WHERE STORY LIVES: YVONNE CONZA INTERVIEWS SARA LIPPMANN

JERKS by Sara Lippmann, from Mason Jar Press

I picked up a book years ago, first admiring it for its proportional size to my hands. Its practical scale and weight made it possible to read anywhere — subway, plane, tub, boat, bar. Companionable. Then, as I dipped into the book’s pages, a rush of excitement came over me as I discovered a writer’s work to forever-follow. Efficacious. Over Zoom, relating this recollection to Sara Lippmann, author of Doll Palace and now JERKS, her second book of stories, returned me to falling in love with an author and their artistry. 

Scripted in white lettering, JERKS, a marque title, floats above a 1952 Gar Lunny journalistic-photo of Grant Moore and Alex Groetaers shaking hands on a tennis court. Friendly volley? Battle of the sexes? What’s at play? Barefoot on a clay court, red kerchief around her neck, shorter than her opponent, Alex gazes upward at the male player, their handshake blurred. Before turning a page, JERKS’ storytelling, its physicality and endurance, accelerates.

Sara Lippmann: What book was it?

Yvonne Conza: A.M. Homes’ The Safety of Objects.

Sara: Oh yes, her collection. That’s when we all fell in love with her.

Yvonne: JERKS’ reminds me of A.M. Homes’ writing. I read an interview where you talked about how people gave you “all kinds of shit” for your writing, the characters you’ve developed and more. A.M. Homes mentioned how she was bothered by the assertion that she wrote to shock people  —  that’s something applied to my work from the outside. I’m writing to tell stories  —  to illustrate the human heart  —  and if people find it shocking, well, that means it hit a nerve, but I don’t set out to shock or disturb. 

Were outside opinions ever problematic for you? 

Sara: It’s a knotty paradox. Write what compels you, own your voice, do the work, make sure it’s emotionally honest. As Brandon Taylor put it, “take your finger off the scale.” Sure, I may forever be caught in the patriarchal jaw of approval. The need to please. It’s like being stuck in a dime store finger trap: this good/bad girl narrative binary.  Absolutely, it’s easier to tell stories to strangers. I can’t stop anyone from reading or misreading, but once you put out a book, it’s not yours anymore. Everyone is entitled to their hot take and judgment. I did not write this collection for everyone, nor am I for everyone. If my stories make you uncomfortable (hi, dad!) then maybe don’t read me. Or sit with that discomfort and turn it inward. What can be learned from it? We are all fraught, riddled with contradictions. To be human is to be messy.

Yvonne: Has any writing advice struck a chord with you? 

Sara: My undergraduate thesis advisor, Meredith Steinbach, once told me to sit up straight, and even though it took 100 years to process, I finally understood it to mean own your shit. Or nobody puts baby in the corner. Or stop apologizing for taking up space. Or something.  

Yvonne: Dialogue is consistent and maximized throughout your stories—never used as a crutch in the material, but it’s pivotal. How has ‘dialogue’ evolved in your writing over the years? 

Sara: My characters tend to be caught up in their own bullshit, so most of the dialogue is either indirect or internal (monologue.) Because of this, the actual external exchanges hopefully provide relief from that claustrophobia, advance the story and offer some perspective into character. I think there may be a lot more spoken dialogue here than in my first book Doll Palace. Oh and I use quotations which I didn’t do in my last book. Is that evolutionary?

Yvonne: Concise dialogue fuels the interiority of your pieces, imbuing exchanges with greater tension. What is the task of dialogue in your stories? 

Sara: Mostly, it’s an opportunity to magnify the disconnect between what is thought and what is said, which is the subtextual driver of much of this stuff.

Yvonne: While we’re within dialogue, I need to bring up a truth. I owe you the biggest fucking apology. I failed you. Failed you miserably. In 2013, you and I were in a writing workshop group for three years. I didn’t understand how beautiful, extraordinary, and difficult motherhood was. 

Sara: I don’t know what you’re talking about.

Yvonne: Our former writing group. I will never forget the day you wanted to bring your daughter and I was just stupid by telling you no. There were things going on, I wasn’t being flexible. I was losing control of the writing group, trying to hold it together and wanting to take it to another level. I fucked up royally.

Looking back as to why I see the clues of how our group imploded. I had been dealing with my dad's death, then the death of my dog. I was just a mess and unable to ask for support from the group. That moment when you said, "Can I just bring my daughter?" I was like, "No, we can't have that." What the fuck was wrong with me to have said that? When you fuck up, it’s important to hold yourself accountable.

Sara: I don't even remember that. Now that you're describing it, I remember, but I totally—

Yvonne: I want to talk about this and the lit world — the gossip, the bullshit, the bad artist friend, and all that stuff. And, I want to go to a different place with this conversation. We could have been that ugly story. But you had such grace. I didn't even know how to unfriend somebody on Facebook then when I did it, I thought, "She'll never know. I'm not that important to her.” I was in a miserable space. 

Sara: Stop. I adore you.

Yvonne: You had all the right in the world to write a bad artist lit thing. Instead you went with, “What’s really important here?” On a macro and micro level, things happen all the time in writing groups and workshops. To change the lit community, that is to change the shit side of it, let’s talk about it. Why did you do the right thing?

Sara: I didn't feel settled in how things fell apart. I also knew that I didn't know the whole story. I wanted to clear the air. It’s the way I am, and I think that this is part of why I struggle with aspects of social media. I don't really believe we should be going about things in “a screenshot and gossip” passive-aggressive way. I’ve already suffered through the middle school cafeteria.

There are so many great things about social media. I feel very grateful for all the connections and the way that it's nourished so many parts of me. But the nastiness is problematic, and it seems to go against the very tenet of connection and communication.

This might sound precious, but ultimately, it’s about protecting, cultivating, and preserving direct and open avenues of communication, whether it's between writers in a writing group that might have had a misunderstanding, or on any level, politically, socially. I just feel like there's been this winnowing, a narrowing of that line in service to all these other offshoots or capillary conversations that are not speaking to the thing. I think we need to go back and try to widen that one primary vein of communication.

When I saw that you unfriended me, I was upset because I wanted to have an opportunity to talk face to face. I wanted to make sure that if we weren't going to continue to be friends, then at least we would have closure. I don’t hold grudges. Maybe I am confrontational, and people would probably say — I have no idea what people would say about me. But it can eat away at me, when a door is closed without my understanding.

If we can’t communicate with each other, then what are we doing as writers? Maybe we all rubberneck the latest scandal. I’m not saying I’m above that, but dragging is lousy. Even when you’re hurt or angry. I hope that I made that clear in this book. I'm writing fiction, but I hope the extent to which there’s any dragging, the dragging is all on the main character. Otherwise, I think it can feel cheap. We all need to check ourselves. When we write certain stories and write them from a particular place, it's fine to use that emotion and transform or transcend it. 

We all have plenty of rage, and it's fine if that's what allows the story to be born, but I think it's also important to take a pause and take a step back and look and ask yourself, "Why are you writing this? What do you wish to impart to the reader? Is the takeaway one of stinginess or generosity?" If I'm coming from a place of stinginess, maybe the story does not need to see the light of day. That's a good rule of thumb. I would never write-I shouldn't say I would never do anything. But to drag my own writing group? That would not be a place that I’d ever go.

Yvonne: I wanted to talk about this because I don't think that the culture is going to change until a context, or model, is developed where people get a sense of being comfortable with confronting — and the word ‘confront” sounds off-putting, but it really isn't. Writers can be as strong as they are, but they can also be very fearful. I don't want to discuss this much more because I want to talk about lifting up others. You're doing a lot of that. During the pandemic, your Zoom student readings excelled and presented very exciting work. 

Sara: They're amazing. 

Yvonne: What tips can you offer writers setting out to publish with literary journals and navigating feedback and revisions on their submissions? 

Sara: I don’t know that I have any tips and I wouldn’t trust me for advice. Rejection, it happens, and it’s all part of being a practicing writer. (To that end, I’d like to shout out Erika Dreifus’s wonderful resource The Practicing Writer with its wealth of submission opportunities!) Often, we (and by we, I mean I) try to publish too soon, out of some impatience or hunger for external validation, to alleviate the heavies we feel or to move on from a story. That impulse can outweigh the more honest need to sit with a story and go deeper, grapple with the page and be dissatisfied, be merciless, keep pushing beyond fine, OK. 

As for submitting: If we write to evoke emotion, and publishing is how we communicate that experience, then it’s just a way of participating in that larger conversation. Things have changed a whole lot, but I hold onto what Jhumpa Lahiri said to my class once: when she was a grad student, she’d make an event of it. Go to the post office, then have a drink with a friend at a Boston hotel and try to forget the rest. Because the act of putting oneself out there IS the act. Submittable makes it harder by gnawing at our anxiety, but the sooner we can shake that the better we’ll feel and, most likely, we’ll be more productive. What do I know — I have my little envelope of personal rejects from grad school. I took them so hard that I nearly gave up, and then there were years that I did, and looking at them now, with the handwritten scrawls of encouragement, I’m like Oh, bunny. You had no clue. 

It’s a game of attrition. We’ve talked about scarcity mindset before, but I do wish someone had the heart to tell me early on that perseverance is everything. Or maybe I wasn’t listening. Hang in, kid. You will fall many times, you’ll get bruised and cut up, you’ll miss the mount entirely, but just keep clawing for the thorny rope.  

Yvonne: Is there a way to work through the editorial process with greater confidence and collaboration? The revision process can sometimes be ambiguous. You want to ask questions, however, the process and protocol can vary with the different journals and editors.

Sara: Maybe it’s because I come from magazines, but I kind of wish lit editors were more engaged in the editorial process than they often are. I love a solid edit. I’m hot for a lively conversation around sentences and story. I like having my narrative assumptions challenged. I know your question was journal-specific, but I want to say I just emerged from a wonderful collaboration with Jerry Brennan of Tortoise Books, who’s putting out my novel in the fall. We are very different, in style and sensibility, and it was fascinating to have someone who does not occupy the space in your head pore over syntax and rhythm and plot with the dedication and detail you have toward your own work. You can always fight for the integrity of a line. You don’t always have to agree. And yet a good editor will help you see things you might not see or might be resistant to seeing. 

Yvonne: Your characters make choices — some of them bad ones — with story arcs that don’t shame desires, lust, wants, cocks, sucking and fucking. No writer I know of has written about breastfeeding with such sexually charged momentum as you have. Have you encountered editors who bristle against the frank, full expression of the female experience? Or, has any publisher drifted into a conversation that confuses your story characters with your own life? I’m curious if your work has been published more by women? Men? Equally so?

Sara: LOL there is an entire essay inside me about shame and double standards and the rage this kind of thinking instills in me, but I get it. It’s a whack-a-mole. I’ve never paid attention to the gender of the editors who have taken my work. You made me look, and it’s a fairly equal split. Of course, predation is everywhere. There are those who maintain if you write about sex you are signaling– you are asking for it. I should not have to say this but I’m not goddamn signaling. Skirts don’t cause harassment. It’s infuriating how fathers do not have to address any of this, but here we are: I write fiction. I do not write autofiction. First-person is a narrative device designed to shore up psychic distance and establish intimacy between writer and reader. It often feels like the right choice for me, given the kinds of stories I’m telling. Unvarnished, emotionally honest stories. Stories that, every time I encounter this line of questioning, make me realize we need to be telling more of. Not that I’m doing anything new. It’s wild. Humans are sexual beings. We are not asexually reproducing starfish, although sometimes that would be nice. Sex is a basic function right up there with shitting and eating. It could not be more banal. This fact of life is THE fact of life. That it's still perceived as exhibitionist or shocking harkens back to some twisty puritanism — some Madonna fetishization.

Yvonne: JERKS gives actual bandwidth and texture to motherhood and you're not the only writer doing this, but you're doing it very successfully and its provocative. Though it’s not done to be provocative. It’s more a muscle, an engine, pulsing in a manifesto of: this is where this story is and lives. 

Sara: Stories live and die on desire. The extent to which one might be startled to encounter sex and motherhood, I think that speaks to a deep problem, and actually engages the rage with which I was writing these stories. We were in the height of the Trump administration when I was writing most of them. And my god, look where we are right now.

The failure to see sex and motherhood together is a problem as old as Christianity. I know I'm not well versed in Christianity. Like, we had to go on and invent the goddamn Virgin Mary because we've never been able to reconcile that. Yet we have no problem with mothers writing about appetite as it relates to food. It’s all just hunger.

Yvonne: You're hitting on a still unresolved cultural overhang, some of it also tagged to my own issues, not your book. Women too, speaking out or keeping silent, can be part of the problem regarding the ‘narration’ of motherhood. In “Runner’s Paradise” and other stories, I was shocked — not shocked as in “how dare you” — but as in “about fucking time” we recognize that women, without apology, seek and want sensual and erotic pleasure. I was once told that I fuck like a guy which shutdown my orgasm. Why was that ever brought into the moment? We were both being pleasured and then suddenly I felt shame, like I was too aggressive. Your characters are stronger, doing the heavy lifting that’s necessary. Why are women writers — all women — held to a different standard when it comes to their bodies? 

Sara: Desire is the universal driver in the basest and most basic and literal sense. From a narrative perspective: character + want = plot. Boom. I almost feel lazy about it, this shorthand. Like, try a little harder, Sar. It’s funny because in order to become a mother you must have had sex, and yet once you become a mother you cease to exist, you become a vessel absent of any individual desire. I’ll probably keep writing about it until it’s normalized.  

Yvonne: You were the star of our writing group. Not only because of your writing, but because your feedback and suggested edits were valuable. My fear is that publishing is going to try and steal you to be on their side. How have you’ve transitioned into being one of the most dynamic teacher/editors out there?

Sara: I was not the goddamn star! I haven't had too many mentors in my life. A couple. I've been in many workshops, and workshops have not always been successful for me. My teaching style has grown out as a response. I wouldn't call myself a teacher, but a facilitator. 

Yvonne: In what stage of the writing process are you thinking about the reader? 

Sara: At some point, if we have an eye toward publication, we must consider the reader. Maybe there's the esoteric (read: male) exception, but I'm not going to go there right now.

For the most part, we entertain the question of the reader once we finish drafting. It's an act of generosity because, if we're trying to communicate anything with our stories, we want to make sure that what we have to say is coming through effectively. My job is to be able to intuit the intentionality that's already on the page. If the intentionality is not yet known, then I guide the writer in exploring essential questions to get there. Clarity is key. How can we tell it as precisely and powerfully as possible? Once the story goes out in the world, that’s it. People are going to read or ignore regardless, so I love working in the stage prior to submission. It’s an incredible opportunity. I'm not a particularly generative type of teacher. Revision is where my heart lies. For me, 90% of my writing is revision.

Yvonne: What does ambition mean to you?

Sara: Shit. Ambition. It's been a long road for me. That's something that I've had to sit with. I just want to be able to keep writing. Oh man, I’m getting emotional. What's ambition? I think there's ambition and there's desire, and there's want. Ultimately, I came to a place at age 45 where it's not that I threw ambition out but had to reframe it. Ambition can be healthy and instructive and, certainly for some people who have a healthy relationship with ambition, it can be a motivator.

For me, ambition is a self-conscious term paired with expectation. God, watch me cry. I've had to let go of a lot of expectation. Once I got rid of the external expectation that I carried with me from a very young age, then it's been, I feel, like I've entered a much more honest place with my writing and with what I want to do and say. That doesn't mean that I don't have ambition. I want to keep doing what I do. I just want to keep writing books and hopefully I'll get better at it and keep writing more complex stories. Hopefully, there are a couple more books inside of me, but I don't know if I’d call that ambition. Does that make sense to you? 

Yvonne: Yes it does. You okay?

Sara: I'm fine. It's not an interview if someone is not crying, right?

Yvonne: Is there a particular writer that’s had an influence on you? 

Sara: So many. I could go off. But all your earlier statements by A.M. Homes remind me of falling feverishly hard for her work at 21, first with The Safety of Objects, then The End of Alice and Music for Torching. I chose my MFA program because I thought she was teaching, but by the time I arrived, she’d left. So in a way, I’ve been following Homes my whole life. 

Yvonne: How do you see yourself in ten years? 

Sara: Alive.

Yvonne: Choose three verbs to characterize your writing? 

Sara: Fuck, marry, kill, of course.

Yvonne: What books are you reading right now? Is your read by audio, iPad or paper pages? 
Sara: The Art of Revision – Peter Ho Davies (book)

The Final Revival of Opal and Nev – Dawnie Walton (audio)

Oh and I just started The Master and Margarita with my friend Julie Innis, who is one of the smartest, funniest and most exciting writers I know.

Yvonne: Which writers are doing something that you can’t quite put your finger on, but that you absolutely find yourself drawn to? 

Sara: I have the terrific privilege of running workshops with nervy, brilliant writers working at the top of their game. Writers with enormous careers ahead. Their voices are whip-smart and distinct, their narrative choices never easy, and their prose crisp, kinetic and resonant. I’m still turning certain lines over in my heart and head years later. The best thing I can say is that their writing makes me want to write. To be stirred not only on the level of language, but on the verve of story itself. If you’ve ever been in my workshop, I’m talking to you with gratitude.

Yvonne: Podcasts you’re listening to? 
Sara: The podcast situation is overwhelming for an old bird like me. It’s like a hot night of scrolling through Roku before zoning out to the home screen. I don’t know where to begin so I haven’t ventured beyond The Daily, Otherppl, I’m a Writer But, The New Yorker fiction pod, Between the Covers.