Comforts of the Abyss: The Art of Persona Writing

by Philip Schultz

Overview

A vivid, intimate, and inspiring exploration of how to write through persona, from the Pulitzer Prize–winning founder of an influential writing school.

Throughout his growth as a writer, acclaimed poet Philip Schultz has battled with the dark voice in his head—the “shitbird,” as his late friend the poet Ralph Dickey termed it—that whispers his insecurities and questions his ability to create. Persona writing, a method of borrowing the voice and temperament of accomplished writers, offers him imaginative distance and perspective on his own negative inclinations.

In this candid and generous book, Schultz reflects on his early life in an immigrant neighborhood of upstate New York, his first writing experiments inspired by Ernest Hemingway and John Keats, his struggles with dyslexia, and the failures he witnessed in his father’s life and his own. Through surprising, sometimes humorous, and encouraging encounters with the writers who influence him—including Elizabeth Bishop, Joan Didion, and Norman Mailer—as well as moving experiences of loss, Schultz learns how to fashion personas out of pain.

Perceptive, enlightening, and profound, Comforts of the Abyss reveals how persona writing can be used as a tool for unlocking a writer’s own story, the philosophy on which Schultz founded The Writers Studio in 1987.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393531848
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	06/07/2022
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	8.30(w) x 5.50(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Philip Schultz is the author of eight poetry collections, including Luxury and the Pulitzer Prize–winning Failure. The founder of The Writers Studio, he has been teaching creative writing since 1971. He lives in East Hampton, New York.

Table of Contents

The Mind's First Freedom 1

The Shitbird, Named and Unnamed 6

I Never Wanted to Be Me, I Don't Think 13

Pity and Fear 23

My Two Libraries 32

The Poet and the Fiction Writer; Conduits of Revelation 48

Our Most Curious Artifact 62

Somebody Loves Us All 75

Penurious Arrogance 86

A Magic Act 98

Indian Wrestling 107

Which Side Are You On? 119

Voices Veiled and Unveiled 132

The Socratic Method 144

In the Nature of a Test 151

The Map of the World 160

Gussie 168

I Came, I Saw, I Suffered 176

In the Manner of Poetry 184

A New City of Words 193

Anger and Shame 202

The Argument and the Lullaby 211

What We Want 220

Acknowledgments 223

Credits 227

Editorial Reviews

★ 04/11/2022

Poet Schultz (My Dyslexia) delves into the written expression of real emotion in this eloquent guide to “persona writing,” or developing a narrative voice and viewpoint different from one’s own. Doing so, he writes, makes it possible to articulate difficult feelings and can provide a shield from the “shitbird,” Schultz’s term for one’s sense of doubt and self-hatred. Key to his program is understanding that “making a successful poem or story is a process of trial and error, and that disappointment and confusion are important parts of the process” and doing “exercises in selfhood” such as writing a letter to one’s “most pronounced antagonist.” His tips are solid, and much of the book consists of rich anecdotes about writers he knew: Schultz recounts the time he played a game of chicken with Norman Mailer to see who would come closest to jumping off a cliff (Schultz won; Mailer grabbed him at the last minute and pulled him back), and there’s a story about Elizabeth Bishop cutting a paper bird out of newspaper at a party in San Francisco, setting it on fire, and watching it fly through the air. This intimate account is sure to satisfy writers in the making. (June)

Publishers Weekly

"Philip Schultz turned a childhood obsession with masks and personas into a distinctive mode of writing, a compelling method of teaching, and finally an entire school of creative writing. Reading this marvelous and forthright memoir of his journey, a literary struggle, a passageway that has always been powered and impeded by doubt, I kept thinking of a line by Ralph Waldo Emerson: ‘I am Defeated all the time; yet to Victory I am born.'"

Edward Hirsch

"In this tour de force on the artist’s life, Philip Schultz takes us deeply and intimately into the many perils of the writer’s perpetually hovering shadow of self-doubt, of fear and anger and shame and the astonishing truths that can be discovered if only the artist can find a way through—perhaps simply in the voice of another. Erudite, emotionally naked, and profoundly moving, Comforts of the Abyss is an essential and unforgettable work."

Andre Dubus III

2022-04-08
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.

Kirkus Reviews

"A prolonged elegy for the poet Ralph Dickey is woven into sidelong autobiography where Philip Schultz ponders his father’s bankruptcies and early death, a story threaded through often hilarious accounts of Schultz’s friendships with writers: Allen Ginsberg, Philip Roth, Yehuda Amichai, Denise Levertov, Joan Didion, John Cheever. How to turn pain and humiliation into art? How to be a writer? The answer, Schultz teaches, lies in imaginative transformation, as he demonstrates in this brave, raw, and inspiring book."

Rosanna Warren