Before Smith College professor Ruth Ozeki was an internationally acclaimed novelist, she made her artistic start on the set of a low-budget horror movie called “Matt Riker: Mutant Hunt.” She’d never set foot on a film set before, but her then-boyfriend was in the film business and Ozeki needed a job, so she used her background in Japanese Noh drama to fill the role of art director.
The Japanese-American Ozeki stayed in film for about a decade, eventually producing two of her own critically acclaimed feature films. It wasn’t until she ran out of money in her late thirties that she decided to write her first book. Since then she’s penned a memoir and three highly praised novels; the most recent, 2013’s “A Tale for the Time Being,” was shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
A Smith graduate herself, Ozeki came back to the Valley in 2015 to take up the college’s Elizabeth Drew professorship, a two-to-three year position teaching creative writing. She has since become “part of the furniture,” as she puts it, having accepted a tenured position as the Grace Jarcho Ross 1933 Professor of Humanities.
Self-deprecating jokes aside, Ozeki is anything but parlor furniture. She looks far younger than her 62 years, with a bright smile and eyes that reveal her curiosity for everything the world still has to offer. Around her neck she wears a necklace with two silver charms: a talisman with a hand holding a quill that she has worn religiously since discovering Patti Smith has the same one; and a tiny astronaut, the only hint she’ll give about her latest novel.
With the new school year getting underway, Ozeki sat down to discuss her writing career, her love of Smith College and her advice to young writers.
Gazette: Did you always want to be a writer?
Ruth Ozeki: Yes. Ever since I was a kid. I was one of those kids who, I read my first novel when I was 7 or something and immediately thought, “This is what I want to do.” And pretty much stayed there. That was my main focus, but I ended up doing a lot of other things and getting, not distracted exactly, but just taking little detours from there.
G: Did your time as an undergrad at Smith influence you as a writer?
RO: It laid the groundwork. It wasn’t like I was studying creative writing at the time, but I was studying literature, and that influenced me tremendously. I still think the Shakespeare studies I did at Smith influenced me more than just about anything that I’ve studied subsequently.
I learned to love language there, and to work really hard. College education was kind of an ordeal, [but] it was a good ordeal. It’s important that things are hard, and that they’re maybe even a little bit too hard. And that you suffer.
G: Do you have a favorite memory from being a student at Smith?
RO: I had a motorcycle there that I bought with the prize money I’d won for some writing thing. My Shakespeare teacher, Dick Young, was a veteran who had lost [a] leg, and he rode around in a golf cart. He was kind of a curmudgeon, but I loved him. And we used to drag race down the paths from the quad. He and his wife lived on Paradise Road, and we’d start there and I’d be on my Honda 350, he’d be in his golf cart, and I’d give him a head start and then we’d drag race along the path to Wright Hall. He was my teacher, so I always let him win.
G: What made you want to return to Smith as a professor?
RO: I wasn’t really looking to do this at all. I saw a posting for the Elizabeth Drew Professor of Creative Writing, and I recognized it because when I was a student, there was an Elizabeth Drew professor — it was Richard Wilbur, the poet, and I wasn’t interested in writing poetry at the time, so I never took his class.
But I remember thinking how cool it was that there was a real, professional writer on campus, and what a shame that that person wasn’t a fiction writer. So when I saw the posting, I thought that would be fun, to go back to Smith for a couple years and be the Elizabeth Drew professor who wasn’t there when I was there.
G: What do you like about being a professor?
RO: I love the teaching. I suspected I would like it, but I didn’t think I would love it as much as I do. I’m teaching something that I love, and I only teach students who want to do it. They’re all interested, smart and motivated, so we have a good time. I don’t find it that much different from hanging out with my writer friends talking about writing.
G: You’re also, on top of this, a Zen Buddhist priest.
RO: Yeah, I know. I don’t know what made me think that having three careers was OK, but why not, right?
G: How did you initially get into Zen practice?
RO: It’s in my family. My Japanese grandparents were both Zen practitioners. I think my earliest memory was of seeing my grandfather sitting zazen (a type of seated meditation), so it was imprinted on me like a little duckling. The main thing is it just helped [me]. And I just felt that this was, in a way, the most important thing that I could do, to put myself in a position where I could help spread this. That’s why I asked for ordination.
G: Have you found that practicing Zen affects your writing?
RO: It does, in so many ways. I’ll give you an example. When you’re meditating, you’re sitting there and paying attention to your breath, and then you start to think about something and you go off; eventually you catch yourself and you bring yourself back. We call it the practice of return. After you do that a few hundred million times, you start to develop a profound kind of patience with your mind. Little by little, it’s like your mind is just this kind of puppy and you don’t get angry at it anymore.
That is analogous to writing. You write something and it’s not very good, and then the demons and the doubts start to come in and you start to get discouraged. But meditation practice teaches you not to get attached to all that extra stuff — you let that go and then you come back and you come back and you come back.
G: What’s your advice to young writers?
RO: Find the sweet spot between patience and impatience and hang out there until you’re done.
G: Do you have students who are really invested in the writing thing and who are frustrated, saying, “Oh, I’m 20, why isn’t this working out for me?”
RO: That’s the other thing I keep telling people. This idea that being a writer is somehow an identity — that once you are one, then you’ll always be one — it doesn’t work that way. I tell people to be patient, go do something else first, go figure out what else you like to do, and then if you are absolutely convinced that this is what you must do five years from now, then think about it again. But if you’ve gone and done something else, well, great — better, in fact, because it’s really hard to make a living as a writer. It really is.
G: You’ve accepted this tenured position at Smith. Are you thinking now that this is a place you’re going to stay for the foreseeable future?
RO: I think so. I feel a tremendous sense of gratitude and loyalty to this institution. It was only because this [position] was at Smith that I thought to apply to it. It’s not like I want to go teach someplace else. And I like Northampton. There’s something about Northampton that I think is really conducive to writing, and the five colleges are a very rich cultural area, so I like it here.
G: What’s next for you?
RO: The next thing is I hope to finish this damn book. I’m also going to a monastery in January for three months for what’s called a practice period. It’s a really monastic seclusion: You’re there with other monastics and there’s no internet, no phone, there’s nothing. Just a lot of meditation. I’m really looking forward to that.