In her first novel, The Painting, Nina Schuyler enters two foreign worlds: Japan, just as that most insular society cracked open to Western influence; and Paris in the upheaval of the Franco-Prussian War. The two worlds—and two distinct story lines—are bridged by a painting, sent blindly overseas like a message in a bottle.
Surprisingly, it is the Eastern world that is the more familiar of the two to Schuyler, a blue-eyed blond of Dutch descent who grew up in Washington state. The family home was always filled with knickknacks, craftworks and art her father brought back from his frequent business trips to Japan. She never lost her fascination with the culture, later studying Japanese language and economics.
Although Schuyler always loved writing stories and poems, she never considered it as a career until she’d made a couple of false starts in other fields. She spent her college years trying to become like her businessman father, whom she always adored. She majored in economics at Stanford University, then earned a law degree at Hastings College before she tumbled to the fact that her heart belonged to writing. It turned out she had more in common with her English professor mother than she’d realized.
Schuyler’s quiet, even-keeled manner conceals an iron-willed drive and discipline. While she was at Hastings, she wrote on legal issues and worked as editor for California Lawyer magazine. When she finished law school, she went back for an MFA in fiction at San Francisco State University, taking classes at night and working at the magazine days. She spent the early-morning hours writing short stories and poems, getting many published and collecting many more rejection letters. Her book,The Painting, was her thesis. She finished it in 2002.
She got married that same year, to an environmental lawyer. They spent their honeymoon driving through southern Germany and camping in their VW van. The following year, their son Fynn was born and Schuyler sold her book. Published by Algonquin Books in 2004, it was one of five Northern California Book Awards finalists in fiction. Schuyler started teaching creative writing last year at the University of San Francisco. Next semester she’ll also teach at San Francisco State. She has already completed the first draft of her next novel, set in 1924 Berlin.
Schuyler and her husband moved last year from San Francisco to Fairfax so that their son could grow up in a more family-friendly community. They bought a four-bedroom home, big enough to have Schuyler’s mother-in-law fly up from Los Angeles frequently and stay a while, taking care of Fynn, to allow Schuyler more time for writing. They live in a neighborhood of older homes shaded by massive oaks, maples and firs, within walking distance of the park, the library and the school that Fynn will attend. I came by the house while the baby was taking a nap. Schuyler greeted me on the porch, wearing a white T-shirt and loose brown pants. We sat outside and talked about writing as neighbors walked by with their dogs and a light breeze cooled the late morning sun.
For a first novel, you broke the cardinal rule: write what you know. It seems you were trying to get as far away from yourself as possible.
In many ways, yes. I speak Japanese, so there was some familiarity with Japan. My sister lives in Tokyo right now and I’ve been there five times. I studied Japanese language at Stanford and after school I continued studying with a sensei I found in San Francisco until Fynn was born. So I studied the language for six years, which is enough to get by on. It’s such a difficult language. I’d probably need another 10 or 20 years to really feel comfortable with it. They use three different alphabets—one for the original Japanese, one for foreign words that get adopted, like “computer,” and another with Chinese characters. To read signs or walk around Tokyo and figure out where you are, you need all three alphabets to get by.
You’d think there’d be some national movement to simplify it.
I’ve thought about that. It feels like they’ve put up a tremendous barrier to foreign influence, which jibes with their history as well. They’ll take what is useful to the Japanese culture and people and try to keep out that which is not useful. It’s not an easily accessible culture and language for society to infiltrate—possibly purposefully. There were 250 years of isolation before the Meiji era opened up Japan. It was a very homogeneous culture with a lot of rules. Now I think the rules are implicit. A couple years ago I was traveling there with a friend of the family who was in her 70s. We were on the bullet train and this teenager with blue hair got on the train—she was trying to be this rebellious teen. And Mama-san looked over and started saying, pretty loudly, “Ugly. Ugly. Ugly” to this young woman. And instead of being defiant, which is what you’d see here, the girl started hanging her head in shame. It was an amazing thing to watch. She came in looking so powerful and she just wilted at that one scathing comment.
If that’s still going on today, could a woman like Ayoshi [the Japanese painter of Schuyler’s novel The Painting]—who was so independent and rebellious and defiant of her husband—could she have existed in the 1860s?
Who knows? In my imaginative world, she does. She was loosely modeled on my sensei, who grew up in Hokkaido and wanted out. She’s definitely a different kind of Japanese woman that didn’t comply with the female role, which is very subservient, even today, as far as I understand. So if she could exist today, she could have existed back then. When you try to make history come alive again, it’s a lot of guesswork. But I do believe that human nature hasn’t changed, so you can go back to the late 19th century and feel pretty comfortable.
So why did you choose that time and place?
I was in a Japanese language lesson when my sensei started talking about ukiyo-e, which is the floating art world, or painting of the floating world. It applies to the Buddhist principle of transience. From the 17th to the 19th centuries, Japanese artists and artisans were making woodblock prints. They were carved on wood and printed and some of them were poster-like—they were put up to advertise a kabuki show. They’d do a limited number of these paintings, then break the print and carve a new image. And when Japan opened up, some of these pieces of artwork made it over to Europe and America. So when I left that language lesson, I was driving home with all this imagery of paintings flying around the world. And given what’s going on today with the Internet, this electronic connection of the world, I was thinking, what if it was artwork, what if it was beauty connecting the world? What kind of world would we have then? That got me thinking, what is the purpose of beauty? What is the purpose of art? Which is thematically, I think, what ties the two story lines together. Because every character has a different relationship to beauty and art. In literature, you’re not trying to answer that question, but, hopefully, pose it in such a way that the reader starts to think about it herself or himself.
Are you a painter?
I’m an amateur painter. I’d been doing it for the last eight years. I used to paint in San Francisco at the Center for Creative Exploration. You paint whatever emerges, versus focusing on technique. It was a way of exploring not only creativity but, as I’ve gotten more into Buddhism, a way of exploring some of the fundamental principles of life. There’s this flow of life, of imagery, and you can tap into it with painting or writing. So I probably have 500 paintings under my bed at this point, and that’s where they stay. It’s for the process of painting, not for the product. You let go of the product. You use the process of painting to confront—for me, to confront the critic. It’s really helped my writing to be able to put the critic’s voice aside and follow the creative voice that just lets you get that first draft done.
Is that why you started painting?
This is what emerged from it, and I come back to it again and again. I meet so many writers, especially now that I’m teaching creative writing, who get blocked—“Oh, this is no good.” The judge comes in way too quickly, before the fifth revision. The process is still going, don’t stop it there! Let’s go through another iteration of this and see what happens next.
How many revisions of this book have you done?
Five. The first manuscript was 650 pages or something. I just let myself write.
So your process of revision was mostly whittling down?
Yeah. It became that. There was one line that became 10 pages at first. One of my readers said, “This should be a whole scene!” So then it became 10, 15 pages and had to be cut back to five. I tend to overwrite. Then when I got the agent, it was 400-something pages. And she wanted it like 300 pages, so I had to cut again.
Do you tell your students to write what they know, or is that a rule you just don’t observe?
I invite them to write what they don’t know. I invite them to take risks, because I think that’s what keeps writing exciting. So I’ve had some students try to write from other ethnicities. There’s that whole PC argument, can you even do that? and I say, Yes! Step into that African-American woman’s voice, even if you’re a white guy. This is what it’s about. I’m open to whatever they want to write, but I really encourage them to try something they’ve never done before, I think that’s critical. And ultimately, even when you step out into the unknown, you’re coming back to human nature. When did you lose someone who was really important to you? What did that loss feel like? Can you step into a character and recall your own moments of joy? That brings you back to known terrain.
What else do you tell your students? What is most difficult or most important for them to know?
I was working with graduate students this last semester at USF. They’ve all mastered the craft element of telling a story, so at that point, we’re talking about revision and developing the stamina and the discipline to stay with something and not defeat yourself. Part of the writing process is rejection. If you really love to write, don’t let some rejection letter take it away from you.
How difficult was it for you to get The Painting published? Or to find an agent?
For some reason, people were excited about this. I think historical novels are doing really well. I sent out seven query letters to agents after the fourth revision. It was down to 400 pages. I’d sent out a letter with a plot synopsis, which is about a page and a half. Four of the agents got back to me within a week and I went with the first one. And she asked for the first 50 pages, and she read those in two days and said, send the full manuscript and she finished it in a week. And she said, “I’d love to represent you, but you need to cut 100-something pages. I had eight weeks to cut it down. So my mother-in-law came up from L.A. and took care of the baby while I went through eight weeks of cutting, cutting, cutting. I got it to my agent in September and she sold it in November.
So you haven’t had to deal with much rejection.
No, but with short stories, yes, and poems, yes. So there’s been a lot of rejection. In the beginning it’s horrifying—another rejection letter! You’ve got a stack of them. And then it’s fine—oh, I’ll send it out somewhere else.
When did you start writing?
I started as a journalist. I wrote for magazines and newspapers for a while. I started writing about politics for SF Weekly in the early ’90s, I think, right after Stanford. And I got interested in law because I was dealing with so many politicians—going to Board of Supervisors meetings, and so many of those people were lawyers.
What was your major at Stanford?
Economics. And I just missed writing. I love to write. So I went from this really expensive school to making hardly any money. My dad wasn’t too happy about it. But I said, “This is what I really want to do.” Right after school, I took [UC] Berkeley Extension courses in short story writing at the same time I was doing newspaper writing. But at Stanford, it was too hard to get into creative writing classes. Those classes are packed. So you don’t get in. In high school, I was writing short stories and poetry on my own, and papers in English classes. But I think what I was trying to do by majoring in economics was to find a way into my dad’s world, which was finance. And every time I put my foot into it, I’d go [gasps, recoils], “I hate this!” And finally I said, “Your world is not going to be for me.”
Why did you want to enter his world?
He was the most powerful and influential person in my life. He is, still. He’s retreated a bit, because I’ve developed my own life. But he was such a powerful presence in our household and in my life, growing up. He was the intelligence in the family. He was always giving me books to read, and we’d talk about the book later. So I thought I could keep that relationship and now talk finance with him. But I just hated it.
What kind of work did he do?
He worked for Weyerhaeuser, a lumber company, and he was always traveling to Japan. I think they were trying to open up the lumber market there. And he’d always bring back Japanese things—chopsticks, geisha girls in glass boxes, bowls and plates. As long as I can remember, we always had Japanese artifacts in our house. And he’d come back with stories of the culture there. I think he was mesmerized by it, too, because it was so different.
What was your mother like?
She was an English professor. She died in 2000 of lung cancer. And because I was so connected to my father, it’s only now that she’s passed away that I realize how much she gave me in terms of love of language. She really cared about words. Very big volunteer in the community, always giving. My sisters were a lot more gregarious than I was and they’d always bring home girls to live with us that had gotten kicked out of their house. You know that stage?
[laughing] Most kids bring home cats and puppies.
Yeah, they’d bring home girls. So we had all these people at the dinner table. And my mom would just take them in.
It’s extraordinary that she was that accepting and that nurturing.
Very nurturing. Selfless to a point that I could never go to.
Like Natalia [another character in The Painting, who joins the French army]?
Yeah. Definitely, that idealism of Natalia’s reminds me of my mother. Trying to make the perfect world for everybody, giving of herself to the point of exhaustion. I remember her being exhausted at the end of the day and thinking, “Oh, I don’t want to do that.” I was much more interested in ideas and being able to articulate something interesting at the end of the day.
Did you have to struggle with any of that when you decided to get married and have a family of your own?
I did. I didn’t want to become my mother. So I have a baby-sitter that comes four days a week for three or four hours so I can write. And we time it for when he goes down for a nap, and then there’s another two hours. It was really important for me to find some way to balance all this. And I write every day. It’s like a meditative practice. I sit down whether I feel like it or not and enter that page. Maybe I’ll only get a paragraph done in that three hours, but you touch the page and you touch the story every day. I’ve spent so much money on baby-sitters, but that’s what I’ve needed to do to not sink under the weight of motherhood. [laughs at her choice of words—then, leaning into the microphone of my tape recorder] I still love him very much! It sounds awful, but it’s a juggling act. So, yeah, there’s a lot of terror going into motherhood.
Some fiction writers say their characters take on a life of their own. Does that happen for you?
It happens over the years. This took three years to write. I think that’s why it takes so long to write a novel—you have to keep trying to get to know these people. And at some point, maybe at year two or three, they become real. I mean, I miss these people! I’ve spent so much time with them that they seem real to me, still. They’re still alive. Ayoshi is somewhere in San Francisco. Fiction writing uses both sides of your brain—the creative side and the intellectual, rational side. So maybe you made the character do something because it was convenient because you knew this other thing was going to happen in the novel, but it wasn’t true to the character. The difficult thing is pulling yourself out of the story and letting it truly be the honest story of these characters.
How are book sales going?
They just went into a second printing. The first run was 15,000. Algonquin is happy with it. As long as they’re happy, I’m happy. But what I keep coming back to is, I do this because I love to write. And it’s great that this [success] happened, but it’s not what I live for. Because it comes and it goes and you’d better love to write or why are you doing this?
Nina Schuyler will read from The Painting and answer questions in the outdoor dining area of Lark Creek Inn at 234 Magnolia Avenue in Larkspur on August 17 at 7pm. The appearance is part of a series, “Reading Under the Redwoods,” to benefit the Larkspur library’s summer reading program. For more information call 415/924-7766.
PHOTO OF NINA SCHUYLER RORY MCNAMARA
