Sharon Solwitz wrote her first piece of fiction at age 12–a long adventure story about a girl who masquerades as a boy and stows away on what she later discovers is a pirate ship. Her teachers loved it, but their praise made Solwitz uncomfortable. “It wasn’t very good, but it was good for a 12-year-old,” she says. “I’d made it up, based on all the best parts of my favorite stories. But I felt bad because I didn’t feel like it was real. I came home and told my father about it. He said whether or not you can draw on your own experience will determine whether or not you’ll be a writer.”
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She “went underground,” as she puts it, embarking on a series of adventures that included living in a commune in upstate New York, getting married, and traveling to India “and coming back unenlightened.” She and her first husband started teaching elementary school in the Chicago public school system, eventually buying a movie camera and making a documentary about her husband’s kindergarten class called K-AM. The movie won a prize at the Chicago International Film Festival, but Solwitz decided not to be a filmmaker “because it takes too much money and too much organization.”
Bits and pieces of Solwitz’s earlier experiences make up the backbone of Blood and Milk, her first collection of short stories. The characters are mostly women and couples in their 30s, such as a married couple on a tense camping trip in Wisconsin, a woman visiting Iraq who has fantasies that her child is going to be kidnapped, a college student who has been raped but not broken, and a documentary filmmaker who unwillingly recalls an unnerving trip to India at the behest of her current boyfriend. She began most of the stories while still in graduate school. “Some people write a story and if it doesn’t work they toss it,” she says. “For me, if something doesn’t work I put it aside for a while and go back to it.”
There’s a learning curve to writing, just as there is to life, Solwitz explains. “I think there’s a certain time in a person’s life when you get to the end of that interest in yourself as central to the universe,” she says. “Your perspective gets wider, maybe from having a family or getting older or seeing yourself as part of a continuum as opposed to the center of everything. Along with that, your craft has to evolve, and you have to use style and a sense of form where you really invent the thing.”
