Phillip Lopate, THE CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN ESSAY

[2:07]Zibby Owens: This is Zippy Owens, and you're listening to the award winning podcast, Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. I'm also the host of Moms Don't Have Time to Lose Weight, and I'm the editor of the anthology, which you should run out and buy, called Moms Don't Have Time to: A Quarantine Anthology. All proceeds of that book go to COVID nineteen Vaccine Research. And I'm the editor in chief of Moms Don't Have Time to Write, a new publication on Medium, and we're accepting submissions so please send your personal essays there. And if all that isn't enough, you can follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens and my website is zibbyowens.com. Okay. Now back to this amazing podcast. Philip Lopate is the editor of the contemporary American Essay. He is the author also of, well, many, many books, but To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction and four essay collections: Bachelorhood, Against Jois de Vivre, Portrait of My Body, and Portrait Inside My Head. He is the editor of the anthologies The Glorious American Essay, The Golden Age of the American Essay, The Art of the Personal Essay, which by the way was one of my school books and which I still have on my shelf today, and that was from like twenty or whatever years ago, so that was awesome. Writing New York and American Movie Critics. He was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts grants, and two New York Foundation for the Arts grants. He is a professor of writing at Columbia University's nonfiction MFA program and lives in Brooklyn, New York. Welcome, Philip. Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. We're going to discuss your whole body of work, which is like astounding in its breadth and scope and everything. But your most recent is the Golden Age of the American Essay 1945 to 1970.

[3:50]Phillip Lopate: So welcome. Thank you. This is part of a three set anthology of the American essay. It's a crazy project that's taken me the last four or five years to do. And the first one was The Glorious American Essay, which was the whole arc of the American essay. This one, the Golden Age, is really concentrating on the postwar period 1945 to 1978. And the third one will be the contemporary American essay, which is the twenty first century essay. And I know that moms are very busy. I am not a mom. I have certain genetic limitations in that regard. But anyway, I think that even though these books are very fat, the individual selections are fairly short. So a mom on the run could read one at a time and then go back to all the many things that she's doing. I like the marketing pitch. Very good.

[4:41]Zibby Owens: And I agree, I published an anthology with and have another one coming out. And that's what I keep saying to people. I'm like, only have to read one essay at a time. Could check your Instagram instead. It takes no time.

[4:54]Phillip Lopate: I agree. Yes, and the other thing about anthologies is that nobody reads them from cover to cover, from start to finish. You can jump around. Anything that you think would be enjoyable to you, you just latch onto that. That was my I wanted to do a real offering, a smorgasbord of all these different voices and make it as inclusive as possible.

[5:16]Zibby Owens: I still get such a thrill. I feel like essays give you a peek into someone's consciousness that it's very hard to get somewhere else. And even in this with like Joan Didion and Mary McCarthy and all these legends, Susan Sontag, just to see even what they were doing, like at their desk, I finished writing this, or this is how I felt about I mean, I just think it's amazing. It's like you get to peek into someone's diary. Even the more literary or intellectual essays, whatever, there's something just so personal, obviously, about them that over time just, I don't know, it gives me chills. I just love this as form.

[5:53]Phillip Lopate: Yes, me too. I mean, I what you said is so right that there's something intimate about the essay. It's a conversation between the writer and the reader, as though the writer is leaning forward and whispering into the reader's ear, and meanwhile tracking his or her own thoughts. So there

[6:11]Zibby Owens: is something like a diary about it. Yeah, like a personal letter or something. They just didn't know me. Yes.

[6:17]Phillip Lopate: You know, that's so true. One of the things that I did, especially in the first volume, the Loyalist American Essay, was I tried to show how essays could appear in the form of a letter, or even in the form of a speech, or even in the form of a newspaper column. So they're letters in a sense from the writer to the reader. Emily Dickinson, I wrote a letter to the world, but did not write to me.

[6:45]Zibby Owens: Well, I've had your book, The Art of the Personal Essay. I feel like it was required in some class I took, and I've moved 8,000,000 times and it's come with me from place to place. So you've been like a part of the fabric of whatever library I've

[7:01]Phillip Lopate: It's been my most popular and bestselling book, it became a kind of standard text in colleges and universities and even high schools. So one of the reasons that I did this new three volume project was that for years I've been so identified with the art of the person essay, and publishers have said, Do you want to update it? Do you want to revise it? And I said, No, no, let's leave it the way it is. It is what it is. But then I began to get the itch to do another anthology. Originally it was supposed to be one anthology, and then it grew like Topsy into three because I found so many interesting essays that it couldn't just be one. But there's something about, I know you probably feel this when you edited your anthologies, there's something about doing an anthology that's very pleasurable because you're falling in love with other writers. It's not all about you. I've done plenty of books that are just full of law paper from beginning to end. But in this case, I'm the maitre d' seeding these various different writers, and the main thing that the main test for why I put an essay into one of these books was that I really liked it. I couldn't put in something that I thought was important, but I dis liked. So in a way it's very personal because it's about personal taste. But in another way it's not about my ego. It's about celebrating

[8:28]Zibby Owens: this beautiful work by other writers. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I felt like, yeah, like I'm a hostess. Like it's a party that I'm having, but I'm letting everybody in. They're all sitting around my living room sharing their stories, but we can't really broadcast that to the world. And I thought, the next best way.

[8:44]Phillip Lopate: And I think I have a different personality when I'm just reading or writing than I do when I'm doing an anthology. Because when I'm reading for pleasure, if I don't like something, can be very critical. That's it. I don't have to finish every book. That's it for that book. But then when I put on my hat that's the anthologist, I'm trying to see it from the writer's point of view more. I'm not so picky and scornful. I'm much more tolerant. A different side of me is brought out. The nice side, I guess.

[9:16]Zibby Owens: The sweeter side. The sweeter side. Well, I was really interested in this volume of it, in the way you analyzed through the rise and fall of the essay in American history and how you linked essayism and liberalism and how some historical moments were more ripe for this form and why, even linking it to overcoming the Nazis and the position versus Europe and The US and how this art form has sort of shifted over time. And I'm curious now where you see the essay in relation to sort of the greater macro, you know, nationalistic vibe of today.

[10:02]Phillip Lopate: Well, definitely began to see Volume two, the golden age of the American essay, as both a celebration of a time when essays were very welcome, and also as a debate about liberalism. Because it seemed to me in 1945 there was this golden moment of tolerance because America had triumphed over totalitarian governments, and there was this spirit of like the African American soldiers were returning from the war and there were all these books and movies that basically the message was we're all part of one family, and anti Semitism is bad, racism is bad, sexism is bad, let's just welcome everybody as part of one family. And then there were cracks in liberalism and people started attacking liberalism from the left and the right. And so it went from this moment of all inclusiveness to something that much more crisis mode. And now of course we're going through a lot of crises and a lot of polarity and a lot of division, and I think one of the reasons that the essay at this particular moment is a key form is that people are confused. We're getting too much information and too little wisdom or understanding, and experts are no longer trusted. So therefore what Virginia Woolf called the common reader goes to essayists who are trying to figure it out without being experts, trying to figure out what to make of this very confusing moment. And one of the things about good essays is that the essayist is not just trying to write what his or her peer group thinks, but is trying to write individually what you really think, not what you're supposed to think. So it becomes a form for freedom to assess things that are problematic.

[11:53]Zibby Owens: Interesting.

[11:54]Phillip Lopate: So even if you are essentially a progressive and subscribe to the notion of political correctness, you still are allowed in the essay, which is a form identified with doubt, self doubt, skepticism, and thinking against oneself, you're allowed to play out all the different possibilities, variations, and uncertainties. And that's the key word, if I could say uncertainties, that is we're living through a time of real uncertainty. So I'm on the side of immigrants, of diversity, and so on, so I am not on the side of white supremacy, I could say. But that doesn't make me so unique, but it just means that I'm aware that not everybody thinks about it. Interesting.

[12:41]Zibby Owens: Yeah, I liked how even in the introduction, you had a whole thing about the Black essay and all these different ways in which

[12:49]Phillip Lopate: different voices are represented over time and what that does for the communities at large? Yes, because I think one of the things that the essay can do, I think even more than the novel, is that minorities and different groups are drawn to it in order to articulate what it means to be in this minority, and so to some degree it becomes a kind of pursuit of identity to this minority, but it also, like Richard Rodriguez has an essay called Hispanic in which he doubts some of the cliches about the Hispanic. So you both have the right to talk about how you are part of a group and how you're not part of it. How you can't go along with the tribe, which I think is very refreshing.

[13:30]Zibby Owens: I feel like, I don't know, just personally, and I know you're the biggest writer ever, so I can't even share my personal experience without feeling ridiculous about it. But I have been writing essays. Like, that's how I process my thoughts. Like, I've been writing and publishing essays since I was 14. And I feel like it's my way of sort of finding people in the world who might understand making me less alone, but also the other people. And I feel like it's, I don't know, I feel like the essay format is such a, I don't know, it's just a way to process that so many people use, especially honestly in the motherhood space. I mean, there are so many essay sites, and I know We Have Moms No Time to Write is like a medium publication now too, but there's so many sites devoted to many moms and other maybe perhaps it's one of those groups that you discussed, like dealing with a lot of stuff and trying to figure it all out. And that's how they do it. Today's episode is sponsored by Quince. Summer always makes me rethink what I'm reaching for every day. Lighter fabrics, better materials, pieces that just feel good the moment you put them on and look effortless. That's why I keep coming back to Quince. They focus on high quality essentials. Think breathable linen, soft organic cotton, washable silk, but without the luxury markup. It's that rare balance where everything feels elevated, but still easy. Quince has beautiful everyday pieces like 100% European linen pants, dresses, and tops with styles starting at $32. Their denim is soft and easy to wear. I wear my jean jacket all the time. And their organic cotton sweaters are perfect for layering on cool summer nights. Everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. Quince works directly with ethical factories and cuts out the middlemen, so you're paying for quality, not brand markup. And it's not just clothing. Quince has really become a destination for elevated essentials across home, kitchen, bedding, and beyond, making it easy to bring a more premium feel into everyday life. In addition to my jean jacket, I recently got a white tank top dress with a beautiful cotton skirt that is absolutely gorgeous, and I can't wait for it to be warm enough so I can wear it every day, but it has been a cool spring. Elevate your summer wardrobe. Go to quince.com/zippy for free shipping on your order and three hundred and sixty five day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's quince.com/zibby for free shipping and three hundred and sixty five day returns. Quince.com/zibby.

[17:09]Phillip Lopate: Absolutely, and as you know during, let's say, the 1970s, one of the aspects of feminism was women writing essays questioning their maternal instinct, let's say, how mothers unconditionally love their kids and also sometimes really want to kill their kids.

[17:30]Zibby Owens: Or at least smack them. I don't know what you're talking about.

[17:33]Phillip Lopate: Don't know what I'm talking about. Okay, all right. So I do think that some notion like the maternal instinct has a piece of reality, but it also has a piece of propaganda in it, you know, and so it needs to be deconstructed somehow. And that's one of the things that's happened in the last few decades, know, is questioning what it means to be at the beck and call of another human being. Interesting.

[18:00]Zibby Owens: So what is your typical day like? Like, do you wake up and write? Do you wake up and read? Do you research the essays? Are you always on the hunt for amazing essays to include in something? Like, do you just read the newspapers all day? What is your day like? Okay, I usually

[18:16]Phillip Lopate: wake up, have a cup of coffee and some version of breakfast, then read the newspaper. When I was doing the research for these three books, which went on for about four years, I would gather books together and sometimes I would read three collections of essays a day: one in the morning, then take a break for lunch, then one in the afternoon, then early evening the third one. Okay, by that time I was ready for a nap. What can I tell you? On a good day I would find let's say one or two essays that I thought, okay, this could really work. Glorious day would be if I found three essays. Sometimes I found no essays. It was a little bit like cruising. I was ready to fall in love, and it wasn't happening so far. It was a resistance between me and the writer. So a lot of reading, but I will say that even after the project was completed I still need to read every day. I just need that time to process somebody else's thoughts. Charles Lamb, the great essayist, said: I cannot think. Books think for me. It's very hard just to sit down and try to think, you know. So sometimes I need a text to bounce off of. Don't what to think. So for instance, you know, in Volume Two I was reading this A Liberal Imagination by Lionel Trelling, and he says in the introduction that at the moment there's a liberal consensus, that basically everybody's agreed on certain things, and this has a good side and this has a bad side. So the phrase the liberal consensus was lodged in my brain. About 03:30 in the morning woke up and said, yes, the liberal consensus. That's one of the ways I can construct this book. If there's a liberal consensus, what does that tell me? But I didn't just think of it. I needed Lionel Trilling. I needed something to bounce off of. Moms may not always have time to read, but I'm somehow always find time. Sometimes it irritates my wife and daughter. Well, it's withdrawal, a form

[20:26]Zibby Owens: you know. I sometimes irritate my husband too. I'm always reading, especially at night once I finish all the emails and work and interviews. And for me, it's the most relaxing thing. I can't go to bed without it. I look forward to it all day, you know? But that's also the time to catch up and like, How was your day? And blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, Well, now I'm just going to read another half. I'll

[20:51]Phillip Lopate: tell you after I finish reading. Exactly.

[20:54]Zibby Owens: But yes, I am familiar with that feeling. And I don't mean to leave him out, but it was interesting When you read, it takes me completely away. He's like, You might as well not even be in the room. You're not paying attention. And I'm like, Well, honestly, here I am and I'm reading whatever. Actually, I'm in the middle of Venice right now in my head, right? In

[21:19]Phillip Lopate: the middle of Exactly, well I think I started reading as a survival tactic because it came from a family, two parents and four kids, all pretty loud and articulate. And the only way that I could at all escape was to put a book in front of my face, which was allowed in that family. What number were you? You were allowed to not participate or shout or argue if you were reading. So yeah, I started reading a lot. Wow.

[21:46]Zibby Owens: Think that's why I have four kids myself and my fourth kid is a boy and he started reading like, I don't know, four and a half, five. He reads a lot. Reads He better than anybody in the whole family, probably. I think he's just looking for some peace and quiet because it's such a Exactly. Survival mechanism. Yeah. Interesting. Very interesting. Oh my gosh. Okay, so after this sort of heroic project, what are you going

[22:12]Phillip Lopate: to do next? I think what I'm going to do next is I've written a lot of essays since my last collection, which was called Portrait Inside My Head. I had done these four collections: Bachelorhood, Against Roger Riva, A Portrait of My Body, and Portrait Inside My Head. And I'd also done other collections like a book of my film writings called Totally, Tenderly, Tragically. So I've written a lot of personal essays. I've written a lot of literary criticisms, and I've written a lot of movie criticisms. So now I'm going to go through this pile and see if I can put together mostly two collections. One will be personal essays and memoir pieces, and the other will be books and movies. That's what I'm thinking of now. I love that. Okay, so it's an interesting project because sometimes you have an assignment and you write something, like let's say a book review, and it's perfectly fine for the occasion. But is it good enough to put aside a book? Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't. So I'm reading all this stuff with I hope a measure of detachment saying, you know, this is really good, this is just okay, and seeing what will survive and what won't, to try to because I've got all the material. I'm sure I'm going to be writing new essays along the way. So I've got the material. I've just got to see what is it to live and what's going to be buried.

[23:33]Zibby Owens: Wow. That's my next project. You could even do a third. It's just called the reject pile.

[23:39]Phillip Lopate: My god. You know, that's so funny because I once had this fantasy of starting a magazine called Kilfy. And this would be a magazine that would be in a magazine for writers, but my wife is a graphic designer and it would be artists as well and architects who did projects that were rejected. And I'm sure there'd be a lot of fascinating stuff in that. And I certainly have had my share of Kelphys. Oh my gosh, I love that. Well, if you want to do it, call me up. I love that idea. We could co edit it, but it needs a banker or some patron to give us some money to do that. Okay.

[24:17]Zibby Owens: Well, put a pin in that idea. I think that could be really fun. It could even be just an anthology instead of a magazine.

[24:23]Phillip Lopate: Exactly, it could be a one shot something or other. I

[24:28]Zibby Owens: love that, KILFY in anthology.

[24:30]Phillip Lopate: Right? So funny. Yeah, because a lot of times we do things that are commissioned, that we care about, and for whatever reason it just doesn't care. Screenwriters know this all the time. They're like screenplay after screenplay and it doesn't get the green light. And sometimes you read them and you think, well, was a good screenplay. What was the problem with it? Exactly.

[24:50]Zibby Owens: Oh, well, that's exciting. That could be fun. Okay, great. Get right to So now when you're going through all of your work, have to put some in the kill feed pile and then. I have to kill it myself. My kill feed pile is probably a lot bigger than yours because I bet a lot more of yours got accepted.

[25:08]Phillip Lopate: I'm not too sure about, you you're being modest. But anyway, all go through the same thing, and all whitists go through uncertainty and this feeling of, oh, am I bluffing? Am I really alright? Ultimately the world treats you like, says, yes, you're a writer, so shut up about that, and just do your work. But for the longest time, there is this kind of anxiety. Yeah, this whole imposter syndrome, I feel like.

[25:34]Zibby Owens: Authors on the podcast are like, Oh, I don't have any advice. I'm not a real author. I'm like, I just read your book. I'm pretty sure you are.

[25:41]Phillip Lopate: I have advice. Yeah, tell me your advice. My advice is to read deeply in the form, not just contemporary work, but older work by dead authors as well, so that you don't have to reinvent the wheel. It's already been there, and all of these moves you can really learn from. So read, read, read, and the other one is sit, sit, sit. You know there's a Yiddish word called zitzflesh. You've got to be able to apply your buttocks to the chair and put in the hours, which means in a way to accept a certain kind of, I don't know if the word is loneliness or isolation, but I have known students who were very talented, who did not become writers because they couldn't do this act of sitting and being alone with themselves. And I've known other writers who were students who were somewhat less talented, but they could put in the hours. You put in a million hours and it gets better. You do revisions and you get smarter.

[26:42]Zibby Owens: Yes. Also, feel like if you're sitting all day writing, you're not really alone. I mean, don't feel like you're alone, right? No,

[26:51]Phillip Lopate: yeah, you're not alone. You're with your perspective, understanding reader. This reader who you may have no one in your life who you feel understands you as well as this Yeah, the reader, the characters,

[27:07]Zibby Owens: you know, it's like a it's not it's a party, you know.

[27:11]Phillip Lopate: It is a party. Yes, you're not alone. That's what very well put.

[27:14]Zibby Owens: Excellent. Well, thank you so much for coming on this show. This was so just, I wanted to say entertaining, but that seems like a flippant thing to say. I like entertaining,

[27:25]Phillip Lopate: know. That's another thing that I discovered as a writer, was that at first when I was writing, I thought, well, why should I entertain this self satisfied bourgeois reader, you know. And then I realized I myself wanted to be entertained as a reader and that was not an insult. That we need to entertain our readers. We need to engage them. It doesn't mean we need to flatter them. Sometimes we need to provoke them, but that's another kind of stimulation.

[27:50]Zibby Owens: We need to be entertaining. Okay, so then I'll keep my word. I won't edit it out. Great. All right, well thank you so much and we'll get back in touch about the anthology. Thank you so much. Okay. Great talking to you. Bye, Philip. Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram ZibbyOwens and momsdonthavetimetoreadbooks. Also sign up for my newsletter at zibbyowens.com and sign up for my virtual book club and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texture Sound for the sound editing, and thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.