Q&A: Steve Stern on writing and 'literary bootlegging'

The distinguished writer Cynthia Ozick has called Skidmore Professor Steve Stern the successor to Isaac Bashevis Singer. Stern’s new novel, The Frozen Rabbi, will be out next spring; meanwhile, Stern will read some of his new short fiction at 8 p.m. Wednesday, April 1, in Davis Auditorium. The reading is free and open to the public.

What works will you be reading on, um, April Fool’s Day?
I’d like to find the person responsible for scheduling the reading on April 1! Of course it’s entirely appropriate. I plan to read two short pieces, one called “Holiday,” which is an entirely frivolous story written for a Hanukkah series on NPR. The other, “Heaven Is Full of Windows,” is a very short story—three pages—and it will leave the audience in shared misery. This is new stuff. I’ve been here for 125 years and I’ve already read everything old. I’d be happy to take questions, which I will dodge.…

You draw on a vast range of Jewish literature, history, and myth—folktales, cabalistic lore, the Talmud, tenement life on the early 20th-century Lower East Side, golems and dybbuks and Liliths—and bring it all together in the present day. How did you come by this material?
Everything I know about the Jewish culture is all book-learned; I have no primary knowledge of Jews and Jewish history. I was raised Reform in Memphis and until I was 25, I thought I was a Lutheran. Sometimes I really feel that somehow, after reading too much of the literature, I woke up Jewish one morning and I haven’t been able to find my way back to my Lutheran roots.

Have you thought of writing about subjects that are not Jewish?
I have this conversation more frequently than you might think. Not long ago I met a woman who was born Hasidic and grew up speaking Yiddish. She tried to convince me to drop the whole Jewish thing; there’s no future in it, she said. Her first novel was about breaking with the whole literature I discovered so late in life.

But I stumbled into it as if down a rabbit hole while gathering oral histories in Memphis’s old Jewish neighborhood, and the literature became a catalyst for memories I didn’t know I had. The awful thing is that it’s inexhaustible. If I could find the bottom of it, I could go back to writing about pirates like I did in grade school. But even then, it was about finding archetypes. You can use archetypal motifs to inject a kind of magic into very ordinary contemporary environments and situations—I think of it as a kind of literary bootlegging. Psychological realism is the convention of our time; if you’re going to try to inject magic, you have to do it furtively—a stealth operation.

Is it fun?
I think it is. It’s liberating. A source of galvanic energy for me. I write what I’d like to read.

As a Skidmore professor/writer, do you find time to write while teaching?
I get up at 5:30 or 6 and get in maybe three hours. This is my two-course semester, teaching creative writing. It alternates with a three-course semester, when I also do a course in Jewish-American literature.

Do you write one story at a time, or do you work on several at once?
I am a serially monogamous writer of stories, but I'm constantly distracted from the current story by a desire to write the next one.

Do you ever stop short in the middle of some daily activity, struck by a detail or a plot twist, and jot it down? If so, does it usually work out?
On any given day I’m repeatedly struck by inspiration, almost all of which turns out to be delusion and vanity.

Do you ever incorporate the tics or habits or speech patterns or character traits of your students or friends into your stories?
Since my last libel suit I’ve been careful to keep friends and acquaintances out of my fiction, which has never stopped them from seeing themselves in it anyway.

Do you revise? A lot? A little?
I revise incessantly, to the extent that I’m still making corrections on the head of the printer’s devil even as he sets the type. (Okay, I exaggerate.)

How do you know when a story or novel is done?
I know a story is finished when I’d prefer to rip out my own intestines and bind them round my arms and head for phylacteries rather than look at the piece again. And if I find out who scheduled the reading for April Fool’s Day, I’ll kick their butt. I used to be funny but I’m out of that. Now I’m deadly earnest. —Interview by Barbara Melville, Office of Communications




Tags: cynthia ozick, steve stern