An interview with Susan Sherman
1.Why did you go into the arts?
I’ve always loved to read. I remember calling my mother from the public library when I was in the third grade trying to check out The Count of Monte Cristo and Les Miserables. They couldn’t believe a “little girl” could read two such heavy books, so big I could hardly carry them. Those two “heavy books” along with my stack of comic books and my Oz books—which were my favorite—were the source of my childhood imagination and fantasies and dreams. At the same time, I put together my first “little magazine” in grade school, cutting and pasting together stories and poems other students and I had written. So I guess you could say I have been “in the arts” from before I knew there were arts to be in!
Why did I continue? In High School, I had a huge crush on my English teacher and wrote poems to impress her—I hope no one ever finds them. They were truly dreadful! At U. C. Berkeley where I went to college, I became involved with the literary magazine, Occident. It was the late 50s and the tail end of the San Francisco Renaissance and I shared an apartment with Diane Wakoski and LaMonte Young and was surrounded by music and poetry. Many of the artists I knew at Berkeley moved to New York, so I came to New York when I graduated and got involved in the poetry readings here during the heyday of art in the early 60s and co-founded and edited IKON magazine. But that is a long, long story. Much better recounted in my memoir, America’s Child: A Woman’s Journey Through the Radical Sixties.
But maybe the best way to put it is that one day when I was a Freshman at Berkeley I pressed my nose against a coffee shop window and watched a musician playing a guitar and singing inside, and I wanted desperately to be in there with all the other people who seemed so mysterious to me. And finally, when I got up enough nerve, I went inside. So I guess you could stay it wasn’t about proving a point or even expressing myself, just that art drew me to it, like anything or anyone you love.
2. How has your queer identity affected your art?
My identity is my art, so it would be wrong to say my queer identity has affected my writing. It is synonymous with my writing. In the early 60s I was out and closeted at the same time if that makes sense. Outwardly I was a Lesbian to some, bisexual to others, and straight to most!! I had my first relationship with a woman in 1961 at a time world’s different from today. Once I fell in love with a woman, it was very clear to me where heart was, but I continued relating to men for a few years after that until I started living with a woman in a monogamous relationship in 1966. My identifying with being queer certainly affected the response to my work. The poetry world in the 60s in New York, much like the political world, was predominately male-identified and straight, even with the few out gay men. My queer identity was something I had to wrestle with, and although at times it was very painful I think in many ways it made me stronger and more sure of who I am.
3. What was your most fulfilling artistic experience?
When I consider the words “artistic experience,” I think about how many inspiring works I have been privileged to read and artists and writers I have met. IKON magazine, which I edited in the late 60s and then again from 1982-1994, put me in contact with so many talented artists and writers. I particularly value the issues we did in collaboration: #5/6 Art against Apartheid: Works for Freedom with the Art Against Apartheid Collective, #8 with Asian Women United, and #12/13 with Coast to Coast: National Women Artists of Color.
Then there was my trip to the Cuban Cultural Congress in 1968 where I was able to meet progressive creative people from around the world and spend time with Margaret Randall who became a great friend. She and her magazine El Corno Emplumado drastically altered how I viewed poetry and the culture. It was through that trip I began to see the necessity of art not as separate from but as an integral part of the world the artist inhabits.
4. How can art be better used for social change?
I think a better question is whether art as opposed to propaganda (although I have no quibble with propaganda!!) can be an instrument for social change. Obviously from what I have already said, I firmly believe the answer is “yes.” But that “yes” is not simple. The best exposition I think is Audre Lorde’s in her essay, “Poetry is not a Luxury,” where she writes that poetry has the ability to reach into the deepest part of us and “birth” that which would otherwise have no voice. Without our “voice” we have no power, and without power we have no ability to make change. I think in this country art has become so tied into commercial success or fame that the power of art is often overlooked.
It is essays like Audre Lorde’s and short stories like Jame Baldwin’s, “Sonny’s Blues,” along with all the wonderful and inspiring work that is being produced now that is the impetus not only for the empowerment to make change but to remind us what that change should be about, what connects us on the deepest level to where birth takes place.
5. Any advice for younger LGBTQ artists who are still finding their voices?
When I was in college, there was a man named John—I don’t remember his last name or really much else about him except at the time he seemed very old to me!—who advised me when I asked him much the same question: “Susan, don’t worry about your talent, you have that and it will grow. Worry about how strong you are. That is where the test of what you will become will be.” And I think that is the advice I would give to younger artists today. Above all you are going to need to be strong. And I hope you can take his advice, or at least understand it, better than I did!
6. What is your recent project and how does it reflect your voice as an artist?
My most recent book is Nirvana on Ninth Street (photographs by Colleen McKay and Afterword by Rona L. Holub) which was published by Wings Press in October, 2014. It is my first collection of short stories, and more than any other work I’ve done it contains all the themes and writing techniques I have used through the years in poetry, playwriting, the memoir. It’s loosely based on people who lived on or near Ninth Street between Avenues B&C in the early 60s through the 70s (and a little beyond) when the neighborhood was full of artists and writers and musicians and culturally and ethnically very diverse.
My plays incorporate the fantasy of Alice in Wonderland and playwrights like Ionesco and Beckett, while my poems are more imagistic like those of Audre Lorde and Pablo Neruda and Joy Harjo. Part of my memoir has the same setting I include in Nirvana. So Nirvana on Ninth Street is like a combination of all three!! There is love and politics, and the character who ties the stories together is a Lesbian. She is not me by the way!! That is where the similarity ends!! It is interesting in fiction how one weaves together many traits of people you know, places you have been, to create new characters.
Nirvana on Ninth Street is available both as a paperback and an e-book on Amazon, Barnes and Noble and iTunes and at local independent bookstores like the wonderful Bluestockings. You can get information about all my books, activities on my website: susansherman.com.
I would like to end this interview by saying how important it is to support writers and artists by actively buying their books and going to their presentations and plays and supporting the organizations that support them.
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