An Afternoon in Conversation with Pulitzer-Prizewinning Columnist & Novelist Connie Schultz
Written by Rochelle Lefkowitz
These days, while we’re sheltering in place, it’s a challenge to get to know people who live beyond our homes and neighborhoods.
How can we gain insight into their hopes and heartaches, empathy for their grief and share their dreams and disappointments?
It turns out that fiction offers us safe, yet revealing windows into lives unlike ours, lives we’d be enriched by if we could understand, respect and appreciate them more deeply.
Fortunately, on Sunday, July 26, as part of our Ashby Village Arts & Culture Series, we had the privilege of spending time with a writer who offers in her writing and conversation heartfelt portraits of working-class Americans, deftly enlisting mundane details—like train cases and lunch buckets--to shed light on the profound.
Award-winning columnist, and bestselling novelist Connie Schultz, now 63, worked at the Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper from 1993 to 2011. She wrote a column called “Views” for Parade Magazine. In 2005, Schultz won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. The judges praised her columns for providing “a voice for the underdog and the underprivileged”.
Unpretentious, down-to-earth and thoughtful, Connie Schultz creates complex working-class characters who transcend the two-dimensional stereotypes that often trip up other novelists. In her new novel, The Daughters of Erietown, the men, women and children she created draw us close as they share what made them become themselves.
Perhaps that works so well because the world in The Daughters of Erietown was, in many ways, Connie Schultz’s world. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, she grew up in Ashtabula, Ohio, near Lake Erie, 53 miles northeast of Cleveland, just across from Ontario. Before the Civil War, Ashtabula was an important destination on the Underground Railroad, enabling enslaved people who’d escaped to take ships from Ashtabula to Canada—and freedom!
I found The Daughters of Erietown to be a respectful, moving look into daily life of America’s working-class people. It helped me, the older daughter of a mom who got her GED long after dropping out of high school to help support her widowed mother and a father who dropped out of college to work in his family’s business, to more deeply understand the dignity of their work.
For Schultz’s parents, that was the work of today’s so-called “essential workers”. Indeed, Schultz’s mother, a nurses’ aide and her father, a union utility worker, inspired her novel’s main characters.
Schultz also explored the intergenerational trauma of domestic violence, the dreams lost to teenage pregnancies and the sacrifices people make for family.
When I asked her in a conversation between the two of us why she disliked the term “Rust Belt” for referring to Ohio and the Midwest, Schultz replied “It sounds like all we are is a collection of damaged goods, outdated, past our prime, that we’re not worth noticing, like the term “flyover country”.
Noting that “stereotypes of California would likewise offend many of you here”, she added “none of us should succumb to stereotypes when we talk about each other; everyone is more complex”.
In referencing her novel’s probe of the powerful, lifelong impacts of grief, Schultz offered this off-the-cuff gem to Sunday’s zoomers. “You will always cling to who you thought you could’ve been if life hadn’t interrupted,”
She also blended her respect for our origins with a strong caveat. “Our roots are our beginnings, but they’re not our excuses”, she told us. “At some point,” Schultz concluded, “we have to decide who we will be and determine that for ourselves.”
According to reviewers and pre-publication readers, The Daughters of Erietown reveals how the mistakes of one generation get repeated or repaired by the next. They praise how she deftly shares the small moments in her characters’ lives that shape them, for better and worse.
“Perhaps only in fiction,” said Schultz at one point in her thoughtful conversation with us,” can we be totally honest.”
If missed her talk you can watch the recording on our YouTube channel here or through the video below.