Interview With Jen Spyra

By Tess Lennon­Dorn 04/08/16

From English Enthusiast to Late Night Writer

I first saw Jen Spyra perform at a live lit event in Chicago a couple of years ago. Among all of the readers that night, Jen stood out as engaging, authentic, and totally hilarious. In the story she told, she talked about being thirteen and believing her father was going to kill her after reading an explicit note intended for a boy, that had been discovered by a teacher, sent to the principal, and then given to her parents to read. She said that as a thirteen year old, she thought since this was surely the end, she should just accept her imminent. She said she would miss Chanukkah and her sister, but other than that she was okay with dying. She delighted the audience.

Jen completed her Bachelor of Arts Degree in English at Columbia University, and her MFA in Dramatic Writing at Northwestern University. Upon getting fired from a writing assistant job in L.A., which she described as, “totally awful and scary”, even though she was bored by the work, and hated the show, she started to look around for other opportunities. She was in grad school at the time and knew a peer who worked at The Onion. She asked him to let her know if they ever needed contributors. A couple of months later, she got an email saying a friend had recommended her for the Onion Fellowship, and it was an invitation to apply to be a

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Fellow. She was given one month to write a packet. She got the Fellowship, and then was hired as a staff writer from the Fellowship.

Jen described The Fellowship as, “A sink or swim audition”. In the Fellowship, which is the way the Onion cycles in new writers, you are just thrown on as full staff and you find out in a very short amount of time whether or not you are cut out for that specific type of writing job.

Most people aren’t.

Within a couple of years, Jen went from a Fellow at The Onion to eventually becoming a Senior Writer, as well as the head of the editorial video department. While at The Onion Jen saw in the news that Stephen Colbert was taking over “The Late Show” and knew she wanted to apply. Someone who worked at The Onion knew a guy who was going to be working on The Late Show, and he had sent over the information in case any Onion writers were interested. She applied, and was accepted.

I asked Jen to take me through a day in the life. At “The Late Show”, writers work a 9:00a.m. ­ 5:00op.m.,, Monday through Friday. The day starts with a pitch meeting with all of the writers and the head writer. The assignment every day is to come in with a pitch that’s either topical (something that’s currently going on in the news), or evergreen (broader, often repeatable humor). This first pitch meeting lasts about an hour and a half, consisting of a few minutes per pitch, as well as other writers riffing off of ideas. After this hour and a half, pitches from this session are chosen to be worked on, and writers are paired up to work with one other writer on one of these ideas. Teams of two writers will work on a script for two hours, so scripts are due at around 12:30p.m. After the first pitches are due, there is a second pitch meeting where writers Lennon­Dorn, 3

just pitch one idea. From those pitches, a second pairing of writers is made and they work on a second script for the afternoon. That script takes about two hours, which takes writers to the end of the day, around 5:45 or 6:00p.m. While talking about a typical day at work, her voice sounds energetic, excited, and like she’s re­discovering how awesome her job is as she’s telling me.

What is striking about Jen’s work is how specific her jokes are, how well she is able to carry out a joke in the form of an entire piece, and how her evergreen humor is fresh and delightfully geeky. Some titles of her work include, “Museum of Natural History Interoffice Smackdown”, “A Teenager Tries To Make The Best of Hosting Her Middle­Ages Themed Party At The Same Time As Her Older Brother’s Lacrosse Team’s Kegger”, and “She Ordered Sausage”, written from the perspective of a writer revising a porn script “while undergoing harassment­prevention training.” This piece, which was published in The Morning News under Spoofs and Satire, is hysterical. There is also an amazingly distinct voice throughout all of her pieces. To be able to convey a voice, as well as effectively carry out a funny idea is quite a tall order, and it’s something that Jen seems to always have had a knack for.

I was curious about her decision to go to graduate school, particularly because she seemed more interested in the improv scene upon graduating college. Jen described going to graduate school in part out of wanting a , “stamp of approval” that she didn’t feel like she had.

When I asked if she felt like her MFA improved her writing and opened doors, before I could even get the sentence out she responded with an abrupt, “No! No. I definitely don’t”. She then quickly conceded that it did improve her writing skills, and gave her a purpose as a writer. She said, “The training I got in my MFA compared to the crash course I got at The Onion doesn’t Lennon­Dorn, 4

even compare. And when I got to The Onion I was like, ‘oh my god, I owe like six figures, and this job is so much better training than I ever could have.’ So, I mean, I did learn some stuff about screenwriting and playwriting but if you can possibly avoid having that kind of debt, it’s best.” Her conflicting feelings about her MFA program were clear.

There is a question of whether or not she would have landed The Onion Fellowship had she not known someone who worked there in her MFA program. To this she said that while it did help to have a connection, she also wishes she had utilized Twitter and Facebook instead.

She talked about how you really can connect with anyone on Twitter or Facebook, and so if you do your research about who you want to find, you can network on your own. She said that when she was in grad school, she wouldn’t have known it was okay to find someone on Facebook or Twitter and private message them. Social media becoming a networking tool for connecting total strangers puts into question how much of a selling point, “possibility for connections” will really be in the future of graduate programs.

Jen and I discussed the innate uncertainty that goes with any writing career. I asked her if there were any signs at the start of her career that her work was good. She said that there were signs, for example being published in McSweeney’s during her sophomore year of college. It’s interesting, though, because how much of that was her talent, and how much of that was her drive and commitment, which fueled her to submit in the first place? Obviously both have played a part in her success, but she wouldn’t have been published anywhere if she hadn’t even submitted.

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She always had the talent and the work ethic, but didn’t always know exactly how to apply her skills to the job market. She reflected, “At the end of college, I definitely wasn’t sure that I wanted to go into Late Night at all. I really do think there’s been a really rapid change in the last, like, seven years of people being aware of comedy jobs. In college, I was obsessed with improv and I knew I wanted to move to Chicago to do improv and maybe do Second City, but I really didn’t know exactly where that led in terms of money.” It is clear from hearing her talk about her interest in improv and writing that the passion and talent were there first and then the money came later.

She went on to talk more about the idea of whether or not there were signs early on that she was a good writer, and specifically, a good comedy writer. “In terms of writing confidence, I was always one of those people that loves english, so I always thought that I was a good writer in terms of my papers and stuff like that, but I didn’t have any comedy writing outlets so the McSweeney’s thing was the first one and then after I graduated college I started the grad program in 2010, the only comedy writing, “signs” I would have was when I would submit to various websites like The Morning News and McSweeney’s, and then I would get things on and so that was really helpful because otherwise I’d only have affirmation of being good at improv.

So definitely seeing publications was helpful in terms of that. And then getting into grad school was a little affirmation, but then getting the Onion job was a big deal.”

When I asked her if she thought she had improved as a writer during her “sink­or­swim audition” at The Onion during her Fellowship, she said no, she actually thought she was really good when she started. She sounded a little indignant thinking back as she said, “they seemed to think I had Lennon­Dorn, 6

this massive and incredible transformation whereas I thought, ‘No, you guys just were close­minded and only started to recognize my value later.’” She laughed in spite of herself.

Jen seems to possess a quality that could be the difference between success and failure: she thinks she’s a good writer. Her belief that she is a good does not waiver in the face of critics, such as The Onion, or “The Late Show” where her ideas that she spends a couple of hours on each are more often discarded than used on the show. In fact, when asked what makes her or anyone a particularly good comedy writer, one of the skills she listed was professionalism in the face of having one’s ideas rejected. In other words, she doesn’t view having her ideas rejected as a question of her talent, but rather that this process of frequent rejection simply goes with the territory; this mindset is possibly the very quality and skill that has gotten her this far. This idea seems so simple, yet so many writers face crippling insecurity that drives them to not even submit their work because they’re afraid of what some writers deal with every day as a part of their work; pitching and having their ideas and scripts repeatedly rejected. In a way it’s kind of paradoxical that writers are so afraid to submit their work and have it rejected even by a low­ traffic online publication, when this exact process is such an integral part of some of the most top­notch writing jobs out there.

It’s unlikely that Jen was as good a writer her sophomore year of college when she got her first piece published as she is now, writing for The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. Yet the underlying thread throughout all of her career path is that it progressed due to her belief that she is a good writer. It’s so easy to see a writer’s relative talent as something that’s determined by the outside world; but is it, really? Or does that label have to be self­created? Then used to fuel more

Lennon­Dorn, 7 and more endeavors, which then lead to external recognition, and hopefully a steady paycheck. It seems that Jen really has found her dream job, and young too (she’s thirty). Interviewing her was a lesson in how far a writer can go with talent, consistent application, and iron confidence.