Brian Sutton
Oyster River Pages: What is the most challenging aspect of your artistic process?
Brian Sutton: For me, the toughest part is just finding the time to write. That was truer years ago, when I was working fifty or even sixty hours a week at my job and our two kids were both small. But it’s still true to a surprising degree even now that I’m retired and the kids are grown and off on their own.
I’m the one responsible for nearly all the housework. And like the protagonist in my short story that appears in Oyster River Pages, I’m the one who takes care of the family dog, including taking him for three or four substantial walks each day since we don’t have a fenced-in yard. Plus we try to help our adult children and their spouses as they negotiate their own stressful years of raising children while also pursuing careers. That means we spend a lot of time with the grandkids and even spend some time pet-sitting—activities we love with people and animals we love, but also substantial time commitments. And partly because our summer home is in a picturesque location, we’re sometimes hosts, and tour guides, for family and old friends. So each day contains only a narrow window of time within which I can write, and sometimes that narrow window gets slammed shut for weeks at a time.
I probably should say “no” more often, but I hate to disappoint those I love. I guess if you’re not a famous writer, or at least someone who writes full time for a living, then nobody is going to see “I can’t do it because I need to get my writing done” as a legitimate response to requests for your time. Besides, if I did say “no” more often, I’d miss out on a lot of wonderful experiences.
ORP: What would you say is your most interesting writing and/or artistic quirk?
BS: My quirk is anachronistic: I like to write dialogue in heroic couplet, that is, in rhyming pairs of lines written in iambic pentameter.
I discovered the joys of writing this way late in life. I’m a pretty fair musician as well as a writer, and eventually I set out to write a musical comedy. My musical was a variation off Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. But unlike the famous musical based on that play, West Side Story, most of my musical takes place in the “fair Verona” conjured up by Shakespeare. (My musical focuses on Rosaline and Paris, two tangential characters who get rejected as potential lovers or spouses by Romeo and Juliet, respectively, in Shakespeare’s play.) So while the dialogue in West Side Story tried to evoke New York City gangs from the 1950s, my play’s dialogue tries to evoke the world of Shakespeare’s play. Shakespeare used a lot of heroic couplets in Romeo and Juliet, so I set out to do the same thing in my musical. And I found that I enjoyed writing that way—enjoyed it a lot. I had fun mixing fake-Elizabethan with more contemporary language, as when Lord Capulet invites Paris to a party so that he can meet Capulet’s daughter Juliet:
I host a costume party here tonight.
If you’ll attend, you’ll meet her—get it right.
For well you know, her love will soon entwine
With one who’s hot and has a pickup line.
My musical did pretty well: limited run on Forty-Second Street in New York City, largely favorable review in The New York Times, publication, performances in a couple of schools as “the school musical.” But more important to me was the sheer fun of pulling off surprising rhymes like, say, “exuberance” and “protuberance,” at the ends of paired lines in iambic pentameter.
ORP: Who do you consider to be your creative ancestors and contemporaries for your art and/or writing? How does your creative work converse with theirs?
BS: Rather than naming specific authors, I’d say I’ve been strongly influenced by the whole of what used to be called the Western canon—the kind of influence T.S. Eliot writes about in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.”
I was a college English professor for forty years, and for thirty-five of those years part of my teaching duties was a two-semester World Lit sequence. When I first started teaching that sequence, in 1981, “World Lit” pretty much meant “Western Lit,” and I must admit that my teaching of the courses never much evolved from that now-outdated approach. I was a Norton Anthology guy, starting the first course with Homer and the Hebrew Bible (aka the Old Testament), ending the second course with authors like Soyinka, García Márquez, and Atwood, and hitting most of the biggies in between. Over the years I got pretty well immersed in that literary tradition.
So maybe it’s not surprising that the short story of mine that appears in Oyster River Pages alludes to a work by Chekhov in its title, and then to works by Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Chekhov (again), Yeats, T.S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Frost in the text. The text also alludes to old-school lit-crit terms like the journey of the hero, carpe diem, catharsis, point of attack, rising and falling action, deux ex machina, and even katabasis. For good measure, my story also refers to Casablanca and Gilligan’s Island.
In my defense, I tossed in all those allusions not merely to be a Jeopardy!-type showoff or to squeeze a little more mileage out of my experience teaching World Lit, but to mirror the sensibilities of the short story’s central character, a rather cynical, intellectually condescending, retired English professor. But some people who know me consider the short story to be a bit autobiographical.
ORP: Do habits help or hinder creativity? Why or why not?
BS: I should think it depends on the habit and on the individual writer (or other creator). If you’re in the habit of leaving your creative project after about fifteen minutes in order to scroll through social media and get sucked down some Internet rabbit hole, you’re unlikely to complete that creative project, or much of anything else. But if you’re in the habit of setting aside certain hours each day to working on your creative project, then you’re much likelier to complete that project. Of course, you need to be flexible enough to vary your habits when circumstances require it. Still, I think most of us are likelier to get our creative work done if we follow a regular routine, rather than waiting for the Muse to sing and fill us with inspiration.
But the habits that work for one person might be detrimental to another person’s attempts at creativity. So I’m reluctant to generalize about the effects of habit, other than generalizing that it all depends.
