Public and Professional Writing Program

It's the first Faculty Friday of fall, folks.
This week we spoke with Sarah Leavens on perfectionism, editing, climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, and how glue sticks can take your writing to new heights. Read the full interview below, or check out Instagram for highlights!

—Where did you go to school, and what degrees did you get?
I did my undergraduate at Whitenburg in Ohio, I did a BFA in Studio Art, painting at the time, and a BA in Creative Writing. I worked for about 4 years at a nonprofit before I went to graduate school at Chatham, which is what brought me to Pittsburgh. I did an MFA in creative writing and my focus genres were poetry and nonfiction, as well as a certificate type of thing with travel writing and one with pedagogy.

—At what point did you decide that you wanted to start teaching?
Great question. When I was in my undergrad, doing my painting, doing my writing, I really thought I was headed into a career as an artist, as a writer, y’know, as an individual who creates, and then I got involved in this nonprofit that I ended up working for full time. I got involved in it actually through a kind of internship situation and they were doing art and writing with kids and families and it put me in a teaching position with them. I was helping out with various projects and stuff and I had an amazing mentor there. She saw me as a teacher and I had never considered that for myself before. And then I realized that I really loved doing it. I worked with that program for a while, which was an arts education program. I decided that a career I could see for myself would be teaching in higher education, and writing on the side. So I kind of had the painting fall away into a hobby sort of thing. But I thought I could teach writing, I could do writing, and I thought that the higher education setting would be the best for me and give me the space to also do my own thing.

—I guess this might be too personal, but do you find it difficult to keep those personal practices going?
Yeah. Oh, for sure. Yeah. I don't think that’s too personal. I think that that is something people should know. You know, any job you're going to struggle with a balance between your creative work and the work that you have to use your time and your mental energy for during the day. So it's really difficult. When you're in school, it's nice, undergraduate and graduate school, because that is kind of your job, doing your creative work is your job, but then once you work full time, it becomes harder to balance. That is an ongoing challenge for everyone I know. It's not impossible, you know, it's just difficult.

—Are you teaching classes this semester?
I am. I’m teaching The Language of Policy and Power: Topics in Diversity, which is a PPW course that is surprisingly fun. It might have a stodgy name, but it’s really interesting, and I have an amazing class. I work in the Writing Center as one of my teaching assignments, and I am also the internship coordinator, and mentoring some graduate teachers this semester as well.

—What do you do outside of the classroom? What occupies your spare time?
Oh, good question. I occasionally teach with The Pennsylvania Artists and Schools and communities through the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. I've been teaching at the Powerhouse for a few years. (Powerhouse) is a house of women who are in early recovery from drugs and alcohol, and I really enjoy working there, teaching with teaching, working with them, I would say. I do that in the summer, spring and summer time when we're not in school, I teach poetry and visual art and collage and bookmaking.

Last year I decided that I need a project that does not have to do with writing or work. I have always liked to hike and I got really… I sort of got into it as a project.I set a goal to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, and so I spent a year training for that. I went and did that this last summer. I think I'm going to do it again because it was such a wonderful supplement to everything else in my life. I spend so much time looking at screens and sitting down that it has been really great to, spend at least one day a week outside, not looking at any screens. Moving around.

—So you said you got a certificate(?) in travel writing during your grad studies…?
Well, part of the reason that I went to Chatham is because they had this travel writing program. Everyone at that time had to go on one field seminar, which was an annual 10-day trip. I did two of those and an extra travel writing class because I was like, “why wouldn't I travel every single year and write,” if I could? The first year, we went to Turkey, which was incredible. The second year we went to Vietnam, which was also incredible. In my undergrad, I went on a writing trip to Japan, which was fantastic. Early on in my teaching career, I taught a travel writing course in France one summer, for the Center for the Arts.
I don't necessarily have a favorite place to write about, I just love going and writing… I mean, it's useful. Writing is a useful way to see the world around you newly, even if it's a place that you've been all your life. It's just so exciting for me to go and write in new places and learn about totally different ways of being.

—Do you have like a favorite spot you like to write?
I generally write in my house. I don't have a favorite place, really. I just kind of move around. I have a studio area on the top floor of my house that I use to do art and write, but I also write there.

—What sort of projects are you working on right now?
Right now, I am working on writing about Tanzania and my trip on Mount Kilimanjaro. In the year leading up to it, I started writing a lot about walking. So I feel there's a project there that is forming… I would say that's my ongoing project.

I also am just challenging myself to write every single day. I'm part of a writing group that does that and that is a project in itself. Just finding time every single day to write something.

—Do you handwrite or type, what does that look like in action and on the page?
I have done it in my notes app on my phone. I handwrite it as often as I can just to avoid screens, and occasionally if I feel like I want to write something long then I'll use my computer and type. Occasionally I'll do a collage or something with sound words. It's really trying to eke out something creative every single day. Some days it’s bigger than others. Some days it's awful. And really anything you know, but it's a practice. It’s building that habit of “I'm gonna write every day, regardless of the quality”. Yes. Yeah.

Yes, because I think a big thing when we're thinking about that work-life balance, creative work vs. professional work balance, it's easy to fall into, “well, I don't feel like writing tonight, so I'm not going to”. What I have found is the less I write, the less I have the impulse to write; the more I write, the more I have the impulse to write, and the more I'm thinking like a writer all the time.

—How do you combat perfectionism in your work?
Oh, it’s so difficult. Just finding time every single day to write something, to eke out something creative. Building that habit has really helped. Some days it’s bigger than others. Some days it's awful. There is just no way to write something perfect every day. You know, I spend a lot of days with something that I would definitely call a lousy first draft. I am trying to recognize that I made something, now I can go back to later and revise. Again, I think the less you write, the more pressure there is to do something finessed, but if you’re doing it more often then there is, by default, a lot of stuff that is not great. That is fine. It’s part of getting it out there.

—To me, it seems like the longer I go without writing, the more the work I end up producing needs to be perfect. It needs to be the sign I can still write.
There’s something about writing, that if we don’t do it for a while, we feel like we lose our writer card. Most writers I know have that issue with themselves, that we need to prove to ourselves that we can write, whatever that means.

—How would you describe the Writers’ Café that you run?
The Writers’ Café is held various Fridays throughout the semester, usually meeting in the Writing Center. It is an informal community of writers, a Friday afternoon of people who like to write getting together. We have folks come who are English majors. We have lots of folks come who are not English majors, who are just interested in doing some writing. It’s a great way to just get yourself to do some writing in a very low-pressure situation and have the good vibes of a writing community around you.

We always have a professional writer lead the session, and there’s generally a theme to it. It’s usually a 2 hour session, the writer will talk a little bit, and then there is always writing time, then time to share if you’d like. A lot of people share. You don’t have to share. We also give away books by the writer. We had one a couple of weeks ago that was led by Bill Lychack, who is also Pitt faculty, on the theme of oblique strategies… approaching writing from other avenues of expertise, so we talked about this book that he had written, a cultural history of cement, and how much it taught him about writing. So we thought about work that we had done and did some writing about that and came out with a really interesting conversation.

—What inspires your work, writing, and art?
That’s a good question. “What inspires my work”? I don’t know. I think, just, an interest in creating, or experimentation. Reading inspires my work a lot. All of my colleagues and friends who are writers inspire my work a lot. And the experience— this is so corny…— just the experience of living. It is inspiring to write about, to want to creatively represent it and share that with others.

—How do you go about editing?
My practice is to try and think about the shape of the piece first, and then once I feel it’s in the appropriate shape, to start looking at the language.

—What do you do with ideas you’re attached to, but which don’t belong in what's at hand?
I make a document that I call “the cutting room floor”, and then anything I’m taking out is put in there so it still exists, so I’m not totally killing my darlings. I’m sending them off to camp somewhere and I can come back and visit them whenever I want to. It makes it a lot easier to cut things. I always save my files in versions, so I can go back to an earlier version if I’ve done something drastic that I end up hating.

—Cutting room floor is exactly what I call those documents, too.
Is it? Yeah. How funny.
—I don’t know, something about butchery as a metaphor seems to stick with… is it?
I don’t know where that comes from, I always thought it came from film editing. Like, when you’re editing, you had to splice films together by hand, I’m definitely not a person that knows much about this, but then there would be all these little pieces that would float down. That’s what I think of, but butchery works too.
—I think yours is factual, but I’m partial to mine, too.

—What’s a piece of advice you’d like to give, to writers in particular?
Carry a notebook everywhere you go and, ideally, also a glue stick. Write things down, glue little pieces of things in... make it an instantiation, a physical representation of your life and your brain. It’s always with you, as you move through the day, so you can always write.