Stephen Policoff
Stephen Policoff is the author of Beautiful Somewhere Else, which won the James Jones Award, and was published by Carroll & Graf. His second novel, Come Away, won the Dzanc Award, and was published by Dzanc Books in 2014. He was writer-in-residence at Medicine Show Theater Ensemble, with whom he wrote Shipping Out, The Mummer’s Play, Ubu Rides Again, and Bound to Rise, which received an Obie. He was also a freelance writer for Cosmopolitan, Ladies Home Journal, New Age Journal, and many other publications. He helped create Center for Creative Youth, based at Wesleyan University, and has taught writing at CUNY, Wesleyan, and Yale. He is currently Clinical Professor of Writing in Global Liberal Studies at NYU, where he has taught since 1987. His latest book is Dangerous Blues ( Flexible Press, November, 2022).
Facebook: stephen.policoff
Is there a genre of music that influences your writing/thinking? Do you listen to music
while you write?
Music is hugely influential to my writing and to my thinking; I have very eclectic taste and almost always have music on in the background while I am thinking about/planning my work, though not usually when I am actually writing (because I am easily distracted!). I love rock and folk and blues the best…Dangerous Blues, in particular, was hugely influenced by blues singers like Howling Wolf, Mississippi John Hurt, Mattie May Thomas, and Robert Johnson. But two of my favorite musing-about-my-work albums are Kind of Blue by Miles Davis, which I am embarrassed to say I only started listening to a few years ago, and the wonderful recent album of Scott Joplin’s piano rags by Lara Downes.
What’s the oddest thing a reader has ever asked you?
Occasionally, a reader will ask me if something from one of my novels actually happened to me. When my 2 nd novel (Come Away) was published, someone asked me if I had actually seen the mysterious green girl whom the narrator seems to see everywhere summoning his daughter away. I was mildly stunned. My narrator Paul Brickner sounds like me but is not very much like me. “You know it’s a novel, right?” I managed. I have not interacted with aliens as in my first novel (Beautiful Somewhere Else), changelings (as in Come Away) or ghosts (as in Dangerous Blues). One of the great things about writing fiction is you can make it up!
Is there a work of art that you love? Why? Have you ever visited it in person?
Do you collect anything? If so, what, why, and for how long?
Art is equally as important to me as music. I often go to museums, and sometimes I drift through the Metropolitan just gazing at stuff, trying to access some new sensory information to inspire my work. When I was writing my 2 nd novel, I became interested in the paintings of the “mad” British artist Richard Dadd, who famously killed his father and spent most of his life in the British asylum known as Bedlam. His masterpiece, The Faery Feller’s Master Stroke, an intensely weird painting, hangs in the Tate Gallery in London, and when I visited there about 15 years ago, I sought out that painting, which is tiny and does not reproduce well, and is truly beautiful in a bizarre sort of way. It became one of the motifs of that novel. I collect small statues of the Buddha and also of the Hindu elephant-headed god Ganesha. I can’t actually explain why. The first thing I ever bought for myself when I was 11 years old was a small ivory Buddha, in a junk shop in Atlantic City, where I was vacationing with my parents and grandparents (I still have it). My mother then gave me a china Buddha statue which someone had given her as a strange and inappropriate
wedding gift. After that, I sought out Buddhas wherever I went, and eventually segued into collecting Ganeshas. That collection actually appears in Dangerous Blues, though I have given it to a friend of the narrator. I am neither a Buddhist nor a Hindu, but something about the beatific calm of the Buddha, and the charming goofiness of Ganesha really gets to me. And I love that Ganesha is known as the opener of doors—that really intrigued me and found its way into Dangerous Blues.
What brings you great joy?
I think what gives me the most joy is seeing my daughter Jane emerge from a very sad childhood to become a thoroughly fine human being, flourishing when that might well have not been the case. Jane lost both her beloved mother and her adored sister by the time she was 14. Now almost 22, she would have every reason to be an enraged quasi-adult. Instead, she is a strong, smart, funny, and immensely competent young woman. Who could ask for anything more?
