A friend recommended I read and interview author Susan Tekulve’s work. I contacted her and she was gracious enough to send me a copy of her work. I read it over the course of the weekend and was impressed by its power and beauty. Afterwards I got a chance to chat with Susan about her writing and career. Below is our conversation:
Michael Aloisi: To start off, I have to ask the questions I ask in all of my interviews, starting with: What made you want to write?
Susan Tekulve: The easiest answer to this question is that I was always a big reader, and my love of reading eventually evolved into my desire to write. But that’s not a very interesting answer, so I’ll elaborate. I grew up with a fierce devotion to books and stories and the printed word, and my parents were never discouraging about my excessive reading habits or about my tendency to write all the time. My mom and dad are both readers, and I grew up surrounded by books. I read just about everything in the house—mystery novels, newspapers, The Guinness World Book of Records, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights. I cut my teeth, so to speak, on the Romantic writers. I grew up in a small Catholic community in Southern Ohio, so I also listened to a lot of stories about saints and martyrs. Those stories are so gothic and strange,
and they were told by nuns who really believe that these stories are true, and not just cautionary tales. It has occurred to me recently that I was imprinted by the Romantic writers, like the Brontes and Mary Shelley, but also by those gothic saint stories told to me by the nuns. These two forms of story telling may have created my writing sensibilities. I was informed by the nuns’ tales of guilt, fear, self-denial, sin, leprosy, and keeping your virginity. I was also informed by the Romantics, who instilled a love of nature, the wilderness, the beautiful and the sublime in me. Overall, this is not such a bad background for someone who wants to be a writer. By the time I was in the sixth grade, I was allowed to walk to the public
library by myself and pick out my own books to read. I remember walking up the hill to the library, picking out a book, often a mystery, then walking back down the hill with my book. As I read each book, I usually tried to figure out how it was going to end before I finished it. So, I must have had that “writerly urge” to analyze everything I read, and then try to emulate what I’d read in my own writing. Once, after reading Beowulf, I wrote a modern “epic poem,” featuring myself as a Grendel-type protagonist battling the nuns and various other characters I encountered during a day at school. I even used “kennings.” My teacher thought this poem was very strange when I brought it to her. In fact, she read it aloud to the class and
pointed out how strange it was. “This is really strange, but good,” she announced. But my dad was awfully pleased when I read it to him. Actually, he collaborated with me a little when I was writing the epic poem. He is an ex-Navy man, and he’s always had a natural tendency to use naval metaphors for the items in our house. For instance, he called our milk “the cow.” He loved the parts in Beowulf where the sea
is called “the whale road” or “the swan’s way.” He loved making up new kennings with me.
It wasn’t until I was in college that I took formal creative writing classes. Those classes were revelatory, and it was probably in those classes that I recognized that I wanted to write. My first creative writing teacher was the poet James Reiss. He is a very tall, lanky man with a New York accent, and I remember him sauntering into the class room the first day of the semester and reading the William Carlos Williams poem, “This is Just to Say,” the poem about the ripe plums. Jim told us that a poem was in its details, and that it could be about anything. Then he told us to go home and write a poem about anything.
I went back to my dorm room and wrote a poem about my grandmother’s bunion surgery. The poem detailed my grandmother’s marriage to my grandfather, a Sicilian immigrant who grew up in a cold-water flat in the river bottoms of Cincinnati along with twenty-one brothers and sisters. He ran away from home at fifteen and lied about his age so that he could drive a truck for a fruit company. At nineteen, he met my grandmother while he was making a delivery “uptown.” She was a blond haired, blue-eyed Methodist who belonged to the Daughters of the Revolution. My grandfather thought she was a “real American lady,”
and was smitten by her. She would have nothing to do with him, of course, because he was Italian AND a Catholic; in fact, the first time he approached her at the ice cream parlor next to the market where he
delivered, she excused herself to go to the restroom, jumped out the window and ran home. But he courted her for several years, even converting to the Methodist church so that she would marry him
finally. Eventually, he became an accountant who saved every penny, but he bought my grandmother everything he perceived to be American—the first color t.v. sold in town, a house on two acres of
land beside a horse farm (though he hated animals). A few years before my grandmother died, my grandfather decided that he wanted to buy my grandmother an “avante-garde” surgery to remove her bunions. It ended up crippling her for the rest of her life.
So, I wrote all this into a poem and titled it “My Grandmother’s Bunions.” I handed it in the next class period with the rest of the students. The class period after that, Jim Reiss sauntered in and started passing back poems to people, making remarks about how details in poems should not sound like “bad rock song lyrics” or “Marlboro cigarette ads.” Then, he walked over to my desk. I lowered my eyes, readying myself for some kind of crushing comment, but he said, “Bunions!” Now that’s the kind of detail that makes poetry!” After
that pronouncement, I was hooked. I went home from class every day and wrote poems late into the night, thinking only about images, the turning of a line, the sounds that words can make. I kept taking poetry classes until there weren’t any more to take, and then I took all the fiction classes offered. The more I wrote and learned about the writing craft, the better a reader I became. Looking back, I don’t think the bunion poem was a very good poem, but the thrill of Jim’s early encouragement—the fact that he singled me out as someone who could produce “The Detail” that makes poetry—was what channeled me into the study of creative writing. I already loved reading books, and I already wrote things, but it was Jim, and many other creative writing teachers, who showed me that it was be possible, and acceptable, to admit that I wanted to write.
MA: When you decided to start writing, did it come naturally to you or did you have to study the craft before you produced anything of quality?
ST: Oh, I definitely think writers need to study the craft of writing, and I think that the most enduring writers devote years, sometimes decades, to a writing apprenticeship before they produce anything of depth and quality. Contrary to what some people believe, writing is not therapy or emoting upon a page. It is a skill that must be practiced and honed. Even the most naturally-gifted writers study other writers so that they know what’s been written before them, and how it was written, so that they can learn the craft. Writers also need to know what’s already been done so that eventually they can evolve and establish their own style and voice. It always seems strange to me, generally speaking, that so many people believe they can pick up a pen and paper, (or a cell phone) and miraculously write/text-message a poem or piece of fiction. This is a myth that seems particular to the literary arts. Visual artists have long apprenticeships, and most people agree that this is a necessary process. For instance, Picasso studied all other periods of painting before he started creating the Cubist paintings that he is known for today. So it always unnerves me just a bit when I see people with no training “writing” poems or stories on napkins in some public place, never revising them, and then calling these musings on a napkin “a poem” or “a story,” sometimes even publishing this stuff. Publishing can be outwardly affirming. Who doesn’t want to see their work published? On the other hand, the publishing world is very fickle, so I think it is best to concentrate on making yourself a better writer, in private, first. If you approach the act of writing with expertise and humility, then you’ll be in a firmer place with your writing. You’ll have more longevity, and you’ll get through the dry periods when you aren’t receiving very much attention or outward affirmation.
But let me step down off my soapbox for a moment to answer your question. Yes, I have some natural ability. For instance, I have an eye for detail and character, but I struggle constantly with plot and pacing. That’s why I have to study other writers—continually. I never stop studying other writers, and I usually feel like I’m starting from scratch every time I start a new story or a novel chapter. Even as I work on this new novel manuscript, I think of each chapter as an individual “new task.” I have been very lucky to have many good writing teachers and many good writing colleagues who have been willing to read and comment upon my work. Still, when I want to learn how to do something, I study the work of other writers.
To continue reading this interview, click: Susan Tekulve Interview
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