Interview: Natalia Singer on New York, Work, and Optimism

Natalia Singer doesn’t just write about the 1980s. As an English professor at St. Lawrence University, she combines her love of literature and writing with her passion for travel and the beauties of the world, both literal and otherwise.

In this final part of our interview, Natalia tells us more about her work as well as her love for NYC, upstate New York, and other great places. Also, she tells us why, despite the ugliness of the daily headlines, she’s feels good about the future. 

You work in upstate New York and edited a book of essays about the region. Can you tell us a little about this book and what inspired it? 

Living North Country: Essays on Life and Landscapes in Northern New York was the assignment I gave myself when I came up to St. Lawrence University to give a job talk in the '90s—which led to my moving here. I drove up from Western Massachusetts (I’d just gotten my MFA in creative writing at U-Mass/Amherst) on a cold February day, which was the first time I saw the Adirondack Mountains. By the time I hit Blue Mountain Lake, where people were ice fishing under a brilliant blue sky, I was intrigued. Where was I going? How far north was this place? (Very far, it turned out. I now live near the Canadian border.) I promised myself that if I got the job I’d do my homework and find out more about the region, and I did. I teamed up with a talented writer and editor from this area that we call The North Country, Neal Burdick, and we put together the collection. We wanted the anthology to be partly an act of community-building so we solicited essays from writers both experienced and well-known (like Bill McKibben) and others who had never written literary nonfiction before, and we held a writing retreat with the first-time authors. It was a project by and about community.

Tell us a little more about your work in general and what you're working on today. 

I write fiction (including flash fiction), literary nonfiction (essays, books, lyric essays, and political journalism) and I teach creative writing and environmental literature.

For the past decade I’ve worked on a novel set in France. It opens in 1989 and ends in 2015, just after the Paris Attacks. My agent is sending it out in early May. Fingers crossed! It’s been a labor of love and has brought me back to France about a dozen times for research and creative exploration.

In that time period I’ve also drafted a new memoir, which I plan to return to after I send the novel to my agent. It’s about losing my dog to cancer, about our long walks on the river, about learning how to meditate, and about grief and mortality, as well as mindfulness and nature. I’m hoping to finish the fourth draft of it this year and send it out early next year. Then I have some other projects that have been in the back burner for a while, both fiction and nonfiction.

Since this blog is mostly about NYC, how do you compare life in upstate New York to the city?

There is no comparison. We might as well not be in the same state. And I love them both so much. NYC is one of my favorite cities on earth. If I had to list my top five, I’d say it’s NYC, Paris, London, Seattle, and Rome. I also love New Delhi. I’ve never had a bad day in NYC. Even if it’s pouring rain, and I’m waiting in line for hours on a crowded pavement to do something unpleasant, like get a visa in an office where someone will be mean to me and tell me I have the wrong documentation, I still feel more alive in New York City than I do almost everywhere else. I love walking down a crowded street and feeling the mass of humanity all around me, the smells of street food, the found art in everything. When I’m in NYC I always feel like I’m eighteen years old again on my first visit, where I discovered sushi and Star Wars movies and off-off-off-Broadway and got stung by a jelly fish on Long Island all in the same weekend. The sewer steam puffs and the sight of messenger bicyclists and yellow cabs and dog-walkers with six very different breeds, from Dalmatian to Shih Tzu, and Madison Avenue stores and bodegas and bookstores and graffiti and political pamphlets and kiosks and cumin-infused sweat on the subway: I love all of it.

On April mornings like this one I wake up in my home in the North Country to the sounds of the geese coming back. The geese are confused. They thought it was spring but then we had the same Nor’easters you had in the city, and this week we had an ice storm and lost power, twice. I pass my days attuned to small changes: sunset coming later each day and dropping a red fireball on someone’s barn when I drive to dinner with a visiting writer. The trillium that blooms in the woods in early May, along with fiddlehead ferns that we eat with pasta and pesto. The river that flows past our house still carries ice chunks away now; in warm weather my husband and I will get into that river in our canoe with our dog. Our big excitement for the summer ahead: dinners on our new screened in porch—bug-free bliss.

I feel very lucky to have the job I do, where I teach undergraduates literature and writing, but I also get to take them places. Locally we’ll go to farms and the students will help with the harvest. And I have had the good fortune to take students to France (twice), India (twice), and I have taught a writing course to students who spend the semester in the Adirondacks living in yurts, hauling their own water, splitting wood, and learning woodworking. Fitting all these very different locations and activities into one career and one life feels like living multiple lives at once.

Any final thoughts or something you'd like to share?

So I’ve just bombarded you with doom and gloom in all my answers. The '80s was a warm-up act that paved the way to the nightmare we’re living through now under Trump, our new normal in which every value so many of us hold dear—the right to have a good public education, clean water and air, shelter, health care, safety from violence—is being demolished with savage cruelty and indifference. It might not be evident that I’m also a humorist in a lot of my writing. I come from a people that laugh a lot—sometimes, just to keep from crying. And because I’m a professor and spend most of my time with people 18-22 years of age, I’m not a pessimist, despite all the doom and gloom I’ve lived through. I have great faith in the millennials and post millennials whom I teach. They’re smart, sensitive, kind, nuanced in their thinking, and they’re not going to let the recent tax scam and other heinous policies rob them and the planet of a future. When they’re in charge, we may very well achieve that “Great Society” that President Johnson saw as the ultimate fulfillment of The New Deal. But until then, we all have our work cut out for us. It starts with voting. And in active resistance: calling our representatives, writing op eds, and taking to the streets—a lot.

Thanks Natalia!