The Diary: Sam Lipsyte

Last night I went to a fundraiser in downtown Manhattan on behalf of Diana Colbert, partner of the writer Charles Bock. She has had a recurrence of leukaemia and the couple are out of money for treatment. It was a bittersweet evening, as you might expect, with a lot of wonderful writers and musicians pitching in their services. Bock made a brief, moving speech before heading off to be with his wife in a hospital uptown.

When he announced his itinerary, I recalled how my mother lay dying in the same hospital about 15 years ago. Somebody from the financial office handed me a letter announcing that she had “maxed out” her health insurance benefits. It was a curt note but if they’d had any mercy they would have just written, “Dear Lady, Die Already” in block letters. She obliged them soon after.

During the benefit, I kept toggling between that experience and what this couple were enduring. When a young woman needs a literary community to rally for her cancer treatment, and when there are millions and millions more who happen not to have any cosmopolitan cultural scene in their corner, I guess you could consider the country they live in “maxed out”. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the US healthcare bill will pass. Maybe some Supreme Court hearts will melt. One hopes they haven’t been ruined by freezer burn.

. . .

Speaking of which, I think this is my first season ever with what I have self-diagnosed as SAD, or seasonal affective disorder. This winter in New York City has been harsh and I’ve experienced serious spirit-wilt. When I was younger I hardly even registered the weather. (Probably drugs and booze protected me.) I laughed scornfully at SAD but I understand it now, even if I continue to chuckle at the condition’s acronym. (The chuckles boost my mood.) This year even clichés such as “chilled to the bone” resonate with me as though they were powerful bursts of poetry. What I crave most of the time in this weather is a nap. This is difficult to achieve because I work outside home or office.

There is a place I’ve heard about in Midtown where you can pay for a power snooze in a state-of-the-art chamber but I’m convinced that if I laid down the cash, Hypnos, the god of sleep, would desert me. I’d just lie there vibrating with self-loathing for stuffing myself in a specially designed nap module, a decadence I surely cannot afford. I work mostly at libraries and you’d think I could snag some Zs in them but it’s not so easy. In the Rose Reading Room of the New York Public Library, a guard will bang his fist on the table right beside your head if you’ve fallen asleep. I do not consider him a cruel man but the awakening can be brutal. If I doze in one of the libraries at the university where I teach, I run the risk of my students seeing me conked out in a chair snoring loudly, perhaps with a web of saliva fluttering in the corner of my mouth. It’s not vanity that prevents me, at least not completely. It’s a question of pedagogical authority.

. . .

When you teach creative writing, you are already on the defensive. People love to poke you in the chest and cry, “But you can’t teach writing!” This is precisely what I think about automobile driving but I let them rant while I rub the sore part where they poked me. I don’t know why people get so worked up about this subject. Nobody has asked them to teach creative writing or even to learn it. Apprenticeship, the sharing of history and technique, has always been a central feature of art-making. Yet people cling to a romantic idea of the self-made genius toiling away in a garret or napping undisturbed in a sleep module.

If you can teach people to play music, however, and rumour has it you can, though not every student will wind up a Yo-Yo Ma, or even a Liberace, then I also believe you can guide people in their quest to make art out of something we use every day – language. It’s true that the writing workshop is a very American institution. Somehow amid the institutional exhortations to die and the weepy faux catharsis of daytime TV and the speed and loneliness (1,000 friends?) of the internet, people still want to sit around a table to help each other write stories and novels and essays and poems that will make the world think and feel in new ways. Since I do it for a living, I might be partial to the vision but I love to be in the room where rigour, honesty, curiosity and a reverence for fresh prose are paramount. Afterwards, we all have to go to the garret or module to suffer alone anyway.

. . .

But back to the initial question: You can teach sex, can’t you? Why can’t you teach writing? Most people need to be taught sex. That’s why there are books such as the Kama Sutra and The Joy of Sex, not to mention people, like your best friend’s older sister, or places, like the neighbour’s garage. Nothing’s more natural, and more dependent on natural talent for its most transcendent demonstrations, but sex is still best if taught properly. So, what’s so crazy about passing along a few literary tricks and reading tips?

The night of the benefit for the woman with leukaemia I sat in a “Literary Advice Booth” with some other writers, including Amy Hempel. She is a master of the short story, a legend, and it was a delight to watch her dispense wise advice. One man spoke of being lost in work that formerly had “crackled”. He didn’t know how he’d got derailed. I told him all I could offer was my empathy. It was true. I’ve been there often, the project has suddenly crapped out, the narrative unravels, the music sounds toneless, the rhythms monotonous, the ideas just a lump of albino newts, dead on a surgical tray, the images and conceits no longer growing organically from the prose but relying on sensational elements, such as dead albino newts.

I understand being lost. I understand being cold. I understand being cold and not even feeling it because of how lost I am. I understand sadness and SADness both now, and the rage and sorrow born of seeing people crushed by political abstractions and very concrete need. This is the stuff you can’t teach, of course, but you don’t have to teach it. You don’t even have to learn it. It’s life. Goddamn, here it comes again.

Sam Lipsyte is author of ‘The Ask’, out in paperback on February 22 (Old St Publishing, £7.99)