Tom Purcell

Posted on October 3, 2011 by daysofyore

Tom Purcell is currently the executive producer for The Colbert Report. He’s been with the show since 2005, first as a writer, then head-writer, then producer. During his time with the program, he has received a Writer’s Guild Award, and the show’s first Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing For A Variety, Music Or Comedy Program. The series has a combined total of 15 Emmy nominations, and also received the Peabody Award for Excellence in Broadcasting.

Before Colbert came along, Purcell wrote for Cosby and Grounded For Life. He is a veteran of the legendary comedy collective, The Second City, where he has also taught or directed countless shows and classes.

Where did you grow up?

In St Joseph, Michigan, just north of South Bend, Indiana, which you might remember from the race riots. It’s an all white city next to an all black city, so there was a lot of racial tension there. I moved there from Oak Park, Illinois. I remember the first day of sixth grade, a kid stopped me on the playground and said, “Don’t worry, if they try to come over the bridge, me and my dad will be there with shotguns.” And I was terrified, I was like, “Who’s coming over the bridge?” And the kid looks at me like I’m a moron and goes, “You know: the n***ers.” Horrible, you know. So that was my introduction to the town. If you weren’t born there, you were never really part of it. I felt like a new kid for nine years.

What was your saving grace?

In St Joe’s, the high school newspaper was basically this comedy newspaper called The Wind Up. This teacher Mr. Holt had made it completely independent. It was all ad revenue and donations, so no high school money went into it. This guy bought it for the independence. I remember as a freshman, there was this kid Will Peyovich. When people say, who is your comedy hero, I say Will Peyovich. His stuff was brilliant, I wanted to be just like him.

So you followed in his footsteps?

Yeah, by senior year I had the main comedy column, I was the features editor. So I basically started writing comedy when I was 15 years old.

Did you know immediately you wanted to do that forever?

Pretty much, I think, looking back. I just gravitated towards the people at that paper. But after high school I went to Loyola for college because my father was a professor there. So I went there for free. And then I spent so much time broke. I don’t understand how people with student loans do comedy, because I was broke for ten years. I couldn’t have imagined throwing an extra five hundred bucks for a loan into that. It would have killed me.
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Margo Jefferson

Posted on September 26, 2011 by daysofyore

Margo Jefferson is a Pulitzer Prize winning cultural critic who wrote about books, theater, and the arts for The New York Times for thirteen years. Her writing has also appeared in Bookforum, Salon, The Nation, The Washington Post, New York Magazine, Vogue, and Newsweek, among many other publications. Her book On Michael Jackson was published by Pantheon in 2006 and Vintage in 2007, and the essay she wrote on Michelle Obama, Movin’ On Up, was published in Best African American Essays: 2010. She also wrote and performed Sixty Minutes in Negroland at The Cherry Lane Theater and The Culture Project.

Jefferson received a B.A. from Brandeis University and a M.S. from Columbia University’s School of Journalism. She teaches Literary Studies at Eugene Lang College and Writing at Columbia University.

A startling presence in any room she enters, Jefferson moves with the grace of a dancer, speaks with the authority of a statesman, and thinks with the quickness of a whip.

What was Margo like as a child?

Margo as a child was very theatrical. She liked to take over rooms. Perform. Not so much singing and dancing, more, “I’m going to say something.” Declaim! I once arrived at a little party in my circle and one of the boys looked up as I came in and he went, “Bla, bla, bla…” [Laughs.] I was high strung and high spirited.

And were you a reader?

Yes. Always. I was read to a lot by my mother, who was a lovely reader. Not just at night. She’d read poetry. There’d be children’s books, Winnie the Pooh books, Alice in Wonderland.

Do you have siblings?

I have one sister who was also a real reader. Three years older. In the summers especially, we would go to the library and sign out books and we’d just spend the afternoon on two ends of the couch, or on separate couches.

And at that point, did you start thinking about books as written by someone?

When I was quite young, say five, six, seven, I don’t think I was thinking about that. As I got older— eight, nine, ten— then certain poets would interest me…and then, as my sister was three years older, she would be reading Robert Louis Stevenson, something like that. When she got a little older, she was reading these huge Dumas bricks, The Three Musketeers. Then I would associate them with, you know, writers!

What did you think that meant?

It meant having very intense responses to things. And being able to do something magical with words.

When you had that thought, did you start trying to do magical things with words yourself?

I didn’t. You know, it’s funny. I didn’t translate that directly. I did my writing in a more decorous, schooly way. The school I went to, we had teachers who had us write a lot. And I loved it. One fifth grade teacher in particular. She would say, “It’s time to write a story.” And then we’d have a certain amount of time and I absolutely loved it. And I also did dabble in poetry in those early years. Believe me, totally banal stuff. I got a little published in the local library journal. My mother had worked for this librarian when she was in college and she was known in our neighborhood as a great children’s librarian, so she saw a couple of my little poems. It felt very nice.

Your first publication!

I was very excited to see it in print. I was very proud.

Much later, when you were first paid for your writing, do you remember what that felt like?

The first piece that I was paid for, I believe, was a piece I’d been working on in graduate school and it was about rock and roll. It was 1970 and I felt very strongly about all this! But it was more exciting that it was published, it was published in Harper’s. I mean, it was nice to get paid, but, oh my God…!

Harper’s!

Exactly!
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Adam Zotovich

Posted on September 19, 2011 by daysofyore

Adam Zotovich is a Broadway performer and producer who has appeared in or brought us some of the best remembered shows of the recent decade. With a background in concert dancing, he has graced the stages of Chicago, Contact, and Fiddler on the Roof. The six shows the 34 year old has so far produced have led to tours, a London engagement, and have grossed a total of over $245 million; they include Driving Miss Daisy, The Addams Family, Legally Blonde, and The Color Purple, which was nominated for eleven Tony Awards.

Zotovich is that rare breed of crossover from on-stage presence to behind-the-scenes facilitator who manages to exude the gravitas of a New York producer while maintaining the exuberance of a Broadway performer.

I read somewhere that your mother bribed you to take dance classes?

That’s true. I am one of six kids, and our parents wanted to encourage us to be well rounded. So, if we were more athletically inclined, they would also push us in artistic directions. And vice versa. I pretty much did everything growing up—fishing, riding horses, playing football, taking piano, going to debate camp….anything you can think of we pretty much did it.

Well done of your parents. Six kids and having time to “well-round” each one!

That’s the trick. I have two daughters now and they are both under two years old. Now, as a parent looking back, I’m sort of on to their thinking. I think they just wanted to get us the hell out of the house!

Back to the forced dance lessons.

It stuck with me. I don’t understand why more guys don’t dance. I think that is changing a lot. If you talk to dance purists, they hate shows like So You Think You Can Dance, and Dancing with the Stars. But I think those are great platforms to educate society about what it means to be a dancer.

It is a fact that I am one of the only straight guys around who does it. I sort of feel like a unicorn in an enchanted forest; people have heard about me, but they’ve never seen me. But MMA fighters and wrestlers and programmers and race car drivers, these archetypal males, are on TV dancing. I think it’s totally making a different impression on kids. I think a lot more guys are going to be dancing. There are going to be a ton of guys out there, because it’ll seem more of a legitimate pursuit, like baseball.
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Stacy Schiff

Posted on September 12, 2011 by daysofyore

Stacy Schiff is one of our time’s greatest portrait painters— with words. Her first biography, Saint-Exupéry, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the same prize that her second work, Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), won. A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, was the winner of several awards and was named a Best Book of the Year by the Los Angeles Times Book Review, the Chicago Tribune, and The Economist. Her most recent work, Cleopatra: A Life has soared to third place on the New York Times Bestseller List and was listed as one of the New York Times Magazine’s best non-fiction books of all time.

Schiff’s writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Globe, among other publications. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities and she has been a Director’s Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. In 2006, she was awarded an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Schiff may appear delicate and she may call herself shy, but she is fierce— fiercely smart, fiercely funny, and fiercely committed, whether to the people she is portraying in her work, or to the lowly interviewer throwing endless questions her way.

You worked for a long time in publishing. Tell me about that.

I finished school on a Friday and began work that Monday at Basic Books, where I was the assistant to the editor in chief, Martin Kessler. Martin had many talents but among his greatest was the ability to make a piece of paper vanish in a closed room. I spent a lot of time rescuing wayward pages, writing rejection letters, and imposing on writers for blurbs, for which services I was paid a munificent $9,000 a year. I also watered Martin’s plant, which was half-dead when I arrived and half-dead when I left, a year later. These were the heady days of carbon paper and Dictaphones, also the days when a book like Godel, Eschler, Bach – “a metaphysical fugue” – sold brilliantly.

After Basic, I moved to Viking Penguin, where I supplemented my salary by excerpting books for the New York Post, a job handed down to me by a fellow editorial assistant. (Thank you again, Abby Thomas. And I loved Three Dog Life!) Essentially, you pried out of a perfectly respectable biography of, say, Frank Sinatra, the 1000 words you would be most embarrassed to be caught reading. I used to walk over to the Post for the book on a Friday, slash it up over the weekend, and feel very rich by Monday. Whatever the job paid – $500? – it was more than I was then making in a week. I also wrote an annual report during the Viking years, though for the life of me I can’t imagine how I managed to do so.
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Shawn Ryan

Posted on September 5, 2011 by daysofyore

Shawn Ryan is a writer, producer, and showrunner responsible for helming five major television programs since 2002. His work focuses largely on the gray areas of morality, exposing “facts” under the spotlight of doubt. He also has an affinity for the anti-hero. When he brought these two elements together, the result was The Shield.

The Shield garnered Ryan an Emmy nomination in 2002 for his writing on the pilot episode. The program itself was regularly nominated for Emmy awards and was both a critical and ratings sucess. It was also one of the first programs to draw notable film actors to television (Glenn Close and Forest Whitaker, among others).

Ryan has since acted as showrunner for The Unit alongside David Mamet, as well as Lie to Me and Terriers. He also created the recent crime-drama, The Chicago Code.

The Days of Yore sat down with him in his Sony Studios office between pilot pitches. In an industry often full of frantic showmanship, Ryan has the unique ability to be the honest calm in the middle of the storm.

So, who are you?

I am Shawn Ryan, and I was born and raised in Rockford, Illinois. Currently, I consider myself to be a television writer. Other people would call me a producer as well or a showrunner, but I mostly and primarily consider myself a writer.

Was that always the case?

No, I really was not a writer until I was in college and had no interest in writing prior to then. I did have some interest in theater. I had participated in theater in high school and started to in college, and when I was in college I discovered playwriting. But no, I grew up much more a jock than a theater person or a film person of any kind.

I took sports very seriously, especially hockey and soccer. I started playing hockey when I was four and soccer when I was five. I played on competitive travel teams in both those sports.

I was a pretty good student, especially in math. I was able to get in to some good colleges. I ended up going to Middlebury College and started playing on the soccer team there. I was an economics major when I started, and over the next two years I discovered playwriting, got involved in the Theater Department, and ended up quitting the soccer team after my sophomore year to focus more on theater. I changed my major. I became a joint economics and theater major. I had taken enough economics classes that it would have been foolish to abandon the major, but I added theater to it. My last two years in college, most of the classes I took were theater; either writing classes, directing, acting, or scene study – things like that. There was a big shift, I would say, during my sophomore year in college when I became really interested in that.

Do you remember the tipping point? Any specific experience that stands out to you as one that changed your direction?

Yeah. I had taken a theater class my freshman year where we all had to write a short scene, and at the end of it the professor came to me— Doug Anderson was his name— he came to me and said, “I really liked that scene. I think you have some talent. I’m teaching a playwriting class next year. You really should take it.”

So, I took it. I wrote a play. Mine was one of five plays in the class that he decided to produce the next semester. And so that second semester of my sophomore year a play that I had written was produced. Seeing a live audience watch something that I had written, being able to work with a director, work with actors on the script was all kind of pretty great. That, I would say, was the tipping point for me where I felt like, I’m enjoying this more, and I feel like I’ve got a talent for this. This is really what I want to be doing, probably more than playing soccer, which was certainly something I loved, but I knew that soccer was never going to be a profession. I knew it was something that I would play recreationally for as long as my body would allow me to, but it wasn’t something that was going to dominate my life. There was something about theater and writing that sparked a passion in me.

How did your soccer buddies feel about it?

Oh, fine! I was no star on the team, so it wasn’t like I was screwing over the soccer team [laughs]. I had played JV my freshman year. I had been on the bench of Varsity my sophomore year, so I would have come in and tried to compete for playing time, but there was no guaranteed I would have gotten it. It wasn’t like Michael Jordan stepping away from basketball, or anything like that.

So, why TV writing? How did it all start?

I had always been a heavy TV watcher as a kid. Both my parents worked, so my brother and I would get home from school with a couple of hours to kill before my parents got back. This was when young kids could be left alone in homes, which doesn’t happen so much anymore. I’d always be watching those syndicated sitcoms. The Brady Bunch or The Partridge Family. All that kind of stuff, at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, after school.

Having grown up in Rockford, Illinois, they had movie theaters obviously, but they didn’t have art theaters. You didn’t see the best of the independent movie world back then, and so TV was the dominant art form for me.
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Adam Haslett

Posted on August 29, 2011 by daysofyore

Adam Haslett came crashing onto the literary scene in 2002 with his debut story collection, You Are Not a Stranger Here, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, was named a Time best book of the year, and was a New York Times bestseller. His awards include the PEN/Malamud Award for accomplishment in short fiction and the PEN/Winship Award for the best book by a New England author. He is also the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Fine Arts Work Center. Haslett’s fiction and journalism have appeared in countless publications, including The Financial Times, Esquire, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, and Best American Short Stories. His most recent book, Union Atlantic, a novel, was released in 2010.

Haslett graduated with a B.A. from Swarthmore College, a M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He has taught writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Columbia University. He has also helped write a number of books on U.S. tax politics and policy with a former professor of his from Yale (you know, for shits and giggles).

Haslett is half American, which may explain his level of ambition and devotion to advanced degrees, and half British, which may explain his bloody great sense of humor.

Do you remember the first thing you read that stirred the writer’s desire in you?

Being dyslexic, my greatest achievement was finishing a book at all. I remember clearly being home sick from school when we were living in England (I was probably twelve) and reading A Brief Life of Benjamin Franklin in a single day, a fact I was tremendously proud of. But that wasn’t the beginning of the writing urge. That I’d have to date to sophomore year in high school, reading the plays of Eugene O’Neill. Ice Man Cometh, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Strange Interlude, More Stately Mansions. It was my first experience of tragedy and I was hooked. I wanted to devastate people as I had been devastated by those plays.

How did you go about becoming a “writer?” Did you keep journals?

I began writing in a journal on January 15,1988. I was seventeen and was leaving that day on a trip to Nepal with one of my best friends. I believe the first line in the journal was “And so the adventure begins…” We flew to Katmandu via Paris, Cairo, Dubai, and Karachi. My mother had been against the trip but I’d been obstinate. I was in love with the guy I was going with and the idea of spending two months in a tent with him was simply irresistible. As a side benefit, we’d learned to meditate together, something I do to this day. I filled three journals on that trip to the Himalayas, full of descriptions of travel and lovelorn angst. Once formed, the habit stuck. I have stacks of those journals in a box somewhere. They were certainly never shown to anyone.
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Dinh Q. Lê

Posted on August 22, 2011 by daysofyore

Dinh Q. Lê is one of the world’s best-known contemporary Vietnamese artists. His signature “photo weavings” – which he creates by weaving photo clippings together using traditional Vietnamese weaving techniques – explore his Vietnamese-American identity and the Vietnam War. Lê has received fellowships from the Aaron Siskind Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and his work has been exhibited at galleries and museums across Asia, Europe and the United States. In 2010 the Museum of Modern Art exhibited (and purchased) his three-channel video installation, “The Farmers and the Helicopters.” A New York Times critic calls his art “the product of sharp, complex critical thinking, about an Asian war whose history had been written almost exclusively by the West, about an Asian culture with which the West was for a time intimately and violently engaged, but about which it knew almost nothing.”

Lê, whose family fled war-torn Vietnam in the 1970s, grew up in Los Angeles and studied fine arts at UC Santa Barbara and the School of Visual Arts in New York. In 1996 he moved from New York to Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), and in 2007 he co-founded Sàn Art, an artist-run exhibition space and reading room in Ho Chi Minh City that promotes young Vietnamese artists. Vietnam’s ruling Communist Party censors domestic artists, but Lê – who was born in 1968, at the height of what Vietnamese call the “American War” – openly defends free expression and challenges the Party’s version of Vietnamese history.

The Days of Yore visited Lê’s airy Saigon studio last summer and later spoke with him by telephone.

Have you always thought of yourself as an artist?

I was good at making stuff, but not “art” – more like craft stuff. When I was growing up in Vietnam the idea of being an artist wasn’t really an option – it wasn’t something I thought of – and when I moved to America being an artist was definitely not an option!

So how did you get started?

When we migrated to southern California, and I was going to school, I was just starting to learn English, and that definitely had some effect – I think it helped me develop a visual sense. Also, I didn’t have any friends, so I ended up at the library most of the time looking at picture books of old master paintings. That’s kind of how my interest in art began.
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Carole Maso

Posted on August 15, 2011 by daysofyore

Carole Maso is a writer who carves out her own language space not in relation to established forms or traditions, but to the particular tale she needs to tell. The result often demands a reader willing to yield to the unfamiliar. The reward is supple language, gut-felt emotion, and the privilege of tuning in to a poet who operates on her own, distinct frequency. Maso is the author of ten books, including the novels Ava and Defiance; prose poems, Aureole: An Erotic Sequence and Beauty is Convulsive; essays, Break Every Rule: Essays on Language, Longing and Moments of Desire; and a memoir, The Room Lit by Roses: A Journal of Pregnancy and Birth. Her most recent novel, Mother and Child, is forthcoming from Counterpoint Press in 2012.

Maso has been awarded a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts, among others. She received a B.A. in English from Vassar College in 1977 and is now a Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University.

When did you first realize you wanted to write? Was there an “aha” moment?

Yes, there was an “aha” moment. I had always wanted to paint or write music or dance and choreograph but it wasn’t until I was a senior in college and had to write a thesis and begged my way into writing a creative one, that it became totally clear to me that that was how I wanted to spend the rest of my life. Never with anything else had I been so mesmerized and so engaged. During that last semester at school I knew I would have to rearrange and accommodate this thing I now understood I would devote my life to.

I also understood right from the start that it would take everything. It was incredible, really. Before then I had not written very much—but I had always loved language—Shakespeare and poetry, for the most part.

Did you have some idea in your mind of what it meant to “be a writer?”

I had no idea as to what it might mean. In fact, it was not something I had thought much about. It wasn’t a lifelong dream or anything, and I had no romantic notions about it.

Were you a big reader early on?

I loved to read but was a very slow reader. I still am. In high school I was the only one to fail the speed-reading course in the history of the speed-reading school. There was a lot of daydreaming involved when I read and I would go on a lot of tangents and take a lot of adventures. I’d also get lost in the words, and in the ways the sentences felt, and how paragraphs were being made, and what a chapter was about, and what it might hold…

How did your family and friends feel about your decision to pursue a life as a writer?

I never liked to talk about writing early on and so my friends vaguely knew it was what I was trying to do, but they saw me mostly as someone struggling and doing a lot of terrible jobs while they were going on for graduate degrees and other sorts of glory. My family worried— thinking it would be an incredibly hard life somehow and filled with disappointments and probable failure. Not to mention the being destitute part.

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Luc Sante

Posted on August 8, 2011 by daysofyore

Luc Sante is a writer best known for his exciting and evocative rendition of the roiling early years of New York in Low Life, illuminating the lives of the hucksters and swindlers who stalked the streets of the Lower East Side at the turn of the 20th century. He is a keen-eyed detective probing New York’s vanishing ways of life, the quintessential cataloguer of a city long gone. Sante has uncovered beauty in the detritus of New York with needle-like precision. He further bared the soul of the complex city in Kill All Your Darlings, a collection of his essays, and elegantly chaperoned readers through gruesome crime scene photos in Evidence: NYPD Crime Scene Photographs: 1914-1918. He recently curated a fascinating and haunting collection of real photo postcards from the early 20th Century in Folk Photography and translated Felix Feneon’s beautiful chronicle of despair, Novels in Three Lines. Sante has also cast his unflinching glare on his own past with his memoir The Factory of Facts.

Sante received a Whiting Writer’s Award in 1989, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1992, a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1997, and a Grammy for his album notes in the Anthology of American Folk Music. Additionally, he received an Infinity Award for writing from the International Center of Photography in 2010. He teaches writing and the history of photography at Bard College.

As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?

I first wanted be an artist, maybe a cartoonist. When I was in fourth grade, though, my teacher praised something I’d written and suggested I might grow up to be a writer. After that, I was going to be either a writer or an artist, possibly both. In high school I struck a bargain with myself: If I could go for free to a good college I’d become a writer; otherwise I’d go to art school. I got a full scholarship to Columbia and my fate was decided.

What brought you to New York and how was it to be an artist here? What were the corners you had to cut to survive?

I commuted to high school in New York City from suburban New Jersey for two and a half years until I was kicked out, and I fell in love with the place (my infatuation led directly to my being kicked out, since I frequently cut classes to wander around). Then I went to Columbia and stayed in the city for 28 years.

I had exactly three full-time jobs until I quit my last one at age 30 to write full-time. A couple of years later, realizing I couldn’t quite make ends meet, I became a proofreader at Sports Illustrated, enjoying the last years of one of the great gravy trains (a 17-hour week for full benefits) –I’d probably still be there if computers hadn’t made the job obsolete (and mergers and management put an end to the gravy train). I’ve gotten by on very little money, but as the cost of living was so low for most of those years I really made few or no sacrifices–I only wished for a slightly bigger apartment.

I continue to live the low-overhead life, as much by choice as by necessity, and I’ll never buy something new if I can get it secondhand, but even in much cheaper Upstate it’s not as easy as it was in NYC back then, when, e.g., there were used clothing stores in which everything cost three bucks. That life was, in my opinion, better than any luxury–actually it was the greatest luxury.
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w o r k

Posted on August 1, 2011 by daysofyore

And…we’re back!

The Days of Yore Team has spent a month enjoying the summer and charging our batteries and now we are ready to bring you more in-depth interviews with inspiring artists! We also spent the vacation going over our archive. Did you know that we have published sixty interviews since the project started in May 2010? Yeah, we were pretty taken aback by that number ourselves.

Re-reading interviews from several months ago was a lot of fun, and we wanted to share some of the highlights with you. As we all head back to work, we thought it would be timely to make a compilation of some of the best words gathered on the topic of work; specifically the type of work our interviewees did to keep themselves afloat while they were struggling to publish their first book or sell their first painting.

We hope you enjoy these snippets and we encourage you to go explore the DoY archive— there is a lot of funny, inspiring, and moving material waiting to be re-discovered!

Cheers!

Astri, Evan and Lucas, The Days of Yore Team

 

CRAZY FUNNY BOSSES

Tom McCarthy, writer/artist
I was working with this chef who was totally psychotic. He was like something out of William Burroughs. You know, he’d hold the cleaver in his hand, scream, and throw it at the wall just after the waiters had walked out, missing them by inches. He’d read Nietzsche, but he’d read Nietzsche in the same way that Hitler had read Nietzsche, misread Nietzsche. He’d say, “Nietzsche says there are Übermenschen and there are scum. We must be the Übermenschen! The waiters, they are scum! They are nothing!”

How did you fit into this? You weren’t a waiter?

No, I was working with him. I was an Übermensch prospect. I was a sous- Übermensch. I hated the waiters as well because they were withholding tips from us. Also, this album by Prince had come out. You know that song, “Pussy Control”? It was the first track of the album that came out in ’95. [Sings: “Oh, pussy contro-o-l…."] Anyhow, he played it really loud, on a loop. The waiters were the pussies, and we had to control them… Then there was a cat, a restaurant cat, and when the waiters withheld the tips, we started feeding the waiters the cat food. They didn’t know we were feeding them the cat food…

How did you mask it?!

We just mixed it into the food. Hamburgers, stews… [Laughs.]

So you were complicit?

Oh, yeah. I think it was my idea actually. [Chuckles.] I was really pissed off. They were really odious… I guess I really had that Übermensch potential in me.

Oh man. And this is before any fancy organic cat food. This is the lowest of the low…

Oh yeah, this is when it was addictive! Basically, cats are getting heroin and they don’t even know it. Once you start feeding a cat brand cat food, that’s all they’ll eat because they’re addicts. The waiters liked it. They kept coming back for more. [Laughs.]

[Laughing] Because they were addicted!

 

Jo Ann Beard, writer
I worked once for a woman who was younger than me; she had me doing things like bringing her bagels and guarding her car when it was illegally parked. I liked her quite a lot and liked the job too, mainly because I could smoke while I guarded the car. Then she ran across a piece I had published in The New Yorker and almost had a coronary. She couldn’t adjust her idea of who this person she saw every day was. It’s like a box of paperclips had started talking to her. She just kept staring at me all day, and her friends kept coming by and laughing at her. To them this was high hilarity, that their colleague had underestimated her box of paperclips. At the end of the day she called me into her office and said: “You don’t know it, but The New Yorker is a big deal.”

I might be making it sound bad, but it was actually pretty great, all of it. The cigarettes, sitting on a fire hydrant in the sunshine, this woman’s genuine desire to let me in on my good fortune.

 

Daniel Mendelsohn, writer/critic
There was a nutty opera impresario named Joe Scuro, who had a one-man office operating out of the Economist building—the Steinway building, on 57th and 7th. 111 West 57th, I still remember the address—who was a friend of someone I knew, and he needed a guy Friday, so I interviewed with him and got the job. I worked for him for three and a half years. (…) He was brilliant, mercurial, the most foul-mouthed person I have ever met in my life. But I learned a tremendous amount from him. We went to the Met every night. We had house passes, we saw every performance. I got a real education from him. He was always giving me LPs, stacks and stacks, telling me I had to listen and learn these things over the weekend. And I did, because I was twenty-two and had no life, and why not?

(…)

But he was also a nut. (…) He was this tiny guy with this blond hair, smoking the cigar, and would sit there shrieking at recalcitrant sopranos in Switzerland while jabbing his cigar into the air. I mean, the things he said over the phone…I would be sitting at my typewriter— this was all pre-computer— in the outer office weeping, literally weeping with terror.

For yourself?

No, for the world!

 

Björn Yttling, musician/producer
When I was in high school, I went up to Norsjö [the small Swedish town where he is from] and had a summer job as a musician. I was a bandmaster there when I was like sixteen. I would put together different musical arrangements. I had to be there from 8-5 every day even though I’d done all this work ahead of time planning the arrangements. I didn’t think it was fair. So when I got an offer to do another gig for the hotel in town, Hotel Inlandia, I did it during my lunch hour. The guy who hired me for the first job was super pissed. He sent me a postcard later, I remember: “Good luck with life.” [Laughs]

 

BEING INEPT

James Franco, actor/writer/artist
I couldn’t find a job anywhere. I had very little work experience. Someone said, “Well, are you too good to work at McDonald’s?” And so I said, “I guess not. I’m doing this because it’s what I really want to do, so I’ll work at McDonald’s, if that’s what it takes.” I went and they hired me.

What did you do at McDonald’s?

They rotate, although I mostly worked the cashier window at the drive-through— I could do that well.

You didn’t flip any burgers?

No! They didn’t put me anywhere near the burgers. Then, when I had to do the food window, I just got too confused and everything got backed up.

 

David Shields, writer
In high school I worked at McDonald’s. Got fired. I worked at a fabric store. Got fired. In college I worked as a custodian. Got fired. Wasn’t too good at the physical stuff. One person asked me if I was so bad on purpose or whether I was really that uncomprehending of the relation between soap and water.

 

Jennifer Egan, writer
The Holy Grail for me was that I just wanted to be a waitress! But I could never get a job. In New York, you can’t get it unless you have experience in New York. How are you supposed to do it? Everyone says, “You lie, of course!” But I was afraid.

 

Jan Maxwell, actor
I certainly did my share of hostessing at restaurants because, honestly, they didn’t want me on the floor. I was a pretty awful waitress; I couldn’t figure out why people didn’t just go get things for themselves!

 

LIVING HISTORY

Michael Scammell, writer/translator
I had rented a room with a Russian émigré lady, Miss Anna Feigin, on West 104th Street, just off Broadway. She was very nice, but kept to herself, and I also kept to myself. (…) One day in the spring of 1960 Miss Feigin asked if I could have tea with her the following Saturday afternoon. So on Saturday I turned up for tea, and when I entered the room, a tall, balding, middle-aged gentleman stood up to greet me, along with his beautiful, elegant wife and an even taller younger man who was obviously his son. ‘I’d like you to meet Mr. Vladimir Nabokov, Mrs. Vera Nabokov, and their son Dmitri,’ said my landlady. So we all sat politely having tea and chatting amiably in a mixture of Russian and English. They asked me about my interest in translation and I told them about Cities and Years– which didn’t seem to impress Nabokov at all – and that seemed to be that. Nabokov was on his way to Utah to go butterfly hunting and then to Hollywood to write the screenplay for Lolita.

A couple of weeks later I had gotten a letter from Vera in Utah, saying, “My husband was very interested to know that you translate, would you send him a sample?” I sent him a Chekov story I had translated. Vera then asked me to translate three pages from Nabokov’s Russian novel, The Gift, and the next thing I knew, I got a letter from California saying, “My husband was very impressed with your translation, would you care to translate his novel?”

 

Molly Haskell, writer/critic
I wound up at UNIVAC, publicizing the new computers. They hired me as a Girl Friday—an assistant to a copywriting executive. I would do some typing, but it wasn’t heavy duty typing, and they promised I would get to write press releases… So that is what I did.

That job was right out of Mad Men. Honestly. It’s uncanny how close it was. I was Peggy, though a little less dowdy and with a little more sexual leverage. I started at something like $65 a week, typing letters, writing releases about the latest fabulous Univac on the market. I had a huge crush on my boss’s boss, who was a blond version of Jon Hamm: he was extremely good-looking, had a mysterious past, and a little bit of a chip on his shoulder. After a few months, I moved from my desk outside Harry’s office into my own cubicle! There were all these guys, copywriters a little older than me, with whom I enjoyed innocuous flirtations, basically we would signal each other through the windows of our cubicles, and go out for three martini lunches— which is just inconceivable now! And there was this voluptuous babe secretary who was just like Joan…It was just that early sixties world, a world that was right on the cusp of change.

 

RANDOM DESTINATIONS

John D’Agata, writer
I worked in a condom shop. Not a sex shop, just a condom shop that also sold a few cheesy sex-gags and maybe some nonthreatening ‘toys’ down near the back of the store that no one ever bought. This was also long before I’d ever had sex myself, so explaining the benefits of various kinds of condoms was kind of amusing for me. I also delivered balloons as a clown, barbacked, and for a brief summer I worked in a bagel shop. They wouldn’t let me actually make bagels, however, so I eventually quit that job because I didn’t like toasting and smearing things for other people. I don’t think I have a problem with serving people, but spreading stuff on toasted bread for another person is kind of humiliating.

 

Ellen Altfest, painter
I ended up getting a job at this crazy hand-painted pottery store on Madison Avenue. They had live chickens in a cage and elaborate ornamentation on every square inch of the store. I remember Mary Tyler Moore came in and complained about the chickens, that it was inhumane to have them in a cage.

 

Sylvia Waters, dancer/director
My first [job] was working in what is now a trendy area in New York—the meatpacking district. Back then it was definitely a meat packing district! I was a bookkeeper’s assistant. I worked in this tiny little office. And I just watched the meat rolling by…they would go in as lambs and come out as chops.

 

Paul Elie, writer/editor
I got a summer job working a couple of days a week in the circulation research department at Time Magazine. For ten bucks an hour, they asked me to tell them where the magazine industry was going. A billion-dollar corporation, asking an underemployed graduate student for strategic direction!

One day I was told that I had to go see Reg Brack, who ran Time Inc. So I rode the elevator up to the executive suite in my tennis shirt and jeans, and Mr. Brack, who had on a suit with suspenders, as I recall, sat me down in a leather chair and asked me to tell him where the magazine business was going. (…)

I don’t remember how Mr. Brack reacted to my advice, but I do remember how strange it was to get out of that leather chair and go home to eat a tuna fish sandwich in my apartment.

 

Ted Conover, writer
I taught aerobics.

Aerobics, really?!

Yeah. Me and Richard Simmons…

The little shorts?

Well, they weren’t like his … and I never said, “Make it burn!” But I got in great shape, better than I’ve ever been.

 

Robert Cohen, writer
I got a part time job at this school in the Sunset District that used to be an anti-bussing school. It was a horrible institution. It was in a church; there were no walls, just blackboards used as room dividers. And the school’s roots were based in the fact that no parents wanted their kids bussed to schools with minorities, even though the school was 30% minorities anyway.

It was a really confused place. And I didn’t know anything, I just had this kind of gee-wiz tune running through my head. The first day I was there teaching 8th grade English. This kid comes up to me, bigger than I was, swastika tattoo on his arm, and he said, “No offense, we just really don’t want you here.”

He said, “No offense” first. That’s nice.

Yeah, I wanted to say, “I don’t want me here either.” That would be perfect, actually, if they paid me anyway. But I hung in there, made that kid my own special project. I got him to read the first book he’d ever read in his life: The Maltese Falcon. His mother came up to me at the end of the year and said he loved The Maltese Falcon so much and it was the first book he’d ever read. I should’ve given him Mein Kampf, that would’ve gotten a good reaction.

 

Kristen Schaal, comedian
It took me a long time to land a job, which was stressful. I tried the restaurant route and got rejected consistently. After a couple months I finally got hired at Planet Hollywood in Times Square because they will take any sucker. It was hard to make money there because you had to tip out of your food sales to your runner and busser and bartender, instead of tipping out of your tips. If you got stiffed by a table you might be paying the restaurant to let you work there that night. It was a nightmare.

Then I worked as a temp at a few law firms. That wasn’t so bad, except you could clock in over sixty hours a week and watch your life slip away in file boxes.

I was a character actor at F.A.O. Schwartz; that was the worst one. No one wants to pretend to be happy for an eight-hour shift. It’s mentally unhealthy.

 

George Saunders, writer
I worked as a geophysicist in Sumatra, then came home and roamed around for a few years. I worked in a slaughterhouse, as a doorman in Beverly Hills (very uplifting), as a roofer. I played in bands, worked in a convenience store, was a barback at a dance club, worked as a groundsman – a little bit of everything, really.  While I was farting around in this Kerouac phase, the oil business went bust, and my credentials, such as they were, got a little dusty. So by the end of this period I had more or less dissipated my college degree.

 

INSPIRATIONAL TANGENTS

Wells Tower, writer
I had a job working in a Nike warehouse. That was just a straight warehouse job, boxing up shoes and things like that. But I was so eager to write that I somehow let my boss know. My boss was a nineteen year-old kid who was probably making ten times what I was making as a warehouse guy. What a weird idea, really, that I sidled up to this nineteen year old dude, who’d probably dropped out of high school, and was like, “Hey man, I want to be a writer.” Anyway, somehow I let him know that I knew how to write. So he would pull me off the line and I would write his emails for him. I would pack all of my frustrated literary ambition into this kid’s emails.

What did the emails sound like?

It was like: “Hey Larry, we need more of the number 3 boxes on line 6.” And my version would be like: “Dear Larry, I have been contemplating the matter regarding those boxes on line six and my thoughts were as follows…”

 

Tim Davis, photographer
When I had this stock boy job in high school, I would go to the local library in Amherst, Mass, after school and read photography books. I had a vision that there were these books, that there was a place that these things I made might end up, and that they would be there forever. That was very powerful. (…) There was also something illicit about reading those photography books. I told the deli where I worked that I could only show up at 3 and school got out at 2.15. So I would go to the library in-between, and it was this secret, illicit time by myself when I was looking at photography books. It was almost this sexual, private thing.

 

William Finnegan, writer
I was a railroad brakeman in California for a few years after college. That was a dream job. The pay was great. I worked the coast route, between San Francisco and L.A., mainly agricultural freight. People in that world used to say, ‘The big iron gets in your blood,’ and I sometimes thought I’d never leave. The tracks tend to run through an old rural and industrial California that few people ever see, and railroaders speak a strange, rich, American language that I loved. I filled a lot of notebooks with railroad language and lore. The seasonal rhythm of the job suited me. I had no seniority, so I’d get furloughed in the winters, when traffic slowed down, which gave me half the year to write. I’d go hole up somewhere—Mexico, Europe, Montana. My third novel was set on the railroad.

 

SNEAKING AROUND

Gary Shteyngart, writer
You want to work 9-5, so that when the day is over it’s over and the weekends are yours. And the best thing, which I had at a couple of jobs, is when you can lock yourself in your office and write. People would say, “Oh Shteyngart is not a team player, he is always locked in his office, God knows what he is doing in there!”

I used to work at this non-profit that dealt with immigrant resettlement and I would help write directions for new Russian immigrants, like how to not get drunk, how to avoid AIDS, stuff like that. That took max a couple of days a month, really. And the rest of the time I would lock myself in my office and work on the draft of my first novel. Half of it was finished by my senior year in college and the other half was finished working that job. It wasn’t the kind of service job where I would come home exhausted. I would come home ready to write or would have accomplished the writing at the office. It was brilliant.

 

Noah Hawley, screenwriter
I got this corporate paralegal job and – classic scenario – I’d just go home and write at night and on weekends. During workdays [I'd say]: “How quickly can I do this task so I can focus on my own stuff?” There’s this weird sub-culture in offices where the large percentage of people are trying to be something else, but they’re all keeping it secret. I went out with a couple work friends one night and finally revealed that I was a writer and I’d sold a book and one of them was like, “That’s what I’m doing.”

You really have to commit to spending your nights and weekends writing – you have to choose that over going out drinking and being 26 and going out with your friends. But the alternative is you’re 40 and you’re still the paralegal. I just didn’t want to be in that place.

 

AND FINALLY…NO EXCUSES

Thomas Roma, photographer
I worked as an assistant at Pratt and I worked in wedding photography studio, mounting photos onto driftwood. Two jobs. But I would get up every morning before the Pratt job and take the prints I had made the night before. On my way to work I would photograph. I would develop the film during my lunch hour, because there was a darkroom there. I would go to my night job. Then get back from my night job at midnight and print more photos. The next day, I would do it all again. Not because I was a superhero. It is what I wanted to do.

No one is going to prevent you from doing what you want to do. But so many people buy into various systems. There is an art school system, an internship system, all that. They want to be explorers and individuals, but they want instructions for how to be their own person. Does that make any sense? “Tell me where to go to go off the beaten path!” I mean, come on.

I am not going to give one inch to the “you need to support yourself” argument. I had a student at the School of Visual Arts once. He came to class one week and didn’t have any work because his camera was stolen. I understood that. But the next week he came back and still didn’t have any work because he said he didn’t have enough money to buy a camera. I said, “I’m going to throw you out of the class.” I made him come up to the front of the class and I asked him to stick out his arm. He did. I grabbed his hand and said, “What is that?” He had a Tag Heuer watch. I said, “Sell that watch and buy a camera.” He said, “I can’t sell that watch, my grandmother gave it to me.” So I said, “Sell your grandmother into slavery and buy a camera.” I threw him out of the class.

People who are concerned about money are the ones brushing their teeth three times a day. Maybe you have to live in a way where you don’t even brush your teeth. Maybe you can’t bathe too regularly. Everyone says “I have passion…but I have to go to the movies…or eat at a restaurant…live in a nice place!” People say they need to support themselves, but what that means is that they have to have a certain standard of living. You make it work. There is always a way to make it work.

If you don’t treat your work as if it’s important, and necessary, there is no point. Every creature on earth has the need for food, shelter, and to reproduce. Humans, we are exactly the same way. But we also have this one other drive and that is to express ourselves. That is why poets lock themselves in a garret, even though they get nothing else out of it, even if they never find recognition. But if that drive is not as powerful as those other three, or if you are only using that drive to get at one of the other three—the house in the Hamptons, food, or sex—then what have you done? You’re a mammal, or something! It’s not a luxury what I do. It is a necessity.

The political prisoner who was tortured can say, “I paid in blood for my beliefs.” Why should the artist expect any less of herself than to pay in blood? There is a great expression: “shoe leather,” as in something took a lot of work, a lot of walking around. Well, the shoe leather is the every day. You have to put yourself in a position where you are going to be affected by the world. And it’s not a luxury to say you’re not going to chase every dollar. You need to give yourself time to be in the rain. Robert Frost wrote, “I have walked out in rain — and back in rain.” I read that and wondered what he meant. He means that you have to be rained on. You have to do things that other people consider mistakes and then hang on to those mistakes. We have to acknowledge that failure isn’t only an option, it is your companion.

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