The Grievers

I met Marc Schuster, who had just published his novel, The Grievers, through the Internet. That is to say, I met Marc through the Internet—he did not, in fact, publish his novel through the Internet (that was with The Permanent Press). I forget exactly when and how, but I swear it must have been that he visited my blog and “Liked” one of my posts. As I always do, I check out those who leave a “Like,” because, well, I’m not famous, and only have a handful who do that, but that’s probably how I found out about him. At the time (this had to be in early 2011 or 2012…time has a way of warping for me…) he had not yet published The Grievers, and was asking for reviews. I checked out the book—was absolutely grabbed by the cover (and the quirky story)—and asked for a copy. Here is my review of it. Marc also devotes much of his life to promoting independent publishers, through his Small Press Reviews site. Anyway, ever since, we’ve interacted through blogs and e-mails (again, in either 2011 or 2012, I was listed as “Stalker” on his end-of-year stats WordPress publishes to it users), and I found him to be quite the “stand-up” guy (pardon the predictive pun; keep reading). Plus, he’s smart, and I like to hang out with smart people (or, I should say, I need to hang out with smart people). He’s also what I call, a “Renaissance Man.” I only know one other person I use that term with, and it’s my writer/producer/actor/blah-blah-blah brother, Greg…but, never mind him (for now). I’ve been wanting to get Marc and his bow ties on the “chopping block” for a while, so….

Marc, curious minds beg to know: do you sleep?

It’s funny—I used to have trouble sleeping, but I’ve gotten much better at it in recent years.

Could you give us a short bio?

I lived in Northeast Philadelphia until I was about thirteen, and then my family moved to the suburbs. This is actually turning out to be a significant detail in my life, as I’ve been meeting a lot of writers from that neighborhood lately. Shaun Haurin, who wrote the short story collection Public Displays of Affectation; Marie-Helene Bertino, who wrote Safe as Houses; and the indie-film producer Keir Politz all grew up within a few miles of my childhood home. We all focus on the same subjects in a way that I think has a distinct Northeast Philadelphia bent. Now I live in Havertown, which is a suburb of Philadelphia. Someone recently told me it’s “where the writers live.”

You teach writing and lit courses at Montgomery County Community College in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania. You write. Paint. Compose. Now, do podcasts. Got ADD?

Actually, yes. I was diagnosed in 2011. In fact, it’s taken me over twelve hours to answer this question.

Has writing always been in your blood? Has teaching? Have podcasts, painting, and compositions?!

Technically speaking, I guess podcasts haven’t always been in my blood, but I used to record radio dramas with my friends on a brown Fisher Price tape recorder when I was eight or nine years old. I’m sure that the tapes are floating around somewhere in my parents’ house. If I can find them, I might even start posting them when I run out of fresh material for my podcast. As for the other activities, I’ve always enjoyed art and writing. In fourth grade, I would write knockoffs of Doctor Who episodes. My hero was called “the Detective” and I distinctly remember that one of my stories was a recycled version of “The Robots of Death,” which I titled “The Killer Robots.” I probably spent more time drawing a picture for the cover than I spent on the story. As for teaching, I had a pretty strong sense that it was what I wanted to do from an early age if only to give me an excuse to wear a bow tie every day.

Interesting. Would love to hear those tapes! Marc Schuster: The Fisher Price Years….

So would I! I’ll have to try dig them up. Hopefully I didn’t record “Mr. Roboto” over any of them.

Dōmo arigatō. Okay, pretend you’re bellying up to the bar, Marc. What’s your pleasure? Do you prefer one activity over another?

I think that’s the problem—I enjoy them all. Or at least I enjoy one activity until I get bored with it, and then I move onto the next one. Fortunately, they complement each other. I’ll write until I hit a wall, and then I’ll paint for a bit, or work on editing one of my podcasts. The only part of my life where I can’t be so—flighty, I guess—is teaching, because the deadlines are always pretty tight. When you have sixty papers to grade, it isn’t a good idea to let them sit for too long. They need to get done.

What would you be if you weren’t a Renaissance Man?

Depressed verging on miserable.

So, see, there is truth to the urban legend that writers write to keep their sanity! It’s like, psychologists are actually trying to figure themselves out, and MDs “healing thyselves.” Themselves. You know what I mean.

Yeah, and I wonder if people in general would be happier if they were encouraged to express themselves in one way or another—or at least if it were considered less “odd” to engage in creative pursuits. So many hobbies in our culture revolve around collecting—which I see as a form of consuming. We don’t really encourage more creative hobbies. And a lot of the time I get the impression that people are shy or embarrassed when it comes to admitting that they have a creative side. So what we get is a culture full of people who bottle everything up and end up miserable because the overwhelming message of society is that happiness comes from accumulating more crap to fill the void rather than staring down the void and coming up with a creative way to express our feelings about it.

Totally agree! “Buy more!” “Keep up with the Joneses!” What’s your take on the current state of publishing? Or, perhaps, would a better question be on the state of reading?

You make an interesting distinction. As a business, I think publishing is in a state of unprecedented flux, and the people who want to make money in the industry are trying everything they can to turn a profit. I don’t think that this desperation helps readers, though, because the ceaseless hunt for blockbusters doesn’t allow big publishers to nurture and develop budding writers. That’s where small presses and independent publishing step in. For the most part, they recognize that what matters over the long haul is quality—however it’s defined. Growing an audience and developing a readership. One way to do that is through what I’d describe as a kind of curatorship in which publishers—and reviewers, to a certain extent—find writers whose work they enjoy and then promote their work to like-minded readers.

Interesting…now, you also make a nice distinction: how reviewers are part of that curatorship of developing writers. I don’t think that’s anything to sneeze at (I just sneezed a moment ago). We could do a whole “thing” on reviews, but in reading your reviews I find that, yes, they do bring new writers to readers (that is, your reviews do this; I’ve read other reviewers who are only out to rip others a new one, or prove how much more intelligent the reviewer is at the expense of the writer). It brings to mind how I like to think of social media: sure, authors can and should use it, but I think the real benefit comes from the readers who find someone they love (or hate) and “backyard gossip” them up.  Create the much touted “buzz.”

That’s the great thing about social media—and why I gravitate more toward “long-form” social media like blogging and podcasting rather than abbreviated platforms like Facebook. On a blog, it’s not only the case that you can go on at length about a new author you’ve discovered—or your favorite recipe, or a city you’ve just visited—but it’s also expected. Bloggers are ultimately sharers, and I feel like I’ve really gotten to know a few people online—people who are spread not only across the country but around the world—by following their blogs. (Yours, of course, chief among them!) And I hope that people who read my blog feel like they’re getting to know me.

You’re too kind, but thank you, sir. I definitely feel like I’ve gotten to know you much better over the past year of two. Given your erudite background, what’s your take on “today’s youth”? We constantly hear about the steady “dumbing down” of Humanity. I had recently heard the average global IQ level has dropped 3 points since the 1950s? Are Smartphones to blame? The Internet? Frank Dearborn?

Funny you should mention Frank Dearborn, since I think that one problem I have with education in recent decades is the way that it’s marketed. I can’t go anywhere without seeing a billboard for a college or university that touts things like ease and convenience. The basic message is that you can get a degree from home without ever getting out of bed. And then there’s the promise of financial gain, the idea that getting a degree from a particular college will provide you with the skills you need to get the job you want. Apparently the marketing experts aren’t consulting with the teachers, because as it turns out, earning a college degree involves a lot of hard work. More to the point, the purpose of a college education is not, in my opinion, to provide discrete job skills. It’s to give students perspective, to allow them to think about the big picture, how everything is connected, to develop a way of thinking that isn’t just a matter of ticking boxes and filling in forms. But that’s hard to sell, and it’s even harder to measure. Yet we live in a results-oriented society that wants to see one-to-one correspondence between time, effort, and money spent and return on the investment. The questions stops being, “How will all of this change the way I think about the world?” and becomes instead, “How will this particular thing you’re telling me right now apply to the job I want.” It’s a frustrating variation on “Will this be on the test?” I want to help students build systems of knowledge, ways of knowing themselves and the universe and how the two are related, and they want me to give them disconnected facts—trivia, essentially. Of course, I don’t blame them. They only want what they were promised.

“Promised”…or developed into? The Internet is Evil, commercials the Devil’s Candy, and movies are about exploiting sex, images of must-haves/must-bes, and whammy shots. As I look over your work…The Grievers, The Singular Exploits of Wonder Mom and Party Girl, The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, and Don DeLillo, Jean Baudrillard, and the Consumer Conundrum, they all seem concerned with consumerism in some way. Might that be your Moby-Dick?

It’s definitely a theme that fascinates me. I understand that business is business and that corporations need to sell products and services in order to keep the economy strong and give people jobs, but I also worry about what the constant drive for higher profits—a quest for the white whale if there ever was one—is doing to us. Everything gets boiled down to a commodity. I mean, I even hear it among some of my writer friends. They don’t talk about the books they’re writing. They refer to them as properties. I mean, really? Properties? And then there’s always talk about building a platform as a writer and branding oneself as a writer—and that gets right to the heart of my worries about consumerism. We’ve absorbed so much from the world of marketing that we’ve come to think of ourselves as commodities.

Do not get me started! You seem to tend toward the quirky, if I “read” your Small Press Reviews correctly. Does this bear itself out in your everyday life? Are you quirky, Marc? Give examples. Support your thesis.

I think I have an appreciation for quirkiness and a quirky sense of humor, but my life is fairly predictable. Gustave Flaubert once said that writers should be regular and orderly and live bourgeois lives in order to be violent and revolutionary in their work. I’ve more or less taken that to heart but substituted “quirky” for “violent.” When school is in session, I wake up at 5:15, get dressed, eat a bowl of granola, and head out to work. On weekends, I grade papers, mow the lawn, do laundry, and make enough granola for the coming week. Every two weeks, I buy three pounds of rolled oats so I can make more granola. Basically, my life revolves around granola. And bow ties. I really wish I had more occasions to wear bow ties.

I’ve always wanted to use “Flaubert” in a sentence. What’s your typical day like? Are there even 24 hours in it? I think you run on 27.

I guess it depends upon the day, but a few things remain relatively constant. I’ll usually have a cup of coffee in the morning—or two at most—before switching to decaf. I’m like Karl Childers in that respect. Too much coffee makes me nervous. When I’m teaching, I’ll meet with my classes and attend to other school business throughout the day. When school’s out, I’ll try to get as much writing done as I can in the morning, and then catch up on my reading in the afternoon. After dinner, my wife and I will usually go for a walk. All of the other work I do happens in the interstices—whenever I get bored or restless. Which is fairly frequently.

Dammit, you made me look up “interstices.” See, I really do need to be around smart people, not smartphones. You’re “living the dream”! But I think you touch on an important point…restlessness. The restless mind. I think this important for the writer mindset—heck, Humanity, if you get right down to it. Do you really get “bored,” or are you just always looking for the next curiosity?

I don’t know if I always go looking for the next curiosity. A lot of the time the next curiosity finds me. Maybe that should be a corollary to the saying about opportunity. When curiosity knocks, open the door and let it in.

Every time I answer the door, I find a burning paper bag before me. Are there other forms of expression: a) you’re already doing, and b) you’re not, but would like to do?

I like playing music. I do some recording from time to time, but I find that it eats up a lot of time. I can spend hours on a thirty-second piece of music, and then I start to obsess over all of the other things I could have been doing in that time, so sometimes I’ll just give myself an order not to record any music until I’ve completed another project. For example, I’m working on a new book, and I’ve given myself a pretty strict and somewhat unrealistic deadline for it, so I’ve decided not to work on any music of my own until the project is done. If someone else calls me up and asks me to play on a recording, that’s a different story, but for now, I’m doing my best to resist the sirens.

In terms of what I’d like to do, I’ve always wanted to try my hand at standup comedy, but the prospect of tanking is too daunting. The unfortunate result is that whenever I get in front of an audience at a reading, the majority of my allotted time goes to testing out material I would have tried at a comedy club.

Okay, didn’t see that coming. Was trying to envision what you’d say. I failed.  Funny thing is (pardon the paronomasia—see, you’re rubbing off on me already!), I can really see you doing this! Your dry delivery. That voice. You come out on stage all “professored up,” sporting white gloves and holding a red balloon—you never acknowledge nor draw attention to the gloves or balloon, but you hold on to said balloon the entire time, switch hands, tie it to the nearby stand as you juggle and deliver your deadpan. Then take your balloon and leave. I’d pay.

That sounds a lot like my approach to teaching, so I’m glad to hear that my students are getting their money’s worth.

I don’t even want to ask how many projects you have going on at any one time….

It’s hard to say. I’ve never really done a complete inventory. Usually I’ll have about two or three unfinished novels on my hard drive at any given time, along with a handful of ideas for essays and short stories. Projects like these tend to loom over me for years, but that’s how I maintain the illusion of productivity. I’ve been working on the book I want to finish this summer since, I think, 2008. It’s been through at least three very different drafts, each with a completely different cast of characters, and they’ve all fallen by the wayside before I’ve managed to complete them. In the meantime, I was finishing projects that had been going since years earlier. I think I’d been working on my “first” novel since 2003 when it was initially published in 2009, and I actually started The Grievers a year earlier, in 2002. Meanwhile, I’d been working on my dissertation from about 2002 to 2005—and then I worked on it some more when it was going to come out as a book, and somewhere in there I squeezed in work on the Doctor Who book, which was my first. So, really, I’m just always juggling projects, and the fact that every now and then I complete one makes it look as if I’m producing a somewhat steady stream of work, when in reality nothing could be further from the truth. Everything else—the short stuff—is just there to keep me busy when I get stuck or bored with the big projects.

In stitches…interstitial…intersteecees…is there anything else burning inside with a need for expression?

At the moment, I’m just trying to do as much as I can in the time allotted to me.

Well said. If you were to have a gravestone, what would you have engraved upon it?

Life is good.

Thanks for your time, Marc, always a pleasure and quite enlightening!

The pleasure was all mine! Thanks!

Find out more about Marc, at:

Marc Schuster’s website:  http://marcschuster.wordpress.com/

Marc Schuster’s Small Press Review:  http://smallpressreviews.wordpress.com/