Los Angeles Magazine gave Entertaining Disasters a great review. What other responses have you received?

Spiller: To be frank, I had never looked to Los Angeles magazine for book reviews. The length that it went on for was just phenomenal. A lot of other magazines reviewed the book too.

One thing that was suggested was that the women’s magazines were taking a lead from Oprah, giving people something of value along with everything else that goes on with the show. It was sort of like it made sense that the women’s magazines would take the lead in regards to suggesting some good books for women to read.

Ex/Urb: Deeper books?
Spiller: Yeah. Because my publisher and I consider it literary fiction and a serious undertaking of some contemporary concerns and also of suburban life in the 1950s and ’60s. But I know certain people tend to have this need to label things. And when it’s women’s writing, it’s often “chick lit” and I think all women should rise up and take exception with this.

 

 

Ex/Urb: Do you think the success of Eat, Pray, Love sent people searching for other food books?

Spiller: Well, you know there is a growing market for food-oriented writing. One of the reasons people are drawn to this is that we are getting more disconnected in the world we live and more alienated from ourselves and each other. I think food is so intimate and it’s a daily necessity. There’s just no getting away from it, it’s something you’re taking inside yourself. It’s sensual. It’s something you can discuss with other people. Craig Claiborne’s A Feast Made For Laughter, dealt with his troubled childhood, his homosexuality and his career in food writing. For him growing up in the South, food was something they could talk about when they couldn’t talk about anything else. There were sexual things they couldn’t talk about in the context of his family. You know, food is on par with that but it’s an acceptable subject. We’ve gotten alienated and disassociated from sex because that has been so exploited and so commercialized. Food is something we’re drawn to. It’s undeniably something we need to exist and it’s a topic we can share and discuss.

Ex/Urb: Is this a good thing that we can talk about food at least?

Spiller: I think it’s a good thing because it’s also a way back into some spiritual things we’ve gotten away from. It’s tapping emotions. There’s a whole psychology that says our earliest memories are often connected to food just because of the wiring of the brain. The memory spot is also connected to the emotion spot and that’s also where our food memories imprint. Smell is a big part of food…we can’t avoid having that penetrate us and be poignant on a variety of levels. In lieu of everything else we’ve lost touch, food brings us back to all of those things fairly immediately with just what we have in front of us on the plate and what we choose to eat and what we choose to put in our bodies.

Ex/Urb: What do you tell people your book is about?

Spiller: There was an elderly gentlemen at one of the readings in Northern California who sat in the back and the last question of the Q&A session he raised his hand and asked, “What is your book about?” My instant response was to be a good girl and answer him. I said, “To enjoy life.” And then afterward I thought, well, he didn’t buy the book, maybe I shouldn’t have answered him. Maybe I should’ve said, “You buy the book and tell me.” 

Ex/Urb: I know you’re also an artist. I always wonder about people who explain their own art or their own writing. Some people do this, some don’t. How do you feel? Do you think explaining is a good thing?

Spiller: I think people should read the book and take from it what they choose to take from it. I think it offers a variety of things on a variety of levels and I think it’s something that needs to be read and experienced. I noticed a couple of things on blogs from these women who review books regularly. One in particular I remember seemed to be disappointed that there wasn’t more of a plot. I think there’s enough plot to move it along and hold it together. But if the books she’s used to reading these days are heavily plotted. That’s not the sort of book this is. 

Ex/Urb: Some authors don’t even read their reviews. You seem to be aware of them and you’re really mature and brave about dealing with them.

Spiller: Well, it helped that Ariel Swartley [in Los Angeles Magazine] spent so much time with it and got it to the extent that she did. I think for the bloggers, though, it’s easier to summarize a plot rather than understand a book. And it just seems like they’re cranking out so much copy.

Ex/Urb: Well, there definitely is a plot to your book. And some of the greatest books have absolutely no plot, anyhow.

Spiller: Of course. Some of my favorite books are books without plots.

Ex/Urb: What are your favorite books?

Spiller: Most recently my favorite authors include Nobokov and Flannery O’Connor. I like Speak, Memory by Nobokov. I have a wide reading interest, which I think is a good thing for anybody. I try to read the best. I try to read quality writers. I have no interest in escapist fiction. I even have a hard time sitting still for some movies that are just entertainment. I feel like if I’m going to do this, I want it to be the highest quality I can come across whether it’s nonfiction or fiction. Sometimes I don’t even read, though. I listen to books.

I download whole books. I jogged my way through Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. And it was well worth it. The podcast of the New Yorker fiction is fabulous too. I also download Michael Silverblatt’s Bookwork, which I rarely got a chance to listen to on the radio, but now that it’s on podcast form I can.  Studio 360? Do you know that one? It’s with Kurt Andersen. It’s a cultural show. It’s set in New York but he’s been going all over. In fact, he’s in Southern California now for a few months. It’s a wonderful collection of artists, writers, filmmakers and actors.

 One of the Flannery O’Connor books I just read was Mystery and Manners, which is a collection of her lectures and writings about writing. It’s really wonderful. And a writing book I downloaded, that I would not have sat down and read but I could listen to in my comings and goings, is Stephen King’s On Writing. It’s great. I’m not a Stephen King fan at all but I thought what he had to say about writing was interesting.

Ex/Urb: Tell me how you started out.

Spiller: I’ve been writing and making art since I was a kid. As a kid, it was mostly drawing and painting a little bit. Just sort of capturing the world around me and with writing it was sort of the same thing. The only scholarship I ever got was to the San Francisco Academy of Art right when I got out of high school. That was for the summer. And then I went to San Francisco State. I got myself into the English Department because I didn’t have the resources to go off and study art for four years. So I pursued English and creative writing. I was in San Francisco at a time when Rolling Stone was there. I happened to make the acquaintance of some good people who were at Rolling Stone who were role models for me as far as their writing went. It was Tim Cahill, Joe Klein and David Felton. I started socializing with that whole group. Of course, they did more than music writing. They were doing a wide range of cultural topics, popular culture and all that. I was able to put some of that stuff into practice in school and when I got out I started freelancing. My first published story was in Mother Jones magazine about The Gong Show. At that time, The Gong Show was signifying the demise of Western Civilization. Or so we all thought. Little did we know it was harkening the dawn of reality TV.

I eventually went to New York and I was freelancing there and struggling to survive. I did some work for places like the Washington Post style section. This was the late 1970s. I was always a generalist, which I always have been. That’s been one of my problems, the specialization of everything and what you can write about. I just find it too limiting. Then I came back and was a feature writer at the San Jose Mercury News. I was able to pursue a bunch of Gonzo stories. I was a singer in a garage band, I rode on a cattle drive, I went to truck driving school and drove a big rig on a run up to Washington.

 Then I met my darling husband, who had custody of two boys. I became stepmom. He was in television and so we came to Los Angeles in pursuit of his television work. I got on at the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner and that’s when the forces that were trying to push specializing went to work. I got hired as a television writer. I have an interest in television, but also a lot of other things.

 The Herald-Examiner was kind of scrappy. The staff was great but the management was awful. Everyday you came to work and the paper was going to die any minute. That was back in the late 1980s. Then it did. The dreariness of all of it was overwhelming. I was like one of the first canaries in the coal mine. I just fainted at the prospect of this apparently dying industry.

 After a while entertainment journalism got boring too. For a while I was an editor at an entertainment news services for the Los Angeles Times syndicate. I thought I’d try editing and go that route. But I quickly discovered that I needed to be a writer; editing wasn’t for me.

 So I started to pursue fiction. And food writing. I turned away from the entertainment. I started some food writing by doing humorous essays for the Los Angeles Times magazine.

 Ex/Urb: Did you always have an interest in food?

Spiller: Well, where I grew up in the San Francisco suburbs, everybody had gardens. In San Francisco everyone is very into food. There are a lot of Italians and French there and they brought their interest in food with them. I was always into food and cooking. I grew up with the food section of the San Francisco Chronicle, which is great.

 My mother had a French background too. Just as the mother is described in the book, my mother was using fresh garlic, making her own vinaigrette, where everybody else was buying bottled dressing and was scared by fresh garlic.

 Ex/Urb: For suburban 1950s that was pretty cutting edge?

Spiller: Yes. And she was doing homemade noodles and fresh soup that didn’t have the uniformly cut little squares of carrots so we thought it was just part of her craziness.

 Ex/Urb: I ended up making soup after reading that part of your book and it made me worried about my vegetables. So I just pureed the soup. I guess I’m not a very exact cook, either.

Spiller: Really? Well, it’s not healthy to be an extremely exact cook! I think pureeing is a fine way to go if you want to eliminate all those worries. I don’t think pureeing was available to my mother at the time. And, meanwhile, she had this group of kids that questioned everything she did. If her vegetables weren’t just like Campbell’s we ended up throwing it out. That’s a pretty serious assault on anyone. A mother especially. The one thing she can do is cook for her kids and to have her food rejected is a terrible thing. Has your son ever rejected your cooking?

 Ex/Urb: Oh, yeah! He’s at the point where he’s suspicious of everything I give him unless it’s Dino Nuggets and mac & cheese. It’s horrible.

 Spiller: My two stepsons were very young when I came into their lives. There were all these great restaurants in San Francisco and they liked exotic things like dim sum. Then we came down here. My husband also likes to cook and I remember we were making our famous salmon and sorrel sauce and my youngest son came up to me and said, “Boy, I’ll be glad when this is over!”

 But I always say that the best cooking anyway is just the best ingredients simply done. And in California there is so much great stuff available to us. My mom’s background was French but also that sort of Midwestern thing. So I like simple too.

 But, you know, I got into food young because there were all these great restaurants and that’s what people did. I also gave a lot of dinner parties in college. I was living with my boyfriend, who was an artist, and we gave a lot of dinner parties. A lot of the dinner parties were for Rolling Stone people. When Rolling Stone put to bed the magazine every two weeks, they’d all be exhausted and I’d cook dinner for everyone. I’d get to try recipes from the Chronicle. I’d do these really crazy, obsessive recipes, though. You know, like I did stuffed squid one time. It was absurd. Absolutely absurd. Or I made marzipan and I actually blanched the almonds by hand. It was like knitting a scarf. It was this ridiculous thing that went on forever. I don’t do that kind of cooking anymore because I know better. I really feel like I’ve been through that and I don’t need to do it anymore.

Ex/Urb: What are your favorite restaurants and markets?
Spiller: So we did move from Glendale – the book is set in Glendale but I finished writing it in the Palisades. One of the wonderful things I love doing right now is the Wednesday [Santa Monica] farmer’s market. I get completely seduced and bring far too many things home.

Ex/Urb: There’s something about the Santa Monica farmers market in particular, don’t you think?

Spiller: Yeah, there is something about it. But isn’t the one near you the Thousand Oaks market on Thursday afternoons? That’s a good one too. You have a lot of people from Ojai there.

Ex/Urb: They changed the location now but I used to get freaked out sometimes because it was in a parking lot and it’d get really hot on summer afternoons.

Spiller: Yeah, I used to go to the Hollywood farmer’s market on Sundays and it was always like 15 degrees warmer there than even where we were in Glendale. To me, it was always kind of oppressive. Even in the winter. And in Hollywood, of course, everything is just paved in.

To me, Los Angeles has just gotten too crowded. When we were living [in Glendale], I could sense the increase in population and see the increase in dirty air. As a freelance writer, I’d tried to write something about air pollution in L.A. and why the residents don’t know more about how clean or dirty their air is. I wanted to know why we couldn’t know more about our air.

Ex/Urb: Your cat was a concern too, right?

Spiller: Yes. My cat didn’t have asthma when we moved to Glendale and then once we were there my cat had to take Prednisone.

As a journalist living in Glendale, I wanted to not only write about all the things that were fun and entertaining but also all the things that had to do with our surroundings. I couldn’t find any publications that were interested, though! I was jogging through my neighborhood and I was attacked by a dog once. The dog was owned by an angry man who rented in this little cul-de-sac and had three rescue dogs who terrorized the block I happened to go on that evening. The neighbor who I yelled at for help just disappeared into his house as I was getting attacked another time! I had to go knock on his door. It was like Kitty Genovese in Glendale. I was calling for help and nobody on that street came out to help.

Ex/Urb: What do you chalk that up to?

Spiller: I chalk it up to the alienation, the disconnect in the world we’re living in today. That’s another one of the serious, serious illnesses of Los Angeles. We’re all in our cars, we’re all in our houses and we have so many ways we can just shut people out and disconnect that that’s what we choose to do. It’s incredibly dehumanizing. On a daily basis we just loose more and more of our humanity.

In Glendale, I felt as if it was a small city in a way. At first it was manageable and you sort of felt like you lived in a place where there was an identity. Increasingly, though, I didn’t feel connected to it. I felt there was this kind of daily indifference and this Eastside hip-ness. The young people who were coming in were paying far too much for their housing and they were trying to create this culture that they could live with. It was just written up in the New York Times. A neighbor on my street, Scott Timberg, just wrote something for the New York Times on Eagle Rock and how in the recession all the hipness is disappearing. These people are sort of finding themselves stranded in this funky, ‘50s neighborhood that’s smoggy and the roads are lined with auto repair shops.

I know somebody who moved there and they were drawn there because of the schools. The schools are one of the last L.A.U.S.D. schools that are considered good and the parents are engaged. My friends who were there found it wasn’t what they wanted it to be, though, and they stretched themselves out and moved to South Pasadena instead. People are hanging onto South Pasadena for life because the schools are okay.

Ex/Urb: The smog issue and dog bite goes back to how you became a fiction writer, right?

Spiller:  Yes. This is the mid-90s and I was trying to do something other than entertainment journalism and I was trying to draw attention to the society in which we were living.  And the air is going bad and I can’t get anyone interested in it. The dog attacks me and I’m pitching the Los Angeles Times. Wouldn’t you love a great first person story backed up with national stats? Dog bites at that time were epidemic in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control. The whole thing had to do with Lassie being replaced. The suburban dog for the 1950s and ‘60s had been replaced by mastiffs, rottweilers, Doberman pinchers and pit bulls. These were dogs people couldn’t control and didn’t have time to take to training. People said they were getting them to protect their property. I think they are unlicensed weapons.

So the Los Angeles Times couldn’t have been less interested in the story. I thought, Okay, now what do we do? Let’s go write fiction!

Ex/Urb: How did you come to use a food writer as your heroine?

Spiller: It reflected what I was feeling. Nobody cared. Nobody cared on so many levels that I thought, Hey, I could be sitting at home inventing dinner parties and making them up for the page and nobody would care. I also felt food was something I could use to get to some very personal issues.

Ex/Urb: Just for the record, though, have you actually ever made up dinner parties and written about them for magazines?

Spiller: No. And that’s such a good question. Sometimes I offer it up because nobody seems to ask. I never did make them up. And I never made up anything as a journalist. I hung on to those ideals in the face of tremendous pressures in Los Angeles and…excuse me, we’re about to swallow some lettuce down the wrong way…yes, okay, I’ll survive… increasing pressures in the business, you know, for journalists to do whatever they are told to do instead of whatever they felt they should be doing. But I had editors who were making things up on my behalf and not even telling me about it because of the pressures they were under, I guess. I had a cooking publication I wrote for take an innocuous piece I wrote for them and change it from third-person to first-person. Well, I had never had that experience and they were going to put my byline on it! I didn’t even know until a copy editor ran it by me for a final look-see. I had them take my byline off.

Ex/Urb: How much of your book includes experiences you’ve really had then?
Spiller: It’s an autobiographical novel. There are a lot of things that I’ve experienced in it but not everything happened in one week.

Ex/Urb: You feel okay saying it’s an autobiographical novel? A lot of fiction writers might bristle at that, I think.

Spiller: Yeah, I think that’s really unfortunate because there’s a long history of autobiographical novels. At some point many writers started insisting that their work wasn’t autobiographical. I tend to think that was a macho thing. There were a lot of American, male writers who insisted they never wrote anything autobiographical. The truth of the matter is that before we had the interest or obsession with comparing somebody’s life with what they had written there was a long history of autobiographical novels. Look at James Joyce’s A Portrait of The Artist as A Young Man. But he didn’t include recipes.

Ex/Urb: And Philip Roth?

Spiller: I love Philip Roth’s book Everyman. I had my unnamed food writer before I read Everyman and realized Philip Roth wasn’t naming his narrator either. I just came to that on my own and then realized a couple of other people are doing it too. And I don’t know anything about Philip Roth’s life, but I don’t feel I need to in order to get what I can from his writing.

Ex/Urb: Do you think people will feel that way about you and Entertaining Disasters?
Spiller: Well, it’s their choice but I feel fine either way. One thing about fiction is that you go to it in order to arrive at truths you cannot get at through fact. That’s what I was attempting to do. Memoir would’ve required cleaving more tightly to the facts and it also would’ve been much darker and it would’ve been much more disturbing to people who are still alive. I didn’t really have the interest in writing a memoir anyway. 

The true parts of my novel include that I grew up in the suburbs of Northern California in the 1950s and ‘60s and my mother did suffer from mental illness. I did live in Glendale and I had a house that shared the top of the hill with Forest Lawn. And I had a garden and killer views and the house was a constant concern because it was aging and just constantly demanding. It was sort of a character in its own right.

Ex/Urb: You did some research on mental illness in suburbia, right?

Spiller: I did do research on it. One of the reasons for writing the book was to explore this issue that seemed to have had such a detrimental effect on my family and was maintaining a hold on me into adulthood. I wanted to find out more about my mother’s own history and situation. In my family it was sort of dismissed or treated as humorous, which it wasn’t. It was tragic. And then growing up at that time, there were other women suffering as well.

There was only one long-term study I could find. It was a long-term study done on women suffering from mental illness living in the suburbs of Northern California in the 1950s and ‘60s and it went on to study the children and the women through the 1970s. I was fascinated—it was in the San Francisco bay area.

Ex/Urb: The bay area is a suburban haven right? Like L.A., there’s more suburbia than not?

Spiller: You know, it’s a haven for it but the suburbs of 1950s and ‘60s were the same as suburbia everywhere. Post WWII, a phenomenon of the car, and dry wall, which was a product of WWII and made it possible to have houses just pop up immediately. In Northern California, and Los Angeles as well, people were coming from all over. It was such a huge influx coming into the bay area but they didn’t usually have extended families. All these people were gathering who didn’t know each other and really didn’t know how to connect with one another. To me, this was one of the reasons Northern California seems to pay attention to these things. But in Southern California they seem to tune them out. There seems to be this force here that needs for us to tune them out. Up there it seems like something they’ve refused to give up on to a certain extent. It’s a more humane environment in the San Francisco bay area. The scale is more humane. They’re not into overdevelopment. They’re not into signing off on just letting anything happen.

One of the things I found astonishing when we first moved here was this oil spill that happened in Granada Hills. The oil pipeline from a refinery somewhere way up north came down and sprung a leak and there was this flock of birds coated in oil. This was barely a news story here! In San Francisco, this would have been on the front page of the Chronicle. Everybody would’ve been out cleaning up the birds. That’s kind of the difference. The degree of attention that is paid there versus the lack of attention that’s paid here.

Ex/Urb: So you think the L.A. area is more suburban in the worst sense?

Spiller: Yes, I think Los Angeles is much more suburban.

Ex/Urb: Do you think suburbia makes some people crazy?

Spiller: I think it cuts you off. It helps cut you off from people. You’re isolated in your car, you’re isolated in your house. One of the ways that our times are similar to the 1950s and 1960s, but not just for housewives, is the isolation. Los Angeles is one of the biggest home worker communities. A lot of us are working at home. So we’re isolated in our homes. Everybody is so busy working that you don’t have time to socialize or connect. How do you get involved? You get involved in writing groups or reading groups or some other version of adult playgroups. But it’s a challenge and people don’t always have the resources to pursue those kinds of things. It’s very easy to get desensitized and cut off.

There’s something I call the big box sensation. We have a beach condo out in Oxnard too so I experience the box stores if I go shopping out there. And it’s like you go in there and nobody looks you in the eye and all of the clerks are so intent on not being there. They’re so desensitized. I hate those places! I hate Home Depot and all of those places! You go in there and they will not look you in the eye or talk to you. Their greatest desire is to get a good, lively conversation going on with their coworker that they can finish before they even have to look your way. And if they can have the conversation while taking care of your transaction, that’s double points. That kind of stuff drives me nuts. I’d rather shop online. And then, see, that’s what’s happening…You shop online.

So where we are now in the Palisades is so interesting to me because of the Palisades Village. The Palisades is sort of considered the land of the rich. It doesn’t feel that way, though. It feels like 1950s or ‘60s America and what we were all told it could be. Middle class. Middle America. Just nice and manageable.

And what I said to a friend who is still on the Eastside is that it’s the price of nice. We paid too much for this condo. I actually feel like we’re living in the projects in the Palisades but it’s perfect, you know. I love the location. I love the fact that we’re living at the edge of a forest. I don’t like the fact that it’s a year round fire season right now. Fires are a very real concern in hot and dry conditions. But my old house in Glendale there were times that I felt I wish it would burn! Now I don’t feel that way.

Ex/Urb: Do you feel a part of the community?

Spiller: I do. I see the challenges of becoming a part of the community but I’m feeling a part of the community much more quickly than I ever felt in Glendale.

Ex/Urb: How long have you been in the Palisades?
Spiller: Three years and I feel more a part of the community because, I think, people pay attention in the Palisades. It’s a small enough community. The shopping is small. People want to go to the hardware store, they want to go to Gelson’s or the nice Ralphs.  They want to go to the little stationery store. The businesses are still small and people pay attention. They look you in the eye. They’re nice to you and you’re nice to them. You’ll see them again. There’s a reason to be nice.

Ex/Urb: Is there a big “buy local” campaign there?

Spiller: No, they don’t have to do that! People are there because of that Village. If you’re in Brentwood or Beverly Hills, which to me is, you know, pick your delusion. Brentwood has this perception of being the land of the posh and major mansions and things. The reality of Brentwood, though, is that there’s a huge portion of it that’s overdeveloped and I think there’s this level of tension there that maybe you’re not going to experience until you move yourself there. Beverly Hills the same thing. The deal with the Palisades is that it got discovered a few years back. It was 900-square-foot houses on the big lots owned by UCLA professors and other middle class people who were willing to go a little further out than others. Now it’s gotten discovered by this element that’s coming in and building the large houses. But they’re controlling it really well. The sense of the area is being maintained. The open space around the Palisades is no accident.

 There are no big boxes. I better understand now why people should be fighting those things.

Ex/Urb: Tell me about your feeling of living in suburbia vs. urban areas since you’ve lived in both?

Spiller: In the book, there’s a dinner that takes place in San Francisco and there’s a reference made about the houses and how they’re all joined. People know where they stand because they’re all together. That’s, to me, one of the benefits to living in a more communal, city sort of situation where you do feel as though you’re a part of a community. People pay attention.

Ex/Urb: You’ve mentioned the idea of paying attention a few times. Is that it? Do you think we all need to pay attention a lot more if we want better communities?

Spiller: Yes, I think we all need to pay attention more. In the suburbs, you can have your electronic cottage where you’re communicating and ordering online but what’s the living culture? What’s the local culture of where you are? How do you partake in that? In Los Angeles, it’s such a challenge because of the traffic. And that’s a very deadening thing. It gets to the point where people don’t have the energy or time to partake of culture.

Ex/Urb: Maybe we all have to stake out where we are and make culture happen there?

Spiller: Well, yeah, if you can make that happen. Then it’s just a choice of where you want to be stuck. When we first moved to Los Angeles, to Glendale, I felt like I could partake of the whole city. I could get to the Westside. But by the time we moved, it was a covered wagon expedition just to get to the Westside! It was easier to get to the beach in Oxnard than it was to get to the beach in Santa Monica.

Ex/Urb: It’s ironic because sometimes I tell people where I live in Westlake Village and they’re sort of horrified that I live past Calabasas. Yet they might spend double the time and go from the Eastside to Venice or Santa Monica and not think twice about it. Do you think our gauge of distance and drive time is sort of screwed up?

Spiller: Well, you wonder. But maybe it’s the empty space between that scares people.

Ex/Urb: Tell me about your art because…OH! I have to go get my son from school! I’m going to be late! Do you want to tell me about your art while I wave down the waiter to pay?

Spiller: Okay. The art goes back to the frustrations of journalism and the environment. I started painting and pursing that. When it came to my first major exhibition is was about this environmental concern and actually seeing what was going on around us as opposed to the delusions we were being fed. I collected a year’s worth of junk mail and shredded it. I had 157 pounds of shredded junk mail and I started looking for a place to display it. And it just turned out wonderfully well. It got a write up in Art In America. It captured their attention.

 Ex/Urb: Thanks Nancy!

 

For more on Nancy Spiller visit her her website.