COMFORTS OF THE ABYSS

How a Pulitzer Prize–winning writer overcame his destructive demons.

Schultz, founder and director of The Writers Studio, chronicles the challenges he faced as a poet, fiction writer, and teacher that led him to see the aesthetic and psychological value of creating a writing persona. He has long confronted a pervasive inner critic that he calls “the shitbird,” whose “sole agenda is to negate and revoke; it uses confusion to disseminate remorse and self-reproach; its favorite phrases are ‘I don’t know,’ ‘I have no right,’ and ‘I don’t want to hurt anyone.’ ” To counter an inhibiting presence, which besets many writers, Schultz advocates finding “an opposing phantom voice” by borrowing another writer’s narrator, personality, attitude, and tone. Long fascinated with masks—“the ones we hide behind and those we create as friends, sources of inspiration, and companions”—the author discovered that a persona allowed him to distance himself from his material, such as his erratic, self-destructive father, and his own feelings of shame and fear of failure. Identifying with Walker Percy’s protagonist in The Moviegoer, for example, led Schultz to see the world “from a more gracious and philosophical perspective.” At times, the author adopted the “lusty bravado of a Walt Whitman or Ernest Hemingway,” the irony of Holden Caulfield, and the sass of Huck Finn. Finding a persona proved to be a successful teaching technique for helping students to transcend the autobiographical. The process requires careful self-examination, Schultz counsels, “into the cause and effect of old mistakes and wounds, into the realm of mixed feelings for what has been lost and left unresolved, all of which requires an act of self-forgiveness and deliverance.” The memoir is enlivened with deft anecdotes about Schultz’s relationships with writers, including Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, Denise Levertov, Joan Didion, Wright Morris, George Oppen, and John Cheever.

Insightful encouragement for writers facing their own “shitbird.”