Paula Marantz Cohen, Professor of Literature, is among the star players in Drexel University’s English Department. She’s the author of six books on a wide range of topics, including silent film and Victorian literature. Her credentials are impressive, but perhaps more importantly, she’s a warm, amiable person who always elicits a strong, positive reaction from her students. It’s obvious to anyone who’s ever taken one of her classes that she loves teaching. Her most recent book is Jane Austen in Scarsdale or Love, Death, and the SAT’s.
: Where did the inspiration for this book come from?
Cohen: From my own experience as the mother and teacher of college-age kids--and from a desire to write another satire of middle-class life.
: You only recently started writing fiction. What prompted you to make the jump from non-fiction to fiction?
Cohen: I think I wanted to do something new and less inhibiting. When I started my first novel about six years ago, I had just finished a very ambitious nonfiction book and felt it was time to change my mental landscape. I still write nonfiction and enjoy weaving that sort of dense, intellectual argument. But my fiction comes from a different place. It gives me more of a sense of freedom and delight, at least when it's going well. To write fiction, I think I had to reach a stage in my own life where I felt confident about writing in a very distinctive voice—tapping into humor and even farce and taking responsibility for creating a world.
: All of your novels have a contemporary setting. Ever considered taking a leap into the past?
Cohen: Actually, I'm working on a novel set in the past right now. I'm not ready to talk about it yet—talking too early about a project can be bad, in my experience. I will say that it involves historical characters and events. It will have humor, but it will be more psychological than my previous work.
: Are you the sort of writer who sits down to write at a certain time every day, or the kind who goes for weeks not writing anything, but then suddenly hammers out a lot of pages? Or something else altogether?
Cohen: I don't write every day, though when I work I usually start early in the morning. I need to feel ready to write, and that doesn't come every day. When I am on a roll, I can write for 6 or 7 hours straight. There are other days when I can't write or even read, and, if I'm not teaching (a great alternative diversion), I spend the day straightening the house or prowling through discount stores and thrift shops.
: The world is full of would-be novelists, and people who lie awake at night dreaming of books they might never write. What’s it like to have made it into the I-have-a-published-book-that’s-actually-in-Barnes & Noble club?
Cohen: I have spent my whole life working at being a writer—first nonfiction and now fiction. It's been a continual struggle. I always feel I can't write the next book. I think the major reason why I've had some modest success is due to tenacity—a need to write and to keep writing, even in the face of disappointment and rejection. I will say that getting my first novel published was enormously exhilarating, but once that feeling wore off, I was back where I started, having to push the stone up the hill again. Each project is starting over and, in a sense, learning how to write again. And it's always hard.
: Jane Austen and Alfred Hitchcock have informed a lot of your work. Is there anything you’d like to ask them? Who would you prefer to meet?
Cohen: Also Henry James. Those three are my idea of supremely creative people with sensibilities I admire. I can't say I'd prefer to meet any one of them or ask them any one question. I would love to have conversations with them all—about their lives and relationships, and about issues of craft. In particular, I would like to speak to Jane Austen about her relationship with her sister, with Hitchcock about working creatively within a commercial industry, and with James about problems of ambiguity and the difficulties of revision.
: How do your Jane Austen enthusiasts feel about “Boca” and “Scarsdale”?
Cohen: Most seem to like these novels. Austen fans realize that Austen's greatness was as a social critic. That's more or less what I'm trying to do in a contemporary setting with my novels. They understand that I'm writing in the spirit of Jane Austen, not trying to duplicate her or steal from her.
: How would you feel if Hollywood came-a-callin’?
Cohen: There's been interest from Hollywood in all three novels, and the first was optioned twice. Nothing has come of this yet, but that doesn't mean it won't happen. I would love be able to go to the Academy Awards—I've already thought about what I would wear.
: Drexel has a diverse community of students. What it’s like teaching a class half-full of engineering students, while the other half are arts majors?
Cohen: I love the diversity and liveliness of Drexel students and have never felt any particular dissonance in my classes with respect to their areas of interest. I think the greater the range, the more interesting the class. Some of the best experiences of my life have come in the classroom, when a discussion goes in an unexpected direction and the class is lifted to another level. It's a magical sort of thing, not unlike what I feel when my writing is going well. And it has nothing to do with what the students are majoring in; it has to do with how engaged they are with the material at that moment.
: What’s your advice to young writers?
Cohen: To keep writing. I don't think anyone becomes a writer without great labor. Most every student I've come into contact with at Drexel has some sort of writing potential. It's a matter of whether the student wants to cultivate that potential or not. The hard part is getting the germ of talent to develop. That takes great commitment and relentless work. I should add that if you are meant to be a writer, you simply feel the need to write and, in time, you get better at it by doing it. It's a stressful sort of life and the effort doesn't generally get rewarded. You have to feel a kind of obsessive commitment to the process, and find the process of writing a reward in itself.
