Things are heating up in July! Q&A with Helen Schulman

Jul 4

Dear Writers,

Happy 4th of July! This month, we’re thrilled to share a Q&A with Helen Schulman, whose novel, Lucky Dogs, was published in June. Years ago I took a fiction writing workshop with Helen at Columbia. She was wry, funny, warm and candid. There were several other women teaching in the MFA program at the time—iJennifer Egan, Maureen Howard, Binnie Kirshenbaum, and Dani Shapiro. I was in awe of Helen because she was a successful novelist who periodically discussed parenting. One day, she described dropping off her daughter at preschool. She said she had stood at the classroom door, and fogged up the door’s window to get one last look. The detailed way she described the scene and the passion she brought to the telling flipped a switch in my brain: You could explode tiny, important moments and write about them.

I am deep into reading and listening to Lucky Dogs and loving it. The novel tells the stories of a young Hollywood star, who was sexually assaulted by a studio executive and writing about it, and the young woman who is hired to befriend and betray her. You can read the NYT review of Lucky Dogs here and watch Helen’s Q&A with Deborah Copaken here. And read our Q&A below.

Years after studying with Helen, I taught fiction and creative nonfiction through Columbia’s Artist/Teachers (CA/T) program. Beth Raymer was one of my students. Her debut novel, Fireworks Every Night, also came out in June and received a fantastic review from AP. Listen to NPR’s review of Helen and Beth’s novels here.

In other reading news, I loved three other great books: Rebecca Makkai’s novel, I Have Some Questions for You, a #MeToo murder mystery set in a New England boarding school; Nita Prose’s novel The Maid, a murder mystery about a hotel maid who (probably) has Asperger’s, and Jonathan Rosen’s memoir, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness and the Tragedy of Good Intentions, which describes the author’s devastating friendship with Michael Laudor, a Yale law school graduate who has schizophrenia. If you’re interested in mental illness in general and schizophrenia in particular, The Best Minds is a fabulous companion to Robert Kolker’s Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family.

In late June, we held a “Summer Submissions Seminar” via Zoom. Beth Harpaz, an editor at The Forward, Julia Nusbaum, managing editor and founder of Herstry, and Doris Cheng, a fiction editor at Bellevue Literary Review, came to speak. It was a wonderful two hour discussion. Jo Varnish, creative nonfiction editor at X-R-A-Y Lit Mag, did a separate Q&A via Zoom. You can read stories written and edited by these editors below under “Juicy Reads.”

This month, we are headed to New Hampshire to run a four-day writing retreat at Cranberry Meadow Farm. Enjoy the fireworks. See you in August.

Juicy Reads

Elizabeth Lee, Revolutions in Time (Bellevue Literary Review)

Lara Palmqvist, In Another Life (Bellevue Literary Review)

Arya Samuelson, Car Wash (Bellevue Literary Review)

Meredith Talusan, Crosscurrents (Bellevue Literary Review)

Interview with Meredith Talusan

Beth Harpaz, Director Mira Nair wanted an Indian ‘Fiddler on the Roof.’ The result: ‘Monsoon Wedding, The Musical’ (The Forward)

Beth Harpaz, Is it OK for a Supreme Court justice to accept bagels and lox from her high school friends? (The Forward)

Beth Harpaz, A famous rabbi’s son died of a disease like the one in Broadway’s ‘Kimberly Akimbo’ (The Forward)

Rebecca Salzauer, This Family Survived the Holocaust. Could a Weekly Zoom Call Help Them Survive the Pandemic?

Patricia Garrison, I Want to Tell You (Herstry)