Transcription of Debra Spark for the show Bringing Books & Art to Life #254
Lisa: Today, it is my great pleasure to have in the studio with me a married couple who are both in the creative field, but both also teach. This is Debra Spark, an author, and Garry Mitchell, an artist. Debra Spark is the author of six books of fiction, including, most recently, Unknown Caller, The Pretty Girl, and Good for the Jews. Other books include Curious Attractions: Essays on Fiction Writing, and the anthology Twenty Under Thirty, and the recently reissued Coconuts for the Saint. She teaches at Colby College and in the MFA program for writers at Warren Wilson College. A graduate of Yale University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she lives with her husband and son in North Yarmouth. Thanks for coming in today.
Debra: Thanks for having me.
Lisa: We also have her husband, Garry Mitchell, who is an artist who has exhibited nationally and internationally. He has received fellowships from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Edward Albee Foundation, and the Provincetown Fine Arts Workcenter, among other places, and grants from the Ford Foundation, the Massachusetts Arts Council, and the Arizona Arts Commission, and the Maryland Commission on the Arts. Garry teaches studio art at Colby College. Thanks for coming in.
Garry: Thank you.
Lisa: We’re borrowing you from Colby College, the two of you, today.
Debra: Yeah.
Garry: Well, actually, I’m on sabbatical, so, yes, you’re borrowing me, but Colby seems extra far away at the moment.
Lisa: Why are you on sabbatical? What are you doing these days, Garry?
Garry: I am working a lot in my studio. I’m experimenting, I’m trying things that either I haven’t had time to do, or am now making the time to do, so essentially some large-scale paintings, and I also make monotypes, which are much smaller.
Lisa: Debra, I know that you are getting ready to release a book very soon.
Debra: Yes, yes, yeah. August 22 is the release date.
Lisa: Tell me about that book.
Debra: I need a quick way to describe it. It starts, a man from Maine goes to Logan Airport to pick up his daughter, who he’s never met before, because his wife left him when she was still pregnant seventeen years earlier, took the daughter to France, and there’s been a lot of battles, and he’s ever been able to see her, and then very abruptly one night, the ex-wife calls and says, “She’s coming to America, and you’re going to take her for the summer.” He goes down to pick her up, and she never arrives, and not only does she never arrive, the wife, who, up until then, called repeatedly at night making harassing phone calls, stops making the harassing phone calls, and he never hears from her ever again. It’s sort of about the mystery of what happened.
I based it, I know three people who had really short, really crazy first marriages, and I sort of combined details of each of their first marriages, and it goes largely backward in time, so that scene at the airport is sort of the first scene in the book, and then it goes backwards, so you figure out what happened to all these people, how they ended up where they are.
Lisa: What I’m really interested in, in both of you, is that you both teach, so there’s this very outward and intentional energy around teaching. You both also have, you essentially have to promote your work as an author and as an artist, but then there’s also this enormous piece of each of you that requires creativity, and that’s a very different space than many people live within. To be able to come up with what you just said, Debra, is more challenging, I think, than people realize. How does that work? How do you balance all of these different things and all of these different roles, and being the parents of a sixteen-year-old?
Debra: We actually do it in very different ways, and I think part of the way we’re able to do it is that we take different roles in the family. Actually, why don’t you say … Maybe you should say what you do first, because I think Garry is better at making time for his art than I am, but he also does a lot of things in the household that allow me to do what I call my “for money work,” so why don’t you say.
Garry: Oh, well, I’m the cook, the designating cook, which is something I really love to do. I’m kind of an intuitive cook, so I just need recipes as a starting point, essentially, so I do that. You know, the various household chores that, as Debra says, she might not have time to get to, which is all good with me. She has a much more full and active professional life than I do, so I’m there with more time. As far as my work, it’s just something I’ve done for so long that it’s a matter of habit, and if I go more than a very short time without putting in some time in the studio, then I’ll start to get restless, so there’s a kind of a check and balance system there, between our household life and the studio. The only other thing I would say, as far as teaching goes, it supports my studio work in really obvious ways, and, at times, not so obvious, but I see that as kind of an extension of my studio practice, really.
Lisa: I’ve been watching Colby as it really takes on this increased visibility in the art world, and not just within the state of Maine, but really all over the country. It’s very impressive, the new art museum, and I’ve spoken with multiple artists who have actually had undergraduate degrees from Colby in art. Actually, the same is true in creative writing, I believe. What do you think is driving that?
Debra: I’m sorry, what are you asking specifically? What’s driving the art?
Lisa: Why is it so important to Colby to invest in art?
Debra: You can answer about the museum better than I can.
Garry: Well, the museum, as you know, with the gift from the Lunder family, which necessitated the extension to the museum in its former state, the museum has become a real jewel in the crown of Colby College.
Debra: Really, and the state, because it’s such a fantastic museum.
Garry: Right, and it’s well-funded, and it’s great for any of us teaching studio art. The studio I teach in is, it’s the third floor of the all-glass museum annex, so I literally walk through at least the lobby of the museum every single day, and I take my students down there, and if it’s a low moment in the class, that’s always kind of an ace in the hole, because there’s always something that has to do with what we’re studying. I don’t know if that’s the answer you’re looking for-
Debra: You know, they just acquired the Picassos. Did you see that? That’s, again, the Lunder family doing that, so the museum sort of is driving it, but then, obviously, the students have all the benefit of it.
Lisa: There’s also a lot going on in art as writing.
Debra: Yes, yes, and actually, at least for one more year, I’m the director of the program in Creative Writing, and one of the things that the program has, which is really nice, is a really lively visiting writers series. We bring in a lot of people; actually, just in terms of just keeping it in Maine, Richard Ford came this year, and that was a really great evening, and the president, the … Well, I guess he’s not entirely new, because he’s been there for a few years, but the president had this amazing dinner actually in the museum for him afterwards, with the students, so sort of made it even more of an event than it might have been otherwise, so I think that was really special for the students and for the professors, and the community, because there were a lot of community members there too.
Lisa: In addition to you, there are multiple other people who teach within the Creative Writing department who are published authors. Sarah Braunstein is one person whose name comes to mind.
Debra: I’m sorry?
Lisa: Sarah Braunstein.
Debra: Yes, Sarah’s wonderful, she’s wonderful, I’m so glad we have her with us.
Lisa: Do you think that makes a difference, to be a published author and to know what that process is like, as far as teaching?
Debra: Yeah, and it’s sort of, you have to, now. The standard good practices is you wouldn’t really hire anyone who wasn’t themselves not only a practicing author, but a well-published author, at this point. Actually, like with Sarah, my last class, I was teaching Intermediate Fiction this year, so some of my students will go on to have Sarah for Advanced Fiction next year, so in my last class, I had us all read a Sarah story from the New Yorker. I kind of thought it would be nice for them to be exposed to their work, and to look at the story as carefully as they possibly could, to see some of her strategies and her thoughts before they ended up having her as a teacher.
Lisa: I think I read that story.
Debra: Well, she’s had two. She had one, I think about a year ago, and then one about a year before that.
Lisa: It must have been the one that was about a year ago. I was impressed just with the fact that she had a story in the New Yorker.
Debra: She’s doing incredibly well, she’s a great writer, and as a teacher, she’s just a wonderful, bubbly, lively presence. The students love her.
Lisa: You’ve written an entire book, that I’ve actually read, about fiction writing, Curious Attractions: Essays on Fiction Writing, and I found it really interesting, because you wove in your own personal experiences with what you were talking about when it comes to writing. Specifically, I was interested in the conversation about your sister.
Debra: My younger sister?
Lisa: Well, I think that you have a sister that passed away from breast cancer.
Debra: Yes, yeah, yeah, and since I know you’ve had breast cancer, I sort of want to jump in and say right away that that was so many years ago, and before breast cancer treatment has changed so, so dramatically, and also, as you know, obviously, because you’re a doctor, she got breast cancer when she was 21, so obviously that’s highly unusual, and it’s a much more aggressive disease in young women than older women. I’m sure if we knew now, and I’m sure if doctors knew now, what we didn’t know then, we would have treated more aggressively from the start. I think we had made the mistake of going lumpectomy/radiation route initially, I think, thinking she was a young woman, and losing her breast, and that just seemed seemed so horrible then, and I think if it had been treated aggressively from the start, maybe she would still be with us.
Lisa: Does that continue to impact the work that you do?
Debra: I think yeah, you know, everyone in my family, obviously a loss like that, a loss that comes really early, but I do think my second novel was sort of too much based on her, and almost everyone in my family, and actually, most people who have read my work, I mean, who have read all my work, are like, “Eh, that’s not your best book,” and I think maybe I was a little too close to having lost her to write about having lost her. Aside from an essay I wrote about her, which I’m proud of, I think probably I have to write about that experience a little more indirectly to write about it effectively.
Lisa: Is it true that creative work evolves over time, so that something that you might have written about, or some art you might have done when you were in your twenties, is not going to look like something that you will have written about, or that you do when you’re in your forties and fifties?
Garry: I think definitely so. I think that making art, probably of any kind, but the kind I do, it’s a very organic process, and it’s ongoing. One’s constantly learning new things, rejecting other things, establishing a visual vocabulary, and reaching for … This is why I think the look of work changed. You reach a point where you use up that vocabulary, you spoke as well as you can with it visually, and it necessitates … I mean, in my case, it necessitates a change, so you’ll … I’m always a little suspicious when an artist’s work looks unchanged over a period of decades. Generally, I think it’s totally possible, I have nothing against it. Generally, I think it’s from a lack of really pushing onward, and that’s the most difficult thing to do, especially if what you have been doing with your former vocabulary is accepted, people pay money for it, and you reach the point where you can’t make that look of work anymore, you just have to take a deep breath and see what comes from it, and establish a new vocabulary. That’s the change in making, and in the look of the work.
Debra: Actually, Garry and I don’t really ever collaborate on our work, but last year, I wrote a lecture. Actually, all those essays started as lectures for this graduate program in North Carolina that I teach in, and last year, my lecture was called “Jump Already,” and it was about literary artists, but also visual artists who get to a point in their creative life when they find themselves sort of doing and redoing maybe the same thing. I wanted to look at those moments when people have a huge jump forward. I was looking at literary artists mostly, but Garry, and some of Garry’s art colleagues up at Colby, pointed me to some artists who had done that, who had work that you could see, since you can look at a whole career in visual art in a way you can’t in literary art, more quickly, you could see they’d been working in one way for years and years and years, and all of a sudden, there’s this break, and this whole new thing is going on.
I was trying to figure out in my lecture, and now I’m kind of forgetting my conclusions, but what is it that gets a person to the next stage? Especially people who have been working effectively. Rothko would be an example. He was a very successful artist, but then there’s a certain point where he makes this sort of break, and he makes those late paintings which are the paintings that everyone knows him for, the, I guess you call them color block paintings, or … What do you call those?
Garry: They pre-date some of the color field paintings, I mean, that’s the, for lack of a better word, the category. I’m sure an art historian would beg to differ with that-
Debra: I think they come after color field, because Clyfford Still and people like that were already doing it.
Garry: That’s what I mean, I said they pre-date-
Debra: No, they post-date it.
Garry: Oh, they post-date. Thank you. That’s the great thing about living with a writer. You can stand corrected, and justifiably so.
Lisa: I think it’s fascinating to watch, actually. I think every couple has an interesting back-and-forth, but to watch somebody who is an artist and somebody who is a writer, but both of you have also other vocabularies. You teach documentary radio.
Debra: Radio, yeah, up at Colby.
Lisa: There’s an audio component there too. It seems as if you each have completely different languages, or at least dialects, that you’re constantly choosing from.
Debra: I think so. I think when we first got together, which was many, many years ago, I had this idea that we would collaborate on this and that, and we cannot collaborate at all. I mean, we can’t collaborate on cooking, we’re just, we don’t work together well in the kitchen. It’s sort of interesting-
Garry: It’s just a small kitchen.
Debra: … that we’re like parallel play people, like kids. We sort of can play together in the same room, but we can’t work on a project together, which is interesting. I think other artist couples are able to, but we don’t.
Lisa: Well, I mean, that’s okay, really. There’s not really a right or a wrong way to do anything, as long as you’ve developed your own rhythm.
Garry: I know, generally speaking, with regard to my own work, I know things that Debra … I don’t know, but there are things I suspect she might like, and I know there are things she doesn’t like. For example, I’m working on some fairly large-scale paintings, and there’s a lot of black in them, which is neither here nor there, but I know she would not be in any way interested in those paintings. It’s not that I … It just gets factored in, and I know what will appeal to her.
She’s only going to respond to it, as anyone would, based on her own subjectivity, but the payoff for that, I think I get better compensated, because she reads to me everything she writes, and while I’m really a very poor writer, I have to admit, I listen as sort of every person, and when something sounds really corny or ridiculous, I might ask her, “Do you want this character to be obnoxious or annoying?” If she says no, I’ll say, “Well, they really are.” I can give her little bits of things like that, but absolutely, obviously, nothing to do with the craft. However, I get to hear it all through its various stages and drafts.
Debra: Actually, it’s helpful for me to read my work out loud, just because as I’m reading it out loud, I often hear things that I didn’t realize I’d done wrong. It used to be I couldn’t let anything out of the house without reading it to him, so if I wrote a book review, or actually my Maine Home+Design articles, I just couldn’t, I had to read them out loud. Now I don’t write book reviews anymore, and I don’t read my Maine Home+Design articles to you anymore.
Garry: Oh, and I so miss it. I’m being phased out.
Debra: You can read them when they appear. I used to need to; I think I got a certain amount of confidence about my work that isn’t my fiction, that I could send it out the door without Garry listening. I’m actually working on a Chekhov lecture right now, and I don’t think I can make Garry listen, because I don’t think he could stand it.
Garry: It’s like forty pages long.
Debra: No, it’s not. It’s long, though.
Lisa: That actually raises an interesting point, at least one that I’m not sure that many people think about, and that is, you write for Maine Home+Design, it’s a very different sort of writing than fiction writing. How do you move back and forth between?
Debra: I think they use different muscles. I actually love writing for Maine Home+Design, as people here know. It’s actually, when he was talking about painting every day, I don’t write fiction every day, and I often feel anxious about it. Most people will tell you, most writers, I think, will tell you you have to write every day, it’s important to write every day, but I’m the kind of person who cannot do my art until I’ve finished my professional responsibilities. That means I tend to write much more over the summer, and in January, and being able to do the other kind of writing, the writing for the magazine, and my lecture writing, and other things sort of keeps my fingers still doing it, because I don’t like not writing, but I can’t get to “my,” quote-unquote, writing, often, until the semester has ended.
Lisa: Well, that actually makes a lot of sense to me. I have a hard time switching back and forth sometimes between being a doctor and doing writing for Maine Magazine and working on the radio show. I feel like you’re right, there’s many different muscles that we use, and sometimes the switch is harder than others. When you talk about the things that we should do when it comes to being a writer, people say you should write every day, you should write your fiction every day, I’m sure there’s an equivalent in art, can that sometimes make, especially college kids, can that just make people feel a little anxious if they feel like they’re not following the rules?
Debra: The rules, yeah.
Garry: Well, I don’t think there really should be any rules. I have artist friends that work on projects and work in stretches, where they’re doing a particular thing, and then they’re doing what appears to be particularly nothing, but there are things going on. Because I have a particular routine, it works for me, although I have to admit, I waste a lot of time. I don’t think, I’m not much for one, for making rules about how things need to be done in a creative adventure.
Lisa: How do you feel about that, Debra?
Debra: About making rules?
Lisa: Well, about, are there rules, and should people follow them?
Debra: To me, it’s like, I’d like to exercise every day, and I don’t exercise every day. I feel like there are these things that I want to be doing, but I just don’t have the time, and I … I mean, I do want to be doing it, but I just can’t, I’ve never been able to figure out how to do what I need to do professionally, and in the family, and the other pieces. I just think there’s a few too many pieces to try to attend to, so I feel like, just do my best with that sort of thing. Certainly, I wish I was writing every day, and I wish I was exercising every day. I just don’t get to it.
Garry: That notion of time, I think, to do something, to choose to do something, for Debra, to exercise, it means making choices not to do other things, so I realize that for all the time I take in my little world in the studio, there are plenty of things I’m choosing not to do, and that’s the necessity. It’s not really a rule, but I would say to my students, you have to do a certain amount of work, especially since I’m giving them projects, but there’s no real one way for them to get there, I don’t think. I stand to the far side of leniency, I guess.
Debra: I’m probably on the other side. I feel like I feel like a lot of financial responsibility to the family, obviously, so that I feel like right now, I have to make these choices, which is to … I’m not full-time at Colby, I’m three-fifths time, and then I work for the magazine, and then I work for this graduate program in North Carolina, so juggling all those three things, and making the fiction, and trying to be a good friend, and take care of my son, I probably need one fewer ball up in the air, but when I think, well, what do I want to take away, it’s not … I really love writing for the magazine, I love teaching in North Carolina. In some ways, I wouldn’t mind cutting back on my Colby work, but that’s not possible, because that’s health insurance, that’s the bigger part of the paycheck, so sort of where it’s at is the best solution I’ve come up with.
Lisa: It seems like you’re describing something that a lot of people need to consider if they’re going to be artists, really of any sort, is that most people are not, right out of the gate, going to be able to produce works of art that consistently fund their lives.
Debra: Yeah. I mean, you know, most people don’t … We’re friends with Rick Russo, I was just listening to him on Terry Gross last night, I was like, you know, he’s an artist who makes a living at his art, but most artists don’t, and in this culture and this time, teaching has been for many artists, although not all, the paycheck. It’s very time-consuming, and with a college, especially like Colby, they don’t, and rightly so, they don’t want you to just come and teach your class and grade the papers, they want you really involved and completely available to the kids. Certainly, if I send Aidan away to an expensive college like that, I want his professors to be super involved, and writing long comments, and really there, so it’s a lot. It’s a lot.
Lisa: I wish that we had hours and hours more time, because I am really fascinated by this conversation. It’s something that kind of meanders its way through my mind on an ongoing basis, just the balance, the balance between the responsibilities and the creativity, and the balance between two people in a family who are trying to make everything work. The one last question I wanted to ask you, Garry, is you alluded to space, space in a life. In this very delicate balance that we’re always trying to achieve, there is a need for space in which it seems as though we’re doing nothing, but really, there’s some fallow ground that’s, something is happening there. How do you make that work? How do you create that space?
Garry: Well, it’s kind of built in, I think, to other spaces. I’ve said to Debra, and she would be rightfully annoyed at me, a few times, when she’s asked me something, “I’m never not doing anything,” and I don’t think anyone is really-
Debra: You said that, or I said that?
Garry: Well, I might have said it. We’re all occupied with thousands of complicated concerns, and agendas are always circulating around, and I think I would just revisit for a second what I said. The time is what I make it, and I don’t feel like I’m at a disadvantage, but there are other things that I’m choosing not to do so that even if there is a less active time than what I might be doing in my studio, I’m still more thinking about the studio work than any number of other things, but I’m aware of that. I just have to shift gears where it seems appropriate. I hope that answers your question.
Lisa: Yeah, no, I don’t think there is any one answer to the question, I think it is kind of the way that we each interpret our lives and, I guess, commit to whatever answers we come up with as individuals. Seems like it, I don’t know, I don’t know.
Garry: True.
Debra: How do you … I know I’m not supposed to ask you a question, but how do you do it? I mean, it seems like you’ve got as many balls up in the air as I’m saying that I have, so how … I know you run every morning, and run marathons, and …
Lisa: Well, you know, I think it actually has something to do with what Garry was alluding to. I don’t know, it’s the draw of feeling antsy if you don’t sort of fill a certain number of buckets, I guess. I think that for me, I find some different satisfaction out of each of the things that I do, and it would be hard for me to give up one of them, because each of them kind of pings a different set of neurons in my brain, I guess. It’s almost like I … Yeah. I don’t know if that answers your question.
Debra: Yeah.
Lisa: I think that in Maine, we’re very fortunate, because we can live lives that have multiple different layers to them-
Debra: Aspects.
Lisa: Aspects, yeah. I’ve been very intrigued by this conversation, and I’m really grateful that you took the time out of your very busy lives to come and talk with us today.
Garry: It’s a pleasure.
Lisa: Well, you are … You guys are so prolific, and I can tell that you’re just so invested in the teaching, and the raising of your son, and I give you a lot of credit for it. It’s something that requires a lot of persistence and passion.
Debra: Thank you, Lisa.
Garry: Thank you, Lisa.
Lisa: We’ve been speaking with Debra Spark, who is the author of numerous books, and also a teacher at the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and also a teacher at Colby College, and also her husband, Garry Mitchell, who is an artist who has exhibited nationally and internationally, who has received multiple fellowships and grants, and teaches studio art at Colby College, and they both live in North Yarmouth with their son, Aidan.
Debra: Aidan, yes.
Lisa: Thanks for coming in.
Debra: Thank you.
Garry: Thank you very much.