Nina Schuyler

Nina Schuyler’ s novel, Afterword, was published in 2023. Her novel, The Translator, won the Next Generation Indie Book Award for General Fiction and was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Writing Prize. Her novel, The Painting, was shortlisted for the Northern California Book Award. Her nonfiction book, How to Write Stunning Sentences, is a bestseller. She teaches creative writing for Stanford Continuing Studies and the University of San Francisco. She lives in California.

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Are there particular films that have influenced your writing?

I loved My Octopus Teacher, which sent me down a lovely, long rabbit hole, learning everything about the octopus, an extraordinary, magnificent, intelligent animal. They can solve puzzles and escape mazes, and now scientists think they dream. I could go on and on. After that documentary, I read everything I could about animal intelligence and consciousness. Do you know bees have their own language? So do bats. The more I read, the more I felt a tremendous obligation—a heart-wrenching duty—to do something to stop the annihilation of the many nonhuman beings on our planet.

That documentary also made me question what science has prohibited: anthropomorphizing nature and nonhuman beings. The smart octopus clearly feels—joy, sorry, desire, fear, longing. This experience, along with my other encounters with animals—dogs, cats, birds--gave me permission, which was what I needed to anthropomorphize Nature in my short story collection. Yes, I gave Nature a voice.

 If you could create a museum exhibition, what would be the theme?

 The theme would be Attention. There would be different types of art, sculpture, and paintings of all different styles and schools, and the differences would rub against each other. No one room separating the surrealists from the abstractionists from the realists; they’d be side by side, in conversation, creating rupture, juxtaposition, and maybe uncomfortableness. And no explanation of why one piece is next to another; rather, just the experience.

 But here’s the catch: the person viewing the art would have to look at the art for at least two minutes. I might even make it five. Why? The big companies—you know who--have stolen our attention, and we need it back. Most likely, no one would go to this exhibit, but the artists would. Artists, especially, need sovereignty over their attention to truly experience the world and see, my god, its beauty and to create.

 I teach creative writing, and an assignment I love to give students is to, over the course of the semester, write 10-11 poems or stories from a postcard of a painting by a well-known artist. You have to look, you have to attend, to see and experience it. It’s pretty great how much you can experience by truly sitting there and looking and feeling deeply. Maybe I’d call the exhibit: The Art of Attention.

What’s your favorite non-reading activity?

Hiking the hills. I live in an exquisitely beautiful place, with packed dirt trails everywhere, and everywhere you see squirrels, rabbits, raccoons, coyotes, and the occasional bobcat. On hot days, the cicadas’ clicking is the music. On cool days, it’s the birds and wind. A good day is to write and then head to the hills and walk for miles. 

Do you collect anything? If so, what, why, and for how long?

I think I’m a magpie. I collect so many things: pieces of dialogue, images, the sounds in the day. I carry a little notebook around with me and collect how the man at the diner eats his sandwich, chews, rubs his nose. How the girl, in her red shoes, skips her way into school, singing a homespun song. Many of these fragments of the day-to-day find their way into stories. A long time ago, I collected an image of a man dressed in a rat costume. It might have been Halloween, I can’t be sure. He ended up in the collection.

Is there a work of art that you love. Why? Have you ever visited it in person?

 I love Pedro Marzorati’s sculpture, “Where the Tides Ebb and Flow,” located in Paris’ Montsouris Park. It was originally placed there to coincide with the 2015 Paris Climate Conference. Electric-blue heads of men in water, with some heads up to their chin in pond water; others, only to their chests. People stopped. I was there. I saw them stop and stare, not for a second, but for minutes. And they’d talk and point, and many expressions passed over their faces: bewilderment, comprehension, a sort of panic. Here's that exhibit I was talking about, right there, at a lake in Paris.