Stanchion Spotlight No. 5 |
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He's an award-recognized photographer and now he is a published writer, but Lee Grossman is not giving up his day job as a psychoanalyst in private practice in Berkeley, California! One of my personal highlights of 2021 thus far was accepting Lee Grossman's submission of a one-scene play for issue 4, and the heartwarming reaction it garnered on Twitter. Let's learn more about Lee in the latest installment of the Stanchion Spotlight. |
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Jeff: Talk to me about your one-scene play, "Family Therapy" which will be published in issue 4 of Stanchion. Where did this play come from? Lee Grossman: The idea for “Family Therapy” came from a consultation I did with a psychoanalytic trainee. She was working with a man who was talking about how his grown kids kept telling his wife what a failure she was as a mother. It struck me that he was thinking about it because he felt left out — his kids never complained about him. It struck me funny but I didn’t plan to write about it. Then I woke up the next morning with the whole piece sketched out in my head. I wrote the first draft in about two hours (see answer number 2). I started with Dr. Bill — I’ve met a lot of therapists like him in my 40 years as a psychiatrist. The place name, “Reality Estate,” came from my son misreading a billboard for a company called Realty Estates a long time ago. After that, the characters just kind of invented the dialogue and I transcribed it. |
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How long have you been writing and how long have you been pitching your work? What kind of writing do you do, all plays or any poems, etc? I’ve always written. Before I went to medical school I was writing plays unworthy of the light of day. Then my career put creative writing on hold, so I got by writing lots of technical papers. Now I’m 73, my professional life is winding down (helped by the lockdown), and I’ve started writing for the pure joy of doing it. I’m writing short stories and narrative essays, the latter mostly humor. I understand that your main artistic outlet is as a photographer, what draws you to the written word? I think I took up photography because it was instantaneous and I didn’t have lots of time. But someone once told me that the best part of my photos is the titles, and maybe that’s true. The pleasure of photography is in freezing an instant so that it’s significance can develop in your mind. But writing does that with whole scenes or lifetimes, which is such a luxury. I grew up with word people; my mother had stories in The New Yorker, and my whole family loves to talk. I think for me the question wasn’t what drew me to writing, but rather, what took me so long to get back to it. |
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What and who inspires you? I am inspired by my patients, and also by generations of observant humorists, starting with Mike Nichols and Elaine May, on through James Thurber and S.J. Perelman, to Richard Pryor. Madeline Kahn, Tina Fey, and Woody Allen before the Fall. In your experience, which emotional state provides the biggest impetus for creation? I never thought to ask myself that question. I think in general, my comedy writing is inspired by ironic observations and rage, my more sober writing by sorrow and anxiety, my psychoanalytic papers by confusion, and my photography by joy. |
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Where do you create and how does this space/environment impact you and your art? I seem to do most of my creating while asleep in bed. I do my actual writing air the same computer where I do Photoshop work, in what used to be a breakfast nook. It’s completely cluttered and it’s open to the kitchen and the rest of the house. I find the ambient noise of my wife and two bulldogs comforting, and I need to get up and pace at intervals. How does your home inform your art? What do you pull from your surroundings? I write what I hear in my head and on the street. That’s a relatively limited demographic, and I regret the narrowness of that, but I hope the trade-off is in depth. If I can’t not be a white, middle-class man, at least I can mine white middle-class-ness. The biggest environmental influence after my family is my job: as a psychoanalyst I listen to people struggling with themselves all day long. This piece is a parody of course, but most of my writing draws heavily on what my patients teach me about how people navigate through life. |
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When I accepted "Family Therapy" for Issue 4, you asked me to send you your payment as physical check instead of electronically, to commemorate your first paying writing work. Will you display the check somewhere or is it just a memento to store away? The check from Stanchion is going on the wall right above where I am right now, at my computer — next to the first photograph I had published. | | |
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What's next for you? I like the play format because the characters do all the work; I just listen in. So I have two more short plays ready to go, along with some more somber offerings. I’m about ready to start something new, but I don’t know what it is. | | |
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