Susan Steinberg

Interviewed by Crystal Carey

Susan Steinberg's fiction trembles with frenetic energy and neurotic precision. Her first collection of short stories, The End of Free Love (FC2, 2003), explores form and content while creating unforgettably human characters. Steinberg received an MFA in English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a BFA in painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art. She has been awarded fellowships from the University of Massachusetts and Yaddo and was the Alan Collins Scholar in Fiction at the Bread Loaf  Writers' Conference. Her short stories have been published in Gettysburg Review, Quarterly West, and Other Voices, to name only a few. She currently teaches at the University of San Francisco, and her second collection of short stories is forthcoming in 2006.

CC: I found it interesting that you hold a BFA in painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art. How does this background affect your writing (if at all) and how would you describe your art? Are there parallels between your fiction and your paintings?

SS: I actually approach writing and painting in similar ways. I usually start with an image or line or voice or scene and build the story -- even when painting -- around it. And the revision processes are similar as well. After I pile on the details and try to understand how they're interacting with one another, I spend months adding, moving and removing the images (and scenes and lines and words) until the piece feels somehow balanced -- like a story has emerged.

CC: Many of the reviews I read of your work describe the stories in your first collection, The End of Free Love, as hybridizations between lyric poetry and prose that value structure as much as content. If you were to describe your fiction to someone else, would you use those words?

SS: I don't know if I'd use the word "structure" -- maybe I'd use style or form? But then again, I've never been great at talking about my own work. I agree that I'm interested in how a story needs to be written, what the content is demanding of the form. But I also, then, ask how the form is creating the content. It's a constant power struggle (or play) between the two -- and that's a good thing. As for the work being "lyric fiction," I think I can accept that. But is it poetry? Absolutely not--I'm not consciously considering any poetic elements when I'm writing, not technically speaking anyway. I'm consciously writing stories. And though I care a great deal about the words I choose, the rhythm of the sentences, the way images fit together, I'm just not writing poetry. I wish I could say otherwise. I'd love to be a poet. I truly long for the desire to break lines. The power and elegance of that, the amazing line break, is hard to find in fiction.

CC: Of the eighteen stories in your collection the majority of pieces are written in either the first or second person perspective. How do you arrive at the decision for point of view?

SS: Well, sometimes I feel like even the second person stories are actually internalized first person narratives. I think of "Isla," for example, as first person. Because the stories are so voice-driven, first person has always felt like a good fit. Then it's a matter of how much distance I want to maintain. If I want a lot, perhaps I'll remove the "I."

CC: Most writers I've talked with have a fixed attitude regarding the second person (as opposed to normal readers who might not even notice the perspective) -- did you ever have to fight to make others realize this was a legitimate perspective for your stories?

SS: I admit I am often one of those writers with a bad attitude toward second person narratives. I went to a reading once, and the writer started his story with something like, "You like donuts." And I, a cynical graduate student (and a vegan) was like, "No, I don't like donuts." And, in part, because of this, I just couldn't buy the story. I think there's a way to make the second person narrative do a little more than attempt to engage the reader or listener by turning him/her into the main character. In my experience that kind of second person narrative often makes a reader resistant. So, like I said, I often try to experiment with this voice, to try to make it more of an internal monologue, a character speaking to herself or recounting a barrage of commands.

CC: I'm curious about the evolution of your unique voice. How were you originally drawn to writing and has your style changed? Was your initial impetus in writing fiction to explore form?

SS: My initial impetus in writing fiction was to get some revenge. I was angry and in my twenties, and I felt writing was the best way to deal with everything that pissed me off. Paint took too long to dry. It wasn't portable. It was costly. There was a girl in my undergrad class in art school who wrote this incredible poetry. It was just irreverent and truly bizarre and honest and risky. She made her own books of the work and sold them for seven dollars, and I have to say I was so inspired by her courage and invention that I bought a typewriter. Nights, after spending the days in my painting studio, I would type these hostile little poems, in bed, that made me feel amazing.

As for my style -- it changes from story to story.

CC: D.A. Powell wrote of your collection: "More and better than Stein is Steinberg…." Did Stein influence your work? If so, what would you say you've learned from her and where do you leave her behind? What other writers, poets, or artists have inspired or influenced you?

SS: I was not influenced by Stein but have read her work and can understand why people make the connection. The thing is -- and maybe it's a sad thing -- I'm not often influenced or inspired by other writers. Virginia Woolf comes the closest. And certainly a few poets -- D. A. Powell is one. But I'm more often inspired by visual artists and other geniuses: Cindy Sherman, Henry Darger, various people I've known over the years.

CC: Sometimes in her work Gertrude Stein utilized a specific vocabulary. In this collection certain themes and words emerge -- for instance, stars, gravity, trees, Saturday, radio, school, and the phrase, "this you don't forget." I found the repetition very compelling. Were you working with a particular vocabulary or did these themes simply arise organically to unify the collection?

SS: I wasn't aware until now that I had all of these thing recurring. When I defended my graduate thesis, John Edgar Wideman said, "You have a lot of birds in your work," and I wasn't then aware of that either. I am conscious of certain repetition and recursion in the work, but often enough the repetition comes from being an obsessive writer and person and having obsessive narrators.

CC: Many of the young narrators in these stories seem to exist in a completely different world than their parents. So much so that while reading "Away!" I find myself vacillating between believing the narrator is mentally troubled, then accepting the possibility that she simply has a wild imagination and our world, the adult world, is judging her too harshly. I find the ambiguity particularly effective because you capture the divide between children and adults so expertly. This happens in many of your stories and appears quite natural. Do you find it difficult to write with the voice of a child?

SS: I think what's difficult is conflating the voice of a child with the voice of the implied author, to write as an adult and see through the lens of a child. This is the hardest thing to explain to students, and probably the thing most important thing one needs to explain, for so many writers want to explore childhood in their fiction. I know that if I need to write "young, angry teen," I'm really writing as both a young, angry teen and whoever I happen to be that day, sitting in the cafe, drinking a latte. And exploring and understanding that mix, to me, is more interesting than trying to simply emulate the younger voice.

CC: In the story, "Nothing," a young male narrator is questioned by his parents and possibly a therapist after his parents find a list of names that alarm them. The scenario is reminiscent of the Columbine tragedy and in it we catch a glimpse of a (possibly) disturbed mind. Many of your characters seem to walk the fuzzy line between sanity and insanity. In choosing the voices which are often poetic and associative or disjointed are you making a comment on mental illness? Do you think children are different, possibly more violent, today than in yesteryears?

SS: I can't speak for the long ago yesteryears, but when I was a kid in the 70's and 80's, my friends and I were pretty troubled. I wouldn't say we were all mentally ill, though some certainly were. I think most of us were just suffering from being creative and bored and oppressed. Maybe neglected. Maybe suffocated. Definitely trapped. Meaning, trapped in adolescence. Trapped in the family. Trapped in the suburbs. My characters suffer from this, not from a clinical or diagnosable mental illness. That frustration, that paralysis, in my opinion, creates the fuzzy line you speak of. Which some would call imagination.

CC: The story "testing," refers back to you as the writer: "because you're my blood, you're a Steinberg, and Steinberg means mountain of stone." This piece made me wonder how autobiography informs your fiction, if at all.

SS: I think I'm always simultaneously dangerously inside my work and safely outside of it. That is to say, I draw on scenes from my own experiences, but I exaggerate, twist, lie, invent, whatever it takes to tell the story. And by this I mean, whatever it takes to expose the emotional truth.

CC: This collection is very cohesive as a whole. Did you write most of the stories over a short period of time? I'm thinking of the closing story, "Opening," in particular. In this piece we follow the narrator through a sort of continuous present exploration of her last session with her therapist and a bus trip to a pond. In the last paragraph, she thinks, "I could end this. I could end with this. The sunflower abloom in the dirt." This is the perfect conclusion for this collection. Did you know it was the end when you wrote it?

SS: I didn't know "Opening" would be the last story. And I didn't even know what stories would end up in the collection. It took four years to write, more if you include editing, and I suppose the stories feel somewhat cohesive, in part, because I was drawing upon the same demons over and over. Which I guess we do for our entire lives.

CC: Present in so many of your stories is a real sense of urgency which you convey well by employing the second person and by telling stories that are one-long-paragraph. "Standstill" and "testing," are two examples of the latter. The endings of all these stories pack an extra whollop. Particularly in "Standstill" and "The End of Free Love," the closing lines make the reader stop short and catch his breath. Do you value your endings in particular or have a theory as to what constitutes a great ending? Or do your endings almost write themselves?

SS: My endings often write themselves. I usually find the ending about three lines up from what I think it is. Often I think I've said something brilliant, only to find that I've overwritten or overstated something.

CC: Some writers say that once they know their first sentence their story is written for them. Others comments that a singular image motivates them. How do your ideas originate and what is your writing process like?

SS: Yes, one image can motivate me to write a story. But I never know what the story is going to look like or sound like. It's always a building process, piling on the details and scenes, seeing how they relate to one another. My process is all about months of revision and reading aloud. A lot of trial and error.

CC: When discussing your story, "Isla," in the St. Mary's workshop, Lysley Tenorio said one of the goals of your fiction is to challenge a reader, to make him really dive into your work and explore the conflicts. I found this very interesting and wondered if you would elaborate on this idea.

SS: I guess I prefer to challenge a reader than to hold his hand. The work is often about trauma and internal chaos, and to write this in an easily digestible way makes no sense to me. I mean, that's why we have TV. I think we have a responsibility to keep art complicated. This doesn't mean it shouldn't be inaccessible. On the contrary, I want readers to walk into my work, experience the story, understand it. I just don't want them to feel the predictability and comfort of, say, a shitty romance novel.

CC: When looking over reviews for The End of Free Love three stories were mentioned more than others: "Isla," "Nothing," and "The End of Free Love." Were you surprised by which stories received more fanfare than others? When reading your collection two of my favorite pieces were "Away!" and "Winner." Are there some stories that are closer to your heart than others?

SS: I admit I like the story "Life." It gets no attention.

CC: What are you writing now and what are your plans in the future? Do you see yourself writing a novel in the next few years?

SS: I've just finished a collection which will be out in 2006. And, yes, hard to admit, I am writing something that appears to be a novel.

CC: How does teaching at the University of San Francisco inform your writing?

SS: I truly learn a lot from my students, from talking about writing, from trying to practice what I preach. I absolutely love teaching and there is little more inspiring to me than the energy of the serious creative writing classroom.

CC: What advice would you give to new writers working on their first stories, novels, or poems? What advice would you give to beginning writers, who, like yourself, are experimenting with form and aiding with the evolution of the idea of the traditional short story? Would the advice be any different?

SS: I say to all writers: write each story/poem like it's the last one you will ever get to write. In short, be absolutely fearless.