We recently caught up with UHS English Instructor, Scott Laughlin, about his sabbatical and here is what he had to share:
When was your sabbatical?
I took the full academic year of 2018-2019, so essentially it started after school got out in June, 2018 until 2019 when we came back in August.
What did you do and learn in Brazil?
I like to go to places for longer periods of time, and to stay in that place and be immersed. A sabbatical is perfectly suited to this kind of travel. That way, I can spend the mornings holed up in a room writing and not feel the need to squeeze sight-seeing into every waking hour. Though in Rio the apartment I was staying in had a balcony with a view of the city and of Christ the Redeemer, so I felt very much in Rio even while I was inside. I was also able to find a number of great cafes and bookshops around the city where it felt comfortable to sit and write, which isn’t always the case when you’re traveling. The afternoons were spent walking and discovering. That’s another thing I love to do is to walk cities. I may have a rough destination for the day, sometimes not. Though in Rio you have to be a little careful not to stumble into a favela. I don’t wear clothes that are recognizably American or even touristy, but they know right away that I’m not Brazilian. I made some mistakes but was able to alter my route quickly enough. I was also very well aware how fortunate I am to be a man and to be able to essentially walk alone where I want at most any time of day or night.
Since I spend every summer in Portugal, there’s an obvious connection with Brazil through the colonial past, though Brazil gained independence in the early 19th century, so its ties to Portugal have been severed for a long time. Still, there’s the language, so one reason I went there was to take my knowledge of Portuguese to the next level. I picked up some Brazilisms that later would raise eyebrows in Portugal, but in general Brazilians are easier to understand (they pronounce Portuguese while the Portuguese swallow their words), so I felt like I learned a lot. I also love Brazilian literature and music. I brought the newly translated Collected Stories of Machado de Assis, the only book I brought, as it was over 900 pages. I read the whole thing while I was there. I’m also a big fan of Clarice Lispector, so I went to a number of places associated with her work. I could go into the musicians, but they’re too numerous to count. There was one local bar in Copacabana where I went to see jam sessions, so the music is still happening, though obviously not in the hey-day of Bossa nova and samba. I also found some of the best vinyl shops in Rio and brought back a number of albums you can’t find here in the States.
I traveled all over Rio state, which was a lot even for a month. You really get a sense of how large, vast, and unbelievably diverse the country is. I’d love to go to the north, which they say is the seat of Afro-Brazilian culture, and I also want to go to the state of Minas Gerais. Another time. One thing that struck me is that they’d just elected their own president, Bolsonaro, who draws obvious comparisons to Trump. It was clear to me, however, that Brazilians weren’t thinking about the United States at all: they were thinking about Brazil—though, I would argue, not too clearly. The reasons behind the election of Bolsonaro are vastly different than the reasons for the election of Trump in the States, so what is striking when you travel is that the world doesn’t see everything through the eyes of the United States, as we tend to believe. Overall, we have a tendency toward narcissism here in the U.S., so traveling is a way to break the mirror and see things from multiple perspectives.
What did you do and learn in Portugal?
I run a literary program every summer in Lisbon called DISQUIET. The summer coming up, 2019, will be our tenth year, and over the last nine years, over seven-hundred writers have come through our program, including some of the biggest names in contemporary North American literature: Colson Whitehead, George Saunders, Eileen Myles, Mary Gaitskill, Tayari Jones, Denis Johnson, just to name a few. I started this program with a friend of mine because I had a mentor relationship with a Portuguese poet named Alberto de Lacerda, so we wanted to honor his name and memory by starting a writing program. (This is for adults, by the way.)
Because my life is obviously in San Francisco, I’d never had the chance to live for a long period in Portugal, so I decided to apply for some grants, and received a Gulbenkian Grant. The Gulbenkian is a famous foundation in Lisbon that mostly gives grants to academics, so it felt like a great honor for them to be supporting a writer. My project was called “Portugal: A Personal Journey,” and it ended up being a series of interconnected essays all having to do with my experiences in Portugal. I wanted to describe why I first went there, the changes I saw, including what I experienced and witnessed in the months while I was living there during sabbatical.
I lived in a sort of up-and-coming neighborhood in Lisbon called Intendente and wandered the city a lot (yes, walking). It’s strange because I felt like I knew Lisbon, having been there so many times, but there’s nothing like living in a place to see all the layers you don’t see even when you’ve spent a lot of time there. I found collectives and charity organizations and concert venues and all kinds of places I never knew existed. I also took Portuguese lessons and read more deeply into the history of Portugal. I talked to a lot of people and traveled to every corner of Portugal. One place I stopped was the city of Aveiro and spent three weeks at a writing residency called VIC. The residency is an old house that was owned by a filmmaker, and he built a theater in the basement where he used to show banned films during the Salazar dictatorship that dominated much of the twentieth century in Portugal. I gave a reading in the theater, which felt special because I was reading my work in a place where subversive intellectuals had gathered to discuss politics and art.
What was the best part and worst parts of your sabbatical?
The best part of my sabbatical was how much I read, wrote, traveled. I wrote the whole manuscript of a book about growing up in Los Angeles (my mother was a minor actor, so there are stories). Throughout my sabbatical, I made sure I wrote 500 words every day. I also wrote the very rough draft of the book of essays about Portugal I mentioned before. I’ve been trying to find time to edit them while being back in the classroom, always the struggle for any artist who’s also a teacher.
The worst part was being away from my wife and kids. I have two daughters from a previous marriage who are now ages 10 and 14, and they stayed with their mother while I was gone. In the fall, I came back often to the city, and I spent October in San Francisco, and we had time together over the holidays, of course. I also took my older daughter to Rome and Florence on my way to Portugal (she flew all the way back alone: serious maturity!), but otherwise, I only saw them twice between January and August. That was really, really tough, but they were supportive. My wife Caroline also decided to stay here and keep her job despite my pleading for her to join me, so not being with her was obviously hard, but we made it work, and ended up seeing each other at least once a month.
What do you feel were the benefits of your time away and are you looking forward to doing it again someday or revisiting some of the places you visited during your sabbatical?
The benefits are too numerous to count, really. The sleep, to name one. Not being inside an organization of some kind—no offense to UHS—is also incredibly liberating. I also took the time very seriously, as I knew what a gift it was. I rested, of course, but I also read and wrote and drank a hell of a lot of coffee. I traveled as much as I could, and came back transformed as a human, with a deeper understanding of the world and myself. I think when I was younger, I wanted to see as much as I could, but now I see myself as a traveler and want to go deeper into places. It’s that idea of slowness. In our “experience-accumulation” culture everyone is just trying to see as much as we can, but we often don’t stop actually to see what’s around us. Even the idea of the phone has made it so that our urge is to document our place at places, rather than putting the phone away and really seeing where we are. We’re also so busy in our “regular” lives, always going to the next thing, especially at UHS, so I encourage kids to take a break, call time-out, and rather than living for tomorrow, to live for today: to stop and reflect and try to find a deeper connection to oneself and the world.
In terms of revisiting, the good thing about having gone to Portugal is that when I left, I knew I’d be back in the country in nine months. I plan to spend June there with my daughters, and to have them see the celebration that will be the tenth edition of DISQUIET. We are opening a writing residency in the Algarve in the South, so I’ll be running that, too. The first line of the first essay in the book about Portugal is something like, “I haven’t been trying to outrun Portugal, but it’s been chasing me my whole life.” I’ve just given up and accepted that Portugal, for better or for worse, is my home away from home.
