Karen Ponzio Photos
Saul Fussiner.
“I wanted to be Billy Bragg,” said Saul Fussiner: storyteller, playwright, screenwriter, teacher, and music fan. “The reason why I’m a live storyteller, I think really, is because of music. But I can’t play guitar and I can’t sing really well, so I needed a different way of doing storytelling.”
Had Fussiner ever played guitar? He laughed. He had a story about that.
“There was one time when I was living in New York City that I had been practicing guitar for a month, and I thought I really had it. Then my wife picked up a guitar and in the course of an afternoon got better than me. At that point, that’s when I gave up. It had been a decade of picking up the guitar and trying it at different points, and when she got better than me in the course of a single afternoon, I said, ‘yeah, I’m going to have to be a different kind of storyteller.’”
This weekend — and every fourth Saturday of the month from here on in — Fussiner will be bringing his two loves together for one show, called “Songs and Stories at Next Door,” the bar and restaurant on Humphrey Street right here in the city where Fussiner was born and raised and is now the director of Creative Writing at ACES Educational Center of the Arts. It is also the city where he honed his natural ability to weave the threads of his experiences into something much more.
Local writer and former arts editor for the New Haven Advocate Christopher Arnott was the first to ask Fussiner to tell his stories live on stage.
“Chris knew I was a writer,” said Fussiner. “I didn’t know he knew me — I have a thing where I don’t feel like people remember me — but he contacted me and said he had a storytelling series.” That was Get to the Point at Cafe Nine.
“I’m a teacher and I wasn’t going to it because it was Monday nights,” Fussiner said. “It was the summer of 2013, and I was about to put up a show of my dad’s work, and he said, ‘I want you to tell a story. I know you’ll be great, maybe do something about your father.’”
Fussiner first mulled over Arnott’s suggestion. “But I kept thinking about this story that happened to me in college about a lamb carcass, so that story was what I put together. October 2013 was the first time I told a story there … and then I started to do it every month, challenging myself to write something new each time. A year later, the Institute Library started their live storytelling workshop, so I took that workshop and I just kept doing it.”
God In Training
Writing has been a part of Fussiner’s life from early on. During his time at Connecticut College, where he earned a degree in history, he also spent his junior year at the National Theater Institute at the O’Neill Center in Waterford, where he wrote a play called Bournemouth.
“Bournemouth is a beach town in England and it’s where a lot of English people go on holiday. When I went to school in England at the end of 1978, they brought the upper grades to holiday at Bournemouth, so my brother and I are very sentimental about it,” Fussiner said. “The conceit of the play was that this old woman buys a house in a beach town in America, trying to recreate something about her honeymoon at Bournemouth in England. There were two British theater critics who came to see it, and I was there with my notebook, and I wanted to learn what they would say about me. I was hoping they would be critical and I would fix stuff. And then the worst thing that can happen to a 21-year-old happened to me: All they did was praise it and say what a great piece of writing it is, and how I should just keep writing, so I thought I was some sort of playwright god,” he said with a laugh.
College was also where he discovered Bragg, introduced to him in a most unexpected way.
“My first week of college, I was in the library and a guy came up to me and said, ‘do you know who you look just like?’ And I said Suggs from Madness — because I had a flat top and people used to say I looked like him — and he was like, ‘no, Billy Bragg.’ And I said, ‘who’s that?’ and he said ‘come with me.’”
“We went to the area where they had the hanging newspapers and he took a copy of New Musical Express, opened it up to a picture of Billy Bragg, and he said, ‘there, you look just like this guy.’” Fussiner said. “So, I decided I need to know who Billy Bragg was. Once I found out who he was and heard his first two records, especially that first record, I just was completely taken with him. I was really into punk and eventually I had gotten into hardcore punk and stuff like that, but at this point when I was in college I was looking for other music. Bragg was a mix of a punk but also an incredible lyricist who is also very literary. He obviously read a lot and his work was very poetic, so I was really taken by his lyrics and ended up seeing him many times live between 1986 and 1992, including in England at the Hammersmith.”
Another musician who has been a big influence on Fussiner’s work as a storyteller is Henry Rollins.
“I knew him from Black Flag, seeing them back in the ‘80s,” Fussiner said. He saw Rollins in San Francisco, when he was living in Oakland for a year between college and graduate school. “It was sort of announced as a poetry event and it was mainly live storytelling. He would tell stories that were 20 minutes long, and I was completely transfixed by that.”
Fussiner was 22 years old. The experience remained cemented in his memories. “I had had some success in playwriting already so I thought I was supposed to be a playwright,” Fussiner said. “But those stories of Rollins’s I saw as a really exciting new form. I don’t know if I even thought about it that way at the time. It was years later and I still remembered it, remembered some details of his stories that I thought were amazing. I was already a huge fan of Spalding Gray, but he is a different beast. He tells a story that is two hours long. It’s an entire evening, and it’s one story. Rollins told a series of stories. Some were five minutes long and some were 20 minutes long, but … I still remember them, and that was 30 years ago.”
Back Home
Fussiner spent six years as a screenwriter in New York after graduate school at NYU. He returned home to New Haven, where he became a teacher at New Haven Academy. He taught classes in U.S. history, civics, and a curriculum called Facing History and Ourselves, which focuses on the darkest chapters of recent history and asks students to connect it to the present.
“In those classes,” Fussiner said, “you’re getting kids to write a lot, not for the purpose of getting them to become writers, but for the purpose of them understanding themselves by having to write down their deepest feelings.”
At New Haven Academy, he also became involved in another playwriting project, this one with Donal O’Hagan, a teacher and playwright from Ireland. He kept writing on his own, too.
“I realized I had these groups of stories that could be a one-man show, so I started writing them down” Fussiner said. “There is one about Ireland called ‘I’ve Heard Those Drums All My Life,’ and there’s one about my trips to Poland called ‘The Ghosts of Poland.’ I want to perform one-man shows that are three stories, an intermission, and then three more stories. I’m really happy with ‘I’ve Heard Those Drums All My Life’ and what I’m working on now is making ‘The Ghosts of Poland’ stronger. Here’s the thing: they’re written pieces so I can get theaters interested in them, but when I tell them live, I don’t memorize them. I’ve found when I do live storytelling and I have something memorized, it makes it very stiff and very arch, but when I just hit the key spots and adapt the story to what I’m getting from the audience, then it’s really alive, and that’s what I love. I have written versions of the stories that are often quite lyrical, quite poetic, but when I tell them they’re less lyrical and less poetic and more about just hitting the points of the story because that’s what moves people in storytelling. They don’t want the lyricism. They want the big moment. They want to really feel that thing you felt.”
Fussiner has been getting more and more time in front of the microphone over the years in a variety of venues.
“Most months I’m telling a story on the first Friday of the month at Buttonwood Tree in Middletown as part of Story City,” he said. “I usually take the summer off, but most school year months, I tell a story there just to hear the stories and develop them and to be challenged to do something new every month, because they don’t allow you to tell the same story within a two year period. I have to keep generating new material, which is good for me because it gets in the way of my assumptions. They’ll have a theme every month and I’ll have to figure out which one of my potential stories meets that theme — and … by having to do that, I’ve told different versions of the same part of my life several times.
“All of my stories are true stories, truth to the best of my memory, and — full disclosure — I think sometimes I exaggerate things, or I put someone in a place where they might not have been because it works for the story, so I stretch the truth slightly here and there. But the basis of it is complete truth in my life.”
“I use it to examine my own life,” Fussiner added. “It’s more fulfilling than any other work I’ve done because in having to make a story about these things that happened in your life, you have to go into everything else that was happening in your life at that time, and you realize things that you would never have realized otherwise. I’ve learned all these new things about myself that if I didn’t reflect on that time period — based on an event, based on an object, based on a moment — I would never have learned.”
Since 2014 Fussiner has also been involved with Narrative Four, an organization run by cofounders Colum McCann and Lisa Consiglio that focuses on people telling each other stories to improve their empathy. Fussiner, who is training to become a master practitioner for this organization, is going to incorporate their work into his ECA program; in addition to being the director of the Creative Writing program, he also teaches screenwriting and live storytelling.
“I have come to it as a teacher looking for a way to improve student’s empathy in the classroom,” he said. But “I can’t help but consider my own storytelling when I’m exchanging a story with someone in a Narrative Four context. I’m still looking at what it says about my life, and then I’m looking to find what the other person’s story says about their life.”
Next Door
Now with the new storytelling series beginning at Next Door, Fussiner is hoping to get as many people excited about storytelling and sharing their stories as he is.
“I wanted New Haven to have a storytelling series, and I thought since Robin” — that’s Robin Bodak of Next Door — “was giving me an opportunity to do something, I thought I would like to do a series that would somehow draw a wider audience to storytelling. When I thought about that, I thought about how I go to shows where I see bands or singer-songwriters, and I go to shows where I see storytelling, and they’re separate audiences. But I thought both of those audiences are hungry for good storytelling. People who love singer-songwriters love lyrics, and they love the story that’s there…. I want to get people who are excited about singer-songwriters excited about storytelling. And I want to get people who are excited about storytelling interested in singer-songwriters.”
For the first show Fussiner has brought together three local singer-songwriters (Frank Critelli, Jon Schlesinger, and Ponybird ) and three local storytellers (Wendy Marans, Sharen McKay, and Jezrie Marcano-Courtney) but their songs and stories are not limited to local lore, and neither are Fussiner’s.
“I’m from New Haven, but the weird thing is I find myself more and more drawn to telling stories about other places I’ve been,” said Fussiner. “Every time I’m in Ireland, I make these incredibly deep connections to people there. I don’t know what it is. I think maybe it’s because I’m just passing through, people open up to me, and it’s a culture that I love so much. I love the literary quality of everything, and I think the language of Gaelic lends itself to great poetry. I mean Ireland — Joyce, Beckett, Synge, O’Casey, Seamus Heaney, Yeats — it’s endless, and I keep discovering more and more. Edna O’Brien is one of my favorite writers right now. It’s incredible.”
“In order to have great writers you have to have great storytellers that no one knows, the people that they’ve grown up around. That’s what fertilizes the soil of storytelling,” Fussiner added. “For any one of those writers, there are 15 people they’ve met in their life that inspired them that no one knows about, that told them stories at some point in their life.”
I told him that now he was that guy, and he agreed. But people are going to remember you, I added.
“I hope so,” he said.
Songs and Stories is scheduled for 9 PM this Saturday August 24th and every fourth Saturday of the month for the rest of 2019. For more information on the event please visit the Next Door website and/or their Facebook page
Two things. First, come to the Next Door show, it will be great, and the beginning of a great series. Second, if you want to try your hand at storytelling in a friendly, low-pressure environment come to the story sharing group at the Institute Library (briefly mentioned in the article) , 847 Chapel Street, 6-8 PM on the second Thursday of any the month. You can share a story at any stage of development, or you can just listen. Saul and all three of the tellers scheduled for this show have honed their stories at these sessions. We have a lot of serious fun. .