This year’s Breakwater Review Fiction Contest Judge is Eileen Pollack, author of award-winning novels including Breaking and Entering, which was named a 2012 New York Times Editor’s Choice selection, short story collections, a memoir, a book of creative nonfiction called Woman Walking Ahead: In Search of Catherine Weldon and Sitting Bull, which was made into a movie starring Jessica Chastain, and most recently, a book of essays called Maybe It’s Me: On Being the Wrong Kind of Woman. To name just a few of her accolades: she is the recipient of fellowships from the Massachusetts Arts Council, the NEA, the Michener Foundation, and the Rona Jaffe Foundation. Her stories have appeared in journals such as Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, and New England Review, and her writing has appeared in Best American Short Stories, Best American Essays, and Best American Travel Writing. 

       Eileen has also spent much of her career teaching creative writing. She served as the Director of the Helen Zell MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan for many years. Her most recent teaching appointment was Visiting Assistant Professor at the MFA program at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. 

       During a virtual chat with Heather Beckius, one of Breakwater Review’s fiction editors, Eileen talks about her writing routine, how to find one’s writing voice, taking creative risks, women’s ambition, and what she’s working on next. 

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This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

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You have had a long and impressive literary career, having written award-winning novels, short story collections, essays, and long form nonfiction as well. How do you move between these different forms of writing? That is, how do you decide what form a piece wants to take, and what does each form allow you to say that the others don’t?

 

In some sense, it’s pretty simple, at least the divide between fiction and nonfiction. When I want the impact of what I write to be that this actually happened — to me, to someone else, in this world — and I want you to believe me, then I write nonfiction. I studied with John Hersey who wrote the book Hiroshima and he was a stickler for writing to be as true as you can make it. If you don’t know how true something is, you let your readers know that, and you try to get other viewpoints. 

       If I want to hide something, or change how things really happened, or combine different events or people, I'm going to fictionalize the material. 

       The length, whether fiction or nonfiction, is common sense for me. Does it fit in a short story, or does it not fit in a short story? I had a wonderful teacher at Iowa: James Alan McPherson. He worked his way up packing groceries in the South. One of his jobs was putting potatoes into bags. He had a 5 lb or 10 lb bag of potatoes. If he stuffed 8 lbs into a 5 lb bag, it would pop open and spill in the parking lot, and if he fit 8 lb of potatoes in a 10 lb bag, people felt cheated. He would get a feel for what 5 lbs vs. 10 lbs felt like. I always ask my students: is this a 5 lb bag stuffed with 8 lbs? If so, take 3 lbs out. You just have to get a feel for what to do with the space. 

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Do you have any rituals or habits that help you ease into writing? 

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Oh yeah, we all do. Before the internet, it was a much healthier literary ritual. I would sit down and read something where the language wasn’t going to warp my natural voice but was going to make me want to write. I looked to certain writers for a metaphor or description I loved and that would make me write for a while. When I’d get stuck, I’d read some more. And of course we get up and clean the house and make coffee and all that stuff. 

       But then came the internet and the only game available was Solitaire, so I would play Solitaire. And if I won three games in a row, I’d have to start writing. Otherwise I’d play Solitaire all day. Now, there’s so much more. And I don’t teach as much. I’m not raising a child so I have much more time in my day. So I do my email and this and that. And I play bridge online. I play eight hands of bridge and then I have to start writing. 

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Do you get words on the page, or are you more time-based, in terms of daily writing goals? 

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Much more time-based. I write in the morning, then I have lunch, then I try to write for another hour or so. Then, when I can’t do any more, I attend to the business of the day. If I’m revising instead of writing, I can do many more hours in a day. Because revising is much more pleasurable. It’s just harder to get the first draft on the page. 

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Do you write every single day without fail? 

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Pretty much. I don’t have a partner now. When you live with a partner, when you have kids, there’s a lot more that intervenes. When I was running the MFA program at Michigan, I couldn’t even keep up with my own life. But now if I’m home, I write every day. 

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You taught for a long time. Are there ways that teaching impacted your writing, either positively or negatively, or both? 

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Mostly positively, especially when I started teaching as a grad student. When you’re trying to figure out what’s not working in a student’s story and trying to help them figure out how to revise, you have to figure out what you think a story is. You figure it out through your own process, because you want to articulate how you do things. But you also figure out how other types of people with different types of minds and notions of creativity write. 

       Back in the day, before everyone was talking about DEI, I just knew that to help people write their own stories, or hear their own voices, they had to read literature that sounded like something they could write. The writer John Hersey gave me Grace Paley and Leonard Michaels to read. I hadn’t thought I’d be a writer because I didn’t think you could write about stuff I knew about growing up in the Borscht Belt in the voice that I could write. Then I read Grace Paley and Leonard Michaels and I thought, they sound like my uncles and aunts, so it freed me up to write. I knew the Black students, the gay students — they needed to see themselves, hear themselves — so I was trying to read much more widely than I would’ve read otherwise. And I put those stories in the syllabus. They gave me many more options of voices and structures and materials. I thought, I can use my own voice, my own material to do something similar or my version of that. So I think I was helping my students but I was also helping myself. 

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I’m thinking a lot about voice, having just finished the first semester of the MFA program at UMass. You talked a little bit about how your voice was developed. How would you describe your writerly voice and what is your advice for emerging writers who hope to develop their own? 

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I grew up in this very strange region of New York State, the Catskills, the Borscht belt. It was a heavily Jewish immigrant resort area and it was known for standup comedy. It was pretty vulgar, earthy, obscene comedy, very sexual. And it was heavily Yiddish inflected. Everybody spoke Yiddish. It was many people's first language, including my family [and] the guests at my grandparents' hotel. But then I ended up at Yale, and the Jewish students there—I didn't even know the Jewish students there were Jewish. They said, Oh, my family would never have gone to the Borscht Belt. You know, they were these Manhattan, very intellectual, sophisticated Jews. And so I just kind of wiped that clean, and then I studied in England on a Marshall Fellowship and then when I came back, I lived in the Midwest. I reported in New Hampshire. I was trying to write like Updike, Cheever, and Flannery O'Connor. One of my early stories is written in this Southern accent and takes place in Georgia. (laughs) I love Flannery O’ Connor. Then a friend of mine said, Eileen, if I had grown up in a hotel in the Catskills, I'd be writing about that. And I was like, yeah, you know, and that's why I went back to Grace Paley. I went back to Leonard Michaels. I went to Philip Roth, who I really love, and Lore Segal. And so, I turned to the real voice I had grown up hearing; but I also had this other voice, which was sort of the John Cheever, the much more mainstream American. One is very comic and rhythmic and Yiddish-inflected, and the other is not. My nonfiction tends to be more in the serious voice. 

       What I do for my students to help them find their voices, especially undergrads, is to assign them to pick the best storyteller from back home. Preferably a family member. Try to capture their voices as they tell their best story. 

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In your own work, what would you consider the biggest creative risk you've taken and did it pay off in the way you hoped? 

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I think the risk taking is more in my nonfiction. I try to write the truth of women's lives — about my life, why I didn't become the physicist I wanted to be. Dating, sexuality, and some of it didn't seem risky to write about, to me. But again, I came from a place where people were pretty out there. If you've seen Dirty Dancing, you know the culture of the Catskills is not shy. And I'm ambitious and I thought people wouldn’t care about my work if I’m not taking risks. And I had wonderful teachers all along who had taken risks. They encouraged me to take risks. If I took the risk, they rewarded it. 

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I love that you use that word “ambitious.” How has your relationship to ambition changed over time, if it has? 

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Ambition was not something that women ever admitted to when I was coming out as a writer. I write about that a lot in my book, The Only Woman in the Room, in the science and STEM fields. What I started to notice in Michigan was that my male students were very happy to say, I want to be a famous author. I'm ambitious. I want to be the great American novelist. The women wouldn't say that. So I would give them pep talks and tell them they’re not making big enough claims for their work and or themselves. That started to change, but it's still, I think, hard for women to admit how ambitious they are. 

       Back to talking about risk — I think the scariest thing I ever did was write my most recent book, a book of essays called Maybe It's Me. The title essay is long, and it was originally envisioned as a one-woman performance, a stand up-routine about dating in your 60s in New York City. I told the truth about it, and honestly, I thought if I publish this, I will never be asked on a date again. No one will ever want to date me. I don't mean that in an ironic way. I’m being completely serious. My friend said, Are you really gonna publish this? But I think that's the role that writers are supposed to play in our society, to tell the truth. 

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Is there anything you're curious about right now, artistically or intellectually, whether you’ll write about it or not? 

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The book I'm working on now, it’s based on a course I taught at Michigan on Jewish American comic fiction. It’s about any oppressed minority using comedy. What is the role of comedy in dealing with oppression, marginalization, trauma? It’s also a way for me to write about some controversial aspects of being Jewish right now, without me directly saying this is what I think. I don't want it centered on me. I want to center it on the writers who’ve taken the risk for the past 150 years in America: Philip Roth, Lore Segal. I want to examine what they said and how they said it, and then come in around the edges and explore how it's playing out now. I have a lot of questions about what it was like to grow up Jewish in 20th century, 21st century America. I’m thinking about Israel, my relationship to Israel, other minorities in America, capitalism, everything. So that's what I'm taking on. This one feels scary, obviously, but it's based on a course I taught at Michigan for quite a few years, and it was really a wonderful course, if I must say so myself. I had a lot of fun teaching it and I think the students really enjoyed it. 

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I'll be looking forward to reading those essays when they come out. To end the interview, I’ll ask whether there's any great books you read in the past year or recently that you would recommend to the readers. 

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I don't have a long memory, so I'll just talk about the book I just finished, which is The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (by Kiran Desai). I thought it was terrific. It’s a love story, but it's also about being in between cultures, and how to write from that in-between place, either as a journalist or as a fiction writer. She did a fantastic job of combining characterizations and all the good things about writing with the political stuff and the meta stuff about writing. It's the first book in a long time that I really just wanted to stay up and read another chapter.