|
•
|
|
An Interview with Janet Sternburg
by
Janet Sternburg's memoir, Phantom Limb, is about the final years of her parents' lives. In it, she does more than thread together moments and memories. She explores the very notion of memory – the good parts of remembering, the pain that comes with it, and the consolations that memory can bring. In this interview, we hear Sternburg's memories of how the memories were brought out – how "going deeper" led to Phantom Limb.
KP: Your body of work has such breadth—from poetry to photography to film to theater to writing about writing. How do all these media work with each other? JS: Until quite recently, I would have answered your question with the story of a young girl who had foolishly turned her back on writing and ran away from it to work in different media. The story would have gone something like this: I came from a family that had very little money, so the only way I could go to college was to get a scholarship. I had won an Atlantic Monthly prize in high school, so I was able to get a writing scholarship. But I felt expectations that, in retrospect, I don't think were really there – they were inside me. I said to these invisible voices, "Please don't make me write anymore," and dropped out of college. I went back home to Boston, waitressed, and went to a lot of movies at the Brattle Street Theater in Cambridge. Back then it was kind of a temple for art films, and my time there coincided with some of the greatest of those films first coming to the United States. I had a very strong reaction to those films—almost as strong as I did to literature. I said, "That's what I'm going to do instead – make films." One of the films I later made was about Virginia Woolf, focusing on being a woman and a writer. Later still, I directed Writers In Performance at the Manhattan Theater Club, a literary series that presented writers. Then I published the first volume of The Writer on Her Work, the book of essays I had commissioned from other writers about what it means to be a woman who writes. So, the story would go on to be about someone who had made films that were a substitute for writing, and got involved with the work of other writers as a way of not dealing with her own work. Its end would be triumph: a dramatic return to writing, the reclaiming of my own voice. I don't believe that story anymore. Recently, I've been thinking: what might have been the "right" path? Here's an alternate scenario: instead of dropping out of college and getting a bachelor's degree at night (I never pursued a graduate degree), I might well have got a master's degree and perhaps a doctorate in English literature (at that time, there were very few MFA programs). I think I might have lived the life of an academic who was also a poet and essayist – a perfectly good life, but one that was I not meant for. The next step in giving up that old story was to ask myself: Is it so terrible to have stopped writing for a while and made films? Do I have to think of my work in other art forms as a substitute for writing? Were the films I made for public television and the productions I created at the Manhattan Theatre Club second class, just because they weren't words on paper? A less authentic path? Not at all! I've had a marvelous time working in all these media. I remember coming across some abandoned footage of a then unknown theater troupe, El Teatro Campesino, that had been working with Cesar Chavez in the fields, making political theater about the migrant workers. I became really interested in what they were doing and got funding for a documentary film for public television. To be able to create work I believed in – to have access to the resources for and to a wide viewership – that was an astonishing opportunity, especially for a young woman in her twenties. In the long term, it enabled me to produce, direct, work with people I admired, make work with a public impact. This must not be devalued, as I've come to understand. And the work in the theater as well, and also making a living for many years by working at arts foundations – these have enriched and deepened my life and, I think, my writing now. Photography came about when I was mid-way through Phantom Limb. I would sit at my desk and say to myself, "Go deeper." That mantra became my way of conjuring the past. But I discovered I was living so deeply in my memories that I had stopped seeing the world in present tense. I love seeing – it gives me so much joy – so this was a big loss. During that time, I happened to be in Mexico, walking along the streets of a mountain town. Suddenly, I needed to take a pictures. Then I needed to take more … I love the process. In both writing and photography, I'm interested in layers, in time, in the interpenetration of past and present. KP: The structure of Phantom Limb is much like an album of photographs. The pieces of the relationship with you and your parents come out in snapshots—potent scenes that work together to make the whole. How did you come to this structuring of the book? JS: I've written a lot of poetry, which means that I naturally condense—so much so that when I got to page two hundred on the manuscript, I felt like shouting, "Yippee! I have a book!" I always write short. Not because there's virtue in that. It's just something I do. In some way, Phantom Limb is like a book of prose poems that tell a story. But there's also an essay dimension, about memory, about neurology. I found it difficult to get the relative weights right – the balance between the main story of my parents and the essay elements. It took a very long time. Toward the end, an editor read the book and said, "I have some suggestions for you, but before I do, I want to praise the book." Well, I must have been praise-starved. His words felt like rain on the desert – it was as though little flowers started blooming out of the top of my head. So you can imagine that I was receptive to what he had to say afterwards, which was very simple: "I have a feeling you know more than you're telling." I knew he was right. I had condensed too much. But it wasn't a matter of length. KP: Your memoir had peculiar effect on me. When I finished reading, I wanted urgently to speak to my mother, to remember her while she's still here. Somehow, you've described the most complicated relationship there is, I think—the mother/daughter relationship after childhood has ended. How do you view this relationship in general? JS: Through writing Phantom Limb, I came to an infinitely more nuanced understanding of my mother. A friend read an early draft and said, " I'm having a lot of trouble because I don't like your mother in the book." I went back and looked again. She was right. The solving of that problem is almost impossible to describe, because it's a process that only happens in and through time. You either give yourself over to it, or you don't. For me, the single most important thing about Phantom Limb was that I realized in the course of writing it, just how complex everything is. It's a short book, but I hope it gives a sense of that—the complexity of everything, an individual life and the human condition. KP: You quoted Oliver Sacks in the book: "A disease is never a mere loss or excess – there is always a reaction, on the part of the affected organism or individual, to restore, to replace, to compensate for and to preserve its identity, however strange the means may be." That seems an apt description of your mother and her phantom limb – the sense she had of feeling the leg that no longer was there. At the same time, I feel that, at the time the book took place, you might have been going through a similar reaction – that, in a sense, the book itself is a phantom limb of your life with your parents. What kind of similarities to you see? JS: This past September 11th, I had a letter published in the New York Times to the effect that, when the towers fell, we were left with a phantom limb. To me, a phantom limb testifies that we are never left with only a void, and that's a kind of a consolation. KP: You describe the phantom limb – the memory of an absent leg – as essential to walking. At the same time, through Madame I*, a woman stripped of her memory, you describe memory itself as essential to living. How do you think the two necessities are related? (*A true neurological case from the turn of the century. JS: That's a really good question. Basically, to put it crudely, I was writing about the good phantom and the bad phantom. The point is that we get them both, like it or not. The good phantom is the one that is essential for walking – it aids in the adjustment to a prosthesis. It's how we make use of the past to walk in the world. Then there is the bad phantom, which causes pain. Madame I has neither good nor bad phantoms. That's why, at the very end of the book, I imagine Madame I and my mother meeting in a scene where Madame I experiences pain for the first time. I imagine my mother asking her whether it was worth it – to have feeling when it can bring such pain? Madame I says yes, because, in effect, it is the return of what it means to be alive. KP: Through your mother's phantom limb pain, and through the pain of your situation as both parents are taken from you, you've also shown memory as a painful part of life. In a sense, it feels almost as if life is really a game of trying to forget and remember. In one instance, you write, "My mother overlooks other sides of my father's nature, and it lets her cope. But isn't the price too high? It means losing more complex truths." How do you think we reconcile this paradox? That we must both remember and forget to get on in the world? Do you think we reconcile it at all? JS: I'm writing a piece now in which I'm thinking about the difference between past and memory. The past is really passed. It's over. Memory, though, means that we're open to revision. We imagine our memories stacked up somewhere, like a little file cabinet. But that's not how it works. We have only interconnected neurons. A memory begins as a particular set of interconnections that make a particular pattern. If a thought is called to mind enough times, that pattern is encoded in the brain and becomes a memory. But the memory isn't intact, just waiting somewhere. In order to remember something, you have to summon those connections each time, as though you're asking them to come together. The image I use is fanciful, but I imagine a funnel in my head, with the big open end in the back, and the front end right behind my forehead. When I can't remember something, I "ask" the neurons to line up and whoosh through the funnel where they come out as the assembled memory. The point is that while they're whooshing forward, they're never coming together as the actual truth. It's a constant recreation. KP: You write, "Sometimes a memory stops, holds itself in place. At those moments, the memory appears domesticated, as though it were being projected against the flapping screen of yesterday's laundry. Only briefly, though. Memory moves on as the sheets are reeled in" (82). This, and other things that you mentioned learning about the neurology of memory, is an amazing way to view the way we remember – and in a way, the way we form our own truths. How did your study of the science behind memory change the way you viewed your own memories? Or the memories of your mother? JS: If someone had told me five years ago that I would have become so involved with learning about how the brain works, it would have come as a big surprise. You know when you're filling out forms, they always have a section for hobbies. I've never had anything I consider a hobby. I love my dogs; I read like crazy. I don't knit. If I have a hobby, it's this passionate interest in the brain. For instance, for the new book I'm writing, I'm learning about the frontal lobes which turn out to house a lot of the capacities that make us specifically human. KP: How did it feel to be writing about your mother? JS: People sometimes say. "Oh, you were so brave!" or "You revealed so much, you were so courageous." I think that if anyone had to sit and decide to be brave, you'd never do it. It's not exactly a choice. The choices might come around when you publish something. That's something else, deciding what you want the world to know. I think perhaps behind your question is, Did I ever feel I was betraying my mother, or betraying a confidence? And certainly in the early parts of this revision process, I wasn't very nice. But I knew it would never end there, that I was going to work my way through to a deeper understanding. I had in mind an image that the finished book was a beautiful circle, and the book at any stage was a circle within that circle. I knew I was working toward a moment when the two circles would fit perfectly together, and that I would recognize that moment. And I did. There was a click. People tell you that, and it's true. I had thought there was a click before, but it was a false click. When it was done, it was done. That's all there was to it. And I think it was because, at some level, I knew that I'd gone deep enough into the relationship with my mother. KP: For many writers, writing is the business of recreating memories – taking what we remember and putting it in a newer form. How do you think this process works with the general process of remembering and forgetting? JS: Since I wrote Phantom Limb, I've discovered that my memory has improved a lot. In the process of going deeper – asking more and more details to come forward, like actually what was the design on the wallpaper in the living room when I was a kid – I think I've strengthened the circuits – I've given them the equivalent of a workout.
To read more about Janet and Phantom Limb, <<click here>>
To read excerpts from Phantom Limb, <<click here>>
To visit Janet's website, <<click here>>
To buy Phantom Limb, <<click here>>
|