feature:
Schultz’s Circuit
A Broken Pencil online exclusive interview
Emily Schultz has been a small press and independent publishing fixture for as long as the community can remember. She’s worked at numerous small magazines (including this one), edited with multiple book publishers, and even turned her living room into an art exhibition space. With a book of poetry, a short story collection, and a widely celebrated novel under her belt, her latest Heaven is Small marks a big league jump for Schultz that could translate into wide mainstream appeal. Author Stacey May Fowles chatted via email with Schultz about the trials and tribulations of being a writer imbedded in the biz, how online is changing the way we interact with the written word, and her love for one Gordon Small.
Stacey May Fowles: It’s hard to read Heaven is Small and not immediately connect it to your diverse personal experience in publishing, specifically your (brief) stint at Harlequin, but also at other publishers and magazines. As a writer who has worked for a number of years at a number of different publishing venues, what is your overall opinion of being a “writer in the industry?”
Emily Schultz: Oh my. Sometimes it’s given me access to information writers should have about the industry–and that’s helped me immensely. On the other hand I’ve seen a lot that broke my heart and would break any writer’s heart. My first couple of jobs were taking care of the unsolicited manuscript piles for little publishers who worked primarily out of their homes. At one such place, there was a room, a ‘room’, filled with unopened mail. When I saw this, I could have cried. There was so much that there was really no option other than to respond with mass rejection. It was kinder to send the manuscripts back than to make those authors wait infinitely, wondering what had happened to their works.
Ten years later, a peer remarked, “You know, you rejected my first book. I really thought you’d take it.” “It didn’t have anything to do with the work,” I said. What I couldn’t convey were the bruises on my shins from lugging a large-size laundry cart filled with manuscripts from the post office, down the stairs, and onto two subways, only to get to this office that was already brimming with bulky Manila envelopes.
When I write about the character of Gordon Small logging 294 broken hearts, it is true.
SMF: Sometimes I think what you’re talking about might be exactly why I started and stayed exclusively on the business side of the industry. When you’re working book publicity or writing grants for magazines, it tends to be so much more about optimism than rejection. The finished book is the happy part of the process. More about inflating hearts than rejecting them.
Do you find the work you’ve been doing in the community lately (with Joyland, teaching, and formerly with the art space you and Brian [Joseph Davis] ran together) is better for a writer’s mental health and, well, their writing in general? As a result of less rejected manila envelopes to cart around, do you feel more love and less bruises?
ES: There are less bruises (going paperless really helps with that!) but more grey hairs. When you run something yourself, you and you alone are responsible.
I’ve always done a lot of work for the community, hosting and organizing events, but I admit I have finally reached the place where I have a good team, and that helps more than anything. Joyland is a network of talented people; from the editors in Vancouver, Montreal, New York, London, Chicago, and LA, to our web designer Bill Kennedy, to Brian Joseph Davis who co-conceived the project, to our editorial assistant Faye Guenther. Knowing that all these people–not to mention the fiction writers who donate their work–would come onboard is definitely heartening.
The Centre for Culture and Leisure in 2006 was an experiment Brian and I engaged in where we transformed our home studio into an art space and opened to the public four days a week. I see Joyland as being the fiction-extension of that project. This time it’s a virtual space and it’s open 24/7, but it did used to be my home. With that said, I think it’s a writer’s prerogative to demand privacy, and I have a tendency to hide away when I need to.
SMF: On paperless giving less bruises; how do you feel about the evolving relationship between print and digital? I know that Anansi offered Heaven Is Small as a complimentary Shortcover, and of course that Joyland is an online, free literary journal that maintains the high editorial standards of its print counterparts (something I think is actually a rare occurance). Obviously those of us who work in the printed word think about the pros and cons of digital literature daily. Do you think that the dissemination of literature via the web helps or hinders the popularity of print? Are they a match made in heaven, or does one hurt or hate the other?
ES: I think they are a natural extension of one another. The digital is a fast, cheap, easy way to distribute, and ultimately advertises or provides information about the print version. Some people will choose to buy the digital over the print edition, but there will be plenty of readers who still prefer the old-fashioned book, and who knows how many of those people will find it via the digital download, then make time for a trip to a bookstore?
One of the things I love about Joyland.ca being a digital publication is that people can find it. The majority of literary magazines (with the exception of a few bigs) are simply unfindable outside of the countries where they are published. Clearly we bypass a lot of problems by publishing digitally. We don’t have to try to coordinate putting our fiction on a truck and shipping it across a vast space. This also means we don’t have to have the same kinds of deadlines a print magazine has. We can play a little looser, which gives the site that free feeling. Joyland is, basically, just responding to present conditions. As for future ones, like the place of print in our culture, I don’t know.
SMF: You definitely seem to have harnessed the power of the internet for good and not evil.
On the topic of the future, what does it have in store for you? Are you working on something new or are you looking forward to taking a break?
ES: It’s a funny thing. I know this is a standard interview question, but truthfully I am still caught in the characters of this novel. To talk about any others would be like an infidelity. A novel takes so long to write that one just wants to sit with it for a while after it comes out. I began Heaven Is Small in July 2004, and since then my life has been Gordon Small, this lowly, unassuming, secretly bitter man who takes transit into the afterlife and once he gets there begins building a new life for himself the way that people do when starting a new job.
The response so far has been interesting — some just fantastic reviews (the Globe and Mail, and Quill & Quire), others not so much. Of the more critical responses, one of the things that has shocked me has been this feeling that people should get what they deserve, be rewarded or punished for their behaviour — even in fiction, even in this strange afterlife that is governed by a corporation — and why aren’t they?
Something I didn’t consider for a moment when I was writing the book was the effect a reader’s values or religious views would have on reaction to it. I saw the book as what I like to call “slapstick dystopia,” and thought the goofiness and the satire would be enough to make most readers suspend their biases. But now I am wondering if writing a book set in the afterlife with absolutely no God, no religion, is somehow more loaded than writing an atheistic book.