Love, Love, Love
An Interview with Sara Schaff
by Karin Cecile Davidson
Sara Schaff is the author of the story collections “The Invention of Love” (Split/Lip Press, 2020) and “Say Something Nice About Me” (Augury Books, 2016), a CLMP Firecracker Award Finalist in fiction and a 2017 Next Generation Indie Book Award Finalist for short fiction. Her writing has appeared in Catapult, Kenyon Review Online, Yale Review Online, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. An assistant professor of English at SUNY Plattsburgh, Schaff has taught at Oberlin College, the University of Michigan, and St. Lawrence University, as well as abroad. She lives with her husband and daughter in the North Country of New York State.
“The Invention of Love” and “Say Something Nice About Me” share a language that is at once straightforward and deeply considered, as well as a landscape that reveals as much about character as it does about geography, ranging from Central and Upstate New York and the Midwest to China, Colombia, and Italy. Generations of characters are examined, many balanced on the precipice where middle-class meets poverty, from youthful, wishing children to mature, meandering adults, and their stories are threaded with themes of hope, disquiet, friendship, envy, solitude, and community. With great care and understanding, Schaff explores childhood loneliness, teenage rebellion, young adult aspirations, adult anxiety—the kind that occurs between having children and peering forward to old age—all within the boundless and hopeful measures of love. In prose that is direct and honest, the stories reach toward strands of emotion buried within or tightly encircling the characters, breathing them alive. This is a breathtaking act, and it is the reason to keep turning the pages.
Of “Say Something Nice to Me,” Peter Ho Davies writes: “These are stories of a devastated domesticity, of families and homes undermined by loss (of parents, of lovers, of jobs), and of survivors clinging to one another … This is domestic fiction torn down, laid bare, stripped to the studs. These are stories about where we live now.” And Bonnie Nadzam extols “The Invention of Love” as “a subtle, alchemical wonder … transmuting darkness into something like love, or love itself.”
Our house was too big. It dwarfed me and my mother … It left room for ghosts in every season.
—Sara Schaff, “Faces at the Window”
KARIN CECILE DAVIDSON: “Faces at the Window”—the first story in “Say Something Nice About Me”—pulls us into the world of 11-year-old Evelyn, called Eve or Evie or sometimes simply E by her single mother. In her afternoons and evenings alone while her mother is working, Evie understands that there may be ghosts in their large ruin of a house, many of them children who died long ago from cholera or scarlet fever, sometimes suggested by flickering lights and shadows in mirrors. Also ghostlike is Evie’s father, whom she has never met, “as much a part of the house as the ghosts that belonged to its bricks and mortar and ugly rugs … his filmy presence surveying me …”
To stretch this a bit, one might say that ghosts travel the stories of both your collections: Dara wondering about her disappeared mother in “When I Was Young and Swam to Cuba”; the ghost of memory that worries the father in “Ports of Call”; the remembered mothers in “House Hunting” and “Our Lady of Guazá.”
Tell us about ghosts in your writing, and perhaps ghosts in literature that call to you.
SARA SCHAFF: When I was a kid, like Evie, I lived near a graveyard where the people who built my house were buried. I imagined grand and tragic lives for them, especially the children. My neighbor was about my age, and we’d hang out at his house until dark and talk about ghosts until we could see them hovering in front of us. And then I would have to go home past this dense little grove of pine trees, in which shadows lived, and I would run as fast as I could, terrified out of my mind.
My ghosts now are my characters. When a character takes up residence in my mind, when she begins haunting me, I’ll follow her into a story. For years I felt haunted by other ghosts—of people, losses, regrets. Those ghosts could be debilitating. But also useful. Writing them into my work in direct and indirect ways has made the haunting less acute.
I love what a good ghost in literature can do for both metaphor and narrative—raise and protect a human child in Neil Gaiman’s beautiful “The Graveyard Book,” or assist Abraham Lincoln in his grieving process in George Saunders’s “Lincoln in the Bardo.” My favorite ghosts right now live on the fantastic television series, “Dickinson,” in which Emily Dickinson often talks to spirits, or in the first season, Death, in order to get at something in her art. When you are creating, it often feels like talking to ghosts, even if, in the end, you’re just talking to versions of yourself.
On Friday afternoon, while waiting for her father to arrive with his new girlfriend, Margaret tended to the rabbits in the shed with her mother’s help … Margaret hoped that by stretching out every task, she might slow time enough to stop it completely … It shocked Margaret how little adults thought she understood. She had an uncanny ability to pick up on the emotional lives of grownups around her, and the tensions and strange intimacies that grew between them over time.
—Sara Schaff, “Shelter”
DAVIDSON: Thinking again of Evie in “Faces at the Window”—but also of Margaret in “Shelter,” Dara in “When I Was Young and Swam to Cuba,” and Lily in “Ports of Call”—the emotional lives of the younger children in your stories are beautifully wrought.
What brought you to Margaret’s stern consideration of grownups, Dara’s innocent, yet frightening way of searching for her mother, Lily’s shy buoyancy, and Evie’s reflective loneliness?
SCHAFF: In writing most of those stories, I was also working through some of my own childhood longings and losses by creating scenarios and relationships that had not existed for me. Each of those characters have pieces of my childhood in them: like Evie, I was lonely and believed in ghosts; like Lily, I was shy. Like Margaret, I was very serious, and I was a close reader of adult interactions. Like Margaret, I knew when my mother was falling in love with a man who, in my child’s righteous logic, was not available since he was married. Then he became my stepfather. When he and his two kids moved in with us, I felt like Antonia, Dara’s new stepsister: angry, resentful, sulky. I don’t blame my 12-year-old self for feeling that way, but I wish I had learned earlier, as Antonia does, to feel more compassionate toward my step-siblings’ own losses.
DAVIDSON: There are moments in both “The Invention of Love” and “Say Something Nice to Me” in which structure comes forward, teasing out the stories in different ways. “Ph.D.,” for example, leads us through a tale of displaced, or perhaps misplaced, love by way of the stages of a Ph.D. program, its sections called Research, Preliminary Exams, Chapters 1-2 and 3-4, Footnote, Annotated Bibliography, and Oral Defense. “We Are Ready” benefits beautifully from a 3-2-1 construction, the last line of each section leading to and repeated in the first line of the next, in turn, creating a lovely, ethereal, almost sinister atmosphere. In “The All Clear” there seems to be an uncomplicated 1-2-3 arrangement; however, the final move in the triptych moves backward, rather than forward.
Speak of the architecture of these stories, the sequencing of each collection, and the decisions considered in terms of how you wished the pieces to play out.
SCHAFF: I love structure, even when the architecture isn’t obvious, as it is in the stories you point out. Good architecture in my writing is like good architecture in our lives: I need to build the right house for the people who are going to live in it.
Structure provides me with a roadmap when I’m blocked. With “Ph.D.,” I initially only had the doctoral student and her longing, but no story, just rather insufferable pining. Once I came up with the organizing principle of the dissertation, the story moved into the architecture that I’d made for it. The narrator’s longing now had a direction, one in which some satire was built in, which helped alleviate the melancholy.
“We Are Ready” also came from a blocked place. My daughter was a newborn. I was exhausted, depressed, and certain I would never write again. My husband, a poet, assured me I would and gave me a prompt: try using the form of a crown of sonnets as a way into a story. And it worked! Once again, form saved me: with a structure in place, characters and their story could move in.
[As] I walked around the lake, I experienced real moments of joy. It was easy to see why Xihu had inspired generations of poets. Something about the water and the rhythm of my walk made me especially aware of the syllables surrounding me, the tones of my adopted language that I had once found so difficult but now thought very beautiful.
—Sara Schaff, “West Lake”
DAVIDSON: The geography of your stories sometimes leaves the United States and travels across oceans to China and Colombia and Italy. Relationships that are severed by distance or death or the passage of time are realized in these places: in “West Lake” when a woman in her ninth month of pregnancy leaves her disloyal husband; in “We Are Ready” as the mother remembers her home; “Our Lady of Guazá” when two sisters come to a place of understanding after their mother’s death; and in “The All Clear” in the aftermath of a tornado which brings a long-lost life to mind.
Do your stories, by chance, begin with place, somewhere for your characters to walk about as you get to know them? What marked the genesis of these four stories?
SCHAFF: Most of my stories begin with character, but I also need to see and smell where those characters live, and each of the stories you mention began, on some level, with setting. With “Our Lady of Guazá” place came first. I knew I wanted to set a story in La Catedral de Sal, in Zipaquirá, Colombia, from the moment I descended into its dark, sulfurous depths. (My husband and I lived in Bogotá at the time.) The Salt Cathedral is so evocative—a site of historical industry, religious pilgrimage, and a genuine artistic and architectural marvel. You can’t spend a couple of hours underground where miners once worked and worshipped and not be a little changed.
“We Are Ready,” as I mentioned, began with form, but also with a strong sense memory of the house I grew up in in Etna, New York: big, old, surrounded by dense trees. “The All Clear” came out of living in the Midwest. When I was pregnant in Ann Arbor, Michigan, one serious tornado warning sent me and my husband into the basement for a long time, and when we resurfaced there was minimal damage on our street, but the damage was severe in a nearby town. I wrote the story only after we’d moved away from Michigan. (I’m usually only ready to write about a place once I no longer live there.)
“West Lake,” which is set in Hangzhou, China, gelled once I figured out the situation—a pregnant woman who has fled her unfaithful husband in Beijing to give birth in another city to punish him. But this story, too, really started with setting. I tried for years to write a story set on the lake in Hangzhou, but the drafts went nowhere. For a while, I had tried to avoid writing too much about pregnancy or infidelity. An editor who looked at my first book said that the stories were too familiar, specifically that “pregnancy and academia” had been overdone. I was so annoyed! Yet the criticism stuck with me. Somewhere along the way in workshop, I had also picked up the idea that adultery was a clichéd scenario I should avoid. Once I let all that go, I let back in my pregnant characters and my adulterers, and I was a happier writer.
DAVIDSON: In your stories Tolstoy, Wharton, and Medieval French poetry make appearances. What other authors and kinds of literature from the past have inspired your writing? And contemporary influences? Are these partly orchestrating what you are working on now?
SCHAFF: The project I am working on now, like “My Husband’s Second Wife,” has a central text at its heart. In “My Husband’s Second Wife,” it’s “Anna Karenina”; in my novel-in-progress, it comes from within the story itself, a book within the book, one that is inspired by Charlotte Bronte, Jean Rhys, and Iris Murdoch. I love the idea of works of art as both organizing principles and object lessons.
Contemporary writers who have provided that kind of object lesson for me include Elena Ferrante, who reminded me it was okay to employ melodrama (and infidelity!) in fiction and to write about the deep friendships and rivalries between women. Also Alice Walker, whose books I read when I was in high school—though not for a class. I found all of her novels at the Ithaca Public Library, and I still remember the excitement of wandering around the stacks alone and being drawn to her titles. “The Temple of My Familiar,” in particular, was revelatory: a riveting novel about love, desire, betrayal, systemic racism, reincarnation, the power of storytelling and art—told from a point of view I’d not seen before in fiction: a rotating third-person narrator, who reveals to us the lives of many characters and multiple places and time periods. I didn’t know a novel could do all of that, and I was mesmerized. Because I was so young, Walker’s writing imprinted itself on my reading habits (and writing goals), becoming a standard by which I measured and selected my books as an adult.
She is the one who wakes up every morning with my father, she is the one who reminds him of what is important every day … And because she does not say how weird it is that in the other room, the two men she loves are playing the piano together, I do not mention it either.
—Sara Schaff, “Ports of Call”
DAVIDSON: LOVE: a three-part question. And we are talking Melba Moore’s “I Got Love” kind of love: big, loud, gorgeous, and soaring over 1970 Broadway audiences lucky enough to have tickets for the musical “Purlie.” So yeah, LOVE!
There are many definitions of love in your stories, but, to me, three stand out: love filtered with envy, as shown in “Something Else” and “Say Something Nice About Me”; love unrealized or unconditional or misplaced, as revealed in “The Invention of Love,” “Shelter,” “House Hunting,” “That Won’t Be Necessary,” and “Noreen O’Malley at the Sunset Pool”; and love above all, which radiates out from “Ports of Call” and “When I Was Young and Swam to Cuba.” Relationships here are tilted and appraised and balanced on their uneven sides. Katie and Marjorie, Kim and Freddie and Miriam and Gregory, Margaret and Alice and Riley and Helen, and—oh my goodness!—Antonia and Dara.
Tell us, tell us, tell us about love, love, love.
SCHAFF: It feels right to begin with ghosts and end with love. Because doesn’t loving someone or something feel akin, at times, to being haunted? When it comes down to it, love is at the heart of every story I write—love between partners, love between friends and family members, love of art and ideas and love for the idea of love. A story has no life for me until I can understand who and what the characters love and long for.
That unrealized love you mention is one that felt foundational to my adolescence and my 20s: the kind of love that is immediate and huge and so consuming it can rarely be equally reciprocated—and it can be directed just as easily at an alluring friend or elusive parent as a romantic love interest.
You can also feel that kind of intense love for a life you cannot have, due to circumstance and systems beyond your control. Our country is full of structures that deny people entry into the lives we’re promised by our textbooks and our politicians—the American Dream!—but only for those who love the dream enough to work their lives into the ground for it. We’ve been taught to love our American myths as a way of preventing real change. And that is a hopeless, oppressive love.
“Love above all”—I’m glad you see that version of love threading through my stories. This love is big but not overwhelming; it’s chronic versus acute, honest as well as compassionate. The way we live now—with our myths cracking while the systems that created them remain intact—we need that kind of consistent, expansive love to sustain us.
Karin Cecile Davidson, Interviews Editor