Writing and Candy Wrapper Fashion: An Interview with Timothy Schaffert

Timothy Schaffert is the author of six novels: The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters (2002), The Singing and Dancing Daughters of God (2005), Devils in the Sugar Shop (2007), The Coffins of Little Hope (2012), The Swan Gondola (2014), and most recently, The Perfume Thief (2021), in addition to being a professor of creative writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.  He’s also an illustrator whose candy wrapper fashion series (selections from which appear throughout this interview) appears regularly on his Instagram and Twitter.

I first met Timothy in 2014 when I took his graduate-level fiction workshop at UNL and attended the Omaha Lit Fest, which he founded in 2005, and directed until 2015.  More recently, his candy wrapper fashion drawings caught my attention, so we sat down over Zoom to talk about MFA fiction workshops, finding the time to write, and how exactly he gets those candy wrappers to stick to the page.

[Cover photo: Candy Wrapper Fashion #356: The Ladies of Beverly Hills 90210]

 

I. I Knew I Wanted to Do Something That Tapped Into My Creativity

 

But I Also Have a Day Job: So to start, how did you become interested in writing?

Timothy Schaffert: I feel like I was writing as soon as I could pick up a pencil.  I loved books, especially picture books.  I also loved drawing, comic books, and cartoons, so I would create my own.  I think I developed a sense of narrative from those comic books.  I grew up on a farm outside of a little town in Nebraska, and we had a library and a grocery store with a good selection of comic books.  That’s really where I put a lot of my attention until there was that period—though probably not so much anymore—when you become a teenager and the idea of looking at comic books is considered juvenile.

BIAHADJ: Were these your standard Superman-Batman comics?

TS: I was more of a Marvel fan, but I also liked Archie comics, and I liked Casper and Richie Rich—I liked the dumb jokes, but I particularly liked the illustration style.  When I was a kid the superhero comics tended toward a kind of realism, moreso than they had in the ‘40s and ‘50s when they were based a little more on caricature.

I also loved the New Yorker comics—my grandmother was a housekeeper, and she would bring me with her to work, and there was one house where they always had copies of the New Yorker, and that woman would save them for me to look at.  At that time—this would have been in the 1970s—some of those cartoonists had started with the magazine in its advent, so you had cartoonists working in what would have been a very antique style.  And that really captured my imagination in the 1970s, when art was inclined culturally towards realism.  Those old illustrative styles really appealed.

BIAHADJ: In your own work did you gravitate toward drawing and writing equally, or did one supersede the other?

TS: I was probably inclined more toward creating characters and drawing pictures.  I liked the idea of indulging in this imaginative world, so I loved coming up with comic book concepts and characters and superheroes, then drawing and sketching them—I was probably more interested in that than the actual storytelling.  But when I was growing up there was also a lot of emphasis on fiction writing in school.  I remember when I was in the fourth grade the teacher invited us to write our own stories and stand up in front of the class and read them—I’m sure she was grateful to have some time filler. [laughs] So I would churn those stories out—I think the first story I ever wrote for that class I didn’t even create the characters, I just used the characters from the game of Clue.  But I think that really got me thinking about short fiction.  And then I was writing plays in junior high and high school, and I put on a couple of them.

BIAHADJ: Was this on your own, or through the school?

TS: Through the school.  When I was in high school there was a junior high drama club, so the high schoolers could write a play and direct the junior high students.  Then in college I really—I think there was a part of me that thought the short story form didn’t exist anymore, that it was this antiquated form, because all of our textbooks in school were old, and all of the books in the library were old [laughs] so I didn’t know there were people still writing.  That’s really what I learned when I was in college, and that poised me for a Masters in Fine Arts at the University of Arizona.

BIAHADJ: Did you find yourself torn between those different paths of drawing, fiction, and playwriting?

TS: Well, you have to decide, right? Especially the way school curriculums are structured—you can’t take too much stuff that might be…fun. [laughs] In high school we were required to take English, so I did some writing there, but drama was an optional class.  That didn’t leave room for art, which I regret not embarking on as well.

BIAHADJ: Why?

TS: Because I kind of lost the trail of it—outside of grade school I’ve never had an art class, so I’m interested retroactively in how to do it.

BIAHADJ: You bring up a terrible obstacle in that you can only take so much in high school, which can hold a lot of people back if they’re interested in multiple things.  College can be even worse in that regard because the way their majors are structured can make working in different areas impossible.

TS: And what a waste of time to take those gen classes and all those math classes. [laughs] I don’t remember anything from those math classes.  I can sit down and multiply, but algebra?  I don’t know.

BIAHADJ: I saw that you originally started off as a journalism major at UNL [University of Nebraska], is that right?

TS: I did—that was another thing I did in high school, I was the editor of the school paper and the school yearbook, and journalism seemed like a practical pursuit to me at the time.  The university journalism school was highly regarded and it had this excellent internship program, so there was a sense that it was a kind of job training, and it would help prepare me for the job market.  But once I got to college and I was around English majors and other people pursuing things that were more about building an education and learning, I got a little frustrated that I was doing this thing that felt like job training.  So I tried to switch around—I’d started in news editorial, but that just gave me a stomach-ache. [laughs]

BIAHADJ: Why?

TS: Teachers were mean.  The classes were taught by these old-school journalists who told us we couldn’t be thin-skinned, we had to go out on a limb, and you have to ask the tough questions, and I felt like that wasn’t really what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a journalist, I wanted to write, and I wanted to interview people and tell stories, but I didn’t know that I wanted to work for a newspaper.  So I ended up switching to advertising, which I also didn’t particularly appreciate.

But around that time I advantageously took a creative writing class with one of the creative writing professors, who set me on the right track and really appreciated my writing, and that was all the push I needed.  I’d been doing an English concentration, so I already had several hours toward an English major.

BIAHADJ: What about that class drew you to take the plunge?

TS: I really felt like I was tapping into my imagination with those assignments.  My teacher also loved what I was writing, and she was very complimentary and encouraging.  I hadn’t gotten that in my college career yet, so when you have a long dry spell of not connecting with instructors or the material and all of a sudden someone steps forward and says, Oh, you have a knack for this, you listen.

BIAHADJ: Which teacher was it?

TS: That was Judy Slater.  She was fairly new at that time, and she and her husband Gerry Shapiro were both teaching.  Both of them were my mentors, and then I got an opportunity to work with them when I joined the UNL faculty.

BIAHADJ: Was it relatively easy to switch your major from journalism to writing because you already had the English concentration?

TS: [laughs] Well, I had to stick around for another year, but during that year I took more creative writing classes.  I had more creative writing classes than I could count towards my English major, but I was really thriving in that environment, I was doing a lot of writing, and I really felt like I was developing as a writer, and I was learning about MFA programs..  Once all of that sparked, then I really did have a sense of a career direction—I was attracted to the idea of having a literary career.  I didn’t know exactly what that would be—I knew I wanted to do something that tapped into my creativity.

 

II. I Didn’t Feel Like It Was My Community

 

BIAHADJ: Do you remember your thought process on deciding your career path after college?

TS: Yes.  I couldn’t really afford an MFA program unless I got funding, and I didn’t get funding.  I was applying the last semester of my undergraduate years, and I wasn’t very rigorous about it, so I only applied to a couple of them.  I got into the University of Arizona but without funding, so I thought I would go for just one semester.  I had enough money, and I liked the idea of going to the desert, so I thought I’d use it as an escape.  But I did have it in the back of my head that I wanted to get an MFA, and I wanted to publish more, and I wanted to become a teacher.  When you’re 22 or 23, your life stretches out ahead of you with all this time to explore all of the possibilities, so I just thought I’d try to, in the meantime, cobble together some kind of job that interested me, so I did a lot of freelance work during those years.

BIAHADJ: What was your financial situation like at that time?  Did you have a lot of student loans from undergrad?

TS: I didn’t have any student loans—I worked all through college, I got scholarships, and my parents helped me out, really as much as they could.  I was also pretty frugal in college, so I had some money saved up, and I could afford to pay for the class and get a little studio apartment for the time that I was planning on staying there.  But then I ended up getting a scholarship that allowed me to pay in-state tuition—so it made the program more affordable.  And I just worked, and again, my parents bailed me out a couple of times. [laughs]

BIAHADJ: What was the environment like in the MFA program?

TS: I didn’t feel like it was my community.  I felt like most of the people there…came from wealth, and came from more culturally sophisticated backgrounds.  Some of them had Ivy League degrees—and the characters they were writing about were much different than the characters I was writing about.

BIAHADJ: In what way?

TS: Well, one student called my characters white trash.

BIAHADJ: Woah.

TS: Yeah, it was weird.  It was a very bizarre environment in that workshop.  I was getting a lot of criticism about work that I cared about, so I felt like I really didn’t want to stick around.  But my parents, they were very generous and very sweet, and they said, Here’s some money, do another semester, and once you do another semester there’s not too much left in an MFA program.  But at that point I’d also found my community—other writers I could connect with.  I had friends whose work I appreciated, and they appreciated mine, and I also had some teachers who encouraged me.  So it ended up being a better experience in the end.

BIAHADJ: The friends that you eventually found, were they part of your original workshop community, or were they from outside the program?

TS: One of my friends was somebody that was in that first workshop, but he was not among my critics. [laughs] Another of my friends was a poet.

BIAHADJ: How about the writing itself—did the other workshop members become more accepting?

TS: This was the time of high minimalism, when Raymond Carver was the god of all literary fiction, and at the University of Arizona it was such hardcore minimalism that I didn’t even understand it. [laughs] I mean, it was so foreign.  I remember I went to the library and tried to look at books on writing to see what I was doing wrong—how did I not understand what the point was?  My inspiration was the modernists—the writers of Southern gothic, Virginia Woolf, and those writers inspired by the modernists, like Toni Morrison.  These were the people I was trying to emulate, but I was getting spanked for that, and it had no place in the more muscular and lean world of minimalist literary fiction.  I had a hard time really conceptualizing that, but I did meet other writers who were writing outside of those parameters.

BIAHADJ: You’re not alone in that respect—I also had training in the modernists and read them for fun, but when I came to grad school and found that sort of experimentation wasn’t winning me any fans, it was definitely a shock.  It took some adjustment to figure out how the writing I wanted to do fit in with that world.

TS: It’s a highly competitive environment too, and depending on who your teacher is you can really be pitted against each other.  There’s this pittance of offerings that they have for students, these paltry assistantships, and maybe a fellowship or something that you can compete for, so you’re all fighting to prove yourself to earn…not much.

BIAHADJ: Did you feel that there was something about the program that actively created that competition, or was it just a byproduct of having limited resources?

TS: I think it was a mix.  Something about the workshop environment was inclined less toward creativity and more toward…I don’t know how to describe it.  You definitely had the sense that the professors had a distinct notion of what was acceptable, and that, to my mind, was a very narrow notion.

BIAHADJ: Did that make you doubt yourself?

TS: I guess I concluded that I wasn’t going to be…a writer. [laughs] I think there was a sense that trying to write, trying to get into literary journals, and then reading the literary journals and not really understanding why those journals selected that fiction—there seemed to be this gulf between what I was writing and my imagination and my sensibility, and what I was seeing as the larger literary culture.  I wasn’t fully aware of all the kinds of books that were being published and all the kinds of writers who were having success.  It was in the years after the MFA that I really found the voices that spoke to me.

BIAHADJ: What was your mindset when you finished the program?

TS: I guess it was just this feeling of, Oh, I’ve got time. [laughs] I was working on a novel that I’d been working on for years, so I kept working on that, and I thought that I might be able to someday really wrap it up and place it with an agent.  I still wanted to teach in an MFA program ultimately, and I still wanted to write, and I still wanted to publish in the literary journals even if I didn’t quite understand them, and I did want to have a literary career—but I thought that was something that would come in time, and I just needed to write.

 

III. We Didn’t Want to Write About Conservative Issues

 

BIAHADJ: You mentioned freelancing earlier—what kind of freelancing were you doing during your MFA?

TS: It was a mix.  I started off writing college brochures.

BIAHADJ: Like the kind of advertising brochures that high school seniors used to get in the mail, that “Come to Penn State University!” kind of stuff?

TS: Exactly.  Somebody I knew in graduate school had more work than she could do, so she gave me some of that, and it paid pretty well.  I was coming up with advertising—headlines, taglines, the whole works.  So I did that, and then I also wrote career guides for a long time.  Another friend of mine from graduate school went to work for a press in Chicago, and she needed freelancers, so they would send me a job title—with little else along with it—and I was tasked with interviewing people who did the job and talking to the professional association.  This predated the internet—I mean, the internet existed, and people were on it, but not everybody had a website, so this information wouldn’t have been readily available yet.

BIAHADJ: What was it like doing work like that in the pre-internet age?

TS: It involved a lot of the phone and the mailbox.  It’s weird—one does wonder, How did we do it? [laughs] Sometimes the professional association would give me names of their members, so I would call them up and ask to interview them, and a lot of times they would be up for it.  And sometimes the job was so obscure that it was really hard to find anybody who did it—I remember I did a whole section on the funeral industry, and some of that ended up in my fiction.  These books were for the library market—people who would go there to look for job opportunities or career direction would consult with these various encyclopedias.  It was good work, it paid well, and it involved some editorial too.  But then I got a job with an alternative news weekly in Omaha.

BIAHADJ: How did that go?

TS: I worked at that weekly for a couple of years, and then it was taken over by somebody else.  Then somebody I’d worked with left and started their own, and they hired me, and that one was called The Omaha Pulp.  That was fun—a small group of creative people got together to design it.

BIAHADJ: What kinds of magazines were they exactly?  Local business and arts-type stuff?

TS: It was a mix.  The first one was really locally focused, so it included some political perspectives and editorials, but also concert reviews, an events calendar, bar reviews, usually a cover story and feature stories, and movie reviews.  I wrote a lot of movie reviews, and I’d get this great swag from the movie distribution companies.  A lot of it I still have—I’ve got a Gosford Park board game. [laughs]

BIAHADJ: [laughs] That’s amazing!

TS: I also had an AI calculator, if you remember the movie AI?  There was some cool stuff—I need to dig it back out and see what it all was.  That was the main thing I lamented when I stopped working for the alternative news weeklies is that I got that swag.  And I did love writing movie reviews—I thought that was so much fun.

BIAHADJ: Sounds like a cool gig.

TS: But it was a tough gig in terms of keeping those newspapers afloat, so if you didn’t have a really rigorous sales team—which neither of those publications did—they struggled.  And the advertiser could be…influential in the content.  So even though there was—superficially—a distinction between sales and editorial, there was a lot of pressure to blend them.

BIAHADJ: How did that affect the work you were doing?  Did you feel like you couldn’t express yourself the way you wanted to?

TS: Well, we tried to be careful…but it was hard.  Omaha was a conservative town, and we didn’t want to write about conservative issues.  Nobody else was writing about the gay community at the time, and we wrote about bars and bar owners.  Some of these people were really just on this side of the law to begin with [laughs] so…

BIAHADJ: Just to set the time period, when was this exactly?

TS: Late ‘90s, early 2000s.

BIAHADJ: At that time, was writing about the gay community in a place like Omaha seen as really controversial?

TS: It was strange, because there was a vibrant gay community.  Bars were busy, and there was gay theater in town.  There was a lot to report on, we had gay writers for the newspaper—and the publisher was gay.  But it ended up being pretty painful because you’d get scolded for things that were legitimate, so you’d sometimes feel gross about it.  On the one hand I loved it, I cared a great deal about it, and I thought it was very important, valuable work we were doing, but it also just ate holes in my stomach.

BIAHADJ: What eventually drove you to leave?

TS: Well, the first weekly was bought out by somebody…who started off by cutting all of our wages. [laughs] The cut was by a lot, and it also felt like this guy was even more conservative, and served the advertisers even more aggressively, and I just didn’t think that was going to be a good creative environment for me.  And shortly after I quit I learned about the development of The Omaha Pulp.  So I got involved with that and that was fun, but then it started to slide too, and it eventually went out of business.  But that owner became pretty conservative too.

BIAHADJ: Kudos to you for leaving a job like that after your wages were cut and the environment changed.  I think that’s a really tough decision to make, especially in the face of uncertainty.

TS: Yeah, it was pretty tough.  But I was fortunate in that I had a spouse—we weren’t married just yet, but I lived with him, so it wasn’t a single-income family and I could afford to take some risk.  But I’d also published my first novel by that point, so I probably invested a little bit more on that possibility than I should have. [laughs] But I did want to write more—I wanted to write another book, and more books, and the possibility of teaching became more of a reality even though my partner had a good job that meant we really couldn’t be too mobile, and I couldn’t go on the [academic] job market in any aggressive way.

 

IV. It’s an Imaginative Space

 

BIAHADJ: So when you were freelancing and writing at the same time, how were you structuring your day?  What was it like to make your own schedule as a twentysomething just out of grad school?

TS: It was a little messy. [laughs] My procedure was to take on the freelance assignments, then write my own stuff until the freelance editors were demanding the material and then I’d scramble around to do it.  I guess that’s the way I write now too—I devote a certain amount of time to my responsibilities, and then when I can chip away a chunk of time to write, that’s when I write.  That’s not a daily thing.  I want to get better at that, I want to devote more creative space to my everyday, but I end up not managing to do that.

BIAHADJ: I like that phrase “chip away at your responsibilities” because that’s exactly how it can feel.  But in a way writing is a responsibility too, just not one with a deadline and immediate repercussions if you don’t finish it right away, so it can be easy to push back.

TS: For me it really is a kind of—I don’t know if you’d say spiritual space, but it is an imaginative space that serves my spirit in a way that…department meetings don’t. [laughs]

BIAHADJ: I think spiritual is a great word for that—I know when I’m working intensely on a writing project I like to devote a few hours at a time to it and separate myself from the rest of the world, and I often spend the first chunk of that time daydreaming or reflecting on the work.  If I only have an hour, though, I can’t do that, and the writing feels less connected.

TS: Right, I just don’t think I can do it.  And I count that wool-gathering as writing time even if I’m not necessarily at the computer.  There’s a lot that happens in terms of character development, and themes, and plot, that comes about just from messing around and entering that imaginative space.

BIAHADJ: Tell me about the novel you were working on after your MFA—was that The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters, or something else?

TS: I had worked for a long time on a novel that was never published.  I’d gotten some recognition for it—it had won a couple of national awards, and at a couple of different times agents were interested but ultimately didn’t take it on.  And that puts you in a predicament, because you feel like if you can just fix these things or polish it up or get it perfect, clearly you’re closer to success than you would be with something new.  But that can be a trap a lot of writers fall into, and then you’re just revising the same material over and over without finding that thing that clicks.

BIAHADJ: Yes…

TS: So at some point I’d written a couple of stories about the same characters, and I decided I’d write a third because I thought it would make a good trilogy.  As I was approaching that third story I thought, you know, maybe this is a novel, so I spent a couple of years writing that.  The agent I approached, Alice Tasman, was an agent of a friend of mine—she was new to the industry, she was taking on new clients, and I was one of her first, and she’s still my agent today twenty years later—that was exciting.  I think the book got about twenty-five rejections before it was accepted by a brand-new imprint.  The imprint was BlueHen, and it was part of Penguin Putnam at the time, which is now Penguin Random House.  It’s strange to think that book was able to make that leap, because it’s just about a couple of sisters who grow up in an antique shop. [laughs]

BIAHADJ: That’s a humbling thing to say about your own work!

TS: I guess looking back, it seems like a pretty small book, and even the editors who were rejecting it said it was too quiet—that was the term that kept coming up, “too quiet.” But at the time I thought, who cares? I like quiet novels [laughs] quiet’s great!  And somehow my confidence was never really impaired by all of these rejections—I had a kind of pathological confidence that helped me through it all, so I wrote what I wanted to write, and put it out there.  I don’t know what chances it would have in today’s marketplace, but at that point in time there was an editor, Greg Michalson, who was excited by it.

 

V. Highly Valuable Relationships

 

BIAHADJ: You mentioned that The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters came out around the same time that you were leaving the Omaha Pulp—what did your career trajectory look like after that?

TS: I was able to do some freelancing—I wrote for an Omaha society magazine, so I was doing some bits and pieces of things.  I also became very ill—I literally couldn’t work, so I was able to work at home and write.  I was prescribed Prednisone—which has so many terrible side effects, but I only had the good ones [laughs] so I didn’t need any sleep, and I had all those hours to write and think, and plus it makes you feel like you’re larger than life to some degree.  One night I decided I was going to take the bull by the horns and forge this literary career and create a literary festival, so I sent a whole bunch of emails to people I had connections with through the paper and through the arts, and the next morning people started responding to them, and I thought, Oh, what did I get myself into? [laughs]

But it ended up being great, because it was something I could get people excited about, and I connected with the Omaha public library.  It also felt like an imaginative space—I could come up with these crazy panel discussions and themes, and I did it all, and I got paid nothing, and I had no budget.  BUT, it was something that, while I was sick, I could put on my resume, something that looked like a job even though it didn’t pay.  That was the Omaha Lit Fest, and it ultimately positioned me for the university job that I took as director of the Nebraska Summer Writers Conference.

BIAHADJ: Oh wow, how did you get that position?

TS: Well, I’d started on this new drug and started to feel a little better, and I was given the opportunity to adjunct, so I could get paid per class I taught.  I lived in Omaha, but the University [of Nebraska-Lincoln]’s not far off, so I taught a night class, and I would drive to Lincoln [about an hour] and get the work done.  That was a nice way to step back into the working world and into a regular schedule.  I think I taught one semester, and then while I was teaching the following semester I was offered the job as director of the conference.  That ended up being a staff job, so I wasn’t getting paid per course, and it was nice to actually have a salary.

BIAHADJ: Were you still writing during this time?

TS: When I was sick, that allowed me a lot of time to write, so by the time I had that conference job I had published two additional novels.  The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters came out in 2002, and then The Singing and Dancing Daughters of God came out in 2005, and then Devils in the Sugar Shop came out in 2007.

BIAHADJ: And what was happening with those novels?

TS: The Singing and Dancing Daughters of God ended up doing well and getting some attention, and getting reviewed.  It was a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers pick, so it was at the front of Barnes and Noble stores all across the country, and that helped a lot.  The next book did not do so well [laughs] but I was in this curious position where the literary imprint that published my first novel ended up parting ways with Penguin and going independent.  The imprint was Blue Hen, and then they became Unbridled, so as Unbridled they published my next three books.  Within that environment my experience was much different—they gave me more attention, they could position the book better, and they invested a lot in me, because they were publishing a smaller catalog.  When you’re with Penguin you’re one of a gazillion books coming out at any given minute.

BIAHADJ: Were you making a lot of contacts through them?

TS: I had a great relationship with my editor, and they were very committed to my writing, and they were able to locate those people within the publishing industry who would also be supportive of my writing, so they really got the book out there and got it in front of people.  People who learned about my writing at that time are still supportive of my writing today, so they’ve been highly valuable relationships and served as a foundation for the rest of my career.

BIAHADJ: And on the job front, how was it directing the Nebraska Writers Conference?

TS: Well, the funding dried up for that.  But around the same time, a faculty position opened up—a tenure-track faculty position.  And I was able to apply, and I ended up getting it—and that’s been my path since.

BIAHADJ: What was the transition like becoming a creative writing professor?

TS: I suppose I had the advantage of already knowing everybody, and already knowing the department and the systems, so my job didn’t change much at all.  I think to a certain degree it actually became easier, because I didn’t have to piecemeal or scramble to put together this alternative to the tenure-track job.

BIAHADJ: Did you notice a big difference in your ability to write after you joined the faculty?

TS: It seemed to become more of challenge to find time to write.  When your work is also about writing and books and reading, I think that can take some energy from your own writing.  But I did figure out a pattern—I wrote on the weekends, and I was able to be pretty productive just writing a couple of days a week, but at some point I lost a knack for that. [laughs] I don’t know if that’s because I’ve been writing more fiction set in the past, and that involves more research and more reading and more preparation before I can even start to consider developing this imaginative world.  It seems like the writing moves more slowly now.

BIAHADJ: I think that amount of research and preparation comes out incredibly naturally in The Perfume Thief, and it’s one of the novel’s strengths.  But yes—anytime you get into the past the workload goes up exponentially.

TS: You really have to look everything up—you can’t just have the character go to the kitchen faucet without checking that you have a realistic representation. [laughs] You don’t want to bog the reader down with unnecessary detail, but you also don’t want to get called out for an error that would knock the reader out with any kind of anomaly.

 

VI. A Commitment I Could Make to Social Media

 

BIAHADJ: How did you get into social media?

TS: I don’t think I was ever very good at it.  I had a hard time keeping track of it.  I was one of the last ones on Facebook, and the last one on Instagram.  I think that to really make something like Twitter work for you really takes a big time commitment, and I don’t know how people have that time—that would totally annihilate the time I have for other things.  So during the pandemic I was also having some illness issues, and I found some great comfort in drawing.  Over the years I’d experimented with candy wrappers as collage, and I committed to doing one a day during the pandemic.  I was keeping to it pretty well—I started with movie stars from classic cinema—Myrna Loy in The Thin Man was my first official drawing of the series, and it was nice because it was something I could post, and a commitment I could make to social media without having to say the same thing everybody else is saying by coming up with some quip.

BIAHADJ: [laughs] You just described about 90% of social media.

TS: A lot of quips, a lot of opinion—especially on Twitter—that are expressed in a very small space.  I just got bored with it.  So posting the cartoons felt like a way that I didn’t have to express an opinion, I didn’t have to try to be clever, and I didn’t have to scramble for attention—it felt like something that came naturally.  And I think it’s worked—it’s attracted a few more people to my feed, and perhaps it’s made people who were already following me pay a little more attention.  I’m sure there are some who think the cartoons are ghastly and embarrassing, but…

BIAHADJ: A pox on them! I remember a few months ago you found a Starburst ad that used a very similar concept to your candy art…

TS: Yes, as an idea it’s ripe to be stolen. [laughs] It’s not the most original concept, but there’s not too many people doing it.  Now I’ve done over 300 of them, so I’ve kind of established a foothold, and I can cry foul if anyone tries to thieve.

BIAHADJ: On average, how long does it take you to make one?

TS: It used to take no time at all because I just tried to approximate a caricature with a few dots and lines, but then for a while I was leaning more towards portraiture, where I was getting really detailed and trying to make the drawing look very much like the person.  Then I decided I didn’t care for that so much.  The way I’m drawing now is really how it’s evolved—there’s an element of the cartoon and the caricature, but I don’t want it to be a lampoon, I want it to be representative.

BIAHADJ: I definitely love the style you bring to them—they feel distinct, and I love seeing how you use the candy wrappers in different ways.

TS: And again, I feel they’re retro to a certain degree—they’re inspired by Al Hirschfeld, and I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know Al Hirschfeld, I feel like he’s always haunted my brain.  When I was a kid I had an Al Hirschfeld book in addition to the New Yorker, and I had a Charles Addams book.  I’d save my money and go to the Waldenbooks at the mall, and they’d have remainder books at the front of the store on a table, so for a few bucks you could get these terrific compilations of some really great cartoonists of the time.

BIAHADJ: I imagine you’re a lot better at finding the Ninas in Hirschfeld’s work than I am—

TS: [laughs] I’m pretty good, I’m not real swift at it, but I’ll usually find them.

BIAHADJ: Do you save the originals after you post a drawing?

TS: I don’t know if you can see this above my head [gestures at bookshelf above] but that’s a stack [laughs] and there are stacks over here.  I have a bunch of them in boxes too, but there’s just too many, I need to start peddling them and getting them out of my house before they dissolve.

BIAHADJ: Do you see the candy art as being related to your writing or your teaching work, or as a separate pursuit?

TS: It’s separate in a lot of ways because it just requires a different brain space and a different kind of creativity.  It doesn’t strain my brain like writing does, it’s more instinctive.  And I don’t have grand ambitions for it, so I’m not constantly pushing myself to take brand-new directions with it, like I am when I’m writing fiction, where I feel like every sentence demands a certain level of attention and finesse before I can move on to the next one.

BIAHADJ: I think that kind of separation is really important, because it gives you another fun creative pursuit that’s still more productive than, say, watching TV.

TS: The candy wrappers are the hardest part, because they’re not always cooperative—candy wrappers are designed not to stick to the candy. [laughs] So it’s hard to then manipulate and tame them.  In some instances I get them as attached as I can and take the picture and then it just kind of unravels.

BIAHADJ: What do you use for an adhesive?

TS: I have double-sided tape that I use most of the time, but that doesn’t always stick.  I have little glue dots, and those tend to be a little more helpful across the board.  And I have a kind of roller adhesive that’s pretty handy as well.  But it’s best when the dress can suggest itself as a gown and you can just unfurl it on to the page and it looks like a dress.  When I have to do a lot of tailoring, it’s a little tougher.

BIAHADJ: Last big question: What are your next steps for your writing, your teaching, your candy wrapper art, or your career in general?

TS: I want to write more books. I feel like I’m doing what I want to be doing.  I love teaching, I love reading the work of my students, I love seeing them go on to success—it’s exciting and inspiring, and moving. Granted, it can be a lot of work, and not every student appreciates your efforts, but it only takes a few students who do to make you feel inspired.  So I love doing that, and I love that it ultimately allows me time to do my own writing.  I have a great editor who’s supportive of my work, and I hope that she continues to be—we’re working together on the book I’m writing now, and I have ideas for another couple of books down the road.

But you’re also somewhat at the whim of industry too—it doesn’t make a ton of sense to have any highly structured plan when it comes to anything that relies on publishing, because you just don’t know.  When I published my first novel I had this sense of being a published writer, but I didn’t take into consideration all the things that can happen or all the particularities of maintaining a career that come into play.  Over the years there have been things that have been gained, things that have been lost, things that have been promised, things that have been taken away, so you just roll with it the best you can—and I’ve been fortunate that I’ve been able to roll forward, I guess, instead of out of it altogether.

BIAHADJ: Do you want to say anything about the novel you’re writing now, or is it still under wraps?

TS: Much of it’s set in Paris.  It picks up at the end of the Belle Époque, and then we have some World War I, and then the 1920s.  This is the first time I’ve written a book where the present moment extends over several years, so it’s exciting to actually carry my characters through a decade or more.

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You can find Timothy Schaffert’s candy wrapper fashion collection on Instagram and Twitter, or find more about his latest novel, The Perfume Thief, at his website.