Don Schofield
by Sarah Bagdon
Fourteen Hills: I know that you have a history of teaching creative writing. As someone who wants to teach, and also has many peers that are currently on the teaching track at SF State, what advice would you have for anyone who wants to go into the field teaching creative writing?
Don Schofield: Over the years I’ve taught a lot of creative writing, my sense is this: first of all, what I tended to do, and what so many other teachers that are writers do, is we wanna teach people how to write like we write… that’s natural and to a certain extent that’s good because that’s what you know. And if students are coming to you because of you as a writer, then that’s a good thing for them. But my experience over the years is that you need to make it as student-centered as possible. You need to really try to focus on what they want as writers, and that’s hard, cause you have to get to know them and a lot of times you don’t have the kind of setup where you can get to know them well.
One of the ways that I encourage people who are interested in Creative Writing is to find ways to open up dialogue, not just in responding to student work in the classroom, but one-on-one as much as possible… I learned from Richard Hugo…one of the best books on teaching creative writing is called The Triggering Talent… and one of the things that he taught was process. What you really are doing, whether you realize it or not, is you're developing process. So I always tried to have an ear out for how students were writing poems and what that was teaching me about their process, not my process.
14H: Speaking of process, I wanted to know, what were the processes like when it came to having your poetry books published?
DS: I’ve worked with Dennis Schmit, who really got me into writing – he taught me precision reading, not to be easily satisfied with poems. Hugo… he really taught me a process where I believe a lot in the unconscious, that your real material is in the unconscious. I do a lot of freewriting and Hugo taught me to think of music rather than meaning, so I simply freewrite music rhythm and sound line, by line, by line and I freewrite many many pages to create a book of raw material. Then, I just break it down slowly following that music, that rhythm, and those sounds until I get it down to where I can’t break it anymore; then I start looking for meaning.
In publishing, I look to the places that have published the writers I like… you gotta get to know the publishers and who they’ve published, what kind of work they’re after and know if your work fits; you just gotta keep at it.
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DS: Richard Hugo inspired me as a writer when I was 2 years into the Montana program. Dennis exposed me to a lot of writers. And there are those that I read without ever having any real contact with them…William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and poets in translation.
European poets meant a lot to me too, Czeslaw Milosz, Tranströmer, many Spanish poets, and he also introduced me to Greek poets. One of the poet’s books that he gave me was a book of poems by George Seferis, a small book of translations by a British writer and academic, Rick Swarner, and it just turned my head around. Seferis is one of the poets that blew me away. And one of the reasons that I traveled to Greece was to see the world that Seferis came out of, and that of course blew me away even more. I wound up reading more Greek poets and eventually was so hungry for the Greek world that I came back and I wound up staying. And poetry played a large role in that.
14H: You’ve published excerpts from your upcoming memoir, one of those excerpts being “Fight of the Week,” that you submitted to Fourteen Hills and was published. The ending of that segment really stuck with me, what was the inspiration to end it where you did for that excerpt?
DS: I think because it fits. It fits the story well – and that doesn’t always happen with a memoir. Dennis showed me that I could write about my own life experience and that had significance. It helped me to understand that I could use writing to look at my own life. And I had a very turbulent, difficult upbringing – and my years with that foster family were the best years of my childhood – but you can see from that excerpt that it was also a difficult time because Nan was a wonderful mother, Papa was a wonderful father, but he was also an alcoholic. Love and violence were intertwined. I wanted to get to the whole story, especially that time in Fresno. How could you love and fear so deeply at the same time? Looking at that “Fight of the Week,” which has always stayed with me, showed that more intensely. Writing that chapter for me was very important to get to that; having that ending where I should’ve been comforting her, but she, after getting beat up, came to comfort me, is just something, a contradiction that I will always live with. Being on that roof… that was my sanctuary when Papa was beating up Nan or wanting to beat me up. The roof was my sanctuary. And having Nan put her hand out there to bring me in from that sanctuary was, for me, a very powerful moment.
14H: What influence did “Fight of the Week” have on the rest of the memoir?
DS: Well, it’s one of the most intense, but there are other intense moments in the book – but, yes, that fight where someone gets killed. Then my foster parents, the people that I’m clinging to for home, and, at the same time, dreaming that my father is gonna come some day and get me and save me. My shining knight in armor. And here these two are fighting with each other and it wasn’t the first time that there was violence between them, but it was probably the most impactful. That always stayed with me. And it’s certainly something that I carried with me my whole life, just like the abandonment in Fresno. But there are other things too, my foster mother abandoned me too. She was divorcing my foster father and had to send me back to my real father and that was a huge rejection. That’s what the memoir is doing, it’s looking at a lot of those moments.
14H: You mentioned a little bit how your poetry transfers into creative nonfiction. Can you expand a little bit more on that? What did the transition from poetry into creative nonfiction look like?
DS: In one sense, it’s a mystery because I never really had the impulse for writing prose until I was hired by this person to be a ghostwriter. After doing that, I realized I wanna try this on myself. All my poetry books had poems about my life. The family poems were there but they were always dipping into bits and pieces. The one book that was completely autobiographical was my second full-length book, where I wrote about my time with the Fresno family, but most especially with my mother, who, at the time, I was renewing my relationship with. It felt like those were fragments, and that these were the stories that needed to have continuity. Another thing that I always faced – I would tell people about my experiences, and they wouldn’t believe me. It’s called a braided memoir, because it follows two strands. It follows my childhood up into adulthood and then it’s written from the perspective of me in my mid-40s from a Greek island.
What happened was, in order to write the memoir – I always think of Michael Jordan; for a year he left basketball to play baseball, and he said, “I had to develop a whole different sense of my muscles.” And that’s what I had to do to write prose, I had to develop a whole different approach. I had to think about character in terms of voice; in terms of situation. I had to think about character and character development, about sticking with the story, about telling the story and then pausing to reflect on balancing that. This was new to me. I had to develop new muscles, it was fascinating doing that.
14H: You submitted “Fight of the Week” to Fourteen Hills and it got published in Volume 31. What about Fourteen Hills really caught your attention and made you want to submit this excerpt to the magazine?
DS: In part, it had to do with the fact that it’s in San Francisco. I was in Job Corps in Pleasanton. My brother was a mailman in Sonoma. And I lived at 16th Inn San Francisco. And I went to Berkley quite a bit when I was at Sac State. And I had some gay friends that I would hang out with and we would go into the gay world of San Francisco. So I felt that this was a way to reconnect a little bit with San Francisco. It just felt like I could get something in a journal connected to a part of California that I feel close to.
14H: I was looking through your website and you have a whole section for your photography. Is that one of your big hobbies outside of writing?
DS: I tend not to use the word ‘hobby,’ cause I feel like it diminishes things. One of the things that interested me, and it was something that I became pretty good at as a poet, was the image. The poets in the 70s’, when I was in school, the image was a powerful element in poetry, and that took me. I got to be pretty good at that. Images play a very big role in my poetry skill. For me, photography is just an extension of poetry, I’m still looking at images. I learned the importance of being quick with the camera and getting the shot in an instant. That’s what interested me. I really got into always having a camera with me, especially when I traveled, and always being ready to get the moment. Many of those images were images that I would work off of in poems, I would write off of photographs. It simply for me, is an extension of my writing.
14H: A lot of your photographs are from different places all around the world. You’ve talked a lot about how you write travel poems and how you love to travel. Of all the places that you’ve traveled to, which has been your favorite?
DS: I mean Greece has been the most meaningful. I came back and… I’m still here. But, I’ve traveled to so many different places, and at different ages, different places appeal to me more. I liked the Middle East a lot. I’ve been to Egypt several times, I’ve been to Morocco, Israel and Palestine. I was in Lebanon during the civil war, I have lots of poems about that – I traveled to Nepal. I’ve been to Thailand twice. I’ve been to Hong Kong. I’ve traveled to South America. I’ve traveled to lots of places in Europe but Western Europe doesn’t appeal to me that much. I’ve been to Ireland, I loved it. I’ve been to the U.K. Southern Europe and the Middle East appeal to me more than other places.
More than the places, travel really opened me up. Travel made me see there’s so many different ways of being. Once you realize that there’s so many different ways of being, you can’t stay stuck in one small parameter in a world view. You gotta open your world view up. And I always feel like that has made me a much different person.
14H: Now we’re down to my last question, so I wanna end it with any advice that you might have for young authors who are trying to make a name for themselves, trying to go and get published, trying to get that first novel out, trying to get their first short story published.
DS: Well you probably won’t like my first bit of advice, and that is: stop thinking so much about publishing and focus on the work. Publishing is there, it’ll come. If you get the work right, you’ll be published. And often publishing has little to do with the quality of your work. There are bad writers getting published and getting awards and getting high esteem. And there are good writers not getting published. A lot of it is just the time that you’re writing in, the kinds of things you’re writing, the way people are reacting to writing. And America is going through strange things right now. If I were in America right now, I would of course want to write and I would of course want to publish, but I would be wondering, What the hell is going on? You find the journals that publish writers that you respect, writers that mean something to you. What’s really important is, get to know your work. Get to know what you’re trying to do in your work. Get to know what you can do to make your work go deeper and wider and follow the tracks that are meaningful to you as a writer. Those are the things that are most important.
Don Schofield lives in Thessaloniki, Greece. His most recent poetry collections are In Lands Imagination Favors (Dos Madres Press, 2014) and The Flow of Wonder (Kelsay Books, 2018). He is a recipient of, among other awards, the 2005 Allen Ginsberg Award (US) and the 2010 John D. Criticos Prize (UK). His poems and translations have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and the Greek National Translation Award. His memoir, From the Cyclops Cave, is just out from Open Books Press. Webpage: https://www.don-schofield.com
Earning her B.A. in Creative Writing from Saint Mary’s College of California, Sarah Bagdon is beginning her pursuit to obtain an M.A. in Creative Writing in the genre of fiction at San Francisco State University. She writes primarily fiction and creative nonfiction, while occasionally dabbling in poetry and playwriting for fun. She was born and raised in San Francisco, always incorporating the city as her home in her writing. She serves as a Fiction editor for Fourteen Hills Literary Magazine. She lives with her family in the Sunset District, along with her two furry friends, May and Hunter.