In this bonus episode for Grammarpaloozians, Pulitzer Prize-winning dance critic Sarah L. Kaufman goes deeper into her journey from the "Washington Post" copy desk to the world of professional dance criticism. We look at how writing about an art form is the ultimate exercise in verb selection, why our brains physically react to words like "meander" or "zigzag," and how to find the "zing" in your writing by juxtaposing unusual adverbs with everyday actions.
In this bonus episode for Grammarpaloozians, Pulitzer Prize-winning dance critic Sarah L. Kaufman goes deeper into her journey from the "Washington Post" copy desk to the world of professional dance criticism. We look at how writing about an art form is the ultimate exercise in verb selection, why our brains physically react to words like "meander" or "zigzag," and how to find the "zing" in your writing by juxtaposing unusual adverbs with everyday actions.
Find Sarah L. Kaufman at sarahlkaufman.com
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| HOST: Mignon Fogarty
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[Computer-generated transcript]
Mignon Fogarty: This ad-free podcast is part of your Grammarpalooza subscription. Greetings, Grammarpaloozians. We are here with Sarah L. Kaufman, author of "Verb Your Enthusiasm." We just talked about this book in the main segment—a fabulous book that I absolutely loved about verbs. But Sarah is also a Pulitzer Prize-winning dance critic. She wrote dance criticism for the "Washington Post," and she wrote another book called "The Art of Grace: On Moving Well Through Life." We’re gonna talk about how all these things sort of come together and share common themes, and then we’re gonna get her book recommendations. So Sarah L. Kaufman, thank you so much for being here again.
Sarah L. Kaufman: Thank you, Mignon. I'm delighted.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. So how do you get from being a dance critic to—I mean, I guess I can see writing about moving well through life and then writing about verbs.
Sarah L. Kaufman: Yeah. I guess I just have always been really a word nerd forever. .
Mignon Fogarty: We like those here.
Sarah L. Kaufman: I know, I know. It's great—my favorite people. I started out as a copy editor in my journalism career, so I was writing headlines, I was fixing grammar, fixing syntax. So actual language has just always fascinated me. In addition to needing to know dynamic and dramatic ways to write—because as a critic and covering a niche art form like dance, I wanted my writing to be very clear but also to deliver some of the charge that I felt watching this art form. I felt like that was really a quality unique to my art form that I could share with people. I really wanted to bring the art form to life and do justice to the dancers as a part of it, in addition to evaluation and taking a stand on the performance itself. So finding ways to do that and looking at other critics who I admired was how I developed an affinity for verbs.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. And describing dance is such an active thing that people are doing. I feel like I'm at a loss for words here, but dance, you know, people are constantly moving. It’s about action, so that would be why you were focused on verbs, I would imagine.
Sarah L. Kaufman: Yeah. It's all action. Even when there's non-action, it’s for a reason. If someone stands still all of a sudden, or there’s a scene where no one’s moving, what is being conveyed? Writing about an art form and taking on the mantle of a critic is a really great writing exercise that I advise everyone to try. Whether you feel like you're an expert or an authority or not, just do it, because it's really interesting. You could listen to jazz music or hip-hop or anything you want to, or even watch sports. Watching a sporting event too, and just generate some verbs, generate some ways to express these unseeable things, right? How someone gets from one point to another. How they get from one side of the stage to another. Of course we see that, but really, how do you express it in just like that burst of creativity that the dancer herself is embodying? And in music, how do you capture the swoops and the plunges in vocals? It's a wonderful exercise to take that on and play around with that. But yeah, that was the challenge for me in capturing dance or writing about it: how do I capture it?
Mignon Fogarty: And that reminded me of something else that I thought was really good about the book is the exercises. I'm not always a fan of exercises in trade books like this that are not meant to be a textbook. Why are you giving me homework? Often they are somewhat uninspired, but in your book, I actually looked at the exercises and I thought, "This actually would be a really useful and fun thing to try." Most of the time when I was going through the exercises...so kudos on that too.
Sarah L. Kaufman: I'm so glad. Yeah, they were fun to come up with. And some of them I have inflicted on my students as well, with positive results, I'll say. But yeah, just things like...I think one thing I advise is to do some of the writing work in advance, kind of in your downtime. Like coming up with movement-driven metaphors whenever something jumps to mind about the sunlight drifting down on the trees like a silk scarf or something. Anyone listening can come up with something more beautiful than that. But when these images come to you, jot them down. Because then if you're writing, whether it's nonfiction or fiction, and you’re struggling for a metaphor, it's easier if you’ve already got a list that can kind of prompt you as suggestions.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. And I thought it was really interesting in the book how you talked about how uncommon metaphors light up the brain more than the ones we're used to hearing.
Sarah L. Kaufman: Yes, exactly. So if marketing materials say, "Our candidate kicked off his campaign well"—we're so used to seeing "kicked off." It doesn't really excite us; it's just sort of part of the wallpaper, like a common phrase. But if you say something a little bit more uncommon... you’re watching a sunrise and you say that “The sun finally popped up like a piece of toast.” It's a little bit more of a zing, like a little tingle. And maybe the reader will remember that; maybe that’ll be one of those phrases that sticks with them.
Mignon Fogarty: Right. When you’re talking about the cord running along the wall, what does that do in our brains?
Sarah L. Kaufman: That was a fascinating study by one of the cognitive scientists who I interviewed for this book, that in the field of embodied cognition. In this field, which deals with intelligence but also physical responses in terms of mental processes and brain processes, there are scientists who believe that we embody actions—that our brain takes us through actions when we read about them. And in very subtle ways. It's not like you're actually gonna feel a punch in your gut when you read, "That realization hit me like a punch in the gut." It triggers a little bit of a response, and that brings up emotion. This woman has done studies where like "the road meanders," your brain understands that as a slow movement. And so your body reacts more; you read it more slowly, which is an interesting nugget to take in as a writer. Is this a moment when I want to use a verb that will slow the action down. Meander, stumble, or wander. Or is there a moment when I want to speed things up and make the reader have to keep up, like zigzag and hopscotch? Or inanimate objects, like a cord. Like a road meandering... okay, that’s an inanimate object, but it is associated with movement, right? Cars travel on it. So a cord "running" along a wall, that’s an inanimate object that has no connection to movement at all. But to say it runs along the wall just paints a more vivid picture in our mind and makes that image just stick in our mind a little bit more. And we read it as a faster, smoother process.
Mignon Fogarty: And when we are allowing adverbs into our writing, it’s interesting when they are juxtaposed in ways that are also unfamiliar. Like one example that I remember is "brutally sweating."
Sarah L. Kaufman: Yes. That comes from Zadie Smith's novel "Swing Time." And of course, she's such a wonderful writer and she uses language so well. That was an example... a lot of us, it's very easy to overuse adverbs. They kind of come foremost to mind when we're speaking; they color the way we talk and color our expressions. But the most powerful way to use an adverb is when, as you say, you juxtapose an unusual adverb with an action, with a verb. So she talked about soldiers "brutally sweating." Sweating is just this ordinary physiological response, but "brutally" was just such a wonderful way to elicit the feeling of these soldiers standing in the hot sun trapped inside their wool uniforms and just the violence that that does on their bodies and their spirits. In the same way that in "Madame Bovary," there's an example where Gustave Flaubert writes about Emma Bovary "brutally unlacing" her corset when she's with one of her many lovers. You don't expect "brutally" with “unlacing,” and it gets at the violence, the quickness, the dynamics, the energy—that forceful energy going into the action.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, and this is why I'm so excited to get your book recommendations, because the examples in your book are fabulous. They're all from these brilliant passages from novels and stories. You must have had a hard time choosing just three. But I'm very eager to get your book recommendations, Sarah.
Sarah L. Kaufman: Well, I am so happy to recommend these books. As a big believer in arts journalism as I am, I picked a book, a compilation of reviews by a rock critic, and it is actually called "The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic" by Jessica Hopper.
Mignon Fogarty: Nice.
Sarah L. Kaufman: Yes. I was asked recently to write about critics who have a great sense of style, who wrote with a lot of power and dynamics, and she was part of that list. Jessica Hopper has written for the "Chicago Reader," for "Pitchfork," and for the "Village Voice." Not only does she deliver cogent analysis of songs and music and artists themselves, but she just captures these ephemeral things, you know,. The way the voice sounds, the way it can just run up and flutter and dive and plunge. It's a very dynamic experience to read her work. Very exciting.
Now I have two novels; they kind of go on the other spectrum of verb use into the more subtle kind of interior charge that verbs can deliver. And the first one is called "The Gathering" by Anne Enright. She's an Irish novelist, and this book is about a large Irish family that gathers for the wake of a son, and it's told from the perspective of his closest sister. She is mourning not only her brother, but also a lot of other fractures in her life that seem to stem from the same wounding incident that her brother was traumatized by and that both of them experienced when they were young. It's just incredibly poignant. It's also very witty; she's a beautiful writer. One of the verb phrases that just jumps out at me is... she had just learned the news about her brother's death, and someone called her and was a little snippy on the phone when she talked about it and said she couldn't really do this thing that he wanted her to do right away. She says, "Well, he was clearly disappointed because my brother had just died all over his Thursday." There's like this dark humor. I love that phrase, this person "just died all over his Thursday." It's a very raw and fresh way of writing. She's just an exquisite writer, and I marveled at how she delved into this subtle territory.
And then the third book is just one of my absolute favorites. I don't have it to hand, but it is "Never Let Me Go" by Kazuo Ishiguro. He actually began his creative life as a musician and a songwriter, to kind of circle back to Jessica Hopper. But this book is about a group of kids in a British boarding school, and it follows them into young adulthood. But the circumstances, there's this twist and the circumstances are revealed very, very gradually, and it becomes, at least for me, almost unbearable feelings of empathy and emotion, protectiveness, affection. It just flooded me with feelings, and that has never let me go. Literally, this book has affected me from the last word until today. I think it's extraordinary. Not a surprise given the writer.
Mignon Fogarty: I’ve listened to the audiobook of that book and enjoyed it very much as well. Well, Sarah, thank you so much for those recommendations. And, you know, those are great gifts. You should read Sarah's book first, "Verb Your Enthusiasm," and then dive into those others that she recommended. Thank you so much, Sarah. Where can people find you?
Sarah L. Kaufman: My website is sarahlkaufman.com.
Mignon Fogarty: Wonderful. Thank you so much for being here.
Sarah L. Kaufman: Thank you, Mignon.