“In any artist’s life, the impulse to make is one that you have your whole life. That impulse cannot be taken away from you, but the impulse to share what you make can be squished out of you.”
Sarah Blackman is the creative writing instructor and the department chair for creative writing at the Fine Arts Center in Greenville, South Carolina.
Interview
Transcript
Sarah Blackman
My name is Sarah Blackman. I’m originally from the D.C. area. I grew up in Bethesda, Maryland. But right now, I’m in Greenville, South Carolina, where I’ve been for the past 16 years. And I teach creative writing at an arts magnet high school in Greenville, South Carolina called the Fine Arts Center.
Haley Hansen
How long have you been working there?
Sarah Blackman
I think this is the end of my 16th year. I’ve been here since 2008.
Haley Hansen
Cool-
Sarah Blackman
Yeah, it’s crazy.
Haley Hansen
And what’s your official job title?
Sarah Blackman
My full job title, I was hired as the Director of Creative writing, for the Fine Arts Center. Just kind of fake job title, because for most of the time, I’ve worked there I’ve just directed myself, but I do now have a colleague. So, I think I’m just the instructor of creative writing. And I’m the chair of the department.
Haley Hansen
Can you walk me through a typical workday? Like I was saying, like, what did you do yesterday, but now it’s almost graduation. So, I’m guessing that’s not actually a very typical.
Sarah Blackman
Yeah, it’s not. My work days change a lot from day to day. But in general, I’m at work by 8:30 after I drop off my kids. And then I have some time to kind of prepare for my day to catch up on any grading or to read over the curriculum that I’m going to teach for that day. My students arrive at 9:15. And then for, from 9:15 to 11:05, I teach a class of first year students. So that’s creative writing three, actually, and that’s their first year. And it’s an honors level class. Alot of time—depending on what day of the week it is. And what we’re doing in that particular unit, that class period could look like introducing new concepts, talking about the reading, having a discussion about form or about the content of something.
Sarah Blackman
If the students are writing that could look like kind of a generative writing day for all of us where they’re working on their writing, and I’m working on my writing in that same space. If we’re a little later in a project, and they’re workshopping, that could look like discussing work that we’ve read in advance the students have generated and then some days, we have guest artists or other projects that we’re working on, or we have the opportunity to work with other programs in the school and to do some collaborative stuff, which is always fun. And then from 11:05 to 1:25, I have a break. And in that break, I eat my lunch. But I’m also supposed to be making my own artwork. So, one of the nice things about my job is that it is very intentionally a space for people who are working artists to continue to be working artists while they teach their art form. So, that is a held space for me to make my own work, which sometimes I even do during that time. And then from about 1:25 to 3:15, I have my second class of the day. And that is for my second, third and fourth year students. And they all are kind of mixed in together. The morning class tends to be a lot of ninth graders, and the afternoon class tends to be sophomores, through seniors. And then we do kind of the same things that I would have done in my morning class, but with different topics different like modes of engagement, different focal points, and then I’m done. Then I go home.
Haley Hansen
How did you end up in that field?
Sarah Blackman
Totally by accident. Yeah, it was. It’s kind of a weird story. But, I always knew I wanted to write. So, when I graduated from undergrad, I had a degree in English and a minor in Creative Writing. I knew I wanted to go to grad school to get my degree so, I got into the University of Alabama. And one of the really great things about their program is that they had a full tuition remission in return for teaching. So, not only did I not pay to go there, they paid me a small stipend to teach. It started with Rhetoric and Comp classes, which are kind of your intro composition courses. I’m sure you took some of them or your colleagues have their, your cohort has their. And then it moved into literature courses and creative writing courses after I’d been there for a few years.
Sarah Blackman
So when I graduated, I had teaching experience. And I had realized that even though I had never intended to teach, it did not like crossed my radar until it was something I had to do to get my tuition covered. I realized that I really liked it. But still at that stage, I was not thinking about high school teaching, I was I was going to do college teaching. I was teaching college at the University of Alabama as an instructor at that point in time. When I was on the job market for college jobs. And I’ve gotten, you know, campus interviews at quite a few of them. So, kind of seemed like just a matter of time. And then I, you know, ended up in Kentucky or Iowa or someplace or Utah or doing something and then you kind of skip into academic job searching, which is basically like you keep shuffling until you hit someplace that you really want to stay if you’re lucky, and you get that job.
Sarah Blackman
But at the same time, I was dating somebody pretty seriously. And he had moved to Mississippi to take a job as a professor. And we were like, maybe we want to live in the same state. That might be kind of nice, but there just wasn’t any work for me there. And this job at the Fine Arts Center came up and I thought, well, you know, I’ll just do it for a couple of years. So we moved, we both moved together, he got a job at Clemson and I started working at the Fine Arts Center. And I was like, “I’ll just do it until I get a book and then I’ll be a better candidate for academic jobs. And I’ll go back into that job market”. And then like a number of things happen. There was a big recession in 2008, which is when I started. So, jobs were few and far between. Hard to come by and we were both really lucky that we both had work and it was stable work. We had health insurance and all that boring stuff. And to me was I really really loved teaching high school like I loved it and I did not anticipate that at all if you told my like college-self that I was going to end up teaching high school in arts high school, I would have been like, furious and, like, really, really annoyed.
Sarah Blackman
But actually doing it day in and day out, I loved the energy, I loved the feeling like what you were doing or saying was making like a real time impact. I loved the variance day by day, I loved the fact that the students had auditioned to get in. So, it really meant something to them. I love getting to work with people like you, Haley, who have very different ideas about where you wanted your writing to go than I want my writing to go. And that was so energizing. I was like, I don’t want to spend my whole life just talking to people who agree with everything I’m saying, I want to talk to people who think, in other ways, and I want to explore the things. So I just stayed, I got a book, I got a second book. And every time I thought, maybe I’ll go back on the academic job market. I was like, “Why? Because I really liked my job”. So, that’s kind of the long winded story of by accident. I started teaching high school.
Haley Hansen
Do you have a defining moment in your creative journey that made you realize this is what you wanted to do?
Sarah Blackman
You know, the writing part I’ve always wanted to do. And I just feel like that was like telling stories and thinking about stories and looking at the world. And trying to think about how I see it through language has just been something I’ve done since before I could write. Since I was a little little kid. And I was really lucky that I had a lot of support. My parents were both scientists. So, you would think that that they would be like, “What are you talking about?”. ” That’s a weird thing to want to do.”. But, I think they both knew what it was like to really feel passionately about something and want to do it. So, they were always very supportive of that, which was awesome. Nobody ever said like, “That’s not a real job.” They just said, “Make it a real job.”
Sarah Blackman
The high school teaching, I mean, I feel like I have kind of yearly, I will have another moment that makes me feel like, Oh, I’m doing the right thing. And almost every year around this time of year, I’m real tired. And real burnout, it’s been a long year. And then, you know, graduation happens. And you get to see people kind of like launching into lives that they can’t imagine yet. And that’s really awesome. Or someone will say something to me that I just truly had never considered before. And that’s awesome. It kind of the older you get, the more you realize how rare it is for somebody to say something to you that just you never thought of. So, the fact that that happens to me about once a year is really valuable to me. So yeah, so those are the reasons why, I really like it.
Haley Hansen
What do you think was the biggest adjustment or challenge that you faced, when you started at the Fine Art Center?
Sarah Blackman
It was a big adjustment to go from teaching college to high school for a couple of reasons. One was seeing students with much more regularity, like in college, you know, you’re seeing them at most, three times a week. And that’s if you have kind of a tough schedule. So, you’re seeing them like one hour on Monday, one hour on Wednesday, and one hour on Friday. Most of the time, you’d see students twice a week, and they’re adults. So, in between the time that you see them, they go live their adult lives, and you really— you’re engaging really very purely on a level of work and which is not to say that you don’t develop kind of personal relationships with students who really care about them, you do.
Sarah Blackman
But it’s more like an adult relationship. With high school students, it was a hard moment to realize that when they leave, you’re not hard. But it was an adjustment to realize that when they leave your classroom, they’re going home to their parents and their their children, you know, grown, growing children, almost grown up children, but children. So, there’s a different responsibility that you have to have for people’s emotions, there’s a different responsibility you have to have for people’s like hopes and dreams, like, you’re a little bit responsible for not squishing people. And not to be like arrogant and be like, you know, “I hold their lives in my hands.” But, you really can’t squish somebody pretty easily when they’re, you know, 13,14, 15,16, that’s a little bit harder to do when they’re 21 or 22. So that was like, you know, taking that responsibility seriously. And not because I was being flippant, but just because I didn’t realize it, it took me a little bit of time.
Sarah Blackman
I think there’s always and I know I share this with my colleagues, almost everyone who’s gone through an MFA program, I think, was being kind of prepared to either just be like, a really famous artist or to work at like that’s your career goal, or to work in academia. And I do think there’s a little bit of a feeling sometimes that you are on a path that even though you like it, even though I like teaching high school, there’s maybe sometimes a feeling like but I should be teaching college and if I was doing what I was supposed to be doing, I’d be teaching college. And every time I start thinking that way, for example, this year, we had a guest artist come on campus, who’s a poet whose work I really admire. She’s won major awards. She’s working at a top tier university. And she just kept saying, “You have the best job.” And I was like, “Man, yeah, I do. I do actually have a really, really good job.” So, there’s was a little bit of a shift between thinking about the title and then asked then then thinking about the everyday satisfaction of the job and which one was more important. So yeah, I think those with both challenges.
Haley Hansen
Do you recommend any specific skills that an aspiring applicant to your position should try to develop?
Sarah Blackman
Sure. So, my job is a little bit different than teaching in a regular public school. I do not have a degree in education, I don’t have a certificate in education. So, I work a little bit more like if it’s a Career Center and its experience in your field, is what qualifies you to teach it like vocation. And in fact, I think the Fine Arts Center is considered a vocational high school. It’s just a vocation is like writing or dance or ceramics instead of like cosmetology or mechanics, or, you know, whatever else, your culinary arts or whatever else you might be learning. So, it’s a little bit of a different path than if you were just going to, not just, but it’s a bit of a different path than if you were going to be working in a public high school where you would need that education degree and a certification.
Sarah Blackman
So, for me for an art specific High School, and they do exist in almost every state, they just sometimes look for them. But they’re there. The path really was more through the pursuit of my creative work, writing or sharing my own work, and others, actually, so being an editor and a publisher, and kind of being visible on those platforms. And I don’t know, making room for other writers to work has been very helpful in my job. The degree I needed to have to do this job was an MFA. So, it’s the masters of the Fine Arts, which is technically a terminal degree in any kind of arts practice field. Although, you can now get a PhD in creative writing in a lot of different places. So that is also a career path.
Sarah Blackman
But I think the thing that most helped me get the job was that I did have some high school level teaching before I applied. So, I’ve been teaching college. And then I did some summer programs with high school students. And I had also judged the Scholastic Art and Writing Contest as a grad student, I judged the regional levels, mainly because they gave me like 80 bucks and free bagels. At the time, I was like, “Free bagels, I’ll do anything.” But, I think that looked really kind of good on my resume, because that is a major contest that as you know, that we applied to every year. So I think that was a good thing. But that’s kind of another like maybe thematic example of the fact that when you’re doing the thing, you don’t necessarily know what’s going to be the thing that gets you a job later, it just seems like the thing you’re doing for free bagels, or whatever. So, like having a varied experience in the world, I think is pretty important.
Haley Hansen
What is something that you want your students specifically to learn about pursuing a successful and fulfilling career in a creative field?
Sarah Blackman
Yeah, I think the main important thing is that you’re gonna get told no, a lot. And you have to be able to hear that. And I mean that in two ways, like, one, you have to be able to hear no and not feel like every time you hear it, that you’re being rejected, like the most important level of your soul. And it’s hard not to hear it that way. Because you’re doing work that is meaningful to you, that contains part of your identity, that sometimes difficult. So when somebody rejects that, as will happen over and over again, it obviously feels like a rejection of you as a human. And that can be really hard. So you have to develop, like a tough skin about that. And you have to develop an ability to hear no and try to turn it into a yes. Which doesn’t necessarily mean like ignoring somebody’s boundaries, or like arguing with them about why they should publish you.
Sarah Blackman
But rather to say like, Okay, this magazine doesn’t want to publish this story, or this press doesn’t want to publish this book, or this agent doesn’t want to represent me. But I have faith in the work. And I’m going to keep looking until I find the right fit. And I think that’s really important. The other part of being told no, a lot and hearing it is that it’s also important to be able to hear no, because there’s something that is happening in the work that isn’t right yet, right. So, also sometimes to be able to go back into the work and look at it and say like, “Why isn’t this landing?” “Why isn’t this doing what I think it can do?” “Am I missing something?” “Is there something that’s not translating.” And that can be a really tricky balance. But I think in any artists life, the impulse to make is one that you have in your whole life, that impulse cannot be taken away from you, but the impulse to share what you make can be squished out of you. And you have to kind of be a little more resilient than that. So that’s the biggest thing I hope they would learn is just to keep keep working to keep making.
Haley Hansen
What would you say is the hardest part of advising students for college and career readiness?
Sarah Blackman
I mean practically, I think it’s making sure that I’m up to date with how things have changed, because I think the more politically charged the way we talk about and treat our college students journey is, whether that means equity on campus, whether that means diversity initiatives, like in our public sphere. Whether that means like freedom of speech issues in terms of campus protests, or even if that just means student loan, like how much debt is too much debt, I think that changes very, very quickly. And particularly as they become talking points for various political agendas. It’s really easy for like the reality of people’s lives to get drowned out by the noise.
Sarah Blackman
So, part of what I have to do is to just keep remembering that things are not the same from one year to the next or from one like five year chunk to the next. And make sure I know what I’m talking about when I advise someone to go to a college because it’s very open minded about whatever they’re concerned about. You might not be any more, or that the level of debt they’re going to get into as the result of getting this degree will be worth it in the end because they will be able to pay it off, they might not be able to. So the economics change, I have to be thinking about that. Part of it, too, is also just shutting up a little bit. And like backing off a little bit and letting people tell me what they want and what their decisions are. Because it’s easy when someone says, “Can you help me think about my career?” “Can you help me look at colleges.” To try to fix whatever is wrong, and it’s harder to remember that I’m not the one who has to live with those choices, right?
Sarah Blackman
So they need to be really right for the student and not just what I think is really right for the student. And sometimes, I’ve had students at this happen this year, who got into, really, you know, just shiny school. Schools that just have really great reputations, that if you have that on your resume that’s going to make you look like you’re really a hotshot something or other. But the choices that they’re making, are about their ability, their economic stability, their ability to stay close to family that they need to stay close to. And you know, there’s a part of you always like a dance mom, or creative writing mom part of you that wants to be like, “Go for the shiny College, like, go to Yale, go to Princeton.” But the right answer for that student might be like, go to USC [University of South Carolina], go to Coastal Carolina, go to College of Trust and go to the school, that’s going to get you a really good solid education, which all those schools are but, it’s also going to let you live your life on your own terms.
Sarah Blackman
And that student is going to be really successful. And the kid who goes to Yale when maybe they didn’t really want to, but they just felt like they had to because it was Yale is going to have a harder time. So like, student success looks different. And sometimes that is challenging to remember that.
Haley Hansen
What part is preparing for college and career stuff? Would you say that you are really successful?
Sarah Blackman
That’s a good question. Probably that’s a better question to ask students, right? So you might know, because I did some of that with you. You know pretty well what you wanted, and you were you were someone I just listened to a little bit and was like, “Well that sounds great, Haley.” I think I am not bad at finding ways for it to happen. And that doesn’t necessarily mean finding the scholarship, but just like finding the right person to ask the questions of so I do think sometimes my students end up with better financial aid packages, or just admissions into colleges that they maybe wouldn’t have thought of, because I am pretty good at looking for the Yes, instead of the No. So I think maybe creative solutions to problems that seem intractable is maybe a strength of mine.
Haley Hansen
I will also say that your class was probably the one that most prepared me for the actual atmosphere of a college class, like-
Sarah Blackman
Yeah, that makes me happy.
Haley Hansen
It really helped the transition.
Sarah Blackman
Oh, that makes me so happy. That’s not something I would have thought of. But it really is good to hear. Thank you for telling me that.
Haley Hansen
Are there any organizations or programs or events that you would recommend for folks who are interested in your field in South Carolina specifically?
Sarah Blackman
Yeah. Okay. So, Clemson puts up a Lit Festival every year, I can’t remember, I think maybe you were part of the young writers workshop there. Couple times. I can’t remember if we did it or not in your years. But regardless, they have one every year in the spring, I think that’s a really great opportunity. They bring a really diverse group of writers to campus. I bet you anything, Coastal Carolina has a good reading series. I just don’t know too much about it. But I know that they’ve invested a lot into the creative writing program over the years, because actually, a good friend of mine was the director of the program up until I think, last year. So, I’ve been talking to her a lot about what you guys are doing.
Sarah Blackman
Right over the border in North Carolina in Asheville was an organization called Punch Bucket, and they’re starting a literary festival. But they also do a lot of just like little symposiums and classes they bring authors in, there’s one coming up with an author named Steven Dunn he’s a fiction writer called, ‘The Art of Cussing in Literature’ where he’s going to talk a lot about like swearing in his books. I’m like, “That’s very interesting. I’d like to go to that.” And then also, I just think any community is going to have some kind of literary engagement, whether that’s in the public libraries, whether that’s through whatever the local colleges or the local community college. And if it isn’t there, you can start it because there’s always going to be somebody who wants to do it. So, I think if you can’t find the big thing, you can start the little thing and find your community that way.
Haley Hansen
Do you have any general advice for current students who are pursuing a career in the creative world?
Sarah Blackman
I mean, other than the stuff that we’ve talked about, which is learn how to hear No. I think, I mean, this is something that I talk about with my students a lot is about this idea of what success looks like. And particularly if you’re in a field that has the capacity to be or to at least appear to be extremely competitive success looks like like the very tip top of the pyramid. That you’re selling these kinds of books, you’re coming out on this kind of press, you’re being represented by this kind of agent. You are teaching in this kind of college and like a very narrow definition of it.
Haley Hansen
I would say, rethinking what that means and thinking about whether or not you have the capacity to do the kind of writing that you want to do. That makes you excited. That makes you want to read, right? If you picked up your own book in the library, would your book make you want to write? And if you can answer yes to that, then really, regardless of the other trappings that is a very successful art career, it but you have to defend your definition of success and you have to defend it maybe most of all for yourself. It’s very easy to start saying, but I don’t have this, I don’t have this, I don’t have this, and forget that what you do have is a working relationship with your own art. So I feel like, the armor that you have to have is almost like against yourself and against your own impulse to downgrade which your weird obsessions, right? Because really all art is is just like giving yourself permission to do your weird obsessions and and allowing them to be important. So, that’s what I think my best advice would be like, let whatever the weird thing is that you can’t stop thinking about like, like lean in, really make that the center of whatever it is you’re doing next.
Haley Hansen
Alright. Final question. Is there anything else that you think it’s important people here? Before we end the interview?
Sarah Blackman
I don’t know. I think I think my my general feeling about art is. In all kinds of art, music, drama, dance, doing good stuff on street corners, graffiti, everything. If you like it, make an opportunity for someone else to do it. I think that’s the most important thing you can do to be a citizen of the art world and in writing that can look like being an editor. For a magazine, it can look like creating publishing platforms, it can look like starting a reading series. It can look like being a first reader for somebody else who you know is working on a novel. Just building community in that way. But, if you like it and if it feeds the thing in you then make an opportunity for it to feed something in someone else and then that way it keeps existing, right? And I think that’s maybe the most the most important thing I’ve learned from from teaching and editing and reading and writing for the past, you know, 40-something-years. Is, is that
