Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum

Ms. Hempel Chronicles shadows the namesake through the trial and tribulations of being a seventh grade teacher. Ms Hempel is not an everyday seventh grade teacher; she is the embodiment of your best friend, your adult idol and most of all, the repository for the unspoken aspirations and disappointments of her students.  Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum was that seventh grade teacher; she taught at Park Slope’s Berkley Carroll for three years. Although Bynum is currently based in Los Angeles, she lived in New York City for ten years, during which she took a break to attend the University of Iowa’s Writer Workshop. Although she has experience in teaching, her writing style exemplifies her talent both as a writer and teacher. I recently saw her at the KGB Bar in New York City for a reading of Creep, one of the stories included in Ms. Hempel Chronicles. At the reading, the finalist for the National Book Award is greeted and greets everyone with such enthusiasm that she is genuinely the most graceful host at her own reading.

Photo by Leigh Dana Jackson

Theme: While I was reading your current novel; I noticed there are a lot of similarities between your life and what is in the book, can you explain what the differences between your first [Madeline is Sleeping] and second novels are?
Sarah Shun Lien Bynum: The first book is much more fantastical in its style then this book is. It draws upon fairy tales, it draws upon French history and its more unusual in its form, content and style. I was working on both books at the same time. So I see both books in some way as being similar even though this one on the surface seems to be much within the realist tradition and the other book seems to be more in the fabulous tradition. I see both books in some way being about the change from childhood to adulthood and about how often painful, complicated, and fuzzy that change is—how unclear that change is. So even though the books are seemingly dissimilar for me they both came out of the same interest in that period of transition, where you are not sure: “Am I this or am I that?”

You have fantastic insight into your characters. Do you take your inspiration from the students you taught or do you formulate these characters?
I owe an enormous debt to the students I taught because so much of the material for this book was my remembering situations, stories, gestures, behaviors, and conversations that I had with my seventh and eighth grade students. When I was a teacher there was a sense that their lives were much more vivid than mine was and feeling so privileged to have insight into all of the change that they were going through, all of the things that they were passionate about, and all of the things that they were feeling so intensely . I feel I couldn’t have written this book without having had so much material that my students unwittingly gave me.

Did you feel that sense of discovery when you attended the MacDowell Colony? I know it is a great retreat for something fantastic, creative, and artistic to go on. How did that experience help you and when did you attend?
I went more than four years ago, I went in the winter of 2004. I had just finished my first book and I was thinking, “Well, what is the next book going to be?” and I sound like a MacDowell convert right now, but it is an experience like no other. There is that sense of feeling so lucky to be given this gift of time, to be given this gift of space, to be sent the message that we take your work seriously enough that we have created this magical environment for you and being with other people that have been given this gift. We are kind of giddy, it’s the sense of unwrapping the chocolate bar and finding the golden dollar in Willy Wonka, we are all holding this golden dollar and cant believe we are lucky enough to find ourselves here.

I am rendered speechless. The friendships you make at MacDowell have that special quality to them. It means a lot to have the friends that I made through that special time; to see them again takes me back to that special winter that we spent in our cabins just going through a period of real productivity.

How did it feel to have the three other women whom you were nominated with for The National Book Award, attend this reading tonight?
It meant so much for them to be here tonight. One of the best parts of that experience was becoming friends with the other finalists. It was a year that there was a mini controversy because some people in the book world felt that the judges had picked five obscure women writers from New York, so there was a lot of negative attention. But what the wonderful side affect was that we came together and spent a lot of time together and got to know each other and those friendships have lasted. Joan [Silber] and Christine [Schutt] both have books that came out recently and both are just fantastic. I feel proud to be within this circle.