Q&A with author Brigid Schulte

Brigid Schulte is the author of the new book Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time. She is an award-winning journalist who works at The Washington Post, and she is a fellow at the New America Foundation. She lives in the Washington, D.C., area.

Q: What first inspired you to write Overwhelmed?

A: It’s sort of embarrassing to say, but this is an accidental book. I never set out to write it. How is it that I came to step outside my life? I was forced to!

I was on a women’s reader committee at The Washington Post, looking at why female readership was dropping. We rolled our eyes—duh, we’re busy! We either had kids and were hyper-involved parents, or were caring for aging parents, or were raising nieces and nephews, while trying to compete with men and others who had caregivers at home—trying to squash two lives into one 24-hour period.

Someone asked, Aren’t there time studies? And I said, I’ll look it up. It all came from that one simple effort—I Googled it and found a time-use researcher. He said, You have 30 hours of leisure time a week! Come and do a time study and I’ll show you where your leisure time is.

Q: What has the reaction been to the book so far?

A: It comes out Tuesday, but I’m really heartened by the reaction so far. People are getting it. I didn’t want to write a mommy book. They’re funny, but now what? The journalist in me wanted to get to the bottom of this and understand this deeply--understand modern life.

I wrote the first chapter, which first appeared in The Washington Post Magazine, about going to the time-use researcher to track my leisure. It was really when I got the response from that article—I had been feeling alone. I’ve never been that good with time. I was thinking that maybe I was a failure. I got so many e-mails, long involved detailed messages from people, saying, You’ve written about my life!

Q: What have you learned about your own time management from writing the book?

A: I’m still a work in progress. I have learned so much—I guess what I’ve learned was how much bigger this is than a single person. Leisure, work, and home are all tied together. On the upper end of the socioeconomic scale, we work more extreme hours.

It’s been so powerful to learn about exciting, innovative workplaces that are changing the norms; about other countries that are as productive if not more, where people work short, intense hours and there’s more gender equality. I also found places that value the sacred time of leisure—not just watching TV or having a beer, but really refreshing your soul.

I still work too much, but on good days I work in pulses, and I try to minimize distractions. I work intensely, and then take a break. When my running partner and I run, we ask, What’s your one thing to do today, so you’re not setting yourself up for failure [with a longer list].

I changed the way I do my to-do list—there’s work, love, and play. There’s time for family, time to reflect, and that has the same weight as work. The detritus of life—bills to pay—I would always put it first and then get to enjoy my children, or reading a book—but I never got to that. Now I take time with the kids first, or read a book first.

The biggest change is that my husband and I are going through a tough but enlightening process, and we’ve had conversations we should have had 20 years ago about being equal partners. We have made so much progress; we’re so much more fair.

Some of it is tied up with working mother guilt. I spoke with Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, who studies motherhood in primates and early humans. [After speaking with her,] I understood it from a broader perspective--that the expectations of mothers are almost impossible. You give your body and soul to your children, and layered on at the same time was [the fact of] a very demanding workplace.

I’ve built time to pause and set my own priorities. I’m less reactive, and I don’t feel guilty for working.

Q: You’ve discussed some of this already, but how do the issues in your book apply in particular to women?

A: When you talk about leisure time, there are cultural notions that if women don’t have time to relax, it’s their fault. Leisure time is when art and civilization and inventions are made, when you have time out of time. Women never had that kind of time. It was really a revelation to me. That’s why artists and writers [have mostly been] men. High-status men have always had uninterrupted long blocks of time; that’s never been allowed to women.

A 1920s study said that a good mother is someone who never sits down. That’s been very powerful for millennia—a woman’s work is never done. In a 1990s study, what resonated with me is that at every socioeconomic level, women felt they needed to earn leisure.

In this whole new era, women have status. We have time to reclaim our leisure time. It’s nothing to feel selfish or indulgent about. We can come back to our other spheres refreshed. One of the big messages of the book is that it’s time for women to have that time.

Q: Do you think this tendency toward being overwhelmed will continue?

A: That’s the $64,000 question. I don’t want to predict; that’s always a mistake. There are hopeful signs out there, if people realize that the expectations are unsustainable.

Some companies realize that their workers are burning out, and they’re not going to get the best work that way. I’m hopeful about millennials, who feel entitled to have it all, both men and women. On the flip side, the baby boomers are living longer and want to keep working, but not in a 90-hour-a-week fashion, so there’s pressure from that end.

The toughest nut to crack is how to change the division of labor at home.

Right now we value busyness; it’s a badge of honor. A hundred years ago, we valued leisure. Maybe there’s a way to meet in the middle, and find a way to value oases of time. We had a busy day last Monday, but we went sledding for an hour with the kids—it was a little oasis.

Q: Are you thinking of writing another book?

A: I’d love to write another book! I’m not sure what it would be about. I’m so wrapped up with this one, plus working full time for the Post. Yes, I’d love to, and I’m hoping that in a moment of idleness a great idea will come to me!

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: When I started thinking about writing a book, I took a book leave, and spent much of the book leave reporting. I was talking with my agent, and I was filled with rage. My agent said, I see, you want to write a game-changer! I want to write a game-changer—I want people to see that this is about how we’re living, and how we can all live better lives.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

March 9

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
March 9, 1947: Author Keri Hulme born.

Q&A with poet Marilyn Nelson

Marilyn Nelson is an award-winning poet who has written many works of poetry, both for adults and young readers. Her most recent books include How I Discovered Poetry, Ostrich and Lark (winner of a 2013 Children's Africana Book Award), and Faster Than Light: New and Selected Poems, 1996-2011. A professor emerita at the University of Connecticut, she lives in Connecticut.

Q: Your latest book is called How I Discovered Poetry. What are some of the themes you explore regarding your relationship to poetry?

A: Just being aware of the world outside myself and my nuclear family, being a little bit aware of the natural world, and interactions between people.

Q: Many of your poems focus on history. Why did you choose that as an area to write about?

A: Like most people who are interested in history, I think there’s a great deal to be learned from history. There are so many rich, true stories; it’s always a resource. If you have nothing to write about, there’s always your childhood—that’s a huge mine. There’s historical gold in there.

Q: As someone who’s written about your own personal and family history as well as more general history, how do the two writing experiences differ?

A: I don’t know that there’s any particular difference. I wrote about my family history in a book called The Homeplace. I did a lot of research. It’s not enough to know the story, you have to know the world around the story, the knowledge of what’s going on in 1928.

For my new book, I spent a lot of time reading old issues of Life magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, Ebony magazine, to reflect what was going on when I was eight years old.

Q: How did you come to collaborate with the San artists on Ostrich and Lark?

A: I made a trip to Botswana with a friend who wanted me to understand the situation of the [San] people. We drove around the Kalahari for two or three weeks, and we happened upon an NGO that works with the San people.

We spent a day or two talking to them about what their work was. As we left, we saw some art by the San people. [The NGO] encouraged people to learn to do artwork. I said, Wouldn’t it be nice if we could find something to do to help them make some money?

I wrote [Ostrich and Lark] to be a vehicle for their art. The rest of the story is long and complicated. It required a second trip to Botswana.

Q: Have you stayed in touch with the artists?

A: I don’t know the artists personally; I know the people who worked in the NGO.

Q: Has the book helped the artists?

A: I’m sure it has. Even the little advance. These are people who have absolutely nothing except the clothes on their back. We put the address of the NGO in the book, so I’m hoping somebody will look them up and buy the artwork.

Q: About another of your books: Why did you decide to write about George Washington Carver?

A: I had finished doing a series of poems about evil; it was clear to me that there was no limit to the human capacity to do evil. I wanted to see if there was a limit to the capacity to do good.

I decided to write about Hildegard of Bingen, a 12^th century German saint. I was getting ready to start when an old family friend called and said he was in town. He stopped by, and I walked him to his car [after the visit] and he took out a brochure from the George Washington Carver birthplace and handed it to me and said, I think you should write a book about him.

Having loved Carver since childhood, I thought, Why would I write about a 12^th century German saint?

Q: Why did you decide to write about Emmett Till?

A: An editor, Andrea Pinkney, called my agent with an idea for a book I could write. She wouldn’t tell us what it was. We had a meeting in New York City; it was icy in Connecticut and very difficult to get there.

She said, I’ve always wanted to write a book for children about lynching. I almost fell out of my chair; it seemed like a ridiculous idea. But I thought, maybe it’s possible. I did more thinking, and it became clear that it should be about Emmett Till.

Q: You’ve served as Poet Laureate of Connecticut. What were some of your responsibilities?

A: There were no real responsibilities, except making the people of Connecticut aware of the existence of poetry. For the first couple of years, I did programs, organized readings, gave poetry prizes to young people. I got donations of poetry books and had bookplates printed, and delivered the poetry books to hospitals and doctor’s offices.

After two years, I decided it was more beneficial for me to find Connecticut stories and write about Connecticut. I wrote four books that have to do with Connecticut.

Q: You’ve written for many different age groups. Do you have a preference?

A: It just happened that most of my books for a young adult audience, I actually wrote for adults. I didn’t think about the age group.

For the Carver book, it got into the hands of a publisher who only published books for children and young adults. It was a really big hit, and other publishers for children asked me to write things. Most of them made clear that I should just do what I want to do. 

Q: What are you working on now? 

A: I’m working on a young adult novel in verse about the Tuskegee Airmen. I’m really enjoying working on it; it’s the first time I’ve consciously tried to write a young adult book. Now I’ve learned that young adult books have young adults as protagonists.

Q: Your father was in the Tuskegee Airmen.

A: Yes.

Q: Is he a part of the novel?

A: No. It’s a fictional novel. I will have a section based on the facts of the entire group of Tuskegee Airmen.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

March 8

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
March 8, 1859: Author Kenneth Grahame born.

Q&A with illustrator Elizabeth Zunon

Elizabeth Zunon is an artist who has illustrated a number of books for children, including The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, a 2013 Children's Africana Book Award winner; My Hands Sing the Blues: Romare Bearden's Childhood Journey; and A President from Hawaii. She grew up in the Ivory Coast and is based in Albany, N.Y.

Q: On your website, you mention the influence on your artwork of your childhood in the Ivory Coast. How is that reflected?

A: Mostly in the bright colors I use. The everyday clothing of people in the Ivory Coast and all over Africa has bright patterning—you don’t see that here in Upstate New York! I love collecting patterned papers and fabrics.

Q: How did you end up illustrating The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, and how closely did you work with the authors?

A: I was the last piece of the puzzle for that book—it was originally going to be illustrated by somebody else who had to drop out.

I did not work extremely closely with the authors. I received reference images from Bryan Mealer, William Kamkwamba’s co-author; he had a lot of photographs of William with his family, in the village. I didn’t speak to William at all really until the project was done. William was off at school.

Q: Do you envision your work differently depending on the age the picture book is designed for?

A: I don’t really change my approach depending on the age of the child. I want to portray realistic figures, realistic landscapes and backgrounds.

Q: How was it to illustrate a picture book about Romare Bearden—illustrating a picture book about an artist?

A: That was a great project for me. It was my very first picture book. I was a couple of years out of college. It fell into my lap; I had lost my job at a flower shop. I had a total of nine months to work on it. That allowed me to delve into the research part; I was not very familiar with Romare Bearden’s work. I wanted to emulate the collage aspect of his work.

I learned not only about the artist but his process. It helped me identify with him as an artist. The story was about him as an adult reflecting on his childhood somewhere else, and I was trying to hold onto my childhood images of the Ivory Coast; I could relate.

Q: What about the book about President Obama?

A: That was different than the other picture books I’ve done. I only painted landscapes; they used actual Obama family photographs. It was about discovering Hawaii. I was transported back to my childhood in the Ivory Coast; [many of the flowers] are similar, and since I used to work in a flower shop, that was great.

Q: Are you interested in writing a picture book to go along with your illustrations?

A: I am, absolutely. I have a couple of stories in my mind. That’s my ultimate goal.

Q: What do you work on with kids during your visits to schools?

A: Sometimes the school asks me to visit because the students have read one of my books—The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, or My Hands Sing the Blues. The kids are already familiar with it. I have a Power Point presentation about how I worked on the book. I use myself as a model, set up my camera on a timer, and work from photos of myself posing. Sometimes I’ll come into a class and we’ll work on a collage project.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: Two picture books. It’s a first for me to work on two at the same time! I’m trying to juggle both projects. One is a true story about a person in Africa, an environmental leader. The other is a fictionalized story—a girl finds poems in her grandmother’s attic written by her mother when she was growing up on Air Force bases.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

March 7

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
March 7, 1952: Author William Boyd born.

March 6

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
March 6, 1806: Poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning born.