March 2025: Q&A with author Lynn Schmeidler
More on love, loss, writing and friendship. In memory of Joanne Serling Fisher.
Dear Writers,
This is a story about writers being kind to each other.
In the fall of 2014, I published my first book, Sweet Survival: Tales of Cooking & Coping. Joanne Serling Fisher, editor of Millburn Short Hills Magazine (then owned by North Jersey Media), interviewed me about it. We were both writers and moms of teenage boys, and one sunny afternoon, sat together at a cafe in downtown Millburn, happily discussing books, writing, agents, teaching, and publishing. Joanne was funny, perceptive, and whip-smart. I spent the next year running around to bookstores, synagogues, libraries, banks, and department stores, talking about food, mental illness, and kidnapping in my family (the themes of the book). Promoting my book was so much fun but by the end of the year, I was at a loss. I didn’t know what to write next. Help arrived in the form of an email from Joanne. She had found an agent and sold her novel, Good Neighbors, to Twelve/Grand Central. The book was coming out in 2018. Did I want her job editing the magazine? Yes! I wrote back.
The money was terrible but the job was terrific. I loved editing and assigning stories to freelancers and covering local events and people. My dear friend, Liz Brous Guevara, and then-student, Jo Varnish, wrote for the magazine. I became friendly with Cindy Schweich Handler, who edited Montclair Magazine (Cindy’s book, A German Jew’s Triumph: Fritz Oppenheimer and the Denazification of Germany, is coming out this spring. Look for our upcoming Q&A.) Then, in July 2016, North Jersey Media was sold to Gannett. The morning of November 9, 2016, my new boss called while I was driving home from visiting my older son in Philly. I had gone to be with him as he voted in his first Presidential election and crowed that he was voting for the first woman president. We had stayed up late to watch the election returns. Rain was pouring down and the drive home was miserable. My boss said he was consolidating editing jobs, my job was being eliminated, blah blah blah, but could I still stay on and edit the magazine through May? Sure, I said.
After I was laid off, Joanne connected Cindy and me to two other writers and helped us form a writing group. Joanne’s novel, Good Neighbors, came out and was sharp, shocking and wonderful. Then Joanne was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, COVID-19 happened and our writing group moved to Zoom. Joanne went into remission and invited us all over for lunch one winter afternoon. It was one of my favorite pandemic events—a group of writers, bundled up in winter coats on Joanne’s patio, shivering as we talked about writing and parenting, and eating Joanne’s delicious food. It felt like a miracle that we could socialize and laugh, despite the temperature and Joanne’s illness. A year later, my husband and I moved to NYC. Joanne and I traded emails a few times but were not in regular touch, though I followed her on Instagram and loved the book reviews she posted.
This past December, my friend Judy Rabinor threw a book party for poet Elizabeth Burk. I arrived late and ended up standing in the back of a room with a woman and her husband. The woman introduced herself as Lynn Schmeidler. We started chatting. Lynne was a poet and short story writer; she had studied and taught at The Writers Studio, where Joanne had studied and taught. I asked if she knew Joanne. Lynn pressed her hand against her heart. “Oh, Joanne,” she said sadly. Wait, what? “Did you know she died?” Lynn asked. No, I had no idea, though I had wondered why she had stopped posting on Instagram. Joanne passed away last March 16. She was 57.
There is almost nothing worse than finding out that someone you liked and admired, someone who helped you multiple times, has passed away while you were oblivious. There was nothing I could do for Joanne’s family by that point, except write a belated condolence note, so I went home and downloaded Lynn’s short story collection, Half-Lives. Schmeidler is an award-winning writer and her stories are so smart, sassy and knowing. I asked her if she wanted to do a Q&A. She said yes and here it is. I hope Joanne, who was so skilled at connecting people, is smiling somewhere.
What is your writing process?
If only I knew! Or maybe it’s best that I don’t know, that I continue to work under the impression that my process is a deeply mysterious one wherein I sit at my desk and type words that come from some unknown place deep inside me and that only once a story announces itself as done do I have any idea of what it was I was really trying to get at. It feels a little like asking what was the process by which I grew my children inside me. I woke up each day when I was pregnant and tried my best to stay healthy and active such that my body could do what it knew how to do. Similarly, for my writing, I need to exercise and get outside each day, and then I need to give myself over to what feels to me like a mysterious process. I also try to read something that’s a little strange or interesting or feels new before sitting myself down at my desk, and giving myself over to a place of suspended self-judgement long enough to type out a few sentences or paragraphs or pages that I must believe have some purpose—whether that’s to further my thinking, to further my story or simply to keep the creative faucets open.
Do you write by hand? Type from notes? Develop an outline?
Mostly I compose on my computer. Sometimes I’ll write by hand. I teach writing workshops and if I’m teaching I’ll write with my students, and in those cases, I’ll write by hand and then retype what I’ve written into the word doc where it belongs. I never outline. I tried it a few times, but while I had such a terrific time during the outlining and felt, briefly, that I was making fabulous progress, when I sat down to actually write the story I’d outlined I had zero interest in it. I felt I’d already written it. The outline took all the energy and excitement with it. I‘m not suggesting outlining is a bad idea. I know writers for whom it’s successful, but for me it just doesn’t work. I need to feel like I’m groping in the dark, feeling my way forward one step at a time. I need to let each sentence point to the next so that I can surprise myself, delight myself, fool myself into revealing what I would never reveal or saying what I would never say if I had known where the words were leading.
If you’re writing a book, did you first come up with an outline or table of contents?
For my book of short stories, I began by writing stories and publishing them one at a time in literary magazines. It wasn’t until I’d written maybe ten successful stories that a writer friend of mine said, “I think you have a collection.” Then I looked back at the work I’d been making and saw that there were themes I’d been turning over—feminism, the female body, agency, aging… Once it was time to compile a book of my stories I began thinking about how the stories spoke to one another. How the rebellious voice of a young woman might be echoed in a menopausal character’s outrageous actions. How a Stevie Nicks impersonator might be not so dissimilar from a con woman who seduces someone else’s husband. Then it was a matter of ordering the stories. All the while I continued to write new stories and to swap out older ones for newer or better ones, so the book was a shifting, changing thing until I finally decided upon the final order. I went with an organizing principle of having the stories, most of which are written in the first person and all of which feature female protagonists, move from youngest protagonists to oldest. So, the main characters age as the book proceeds, making Half-Lives a kind of concept album of the contemporary female experience.
Do you have a regular writing practice? If so, describe it. (For instance, do you write first thing in the morning for at least one hour? Commit to writing 1,000 words a day? Journal for 15 minutes and see what happens? Write late at night, after everyone has gone to bed? )
Honestly, I’ve tried it all, from writing first thing to “as long as you write sometime today.” From writing 3 hours a day to writing 500 words a day. From ending each day with the assignment for the next day to sitting down each day with an anything-goes attitude such that I might write a poem one day, revise a story the next, and continue a new story the following day. I’ve written late at night and early in the morning. All of the above have worked really well until they haven’t, so over the years I’ve become less precious about my practice. There are so many factors impacting when and how and for how long and how frequently I can write that the only important thing is that I do not allow myself to go longer than a few days without writing, because I have noticed that it’s crucial to the way my creative mind works that I keep myself in the flow.
What books or stories or essays have you read recently that have inspired you?
Reading is a hugely important part of my writing life. I read as a sort of onramp to my writing. Reading creates the atmospheric disturbances I need to work on my own stories, and the work of other writers leads me to want to join the conversation. I also read for a sense of permission. Permission to write about topics that feel scary or taboo, permission to write in strange or unusual ways, permission to break rules and create outside of what I have internalized as acceptable ways of creating. Recently I read Marina Abramovic’s memoir, Walk Through Walls, Sabrina Orah Mark’s Happily, and Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things.
Do you read actual books, read on Kindle, read on Audible, or borrow from the library?
While I will sometimes read online—a pdf of a short Borges story, say, I find that the only way my whole body takes in a piece of writing is if I’m holding it in my hand. I love books. I love them as physical objects whose weight I can carry and rest on my stomach, whose pages I can turn, whose ink I can smell.
Which writers do you turn to for inspiration?
Shirley Jackson, Angela Carter, Italo Calvino, Rachel Ingalls, Clarice Lispector, Etgar Keret, Garielle Lutz, Nell Zink, Anne Carson…
If you have had a story, essay or book published recently, how many drafts did you revise before you finally submitted it? How many hours/months/years (roughly) did you spend on it?
The stories in Half-Lives each went through years of revisions and then the book as a whole had a few permutations and titles (Possibility Hunger, The World is a Girl Who Swims Through It…) before it was published in its final form. Because I revise as I write (I start each day’s writing by reading over what I wrote the day before and polishing it as a way to reenter the flow of the story), there was not much revision necessary by the time the stories were compiled into the final book. It takes me on average about 6 months to finish a short story. The oldest story in the book is about a decade old and the newest was finished shortly before the book won the prize that led to its publication.
What are you working on now?
I’m working on a novel. I’ve published poetry books and a book of short stories and this is my first time writing a novel, so while I feel familiar with the daily struggles and procrastinations, doubts and internal critical comments that are par for the course as a writer, this is still quite a new experience for me. It’s requiring a whole new order of faith.
Joyce Carol Oates, The Frenzy (fiction, The New Yorker); Joyce Carol Oates on a New Jersey Adventure (Q&A with Deborah Treisman)
Charlie Geer, Pistol in the Drawer (nonfiction, The Sun Magazine)
Robin Wilkey Gregory, Killing Time (flash fiction, Gemini Magazine)
We Had a World (Manhattan Theater Club, through May 11): Gorgeous, funny, heart-breaking, three-person play about a son, his mother and grandmother, by playwright, Joshua Harmon, author of Prayer for the French Republic. The protagonist, Josh, is close to his grandmother, an Upper East side art lover who was accepted to Wellesley and didn’t go, loves him fiercely, invites him and his then boyfriend (later husband) for dinner, takes him to see Medea and Robert Mapplethorpe’s work when he is still pre-adolescent, and does a range of wonderful and outlandish things in the name of love. But she drinks too much, puts on airs and has a tense relationship with his mother. The show beautifully dramatizes the challenges of being in a family where people simultaneously love, understand and alienate each other. Andrew Barth Feldman, Joanna Gleason, and Jeanine Serralles star. NYT review here.
Writing Our Stories, Tuesdays, 6-8 p.m.
This workshop is designed for beginning to intermediate writers.
In this workshop, writers will:
Write and revise their work with a dedicated community
Master the principles of storytelling
Discuss weekly assigned readings
Do writing exercises (they will stimulate your writing, we promise!)
Discuss other writers’ submissions in a supportive and productive workshop setting
Criteria:
Writers can submit up to 40 pages of work over the course of ten sessions
To qualify for this class, please submit a 2-4 page writing sample here
Have you ever read Julia Cameron’s, The Artist‘s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity? If not, have you wanted to? I read and loved the book in 2012 and 2013. It was crucial to giving me the scaffolding to write my first book. The book is almost magical in the way it supports and stimulates creative thinking. Last week, a friend asked if I would consider teaching a class based on it. Yes, I would! So this summer, we’re launching something new: A weekly workshop inspired by The Artist’s Way.
Please help us gauge interest by answering the following questions:
