Sharon M. Van Sluijs is a writer/science writer for SMPH’s Department of Pediatrics, and has had three of her poems published in Corpus Callosum: Yes is an Apple (Spring 2022), On the Death of the Cook (Fall 2022), and Late Spring Snow Storm (Spring 2023).
Editor’s note: the terms art and artists are used as umbrella terms in this context and include writing and writers.
Question 1: What drew you to writing and what is your background in it?
Van Sluijs: I began writing stories as a child; I was an early and avid reader and an early and avid writer of stories and sometimes poetry. Our house was full of books of all kinds; my mother, who was primarily a painter (secondarily a mother) was never without one or two books in progress. It seemed a natural thing to me.
Question 2: What motivates you to create, and what inspires your art?
Van Sluijs: I write as a way to puzzle things out and to capture thinking. Thoughts are evanescent and writing holds them. It requires concerted attention to bring thoughts up whole out of the unconscious and to hook them with words, to give them an anchor and lasting presence in the conscious world. Metaphor is one effective hook. Poetry, often, is a beautiful, complex, and thoughtful argument. I frequently use the natural world as an entrée into a question. Poetry as a form uses language to make connections — at times extravagantly surprising connections through syntax, sound, and meter — that prosaic language communicating data does not.
Recently, the deaths of my father and mother drive my work: about a dozen poems are the result thus far. Climate change — that euphemism for humans destroying the planet — is also increasingly a question generating poems and stories.
Question 3: Do you have any favorite artists or art that have influenced you and who/what are they?
Van Sluijs: My graduate degree is from the Iowa Writers Workshop, where I earned an MFA in Poetry. I was fortunate to be accepted. I studied primarily with Gerald Stern, Jorie Graham, and for one semester with the poet Elinor Wilner. They all influenced me enormously. My earlier influences were Shakespeare (that seems trite, but it’s not — I was entranced by the language and memorized soliloquies in seventh grade), Whitman, Dickinson, James Joyce, Nabokov, Salinger, Gwendolyn Brooks, Mary Oliver, Ursula K. Le Guin, Philip K. Dick, dozens more. I reread Michael Ondaatje’s “The English Patient” every few years for its brilliant and astounding language and form.
Question 4: How do you balance your art with the rest of responsibilities in your life and does art help you in those other arenas of your life?
Van Sluijs: A few years after I completed my MFA, I received a national award (the Amy Lowell Travelling Poetry Scholarship [note: Van Sluijs was spelled Van Sluys during this time]) and published a collection of poetry with New Rivers Press, which made it possible for me to be hired to teach writing and literature at a few universities. I learned after a few years that the work would not allow me to write. University teaching is nurturing for some but not for others. So, there were many years without balance until I stepped away from it, knowing it couldn’t support my art yet required most of my time.
For me and many others, it’s essential to have time that is unpolluted by anxiety about basic living. That’s why art grants exist, that’s why the MacArthur Fellowship exists. I have small amounts of that time now, and it allows me to write. Before the COVID exigencies, I met weekly with a small group of writers, eventually just one, to read and discuss our current projects. That has been helpful: the existence of a superbly educated audience — even of one —can focus thinking and make words on a page.
Question 5: What is next for your art (anything you are working on now or planning to)?
Van Sluijs: I am working on a novel. The plot, characters, pounds of notes, scores of pages of background data, and some written scenes exist in a box, and there is a room in my mind where it breathes and waits. I am close to making it my principal project. I also have enough poems for another collection, though I am not yet motivated to take that step. Poetry publishing in this country is generally fraught and unsatisfying; I need a more compelling reason than just to have another book in print.
Question 6: Do you have any advice for anyone curious or interested in getting into writing who hasn’t before?
Van Sluijs: If you know you must write, then do it, but to be able to improve — and most importantly to be able to judge whether your work is any good — devote yourself in a disciplined way to reading the work of those who have done it extremely well and pay attention to everything. Writers considered “Masters” are considered that for a reason. In poetry, learn the prosody of the past: that is, write in forms, even if you think they are stilted and old fashioned. You will learn more about syntax, sound, and rhythm (meter) in writing the three main types of sonnets than you can possibly imagine. One of my early teachers, when he felt himself in a deep slump, set himself the goal of writing a sonnet a day. It was nearly miraculous!