Ars longa, vita brevis
Art is long, Life is short.

Professor of Creative Writing and American Short Story at Concordia University, Canada,
the founder and main organizer of the SLS, and author Mikhail Iossel.
Photo: Kestutis Pleita

Professor Mikhail Iossel interviewed by Eglė Kačkutė

This summer, July 15-28 and August 29-12, the 14th edition of Summer Literary Festivals known as the SLS will be held in Vilnius for the 3rd time running. Literary workshops will be conducted by experienced and well known North American writers; famous photographers, artists and researchers will be taking part in the program. SLS is the biggest independent creative writing program in the world that brings together an impressive number of talented teachers and writers to be. The creative writing phenomenon is rife in Europe, too. The first British Creative Writing course graduate in the UK is legendary Ian McEwan who continues to reap the plentiful fruit of his studies at East Anglia University thirty odd years ago. Creative studies are known to be more that just a means to get better at writing, they also serve as an initiation into complex and competitive world of publishing, providing writers to be with much needed references.

Eglė Kačkutė is talking to professor of Creative Writing and American Short Story at Concordia University, Canada, the founder and main organizer of the SLS, and author Mikhail Iossel.

This year for the fourteenth time running, you’ll be organizing the biggest international creative writing program featuring North American and Canadian writers. You teach creative writing at Concordia University and are a writer yourself. What’s your story? How did you come to writing in English and especially teaching writing in English?

I came to the US in 1986, after five years of having my application for émigré visa turned down by the competent organs. Back in Leningrad, which is where I was born and raised, I was trained and for a few years worked (poorly and lackadaisically) as an electrical engineer, in the employ of the research institute charged with the task of lowering the electromagnetic fields radiated in the ocean by the outmoded Soviet submarines, so as to make the latter less detectable by the enemy radars (it was a hopeless enterprise, of course); and I also – especially since the beginning of the 80s -- was active in the city’s burgeoning underground (“samizdat”) literary community.

(Once I had become a “refusenik,” however, my line of occupation had changed quite drastically, and for the last couple of years of my “Soviet” life I worked as an alternate night-guard at Leningrad’s Central Park of Culture and Leisure, tasked with the responsibility of keeping an eye on the city’s only roller-coaster. I loved that job.)
My original “Plan-A” idea, before arriving in America, had been to make a living in the new world by continuing to write in Russian; and when, within the first day or two of my post-Soviet life, it was explained to me how and why that wouldn’t work, I found myself at a loss as to what to do next, for I had no Plan B. One thing I did know for certain, though: I didn’t want to be an engineer again – and in general, I had resolved for myself never to try and make a living by doing anything that, to me, felt like a waste of life.

I could read English well enough, at that point – back in Leningrad, I had translated some contemporary American prose and poetry for “samizdat” journals, including the one I co-published myself – and my spoken English was rather passable; but my oral comprehension, in the absence of any prior practice, was pretty abysmal, not to mention my ability to write in English, which was non-existent, for all intents and purposes.
In an effort to improve the quality of my English quickly – and because the idea of being surrounded by books was soothing and appealing to me, in my discombobulated state just then – I undertook a string of part-time jobs with some terrific bookstores: first around the Harvard Square and other parts of larger-Boston area – and then in Northern California, where my relatives on my father’s side lived.

Unfortunately, I was unable to keep any of those jobs for long. I was, at that point -- not atypically for many Soviet émigrés in those days (when one left the country, and one’s friends and family, forever, in the firm knowledge he would never be able to go back and see them again) -- in a fairly sorry state of mind and spirit: confused, depressed; in a word, sick. I had no clear personal strategy for survival. It was purely a day-by-day kind of existence.

I watched television for hours on end, cooped up in my tiny, overheated sixth-floor, rooftop room on the outskirts of Boston, in a large rambling walk-up apartment owned by a Russian émigré, where seven or eight other people (mostly, from Columbia, for some reason) lived; but my old, rabbit-ears TV, which I’d found on sitting on the sidewalk one day, only allowed me to watch one channel -- and it was the Boston Celtics, basketball channel. So I was mainly learning the basketball-related part of the language.

At some point during those months, in order to distract myself from the sheer uncertainty and sadness of my circumstances, sleepless and homebound and unemployable, I started trying to write sentences in English. Not stories, at that point, just yet – just the competent, authentic-looking sentences. It was, at first, a purely mechanical, self-therapeutic exercise: putting together the small blocks of short, direct sentences, one after another. It was indeed a comforting exercise for me: I was overwhelmed with nostalgia, you see, and my native language, Russian, would not allow me to write about my life objectively and dispassionately, with any degree of calm remove, for it was as natural to me as the very air I breathed and therefore offered no resistance in the process of writing; and as soon as I started writing in Russian, I immediately succumbed to sadness and depression and commenced to wallow in misery and self-pity. The very foreignness of a foreign language – English – afforded me the distance I needed to put between myself and my own life, my present circumstances and my memories. A foreign language one knows well enough to know he doesn’t know it well serve as a natur4al obstacle every writer needs to come up with for the purposes of his or her writing. I could not wax emotional in English, could not feel sorry for myself, could not write soulfully and beautifully about my nostalgia, about the friends I would never see again. I could do nothing but be adequate to the words I was trying to put on paper. English, then, served as a sort of Plexiglas wall standing between myself and my past, my very life. I only could be adequate, as I said, to any English sentence at hand.

One sentence, then another one, and another and soon enough, you have a paragraph. Then another paragraph, and then another. Every sentence had to make direct narrative sense, and every single paragraph had to work towards the telling of the story under writing. It was like walking a narrow path through the swampland: you don’t want to deviate from it at any point, or else you’ll get bogged down without a trace.

Incidentally, and a propos of what I am describing right now: when Samuel Beckett – perhaps the most linguistically gifted and prodigiously verbose (in his youth) writer in all of the 20th-century literature, was asked why, at the age of 46, he switched to writing in French (a language he was not perfect in)< he replied: “I know too many words in English.”

So it went. By that point – early 1987 – a friend at one of those bookstores I’d worked at had told me about the phenomenon of graduate creative writing programs in the US: you could apply there and, if accepted, you would get two year’s worth of time unobstructed by any other practical worries and considerations; they’d give you a place to live, if they liked your writing, and they might even waive your tuition, or you could apply for a student loan. All you had to do there was write.

So I applied to one of those programs – at the University of New Hampshire – and I was subsequently accepted, even despite the fact that I had not a single story in English finished by that time.

The rest was more or less clear sailing: I kept on writing in English, gradually getting better at it (as you get better at anything you do stubbornly and consistently and with passion); and eventually, one story got accepted for publication in a literary journal, and then another – and I was on my way, by and large.

Within a few months, an editor with a large publishing house had contacted me and asked if I might have enough stories for a collection, so I told her I’d have the needed number of stories by the time she needed them.¨

In due time, the book of my stories got published, I went to Stanford University on a post-graduate writing fellowship (the Wallace Stegner Fellowship); then I applied for a teaching job at the University of Minnesota, where there was an opening; I was hired by it for a two-year stint. Then I was lucky enough to have been awarded the prestigious Guggenheim fellowship in writing, which indeed is a coveted distinction to get, and one that makes getting jobs easier. I subsequently went on to teach at a number of colleges and universities, in the graduate and undergraduate writing programs (New York University, St. Lawrence University, Union College), before settling permanently  in Montreal, which is home now.
That’s the whole story, in a nutshell.            

As an émigré and especially as a native Russian language speaker writing in English you probably have to do a lot of cultural translation and adapting from one culture to another. How do you go about it? How do you feel about it?

I don’t think I do much of any such translation anymore, be it in the metaphoric or literal sense. (This, quite apart from the fact that the two languages are not compatible enough structurally to lend themselves easily to the process of instantaneous translation by the translation engine of one’s mind. To me, the oft-asked question, “What language do you think in?” – doesn’t really make much sense, since I don’t really think in words, as most people do not, either. The language of thought is separate from the language of words, thought made word.) I believe -- which is to say, I feel – I have found a place of balance for myself -- or rather, the process of my life itself has found such a place of psychological and intellectual balance for me.

I may, fancifully speaking, be suspended between two worlds, the old and the new one: the world of my past and that of my present, with one foot planted in the present and one in the past; and the past, of course, is also the present.

I feel that my first several years in the new world, which were quite hard and difficult, filled with doubt and nostalgia and despair – those were the years when this process of dividing myself into two selves was taking place. Which, basically, may be a way of me saying that there are two people cohabitating inside me: one belonging in the world of Russia, the other -- citizen of the larger, broader world.

I am very plugged in to the current developments in Russia, I follow them closely, I spend quite a bit of time every day on the Russian websites, I read the new literary publications in Russia, I speak to some very close friends from Russia, both living there and abroad; I still feel that Russia is home for me, in some esoteric way: and when I’m back in Russia, I understand the code of people’s living there, I feel that I belong there – although I no longer live and could never live there again. But my life’s center of gravity has long shifted towards the broader, larger world of my post-Soviet existence, my home is the world outside Russia. I am a citizen of the US and a permanent resident of Canada, but I feel that I live in a larger world than just that of North America.

That having been said, I am a professor of English who teaches the university-level creative writing and American short story; I read lots of contemporary American literature (albeit not as much as I would like perhaps), as well as my students and other young writers’ stories – hundreds of stories every year. Somehow, I manage to stay in one piece and not feel torn or conflicted within my own head and my own heart – but, again, this did not happen quickly or easily; as nothing really good ever happens in life quickly and easily, without some serious work one does, often unbeknownst to himself, to prepare himself for the kind of life that he feels makes sense.    

Who are the star participants among this year’s faculty members?

All of them are stars in my book, as well as by the lights of great many readers in north America and abroad – although not in the same sense or scope as, say, Brad Pitt or Jennifer Lopez or the authors of mega-bestsellers on The New York Times bestseller list are stars. The literary world, at least in North America, is not about starship – there’re not enough readers of serious literature in modern world to make them stars in the commonplace meaning of the term – but it is, rather, about being consistently interesting and thoughtful and contemporary and doing meaningful things with one’s writing, charting new literary routes, taking reader to the place where serious questions about the serious life’s issues get asked… and not necessarily answered, because life itself is an open-ended proposition, with no ready-made answers or recipes for happiness on the offer.

One of the great advantages of being an independent literary program run by writers is that we’re free in our choice of invited faculty. Over the fourteen years of SLS’s existence, we’ve brought to our programs the veritable Who’s Who of the North American and international letters: people who are innately curious about the different paradigms of life in various places and who – although they easily could afford to come to those places on their own – Russia, Lithuania, Kenya -- wouldn’t be content with status of the mere tourists, which they inevitably would be without the familiarity with and immersion in the local literary and arts scene.

Another very distinct feature of SLS separating it from any other program of its kind: we draw no dividing lines between the well-known, famous and accomplished writers on the faculty -- and the beginning writers constituting the bulk of the program participants. Everyone’s in the same boat on the SLS programs; everyone’s in on the same type of discovery. Our programs are about shifting and accelerating the paradigm of one’s literary practice, and so we put people in highly unfamiliar (although on the surface recognizable) settings – and everyone is lost there in the company of other writers; everyone is lost within a findable context. Everyone is brought together by the pressure of the sheer strangeness, unfamiliarity of the surroundings. A very famous writer therefore can drink beer till two in the morning in the company of twenty-year-old undergraduate students of creative writing and talk to them as equals about literature… or whatever else people talk about at two in the morning while drinking beer Writing is an enterprise where the rank has no meaning. A famous writer is nothing but yesterday’s novice. Over the course of my teaching career, I’ve seen enough talented but not necessarily hard-working people, and enough not too brightly gifted (on the surface) yet extremely ambitious and serious and diligent your writers, to know that in writing, dedication to the process and practice of literature inevitably trumps the bright but sometimes shallow flame of natural talent. Talent is not always to be found on the surface of one’s early writing. People come into the possession of their talent, their true literary voices, over the long period of hard work.

This is the third time that you run the program in Vilnius. Why?

I am very glad we’re holding SLS programs in Lithuania now,. The idea to open one came after we had decided to suspend our sessions in St. Petersburg, which we ran for 10 years straight and brought roughly a thousand students to the city on the Neva. The constraints of available space would preclude me at this point from talking about the reasons why I’ve always found Lithuania fascinating – going back to the early years of my Soviet adolescence. But those reasons were indeed numerous, and memorable.
So I decided to see if we could hold a program in a place which, unlike St. Petersburg, Russia, is not that easily and readily recognizable to the North American literary community; does not hold the same kind of raw mystique perhaps that Russia possesses – not to mention Kenya, which is the site of another one of our long-running programs.

Lithuania, of course, is the geographic heart of Europe – but more than that, it is the spot where the tectonic plates of European history have clashed over the centuries, and currently are clashing as well; it is a place of transition from the old, divided Europe, to the new, unified yet still painfully unequal one.

To me, of course, it matters a great deal that this is a post-Soviet space – and of course, and very meaningfully, it is of essential importance to me that Lithuania was the place of the greatest concentration of Jewish people in Europe relative to the native population, for centuries and immediately prior to the WWII, and then became the site of the greatest tragedy in the history of the Jewish people. My ancestry, originally, is from the larger Litvak area: Belarussian border with Lithuania, and Latvia. There is a large agglomeration of factor that have caused me to want to hold the program here, both personal and intensely objective ones

One of the aims of the program is to set in motion a cultural, literary and, most importantly, creative exchange between the visiting established authors and writers to be and the local literary community. Based on previous SLS Vilnius, how does that work, does that collaboration bare any fruit?

We’re working on it. SLS, basically, over the years, without setting this as a major goal expressly, has positioned itself as a moveable platform of sorts upon which the North American and the international literary communities can meet. Over time, we have had lots of former SLS participants collaborating on literary projects with their counterparts from Russia and Kenya and Canada; and we‘re intent on seeing the same happen in the case of the Lithuanian literary community. There have already been some poetry translations of contemporary Lithuanian poetry done by our program participants, on a fairly significant scale, and some work already has been published. We’re looking to expand that effort further still, and on a considerable scale. We are bringing to Lithuania some of the leading publishing-house and literary-magazine editors, who always are interested in discovering the new voices from a variety of places. Ask me the same question in a year: after all, we have only just started our program in Lithuania: three years is a short time. Ars longa, vita brevis.