My Big Little Break: Sara Lippmann
In My Big Little Break, we ask authors to talk about the first piece they ever had published, how it felt to finally break through, and what they’ve learned since then. This week we’re pleased to be speaking with one of the featured authors at our upcoming conference in Philadelphia on September 23, Sara Lippmann.
What was the title and genre of your first-ever published piece?
This sent me to my dusty clip binder – do you remember those? – to find out: it was a short, straightforward profile on a local stained glass artist in my hometown of Philadelphia. The title: “King of Panes”.
My first published fiction – other than in undergrad lit mags – was a short story called “Lola Giter.”
Who published it? Are they still around?
Philadelphia magazine published it in December 1994. And yes, still around.
Lola Giter came out in Spring 2001 in The Beacon Street Review, which was the journal out of Emerson college’s MFA program, and which I believe may have morphed into Redivider.
Give us some context: how old were you? How long had you been writing and submitting? How many times had the piece been rejected? Anything else we're missing.
I was 18. The summer after my first year in college I lived at home and interned for Philadelphia magazine. It was a summer out-of-a-movie – all the interns hung out at work, after work, etc. (Most would go on to become writers and journalists or both.) We were tasked with the hard-nosed journalistic task of discerning what restaurants should be included in the annual Best of Philly issue. Basically, when we weren’t fact-checking, we sat around gorging ourselves on cheesesteaks and soft pretzels and hoagies and “ranking” them. It was the first and only time I ate alligator pizza. My god, we had a blast. As for my first bylined assignment (outside of school newspapers), my boss – Duane Swierczynski – tossed me that bone. I was 18.
Lola Giter was the first story I completed during my first semester in grad school. There was a bulletin board in the MFA office at the New School that posted the open subs call from The Beacon Street Review. I sent it there. It got picked up on its first shot. Dumb luck. I assumed, foolishly, oh this is how it goes. Bwah-ha-ha. I was 25.
Did getting that acceptance feel as triumphant as you'd always hoped? Walk us through the moment when you found out.
The first time I saw my name (spelled correctly!) in a magazine my parents subscribed to it was a sort of thrill. A thrill I’d continue to chase for a few years, when I went on to work in magazines. I mean, I created my ridiculous clip binder. I felt like my dad and his stamps, dutiful in collection.
When I received the acceptance email from BSR, I was in Florida visiting the guy who would become my husband where he was training at the time. I remember it was late morning, the sun characteristically bright, and we went for drinks in Coral Gables to celebrate, but here’s the embarrassing part: I also remember thinking this would be the rhythm. I’d recently left the world of magazines, back in the heyday of glossy magazines, where we were paid handsomely by the word and pitches were greenlit with considerable ease. When the journal invited me to read at their issue launch up in Boston, I felt like a million bucks. Then I realized it would all be on my own dime. Transportation, lodging. Cue the rude awakening.
Are you still proud of that piece? Have you re-read it recently?
The Philly piece is forgettable. The short story, inspired by my grandmother, I never revisited. Never put in any of my story collections, although there have been times when I toyed with the idea of writing an entire collection set in a nursing, or assisted care, facility. These are people rich in stories. Still, it was an 8000 word story that certainly took up a lot of pages. Occasionally, the first sentence revisits me, almost as a mantra: “The night the fire alarms shook the Riverdale Home for the Aged, Lola Giter stayed in bed.”
Now that you've been doing this for a while, collecting plenty of rejections and acceptances along the way, what advice do you wish you could give your younger self?
I shared this tale of two publications to illustrate and acknowledge my entitlement and naivete. It is not pretty to admit. That internship led to a job at the Conde Nast mothership, which led to other freelance gigs, etc. Writing had been tethered to capitalism. When the harsh reality of the literary world started to hit, I felt like a failure. I succumbed to the self-pitying cloud of shame because I allowed my ego to interfere with the work. Rufi Thorpe once talked about the necessary “perversity of spirit” one needs to navigate this thorny writing life – a phrase I love, a moxie, a conviction I lacked. It’s so easy to let rejections feel like a referendum. To tell yourself you suck and allow the suckage to fester into fulfillment. In truth, maybe – definitely! – I did. I had a shitton to learn and still do. We are forever learning. I’ve written about this and even moderated an AWP panel on the topic, but I would tell my young self to get over myself. To find that burning why and to follow it deep into the tunnels of the heart. Let the rest go. This is what matters. Quiet the voices of distraction. Work hard, and then, work harder. Welcome the work as an opportunity for further discovery. Your job is to wrestle with a world until it cracks open, and you begin to understand it enough to shape and share. Watch out for predators who prey on the desperate eagerness of the young. Trust your own instincts and hold onto integrity with everything you’ve got. It took me a while to understand that art and marketplace often make shitty bedfellows, and an even longer time to stop giving a fuck. All there is is the humility of another morning. All we can do is show up for the story that draws us, with urgency and with measure, to the indifferent page.
Sara Lippmann is the author of the novel Lech (Tortoise Books) and the story collections Doll Palace (re-released by 7.13 Books) and Jerks (Mason Jar Press.) Her fiction has been honored by the New York Foundation for the Arts, and her essays have appeared in The Millions, The Washington Post, Catapult, The Lit Hub and elsewhere. With Seth Rogoff, she is co-editor of the anthology Smashing the Tablets: Radical Retellings of the Hebrew Bible forthcoming from SUNY Press. She is a founding member of the Writing Co-Lab, a teaching cooperative, and lives with her family in Brooklyn.