What Is This About? A Conversation with S.L. Wisenberg

S.L. Wisenberg’s latest book is the award-winning “The Wandering Womb: Essays in Search of a Home” (The Juniper Prize; University of Massachusetts Press). The notion of wandering is not exclusive to the book but may well stand to represent the author herself. Wisenberg is forty years removed from the Iowa Writers Workshop (MFA Fiction), but describes herself as “an under-the-radar university press writer,” as well as a “slow bloomer.” She points to the seventeen-year gap between Iowa and her first book “The Sweetheart Is In” (2000) and a slow trickle of book publications over the last three decades leading up to “The Wandering Womb” (“Holocaust Girls: History, Memory & Other Obsessions,” 2006, and “The Adventures of Cancer Bitch,” 2009).

I found myself agreeing with Philip Lopate’s blurb about the essays in “The Wandering Womb”: “They are wry, humorous, melancholy”—and most surprisingly to me given the contrasts in gender and culture between Wisenberg and myself—”universally relatable, filled with the shock of recognition.”

Wisenberg has been awarded a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events. She co-directed the Northwestern University Master of Creative Writing program for the ten years after its inception in 2002 (I know her from my time spent pursuing my degree), is the editor of Another Chicago Magazine, and has maintained a wide-ranging career as a teacher. Her writing is greatly informed by her extensive travel experiences and frequently examines both the Jewish and female condition at personal and societal levels. We spoke over Zoom in January and February.

You dedicated “The Wandering Womb” to your childhood friend Paula Barvin. The epigraph is an excerpt from a letter she wrote to you in 1976. She cautions you about your feelings and how you let them overwhelm you. She also warns that placing such importance on them may lead to an empty life. That presents a problem for nonfiction writers. We often deal with strong feelings, managing and expressing them, and recreating them on the page. How does your work in “The Wandering Womb” balance that notion of living as full a life as possible while still experiencing and honoring your feelings?

She wrote that particular letter to me before I was medicated. Starting in my teen years, I always had this lump in my throat, a feeling like I might start crying. I could envision the lump as a physiological thing that was creating tension. I had that until age thirty-nine when I got on Prozac. I’m not perfect now, but I’m much more stable. I don’t have to stop and think, why am I feeling this? Am I feeling sad? Am I feeling alienated? Some of the essays in “The Wandering Womb” came from before I was medicated.

You’ve had a considerable career teaching at both university and in more casual one-off workshops and seminars. There must be some deliberate elements in “The Wandering Womb” that a teacher can bring into class and say, “That’s how it’s done.”

The “Late Night” piece, I hope. Robin Hemley and Leila Philip run an online journal called Speculative Nonfiction. In speculative nonfiction, you basically go a step beyond what happened and you imagine what something might be like. I attempt that with “Late Night,” which has a few flights of fancy. I ponder whether there will be a television commercial for sleep. That’s just made up. I think it works. I talk about in general people who are scared of the night and things that might happen to them in the night. It’s clear that those notions are imagination, but they bring something dynamic to the writing. I still research and report, which can be hard to weave into an essay because you’ll have the piece swimming along and you don’t want there to be just this chunk. You want to deliver the research in the same voice, for it to sound casual, but be real and correct. I think I accomplished that effectively in “Late Night” and “Grandmother Russia/Selma.”

John McPhee might be a good model to follow. He’s research-heavy, but has such a distinct narrative voice. Who else do you model yourself on?

I never got into McPhee. He’s one of my blind spots. He feels dry. Something like “Searching For Marvin Gardens” didn’t interest me. Maybe because he didn’t get into himself enough.

I don’t think of myself as writing in anybody’s style. I was influenced by others, of course. Mary McCarthy, “The Company She Keeps.” Grace Paley was another one. She has sort of this innocent voice that doesn’t say everything. Madeleine Blais, too. She was one of my colleagues at The Miami Herald. She would make additional interpretations of basic things like flowers at a wedding that remind you that things don’t last. Those influenced me. I’d say Caroline Forché, too.

How have your teaching experiences shaped your writing?

Teaching gets you accustomed to looking at pieces of writing and figuring out what needs to be there, what needs to be edited. Structure, for instance, is very difficult. It’s always easier to look at someone else’s piece and see what the structure should be, to see where the holes are and what they need to do. One thing I’ve always done instinctively is research, which helps a writer get the story away from herself and makes for a more expansive, more informed essay. I had a thesis student who was writing about the Montessori school her child was attending. But there was something missing. So I suggested that she research the life of Maria Montessori. She did, and it fit quite effectively into the writing. I’m not always successful to that degree. The hardest essay in “The Wandering Womb” was the longest one, “Grandmother Russia/Selma.” I don’t know if the structure works. But you start to internalize those skills you had to develop to help your students, and many times they are skills you didn’t expect to develop, and they end up benefiting you.

Editing creates a similar effect, and I’ve been editing longer than I’ve taught. You develop an eye for how something isn’t right, or isn’t shaped right, is too cryptic, or sometimes at the start of a piece people don’t explain enough. I’ve been guilty of that, so I look for it in my own work.

You used to direct a workshop at conferences wherein writers presented only their openers.

It was based on the idea that a literary magazine editor looks at the first page of something and decides if they’ll continue with it. I used submissions people made to Another Chicago Magazine. I would ask: Interesting or not interesting? Well-written or not well-written? You can even tell from the cover letter. If it’s a very plain, basic letter a writer is at least showing they know cover-letter etiquette. First-page decisions came down to whether I wanted to continue reading or put it down. At one point I rejected someone who I still kick myself for rejecting; someone who has a big name now as a doctor/writer. She had started off writing about a medical board discussing something, which she didn’t explain, so I thought I’m not going to read anymore. Looking back, it was probably good. But I was too impatient.

To go beyond the first page, the writing has to be really interesting. There aren’t any clichés. The writer puts together sentences in interesting ways beyond them being basic sentences. They establish some suspense. It doesn’t even have to be deep suspense. Also, a story could be weird in an interesting way. First sentences can tell you a lot. You end up thinking tell me more. I want to be with this voice more.

I do this with my students. I give them only the first few paragraphs. We look for where the senses are engaged. What strong emotions are apparent. What burning questions are established.

It could be that the writer has used compressed language, that they are constrained and about to burst out. The opening line of Forché’s “The Colonel”: “What you have heard is true.” It’s like the horse is about to run out of the stable, but she’s holding it back.

How many years pass throughout the course of “The Wandering Womb?” You just mentioned that you wrote some of the essays pre-Prozac. Others are age-contextualized and appear to be more recent.

The earliest piece is “Separate Vacations,” from the mid- or late 1980s. I revised that a lot since. It was originally in The Sun, which I wanted to be able to say when I was shopping the book around. I submitted the manuscript to the Juniper Prize contest in the fall of 2021, so just about nothing was written after that. There was another essay I wanted to have in there, but the contest administrators didn’t want anything new after they had declared me the winner. I didn’t want to do what they didn’t want me to do, so that piece isn’t in there. “The Wandering Womb” experience was different from “Holocaust Girls” when I had a back-and-forth with Ladette Randolph, my editor at University of Nebraska Press then. (She’s now the editor-in-chief of Ploughshares). There were a handful of essays she didn’t want, and I was all right with that. I slipped in some other essays, and she was all right with that.

I was wanting more feedback from UMass Press on this one. There was a copy editor who really got into it at the line level. But nobody said certain essays had to be in certain places, even though I really wanted that.

That must feel quite validating. Your instincts regarding arrangement carried through to publication.

I hope that the book ends with feeling at home. Because when you’re really at home, you can offer hospitality to someone else. That’s why the last few essays take place so close to home. “Something to Sell,” and “The Romance of the Spiders” all come from home or close to home. In our neighborhood or on our street.

Describe the experience of returning to “Separate Vacations,” which you originally wrote and published well over thirty years ago.

I didn’t like the ending, so I worked a lot on reshaping it. The boyfriend I was traveling with ended up breaking up with me, so I delved more into the notion of breaking up. The final paragraph is more reflective now and accounts for my experiences after the Costa Rica vacation, things that weren’t available to me at the time because they hadn’t happened. Then I felt bad because I was reading the requirements of some magazine in regard to what they accept. One of the editors said they don’t want something from a First World narrator, a person of privilege, who has an insight after going to a developing country. I thought oh God, is that what this is? So I was doubting whether I should have included the piece at all.

Looking back on my voice then as compared to now, I was a little impressed with how aware I was of the world. But I still feel creepy using a developing country to talk about my own psychology. We were learning about what life was like in Costa Rica. So I was seeing my younger self, and I remember that horrible feeling of why am I here? That question is central to the narrative. Why did I spend this money to come here? All these decades later, I still get that feeling sometimes.

In “Female Protection,” you talk about hiding your used feminine products while in Vienna and struggling to find places to dispose of them. At one point you’re scrubbing a menstrual clot from the floor of a bathtub. Later, your essay “Mikvah” of course features a lot of processing about menstruation. You also talk about your failures in love with men both younger and older. You talk about starting Prozac in your late thirties. Do you have hesitations about putting yourself out there to such degrees?

There are so many people doing more stuff than that. There’s Deborah Copaken’s memoir “Ladyparts.” Chloe Caldwell wrote “The Red Zone,” which is all about her cycle and Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder. People write about tons of really intimate things. I would have been more intimate if there wasn’t the chance that my mother would read it. I told her not to read it when it comes out. The only thing is, for conservative audiences, I don’t know if looking at the first few essays, they’ll like the book. There was somebody I connected with on Twitter, and we were talking about my visiting a medical humanities class he teaches. I sent him the manuscript, but I’m thinking he might not want me because of some of the content.

On the other hand, just looking at Jewish books, “Portnoy’s Complaint” came out more than fifty years ago. Roth has Alexander Portnoy constantly talking about masturbation. There’s a famous scene when he takes raw liver out of the fridge and uses it to masturbate. Then he says, “I fucked my own family’s dinner.” That was in the 1960s. So what I write is nothing in comparison.

S.L. Wisenberg/Photo: Linc Cohen

In the title “The Wandering Womb,” I hear the myth of The Wandering Jew who scorned Jesus and was cursed to wander until the Second Coming. If there is a curse threaded throughout the collection, it appears to be “discomfort,” both in your physical surroundings and with yourself. There is a cyclical cause-and-effect relationship happening: Are you wandering in search of comfort, or does the discomfort happen because you’re wandering?

It’s both.

I did not get the echo of The Wandering Jew when I came up with the title. Somebody who saw the manuscript, who is not Jewish, said they heard the same thing you’re hearing. It does rhyme, but I didn’t intend the allusion. Among Jews, we don’t think about that story so much. We do think that Jews are always wandering because there’s always persecution. But because I have discomfort, I write about it. To explore it. To get power over it. I don’t think that people who are comfortable write essays. Maybe they write an editorial or review. I tell students it’s good if you’re ambivalent about something. You can explore that. That makes for a good essay.

You mentioned previously that “The Wandering Womb” ends with being at home. You’re finally finding comfort at the end. But you’re not wandering. You’re at home.

But before people start thinking I’m at home, I have to say “I’m still wandering.” Here’s my travel list of things that are good and things that are bad. That’s what happens in “The Traveler’s Lexicon.”

Can the art of writing be taught? The proliferation of MFA programs seems to be a big, blinking neon billboard that practically screams “Yes!”

It’s a pyramid scheme. I have an MFA, and all it qualifies me for is to teach MFAs, who go out and teach more MFAs. Except it’s not a pyramid scheme because so many people are adjuncts and get paid so little with no healthcare and no benefits. So it’s a poverty pyramid scheme. Like it’s upside down. It’s not Amway.

People can be taught to write better. If you’re not introspective in some way, you can’t be a good literary writer. Maybe it’s wrong of me to say that. I had an undergrad student who was writing about a car crash she had been in, and she was writing, “Oh my! The car hit us! I can’t believe it!” What you can do is get a person to slow down, to go deeper, to talk about it. But if you’re a superficial person, and you aren’t curious, it will be hard. You’ll be writing thin stories.

People can become much better writers, and a lot in doing so is a matter of slowing down and asking “What is this about?” My mother was doing Storyworth. They sent her a question each week and she’d answer it. As a writer, I saw she should go into more detail here, talk more about her feelings there. I didn’t say that. She didn’t want to. She’s not a writer. It made her uncomfortable. She stopped after a year and a half. She didn’t want to spend the time on it.

Journalism can be taught the most easily, because in its bare essence, it’s formulaic. Can you teach good writing? Can you make someone a writer? It’s hard if they have no inner life.

You studied fiction at Iowa and your breakthrough book was the short-story collection “The Sweetheart Is In,” but your three subsequent books have been nonfiction. Why the switch?

I was writing nonfiction at the same time I was writing fiction, but at some point I wasn’t so interested in writing fiction. You define yourself after a while because you want to be able to say what you are, but I started writing short stories again in the past couple of years. I go back and forth.

I can’t do plot. And I waste a lot of time watching old movies from the 1930s. To get my penchant for time-wasting to help me, I thought I’d take a plot from an old movie and that would be my starting point. I watched “Bad Girl” (1931) a few times. The main character is a model in a department store. Men are always wanting to go out with her, but she makes excuses. She spends an evening with a man, which causes a scene in her tenement. Her brother responds by throwing her out. I used those basics, but moved the story to Berlin, hence the title “Bad Girl in Berlin” (Narrative 2022 Spring Story Contest winner). In the movie, the girl ends up marrying the man she spent the evening with and they have a baby. I made her brother worse in my story—she comes home late and he rapes her. She breaks up with her boyfriend because she feels she’s ruined, and then goes on a tear, getting drunk, using cocaine, and going out with anybody who asks her. It felt right, the interpretation a woman would have of her trauma at that point in history. The girl and her sister-in-law escape to family in Bavaria after her brother is arrested. He’s a Communist leader. Then the story flashes forward a few years. The girl is in Switzerland. Her brother was killed, and she misses him despite the assault. I wrote a sequel that doesn’t follow the plot of a movie.

I’ve written a couple of other stories the same way, borrowing parts of plots from old films, and won more recognition through contests. I just need a little starter. They’re sort of like Hamburger Helper. I feel embarrassed describing this process because it sounds so random, but it’s been a good challenge.

How do you continue to write and have an optimistic voice over the last seven or eight years when we’ve seen a rise in anti-Semitism?

I don’t know if I have an optimistic voice. The anti-Semitism feels unreal to me. In Pittsburgh. In California. Even in Europe there have been graves desecrated. I’ve never been attacked for writing Jewishly. Probably because I’m below the radar. But there are lots of horrendous people out there online. I haven’t been targeted as far as I know. I haven’t looked at the websites that are anti-Semitic and just evil. But what I have found is when I look up something Jewish on Google I tend to get very anti-Semitic websites. There are lots of them out there. And there is violence without anti-Semitism. The shooter in Highland Park. He wasn’t going after the people because they were Jewish; Highland Park just happens to be a suburb known for having a substantial number of Jews.

A writer’s materials and routines are highly idiosyncratic. This includes when to use a computer, and the revision process. What do these aspects of the craft look like for you?

I bought a Compaq Portable II in 1986. It weighed more than twenty pounds! I took it to my first artist colony at Edna St. Vincent Millay’s former home in the Hudson Valley. So I wrote on that. I had to teach myself WordPerfect. Before that, I composed a lot on the typewriter. I took typing in high school, and I was on the school paper, so I was a typer. Now if I’m really anxious about something, I’ll write it by hand. And if I’m really, really anxious I’ll take little pieces of scratch paper we have in the kitchen and write on them, because then it’s like oh this doesn’t matter, it’s just a small bit of paper. It’s less anxiety-provoking to write on little bits of paper.

I mostly compose on keyboard, but I’ll take notes in a notebook. If something comes to me while I’m walking, I’ll write it down because that helps me. I have to tell my husband sometimes that I want to walk by myself because I get ideas.

As far as revision, I constantly revise. Usually, my writing group looks at something. I’m very, very defensive, and I try not to let it show. I’m always like oh you just don’t understand… you’re just not reading it right. But all I say is, “Yeah, okay.” Because it’s the best I could do! How could somebody find fault with the best you can do? I think that’s why the “silent student” rule came about because students would always want to explain. And I want to explain! But in my head, I’m like oh, you people! What’s wrong with you?

I look at the feedback, and I see what makes sense, and I’ll revise it. I’ll let it sit awhile. And then I’ll get really impatient and I’ll send it out. And then I’ll revise it again. Whenever I think about it, I’ll keep revising it. It depends. Some pieces I’ll revise over many years, and some pieces are pretty much the way they came out of my head. I’ll revise those a little bit and send them out. Usually the shorter pieces I don’t spend as much time revising.

What do you see as ideal workshop procedures?

It’s good if the writer can ask questions at the beginning, or at the end of their work. I like to ask “What is this about?” in the sense of a high-school-English-class theme. If you can look at the larger picture, that raises the piece and makes it look more important. Most any piece is saying something about the world, whether the writer meant to or not. But what parts of the piece do you admire, that you wish you had written? What parts do you want more of? Less? Where are you confused? What about the dialogue? You have to adjust to each piece, though. How close are we, as far as point of view? How deep are we into the profile character’s head, as far as psychic distance? Do we want more?

Another Chicago Magazine has been around for forty-four years. Starting in 1997, you were the creative nonfiction editor. You’ve been the overall editor since 2017. The publication recently went completely digital. How did that decision come about?

It was expensive to mail the publication. We had a great business manager. He handled everything, but he quit around 2001. From then on, we were disorganized. We were supposed to publish twice a year, but didn’t always. Sometimes we’d have a double issue. But it cost a lot of money. I said at one point in the 2000s to make it online, it would be so much simpler. So much cheaper. The editor at the time didn’t want to do it. I stopped working for ACM around 2010, and a younger generation took over. I was talking to a DePaul student I know who said she was friends with the editor, and the publication hadn’t come out for a while. Before that, I had been on a panel where we had talked in some capacity about literary citizenship. I ended up thinking I should have stayed with ACM when it was floundering. When I heard it was up for grabs, I met with Matt Rowan and asked if I should be the editor. He said why not? He left for L.A., so I saw my chance to make it digital. I got a student who was in my first CNF cohort at Northwestern who had computer skills, and he came up with the magazine design.

How is life different now at ACM on the digital side of the digital divide?

We’re still influenced by the pandemic. We have people who are not in Chicago, and that is the main difference. So we don’t all get together. In the past, I’d accept pieces in the mail, and I’d have to show them to Barry Silesky (the main editor), but now the editors are autonomous. I’ll edit the prose, and give my edits back to the fiction editor. We have Zoom meetings. We haven’t had any readings since 2017, long before the pandemic, so I can’t use that as an excuse. We had a very small reading at AWP last year, and we had another this year. But we need to have readings in Chicago.

You spoke about literary citizenship, and how the idea of that changed your thinking regarding your involvement with ACM. How do you envision the concept of literary citizenship?

A good literary citizen reads current books. You read other writer’s books and go to their readings. You don’t say bad things about other writers on social media, even though you might want to. You support other writers. Give your fellow writers an audience. ACM has a section called “Forthcoming.” We excerpt pieces from people’s forthcoming books. That helps small presses (we only do small presses). It makes me feel we’re more a part of this community of small presses. Anything that supports other writers. If someone asks you to blurb a book, you do that. I get asked three or four times a year, and I always come through. But you also post about what you’re reading, and post about other people’s work. You’re not just out there for yourself.

“The Wandering Womb: Essays in Search of a Home”
By S.L. Wisenberg
University of Massachusetts Press, 248 pages