Angelina Dohre/Photo Editor
STEPHEN SACCO
Special to the Leader
Sarah T. Schwab, a writer who collaborated with Karen Allen and others who are critically acclaimed, paid SUNY Fredonia a nostalgic visit.
Writers @ Work, a collective of the English department, hosted the events with Schwab and Long from March 22-23.
The mission of Writers @ Work is to connect Fredonia’s alumni with students. Specifically, Schwab and Long gave advice that helped students with both career and life-changing opportunities.
Justin Barnard is a graduate student and graduate assistant for Writers @ Work and helps connect writing-related alumni with students. Barnard himself is a writer and is working on a piece called “Belonging” that is inspired by SUNY Fredonia.
Concerning the role that writing plays in Barnard’s life, he said, “First and foremost it’s a cathartic experience, then a story emerges from that.”
Barnard’s piece “Belonging” will be published by Embodied Effigies, a creative non-fiction literary magazine.
One of the most important parts about writing is the story itself.
Schwab was accompanied by Brian Long, a veteran NYC film and theatre producer. Through his experiences, Long has gained intelligence on the preface of storytelling. More specifically, Long commented on the outcomes of theatre.
“The forms that we see writers, actors and directors all getting together in is TV, film and theatre. What separates theatre from those other two mediums is that it’s live,” he said.
Schwab also noted her relation between the actors in the context of her scripts.
“It encourages me that what I’m writing about is connecting with these actors for a reason,” she said.
When it comes to writing a story, Long gives
us insight on what goes on in the mind of the writer.
“There’s three places to get a story. One: your own experience . . . second source is from outside things you’ve read or seen and people you know . . . and then you can come up with something completely from your imagination.”
Well there you have it; the cat’s out of the bag.
Long worked very hard for his spot in film and theater and now reaps the benefit of getting to pick and choose which projects he feels passionate about.
Schwab started her journey with writing in Fredonia. At first, she wrote for The Leader, and from The Leader she went to The Dunkirk Observer, then to the Buffalo News where she still writes articles from time to time.
After her stay at SUNY Fredonia, she made the big leap to the Big Apple to land a job. Schwab had to ambitiously write for odd jobs such as interviewing strangers about their sex lives. While
that was happening, she was learning the social nightlife culture of NYC which is as complex as its subways. She finally met Long after getting published in a magazine. He asked her what would happen if she applied her journalistic skills to theatre — and the rest is history.
On the topic of what aspiring artists and writers should do in order to be successful, Schwab had some advice.
“I think definitely if you’re gonna be a successful artist, you need to certainly have passion, focus and an end goal. That passion is going to carry you through a lot of up and downs . . . you need to have perseverance and resilience; you need to have a really thick skin . . .”
At the end of the lecture, Schwab was posed with a question regarding what her last piece of writing would be.
“I’m hoping that when that times comes, I’m gonna be a very, very old woman who has had many life affirming experiences both good and bad . . . taking a look at my life and really examining the subjects I wrote about and why I wrote them . . . do a self-examination on my own life and my own choices,” she said.