Art Chowder September | October, Issue 23 | Page 32

An Interview With Writer Gregory Spatz Who are your favorite writers, publications or events?  Where should readers go for rich writing or experiences? A short list of my favorite writers, or writers who’ve influenced me over the years, would have to include James Agee, John Williams, Alice Munro, Flannery O’Connor, Franz Kafka, Bruno Schulz, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zora Neale Hurston, William Trevor, John Edgar Wideman, Marcel Proust and William Maxwell. How does teaching inform your work or does it? The main way in which teaching informs my work is that it sets my schedule. There are months where I can write and months when I just can’t write very much. But teaching also keeps you mindful of what first inspired you to write and what gave you a sense of direction. Seeing that proverbial “light” suddenly come on for a student as some particular set of cues or instruction or advice suddenly takes hold, seeing them make a breakthrough in their own work is always surprising, satisfying, and a good reminder of what this business is all about. It’s also valuable to know what younger writers are reading and what inspires them, artistically. I’m always hearing from students and/or former students about new trends and books I need to check out. And there is nothing more satisfying than hearing from a student who finished long ago, learning that they’ve somehow kept at it, kept writing and revising, and that now their work will be published. The friendship and camaraderie engendered around all of this is a vital and ongoing inspiration. For more information about Spatz’s books, music, and performance go to http://www.gregoryspatz. com and http://www.thejaybirds.com. 32 ART CHOWDER MAGAZINE Excerpt from the second novella in What Could Be Saved by Gregory Spatz, published June 2019 by Tupelo Press In the last weeks of her pregnancy with us, our father says our mother developed a set of faint scrims, ghost marks on either side of her belly, each shaped more or less exactly like a violin f-hole. And in the center of her belly, a seam like a loosely furled upside-down violin scroll centered on her belly button. “A sign,” he insisted, though to our knowledge our mother did not share either his perceptions or his readings of them. “Sign of nothing,” she’d say. “Sign of a bladder shrunk to the size of a pancake and lungs halfway up my throat … twin boys kicking to get out…” Our father would not be talked out of his belief: “No, no, no. An indication from the universe! They will be good, these boys.” This was in the days before cell phone photography and the habitual archiving of important life events in a stream of instant-access visual data, so there are no pic- tures to prove, one way or the other, which of them was right. The labor was hard and nearly killed our mother. For months afterward, we’re told, we didn’t see her. First blood loss and then a rare form of infection held her hostage. Then a life-sucking post-partum depression. By the time she returned to us … our recollections from early childhood, let’s say, do not align with pictures of her we’ve seen from before our birth — spinning in polka-dot dresses, smiling avidly, eating cake, smoking slim cigars, looking defiant on a walk up Mount Baker. Of this time, the time of her recovery, we know only that our father was as attuned to her as he was to the instruments on his workbench. And perhaps this is all those transforming marks on her belly foretold, if there were any such marks: not greatness for us, her sons, but a time of life for her where she’d have to be at our father’s mercy and requiring of him all the patience, skill, and care of a fine stringed instrument.