SHOULD I GO TO GRAD SCHOOL?: AN INTERVIEW WITH SHEILA HETI
The following is an excerpt from the anthology “Should I Go to Grad School,” whichcomes out from Bloomsbury this week.
SHEILA HETI: Why are you so interested in MFAs and whether they’re a good idea or not?
JESSICA LOUDIS: Well, it’s not that I’m interested in MFAs so much as I’m interested in grad school in general, and what it can mean to people who don’t know instinctively that they want to be an academic or teach. After getting out of college, I assumed that I would eventually go into a PhD program, but thought that I needed to spend at least a year doing something else first before applying. (This despite the fact that I had no idea what kind of program I wanted to apply to at the time). When that never happened, I started to think about how people regard doctoral programs as a kind of insurance policy; a way of guaranteeing that they will be able to read and think about the things they care about, at least for a few years. Of course, getting a PhD is often very restricting in a practical sense—few job opportunities, committing yourself to a lifelong form of hyperspecialized job training—but it’s still a hard set of notions to shake. When I first started thinking about this, and about other kinds of programs, I realized that a lot of people project these sorts of fantasies onto grad school and think of it as a way of trying to reconcile the person they are with the person they might want to be. So to answer your question, I’m interested in how asking people about their relationship to grad school is a way of asking them about their expectations for themselves at a certain point in their lives. It’s one of those questions that people tend to react very strongly to.
What about you? What’s your educational background, and did you ever think about going to grad school?
SH: I never thought about it. It’s really strange for me to read this. It’s like you’re talking about a handsome, magnetic person who I don’t find handsome or magnetic at all. Grad school has no allure for me, never has. I waited a while before going to university—I didn’t go till I was twenty-one, and I wasn’t even sure I would go—but it was a fantastic experience. I studied art history and philosophy and took economics and political science classes. I just took whatever I wanted and I didn’t worry about grades and I read and learned a lot, and I didn’t have much of a social life, so it was deeply absorbing. But I feel like one can have all of that as a writer; you’re writing, you’re reading, you’re talking to interesting and intelligent people. Your life is structured around whatever book you’re writing, and so is your reading and so are many of your conversations. So for me, grad school has never had much meaning or allure. As well, I have known a lot of people in grad school and no one seems very happy about it.
JL: So in lieu of school, how do you organize your life around writing a book?
SH: Well, if you’re working on a book, the book poses a bunch of questions. Maybe it’s (in the case of my second book, Ticknor) “What were the early birth control pioneers like?” or “What was Florence Nightingale all about?” Most of your curiosities don’t even make it into the book, but you think they will. Moments come where you have to find out about something or you can’t go on. So you start reading in that area (Havelock Ellis, Marie Stopes) and you take in the stuff at a really deep level because your need to know it is at once mysterious (why is Marie Stopes so important to you right now?) and really practical (it might help you finish a scene). I guess the main difference is that you are led down reading paths as you go, rather than coming up with a reading list at the start. And it’s always changing. Then, in terms of how your life is organized around a book, it’s a question of what kind of person you have to be in order to write that book. Do you need to be married, single, traveling, asking questions of other people, alone in your room? What kind of person does the book demand it be written by? You have to become that person.
What else do think you could get out of school that you can’t get out of your life now? When we last spoke, you mentioned friendships and mentoring. I like what Eileen Myles said about mentoring—that she prefers “parallel” to “hierarchical” mentoring; that is, learning from one’s friends and peers, rather than from more successful, established people. I agree.
JL: A big thing is built-in structure. The idea of parallel mentoring is appealing—though I’m not sure it’s an either/or situation—but the reality is, it takes a while to find your peers, and school can be a way of expediting that process. One point that several of our contributors have made is that going into a PhD or MFA program is valuable for the socialization process—either because you find the people who speak your language or because you react strongly to the weirdos you’re working with. You seem to have known from early on that you wanted to be a writer, but how did you find the people you wanted to learn from when you were starting out?
SH: I’ve always had individual friends, but I didn’t find the people I wanted to learn from as an adult until my midtwenties.
I didn’t make friends as an undergrad. And though I attended theater school for playwriting before university (after taking a break after high school), even though my program was small (only three other people), I didn’t have that collaborative or learning feeling with any of them. (Wait—I’m just now remembering; my boyfriend at the time was in the directing program, and we learned a lot from each other, smoking pot and living together and talking about art and working on an adaptation of Faust.) But when it began to happen on a broader, community level—it was a pretty deliberate choice. I wasn’t searching for parallel mentorship, but I was definitely searching for people I could talk to in certain ways and be with in ways that had more to do with art than, I don’t know, gossip. Even though gossip is a big part of art! My then-boyfriend (later husband, later ex-husband) Carl Wilson and I began having parties every two weeks. And with my then-new friend Misha Glouberman, I started Trampoline Hall (a monthly barroom lecture series), and Carl had a music show called Tin Tin Tin, and for a few years we were just building this world of people around us. Anytime I met anyone I liked, I would invite them to our parties or to lecture at Trampoline Hall.
We did it because we were bored. We didn’t know what to do with ourselves. I remember telling my grandmother about our isolation, and she said, “Have regular parties at your house.” I think that’s how she and her mostly Jewish, communist, artist friends socialized back in Budapest. She told me what to do, and we did it, and she was right. God, I owe a lot to my grandmother.
It was the regularity of contact that was important—she was right. We threw four events a month, not to mention the times we’d see people at other events. So after a few years, we had gathered a pretty solid group of friends. It took a lot of time, and you often ended up socializing when you don’t want to. But it taught me how to have conversations, how to find people, how to work with people who are your friends, and how to turn friendships into working things. I’m just realizing for the first time what an education it was. I think making friends you can work with is a skill like any other; developing those particular kinds of intimacies. They’re intimacies like any other, but they grow in a definite direction, not just willy-nilly, like normal friendships. I can’t imagine school as having been a satisfying substitute for me. You’d only meet people in your program, and the nice thing about our world was that everyone was doing different things.
How did you go about finding your people?
JL: I guess just by going to talks, to panels, to parties, and by trying to pay attention to the people I met who I wanted to keep around. Your idea of working friendships sounds a little like a version of networking (a truly noxious term) but fundamentally different—more about figuring out yourself in the context of others and learning to identify certain qualities that matter to you. Could you talk a little more about what you mean by it, and how it’s happened for you?
SH: Oh god, not networking. I mean something closer to love. Like, who are the people who I art-love? That means admire and want to share my brain with and make part of my brain. It’s not like there are a thousand people I can have this ongoing sort of relationship with, as with networking. There are a dozen? Maybe dozens? It’s like having boyfriends, except instead of things lasting six months or a year and then you break up, it lasts indefinitely and it’s not exclusive and it’s less concentrated. I’m in a serious monogamous relationship, and I don’t want to keep having different boyfriends, and I have this instead— with men and women. It’s better. Instead of having sex, we have art.
JL: It seems like your writerly and intellectual patterns are deeply bound up with friendships, yet you say that you were somewhat reclusive until your midtwenties. What changed at that point?
SH: I suppose I fell in love with Carl. I remember thinking around that time, “Well, now I’m ruined. Now I’ll never be able to be alone again.” I saw what was wonderful about human companionship. Before that, I was quite content to be alone, to be a solitary wandering person, and I thought I always would be. Love changed that. I mean, I still have my solitary wanderings, but there’s that additional dimension to my life, which is love of other people and collaboration and togetherness. It seems crazy to think there was a before and after with something so basic, but, what can I say, there was.
Sheila Heti is the author of five books, most recently the novel “How Should a Person Be?” She lives in Toronto.
Jessica Loudis is a writer and editor based in New York. She is one of the editors of the anthology from which this interview is excerpted.
Illustration by Tony Millionaire.
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