AITA: A Conversation About Jerks with Sara Lippmann, by Shayne Terry

I met Sara Lippmann in early 2016 at a coffee shop in Ditmas Park. We were there for a reading she’d arranged for her workshop students. This is a thing she does: when one of her workshops comes to a close, she organizes and emcees a public reading. She pushes her students out into the world.

I was in a workshop with a different teacher, but she invited all of us to participate, and I was the only student who showed up and didn’t know anyone. I read a story about turtles, and afterward Sara said to me, "I have a story about turtles, too."

That story was “Let All Restless Creatures Go,” which follows a young man with alopecia who enrolls in a community college course on wetlands ecology and finds himself roped into the professor’s (possibly doomed) mission to protect the season’s diamondback terrapin hatchlings. That story also became the fulcrum of Sara’s new collection published by Mason Jar Press, Jerks.

The stories in Jerks do what Sara does best: they get right to the ugly, beautiful core of being human. They feature mostly women, many of them with children who require lots of tending, some of them still breastfeeding, so literally giving their bodies over to this care work, plus a smattering of adolescent girls, because what better way to explore what it means to be a jerk? And let’s not forget the husbands, who range from neutral/boring to chaotic/aggressive. Every single character seeks some sort of connection beyond this, where they've found themselves.

Sara and I spoke over email, then in person, then over email again, then in person again. This interview is a woven thing, but it feels like a conversation we've been having for years. That night in 2016, after our reading, I went home and read Sara’s turtle story, and I immediately enrolled in her next workshop. I’ve been learning from her ever since.

Shayne Terry: The title of the collection invites a question as one reads each story: Who's the jerk here? (Am I the asshole?) But the way I see it, we're all jerks.

Sara Lippmann: LOL I love that "Where's Waldo?" approach, like an enormous jigsaw puzzle, only, yeah, you can't isolate the dude with the funny cap. It's part of human DNA. There's no escaping it. Goes without saying I very much include myself here so there is no "gotcha" intent, nothing moralistic about it, to the contrary — but I do hope readers feel that mirror.

ST: And yet your main characters seem to resist generalizations about what people are or aren't. We get all these pronouncements from the other characters — “people always turn out to be shitbags,” “you can't count on anyone,” “people on reality TV weight loss shows are garbage humans” — and, one by one, our main characters are forced to reconcile these worldviews with their own experiences. Do people always turn out to be shitbags? Can you count on anyone? What is a garbage human anyway? Each story seems to ask, "Why are we like this?" Was that a question you consciously grappled with while writing?

SL: I wrote a lot of these stories against the backdrop of the infuriating election campaign then into the Trump era, and sure, we draw from our waters, so there's no shortage of rage and despair. It's not exactly a stretch to arrive at the conclusion that people are inherently disappointing (dogs over people) but I also think that's reductive and stingy. There may not be a ton of happy endings but if I didn't believe in our capacity to change or grow or evolve, to love and feel and connect, if I didn't see the tender in the bark, then why write?

Yeah, people can be shitbags, but that’s not particularly interesting. I tried to push on that. Subvert categorization. For all the in-your-face judgment of the title, it's not a judgment. We are all fallible, deeply flawed, and perhaps doomed — we are both the turtles of Barnegat Bay and the predatory forces of extinction. The trick is how to go on — how to live, how to preserve a kernel of hope, and dare to love anyway. We're all fucked, so now what? What's for dinner? Even if we may all be cannibals when push comes to shove. (But that's another story.)

ST: I would actually say that the collection is full of hope, precisely because your main characters rarely give in to despair.

I have a theory about the story that is the heart of the collection and the story that is the key to the collection. I see "The Polish Girl" as the key to the collection, an answer to many of the earlier stories, because it gives us an outsider's view of some of the group dynamics we were inside in earlier stories — I'm thinking of the tense group getaways, the spouse swapping, the complicated couplings that are a theme throughout.

The Polish Girl, this girl from New Jersey who answers an ad for a Polish girl to care for a house in the South of France, completely reinvents herself and suffers no real consequences, showing that the world is actually full of possibilities. So many of these stories center wives and mothers clawing at the edges of their lives, and then the final story comes along and says, "You could do this. You could walk out of your life and into someone else's."

SL: “The Polish Girl” was the last story I wrote, and when I finished it, I knew I'd hit the end of the book. I knew it would go last.

ST: Yours was the first workshop that made me feel like a real writer. You were the first to suggest that I submit, and you said it as if it were obvious — not like you were a mentor encouraging a mentee, but like we were writer friends just talking about the business side of things. I had never thought about submitting before.

And that class, which spun off into a writing group, was so incredibly special. Magical, for a time. People were really doing their most daring work. There was a level of vulnerability that is hard to achieve in a group of basically strangers thrown together. What's your secret? How do you create these spaces?

SL: I have no secrets. A workshop, a group of any sort, lives and dies on the people in it. The people make the dynamic, form the magic. My style is both an outgrowth and response to the countless workshops I've been in over the last 25 years, some of which have been transformative, and others total stink bombs. Where do they soar or falter? On trust. Only when we fully and wholly trust each other can we do our most honest work on the page, be sensitive and intuitive readers, and open ourselves to receive thoughtful feedback from each other. I've witnessed plenty of posturing (from both "famous professor" and "anointed student") and certainly participated in my share out of some fear-driven desire to fit "how a writer should be." As if I'd be found out for the fraud I am. But when we are busy being self-conscious or envious or erecting walls, that's toxic. We are shortchanging ourselves and our stories.

So I think the challenge and goal for any facilitator is to foster trust. How do we establish that foundation in a short period of time? Bring people together from all over, people who are carrying their own deeply private anvils, and say, hey hey, now we're in the piddling pool together. Who wouldn't be wary? Especially when so many MFA programs fuel that scarcity model. (People are jerks, right?) It's an enormous ask to go in there and say, good morning, please remove your skin and take out your hearts, but I try to model this by checking the ego at the door, as much as I can, stepping into the room with love and fallibility, and by being as open and honest and flexible as possible.

When I was a baby teacher of Expos 101 in a now-defunct GED/2-year college program, I had this student bust in spewing anti-semitic epithets. Maybe something happened on his commute. He didn't know I was Jewish. He didn't even know any Jews. He was pissed off and distrustful for good reason — the system had failed him. He'd been in Rikers. Why the hell should he sit in a classroom and read this thing called Night? I told him my story. Later, he told me his.

There is no authority, nor is there anarchy. Each group shapes it. Each workshop, therefore, is different. Each student has as much to teach me if not more. I'm just another person in the room. We're all just people.

As for submitting, you know this already, but it's part of being what Erika Dreifus calls in her wonderful resource newsletter "a practicing writer." Which isn't to say we need to be burdening submissions queues by sending out half-baked stories willy-nilly. But when they are ready to go out in the world, the most generous thing we can do for our work is to let it go — to participate in the larger conversation, find readers, connect.

ST: What has all your teaching done for your writing?

Many, many people are adept at juggling their course loads with their own projects, but I'm crummy at it. I find teaching consuming, particularly on Zoom, which requires extra energy and focus. Teaching gives me a rush of inspiration — to see others doing the work, taking narrative risks, doubling down on their commitments, and to watch it all come together — but it also can drain the well, and rarely translates in real time to any increased output for me. To the contrary: I write infinitely less while actively teaching.

However! The practice of reading intuitively and providing thoughtful, specific, and organized feedback makes you a better editor, which in turn makes you a better writer. For me, learning how to articulate my thoughts within a craft framework has been instructive and clarifying. For example, if I am able to identify a missed opportunity in a story or pinpoint a pacing issue or a floundering imperative, that will make me more hyper-aware of those issues in my own work. The hope is that you start to assimilate some of that feedback, so when you (and by you I mean I) return to the page, the writing out of the gate is tighter and sharper, with a reduced appetite for bullshit. I mean, there are still a gazillion drafts, but that's the idea at least.

ST: I was lucky to watch this book come together. I still remember the night you told our writing group, “I think I have a collection, and I’m going to call it Jerks.”

SL: There's a difference between having a bunch of stories and having a collection. And it was only when I wrote the last story that I saw where the beginning and the ending were. But even then, this collection was accepted at 55,000 words, and Mason Jar Press only wanted 40,000, absolute max. From what I cut, I have almost another collection.

ST: How did you decide what to cut?

SL: It was tricky. When you're building a collection, you obviously want to connect certain themes, but you want to make sure that you're not hitting the same beat from the same angle. Short story collections shouldn’t be a compendium. So I had to ask those questions. We did some back and forth, and my editor was helpful. Although she wanted to take out “Let All Restless Creatures Go.”

ST: Absolutely not! No.

SL: I had to fight for that. I said, “I really feel like this story is the center of this collection.”

ST: Do you remember when I said I have a theory about the heart of the collection? I think the heart is “Let All Restless Creatures Go.” It’s got the empathy that you need to meet all of the other characters where they are.

SL: Yeah. It had to be in the middle of the collection. It’s got a different tonal register than the other stories, which was really important to me. So there are a couple stories I’m sad aren’t in it, but I also really appreciate a tight, small book.

ST: Same. Maybe it’s because I have a toddler right now, and that doesn’t leave a lot of time to sink into a long book, but more than ever I find myself drawn to really short collections and novels. I know that you have a soft spot for flash.

SL: I came to flash when I had little kids, in 2009 or 2010. Trying to sustain any sort of narrative when I couldn't complete a single sentence was preposterous for me. But the idea of having 1000 words that you could stay on top of and wrangle — just get in and get out and say something in a compressed space — that felt manageable, and also gratifying, that I was actually doing something.

To go back to your question about teaching. Speaking and expressing my thoughts in a linear and coherent fashion does not come naturally to me. And being able to isolate and articulate so-called “strengths” and “weaknesses” in order to discuss them in a specific way and link them to elements of craft, it's not a skill that comes naturally to me at all. So it's interesting to talk about myself as a teacher because I'm not a natural teacher. It's taken me a long time, but the act of practicing that has definitely made me more acutely aware of craft in my own work.

ST: That’s so funny because I think of you as such a gifted teacher. You are just extremely authentic. There’s no bullshitting in your workshop. I’ve been in workshops where no one actually says what they think, and it’s a waste of everybody’s time. But you take every piece seriously, you wrestle with the work, and you are honest about what you think. You’re not harsh, but there’s no fluff, and that is so valuable.

SL: I have been off-base many, many times. Maybe I'm reading poorly or not getting it or I'm intuiting something that's not only not there, but totally unintended. But I do think it's important to get your work in front of another set of eyes before you start sending it out, because once you send it out, it's not yours anymore. So I think even my misreadings are valuable, because if I can misread something important, then someone else could misread it even worse.

ST: It took me a really long time to understand that — that once you send something out, it's not yours anymore. I have one story I wish I’d never sent out. Are there stories you wish you hadn’t published, or do you live with no regrets?

SL: I have stories that I think are weak on a craft level that I published too soon, for sure. It's something I'm so guilty of and I try to caution people against: the impulse to send out without doing the deepening required.

As writers, we’re isolated. You're doing this thing, and at the end of the day, what do you have to show for yourself? So that impulse, that need for some sort of validation or approval, that's always been a struggle.

I've gotten a little better at resisting the urge. Though maybe that’s why I’m not really writing stories or flash at all right now, because it brings out that impulse in me.

ST: Only novels now! You have one coming out this fall, Lech, and you’re working on another. I’ve read some pages and I’m really excited about it.

SL: The Philadelphia project.

ST: Get ready, world. But to go back to something you said about why you turned to flash when you had little kids — that need to say something. I feel like that's what connects the characters in Jerks: they’re each trying to say something, something that is their own, often something that is counter to what others around them are saying.

SL: When I was in my twenties, we lived in a studio in Park Slope. This smarmy divorced guy lived in the building, and one day in the elevator he asked me what I did so I told him I was in graduate school for writing. And he turned to me and said, “I hope you have something to say.”

I remember being so defensive, like, fuck you, dude, I have something to say. But then also, here comes the shame, the embarrassing part is, at 25, I don't know that I had really sat with that.

What drove me to writing was the music of language. Language first, then character. (As a young reader, I had turned to stories for their escape.) But without doing the hard work underneath, language is just window dressing.

ST: Wait, but he was basically saying you don't deserve to try to make art unless you already know what you're going to say, and that's wrong.

SL: He was definitely trying to belittle me, but still, it was instructive. Here’s how I interpret it: It’s not that writing needs to have an agenda or clear messaging, but what are your obsessions? What are you curious about? Go there. Work through that. Find your sensibility. Find your point of view. Double down on that. So, you know, thank you jerk in the elevator.