Talking with Philip Schultz about 'Comforts of the Abyss'

East Hampton author Philip Schultz’s stunning new book "Comforts of the Abyss: The Art of Persona Writing" ($25.95, W.W. Norton) tracks his own writing life alongside the story of The Writers Studio, his famed creative writing school he founded in 1971, now based on the East End.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet spoke by phone from his Hamptons home about falling in love with Long Island, his fascination with masks and the beauty of failure.

You started “Comforts of the Abyss” in 2003. This is a memoir, but it is also criticism, history, and craft. How do you describe this book?

That is the $64 million question. This started out as a book about The Writers Studio, but it became a collision of many obsessions that didn’t like each other and didn’t want to be in the same book yet lived in the same neighborhood. As I wrote it, I realized I couldn’t talk about the school without talking about where the idea came from. I had no desire on any level to write a memoir, but I had to put things in order to explain what happened, and the slow process of endless discovery meant I had to use memoir. In a way, putting this book together was like putting one of my poems together: finally, after getting everything wrong every which way, I was able to get it down.

The Writers Studio is based in East Hampton. How did it start?

The idea came out of New York. We have this little place on Charles Street and in 1987 the school was started out of my apartment — that’s where people would come for class. I started coming out to the Hamptons in 1977. I fell madly in love with the big sky and the ocean and the bays. By the time I got off the train in Amagansett and walked to the little house I was renting that first visit, I realized it was the only place I ever wanted to live. I announced this to my friends and they all laughed. I didn’t even have a car, let alone a house! But 13 years later, I got the house. I won an NEA and that paid for the down payment and I made just enough to pay the mortgage. I met my wife two years later. We raised two kids out here. I still went to the city to teach classes for a long time, but I don’t go in at all anymore. The school is now completely run out of this place.

The book and much of your teaching hinges on the idea of building a persona — on the page and in life. Where did this practice originate for you?

My family made sense when seen as characters. As a kid, I would watch my vending machine-salesman father transform himself from this schlump to going into a fancy building, like DuPont or some fashion factory in an attempt to make a sale. He would talk to himself in the car and try to find a persona that would help him transform into somebody attractive to others. I would follow him into the building and couldn’t believe it: this guy dressed like a slob following men in fancy suits. But after that, they would come out running, so excited to see him. This was my first introduction to the power of persona.

Your Rochester neighborhood, where you grew up, seems to function as a place of personas, too?

My neighborhood was a true American melting pot, where everyone was striving. You survived by creating a mask. You could not be emotional and survive. So, you created a persona. I didn’t use the word back then, but I had the attitude. I became a good fighter. I would go home and cry, but in order to survive I could not be vulnerable outside. I think there is an element of surviving and creating a mask that allows us to get by — it is a compromise, a composite of many different forces.

You touch on the lives of so many famous writers with whom your life intersected, some — like Hemingway — only after their death, but others — like Philip Roth — in life. You call them “conduits of revelation.”

I think what I’m trying to point out is the difference between their personas on the page and who they really were. Norman Mailer, for example: the poet in him needed a friend and a companion. He liked the fearlessness on the page, but it was the other part he felt more at home with. I became obsessed with teaching this idea — of using a persona to defeat the shame and fear that follows us — and this is how the school began.

Your book of poetry, 'Failure,' won the Pulitzer, and your memoir, "My Dyslexia," details your battle with the learning disability. Here you write, “Failure, which played so large a role in my father’s life and in my own undiagnosed dyslexic flounderings, eventually became a source of creative strategy and intuition … a method of survival and comfort.” How does failure function in this new book?

I learned so much writing this book, and these two things explain my life to me: I had failed at saving my father and my closest friend, but I found this writing formula that might help other people. If I were a dinner, I would have ingredients no one would advise, that would be part of no cookbook. But I hope this formula helps turn one’s darkness into inspiration.