The Literary Life and How To Live It
by Sean Murphy
An Interview with Adrienne Miller
What's going on in Akron? Ohio, that is. First the Akron-bred Black Keys drop Rubber Factory, easily the best rock album of the year, and now Adrienne Miller, who until now would understandably be associated with the Big Apple because of her role as literary editor of Esquire, releases her debut novel, a sprawling, earnest and unwieldy homage of sorts to her hometown. And it's the real deal. The Coast of Akron has hit the streets like a set of Goodyears, already garnering reviews any novelist would run over a relative to receive: accolades from Dave Eggers and Joanna Scott, and The Village Voice which (accurately) hails it as "a big, brashly ambitious novel that does not deal in half-measures." It is equal parts encouraging and refreshing—as we lurch into a new century's literary landscape increasingly compartmentalized, fast-sales-oriented and fad obsessed—to watch a writer announce herself with a work that is substantial, intricate and occasionally messy—a work, in short, that is not unlike life.
Adrienne Miller was born in 1972 in Columbus, Ohio, and grew up around Akron, Ohio. As Esquire's literary editor (since 1997), Miller has published stories by Don DeLillo, Aleksandar Hemon, Arthur Miller, Tim O'Brien, George Saunders, and Elizabeth McCracken, among others. Under her literary stewardship, Esquire won the 2004 National Magazine Award for Fiction, as well as numerous Best American and O. Henry Awards.
Murphy: First and foremost, congratulations on the early and positive buzz for The Coast of Akron! It must be equal parts gratifying and terrifying—as perhaps only a handful of people could understand: well-known literary editor of highly regarded and historically important magazine now about to have her work reviewed and critiqued…How different (or similar) would you say your experience has been to any other writer hoping to break through?
Miller: Well, in terms of the actual writing of the book, my experience was absolutely no different from that of any other first-time author: I had a job, I had a life, and I had a book to write. There is no public expectation for anyone's first book -- there is an audience of precisely zero awaiting your arrival – and there was certainly no audience waiting for me. When I finished The Coast of Akron, after about five years of work, I had very little confidence – because it is such an idiosyncratic and personal novel -- that it would even find a publisher. My job seems to be both a help and a hindrance to the publication process. Unlike a lot of other first novelists, book reviewers might recognize my name, so I'm very aware that my job in itself seems to help the book get reviewed. However, I'm finding that the book is often reviewed in a much more skeptical, more jaundiced -- and sometimes less generous -- way than most "debut" novels are. I feel as if the bar is set much higher for me. Of course, I feel that I shouldn't be treated as if I'd skipped a grade. I mean, it's only my first novel! And believe me, I know that I, like any other first-time novelist, have a lot to learn. Also, my book isn't necessarily straightforward realistic fiction, and it's risky in a lot of ways, so I know that it won't suit everyone's tastes. But I have to be suspicious whenever the book is reviewed by a writer whose work I haven't, for whatever reason, been able to use for Esquire. I'm surprised by how often that has happened – the book being reviewed by someone I know (and wish I didn't). People warned me all along about this.
Murphy: Did you always know you wanted to write fiction? One on hand it would seem that being immersed in the writing of very talented authors would naturally impel—and enhance—one's creative endeavors; but it is easy to imagine how the sheer volume of words might be overwhelming or perhaps intimidating. How are you able to wear both hats with such an impressive degree of proficiency?
Miller: I know many novelists and short story writers who also teach, and I don't think it seems remarkable to anyone that they do both. My job as a fiction editor at a magazine isn't a whole lot different than a creative writing teacher's job – I read lots of manuscripts and make comments on them. When we accept a short story, I work on that piece at a very detailed level, as a teacher would in a creative writing workshop. So I don't really find an interest in teaching/editing and an interest in writing to be all that much at odds. It would be a much more interesting story if I had a job as an astronaut or a cop or something entirely unrelated to writing.
Murphy: When I used the word "messy" before in describing The Coast of Akron, it was intentional but not meant in a critical way; on the contrary, a bad novel can be—and often is—a mess, but to convey the messiness of contemporary life (in general) and the effort, illusion and obsessions your characters (in particular) are pushed and pulled by is not an inconsiderable achievement. Or put another way, sometimes messiness—certainly in art—has its own sort of beauty, and I think your novel admirably illuminates the methods to the madness, and vice versa, of these little people with such big hopes and hugely derailed dreams.
Miller: I'm not really a tidy writer, and the books I like the most are pretty untidy themselves. I was really trying to capture some of the feeling of what it's like to be alive right now – what life looks like, sounds like and feels like, and it's messy. I also attempted to write a book in which the reader feels about the characters the way we feel about real people. I wanted the characters to be maddening, irritating, and good – or capable of good -- like us. And just like real people, I wanted the characters' actions to sometimes make sense to us, and sometimes not. An example of this is Merit's weird, creepy affair with her stoner assistant Randy – you kind of understand the attraction, and you kind of don't. I mean, how many affairs – or couples, for that matter – do you know who make sense? Human beings' motivations are often quite muddled, confused and confusing. Tidy motivation doesn't exist in messy real life. We wouldn't spend so much time talking about other people if motivations were clear.
Murphy: Much of the action—and certainly the denouement—occurs in the mansion (one review described it as a "massive faux Tudor", which I think is perfect), named (and anytime anyone is wealthy, or weird enough to name their house, serious trouble usually festers not far beneath the fastidiously polished veneer) On Ne Peut Pas Vivre Seul—"One Cannot Live Alone." But it becomes increasingly clear that all of these characters do live alone, and are lonely.
Miller: I wanted to write about characters who were deeply alienated, characters who were desperately searching for a connection to other people, as we all are. I set out to write a novel that was, above and beyond everything else, sad…although I didn't really think the novel was all that sad until recently. (When I was writing it, some of the stuff, especially stuff involving Fergus, really cracked me up, and I mean audibly.) But a couple of months ago, when I was reading over the last set of proofs, I came pretty close to having a nervous breakdown. I literally couldn't look at the book anymore and remain semi sane. And I'm finding that now it's actually very difficult for me to have to read aloud from the book, because I find a lot of it truly upsetting. The humor in the book now strikes me as a desperate gallows humor, a laugh before dying, like Rita Lydig's famous last words (while being fanned on her deathbed), "Is it a Spanish fan?" (And then she died.) Whatever humor exists in the book is used by the characters to mask a very deep, and very real, psychic pain. That's why the laughs are so uncomfortable. I should also say that if a line, a moment, a scene, was making me uncomfortable to write, then I knew I was on to something. I had to follow that strain of discomfort.
Murphy: With a cast of characters that includes a wealthy fraud of an artist, a quietly desperate housewife and her compulsive, priggish husband, a delusional gay bon-vivant wannabe who is both home wrecker and host, as well as an alcoholic who turns out to be an unrecognized genius—mostly by her own machinations, one is obligated to at least inquire about your inspirations!
Miller: Oh boy, I was afraid you were going to ask this. This book is not my adorable little memoir about my adorable time in New York, and I promise you that there are very few autobiographical elements in it -- I don't have a crazy Uncle Fergus, or any Fergus-equivalent in my life, thank God. But I did start with the name "Fergus" – several years ago, in London, I heard of someone with that name; I wrote that name down, and I let that name guide me. As cheesy and as mystical as this sounds, I let all my characters tell me who they were. I started with the names, then the voices followed, then the characters. I really didn't have any guiding principle during the writing of this book other than: follow it if it's working; get rid of it if it's not. Fergus's voice was probably inspired, in part, by the last couple of lines of Diana Vreeland's memoir D.V., a really outrageous and insane piece of work, and one of my true favorites. The lines are: "Don't ask me her other names. People called Pink don't have other names." Very few of the other people whom I've recited these lines to – and there are many such people -- seem to think they're as great as I do, by the way. So Fergus and Pink are probably how it all started. I also knew that I wanted to write about a young woman, and wanted her voice to be a slangy, colloquial third-person – I wanted her to sound like a midwestern woman around my own age. I wanted to have a statistician character, because I happen to like statisticians (a familial weakness), and I thought it was time for one to get his due in a novel. Lowell exists because I initially thought he and his voice were funny (I no longer think either of these things). I wanted to write a book in which much of the information is traded through gossip (because that's how the world works, as far as I can tell), but I didn't set out to write a sprawling family drama – after about two years of work I had these three very distinct and (at least to me) addictive voices, but I didn't know how they fit together. So I just stuck them all in one house and made them into a family. I wouldn't recommend this formless way of writing to anyone. The writers who start with a rigid outline seem much saner to me, and much more productive…although I certainly don't understand them.
Murphy: How difficult is it for a writer to appear in Esquire? How many submissions will you typically see in a year? Presumably you've compared notes—so to speak—with other literary editors…what is the percentage of quality vs. quantity in terms of unsolicited stories the top tier publications receive?
Miller: This is a difficult question to answer, because not only am I looking for good stories, but I'm looking for good stories that are appropriate for Esquire. Often I'll have to reluctantly pass on a really great story – a story that I, as a civilian reader, love -- because it doesn't match the magazine's style or sensibility. So, that is to say that I'm not only reading for quality, but also for appropriateness. During the year, there seem to be busy submission periods, and less-busy submission periods: during the busy months, we can receive a thousand or so stories; during less busy months, we can see a hundred. Most of the stories I read are quite skillfully done, but, by and large, most seem to lack a certain…what? Zest? Call it tension, drama, a fire in the belly. It's what separates all the merely good stories from the really exceptional ones. When a piece of fiction – or any kind of art -- works, you can feel it viscerally. But I don't need to tell anyone that. We all know what we like, and how what we like makes us feel.
Murphy: What were the circumstances that led you to your position at Esquire? Did you know you wanted to write during and immediately after college but reckoned a "day job" was unavoidable? Did you purposefully avoid graduate school and the MFA scene?
Miller: It so happens that I actually was intending on getting an MFA in fiction, and, by the second semester of my senior year in college, I had even decided on a grad school. I knew I wanted to write, but had no clue how else to make that happen other than the MFA track. The spring before my college graduation, I remember enrolling (as I recall, they wanted a check to hold my place), but, through a professor of mine, I found out about a job opening as an editorial assistant at GQ. I called the editor in question at GQ – after a shot of Maker's Mark -- and for whatever reason, he offered me the job. I'm a horribly pragmatic person – it's one of my least-attractive characteristics – and I knew that I'd probably never have another chance to work at a national magazine (the whole set-up seemed impossibility glamorous to me at the time), so I took the job. And, for my first years in New York, I supported myself as an assistant at a glossy magazine, making no money, often wondering why I was doing it at all, living in a studio apartment so tiny that its kitchen was nothing more than a hot-plate, subsisting on pre-sliced, semi seedless deli watermelon and Annie's macaroni (the brand with the rabbit on the box, prepared on that much-used hot-plate). A few years were spent like this, then, long story short, the job as literary editor at Esquire opened up. I interviewed for this position many times, and wrote a few passionate letters that laid out all the reasons why I, naturally must be hired as literary editor. Much to my astonishment, I got the job. I freely admit that luck and timing have both played important parts in my editorial career, but, I must say that luck hasn't been so much a factor in my writing life. In fact, my professional (meaning: editorial) luck has meant a fair amount of frustration in my writing life. Having a job you like is about the worst bit of luck a fiction writer can have.
Murphy: You've commented that working closely with other writers has helped and not hindered your own creative process. Do you think your professional experience accelerated or impeded your own path to publication? For instance, I remember being told repeatedly back in college workshops that the best (and perhaps only) way to learn to write good fiction is to read good fiction. Then, after enough emulation and hard work and the years of awful, unworthy writing one needs to get out of one's system, perhaps—at some point if you are lucky and ambitious enough—a distinctive voice inevitably emerges. I tend to buy this theory. What about you?
Miller: If I hadn't been making my living as an editor for these last years, I would have probably found a way to make a go of it as a writer. That means I probably would have published a novel or two by this point. I'm not saying that the novel or two would have been any good, in fact, probably just the opposite. And, yes, I definitely do think that reading and evaluating fiction for the last decade or so has made me a much better writer than I otherwise would have been, chiefly because being a professional reader means that I try to read my own stuff with the same dispassionate judgment with which I have to read other people's stuff. I'm not saying I can always read my own writing with a kind of coldly critical eye – who can? -- but working as an editor has at least trained me to try.
Murphy: Several of the writers interviewed for this series teach fiction at the college level. While not in the classroom, you undoubtedly see more manuscripts in any given month than most professors receive in five years. How do you feel about the quality of fiction in the 21st century: What positive trends have you noticed? What awful ones? Is it true to presume that regardless of genre or generation, good writing will ultimately rise above the fads and formulas?
Miller: I'm really quite resolutely unfaddish in my literary taste; I hate faddishness of any kind, in literature, art, fashion, everything. It seems to me that an author must write about one thing: life. That's it. Culture changes, but life –and human beings – do not. I'm really a traditionalist in my tastes, I guess. Character and language: what else is there? Other readers have other values, but those are mine.
Murphy: MFA or No-MFA? Any comments or opinions for the folks who are adamant (pro OR con) about the value of MFA programs? I've read some highly regarded book reviewers (Jonathan Yardley from The Washington Post leaps immediately to mind) who comment frequently on what they feel are the deleterious effects of "workshop" training on contemporary fiction. Again, as someone who has been very much on the front-lines of what ostensibly passes as the "best and brightest" short fiction, do you have any opinions one way or the other?
Miller: Writing workshops seem to be valuable mainly because they provide the great gift of time to writers. Whenever someone asks for career advice from me – "I got into grad school. Should I go?" – I'll usually advise them to go, especially if the program gives them money. And they'll have a book-length manuscript at the end of their two years. But I also think writers should be forewarned that grad school won't really help them get their book published later, or help them get a job (although a job is probably not what any MFA grad really wants). But what they will have is a book. And that's very cool. That's all that matters, really.
Murphy: If you had to say which writer influenced you most, and which book, what would they be? Any other notable influences, artistic or otherwise?
Miller: Many of my artistic influences have been musical. I have obsessions with both Cole Porter (one of whose songs plays a cameo in my book) and Mozart. Oh, and I loved the Smiths and The Legendary Pink Dots, and lots of other arty-type bands that would take an hour to list. I really wanted to be a musician more than anything else, but a conspicuous lack of discipline, and talent, kept me from pursuing that dream. In college, I started out as a poet, so, initially; it was poetry that melted me into a puddle. I can't really say what or who influenced the book – all writers probably want to feel that they are influenceless – but I can say that early literary ardors include Martin Amis (London Fields, which I read when I was eighteen, made me decide to become a writer), Gore Vidal, M.F.K. Fisher, and – I know this is a weird one, and from out of left field -- Quentin Crisp. (One of the book's most probing and perceptive critics noticed a Quentin Crisp connection, which I was amazed, and a little frightened, by.) I should add that I do recognize that my early influences were all supreme stylists; style was, when I was extremely young and impressionable, the literary virtue I most prized. But my literary taste has, I think and hope, become a lot more expansive than it was then. (Oh, and I love Flannery O'Connor, beyond measure.)
Murphy: Lastly: any advice for aspiring writers?
Miller: Apply seat to chair. Concentrate. Apply seat to chair. Concentrate. Repeat daily, for the rest of your life.
Showing posts with label The Literary Life and How To Live It. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Literary Life and How To Live It. Show all posts
Sunday, February 24, 2008
An Interview with Carolyn See
The Literary Life and How To Live It
by Sean Murphy
An Interview with Carolyn See
Carolyn See is the author of several novels, including The Handyman, Dreaming," Making History, Golden Days, Rhine Maidens, Blue Money, The Rest is Done with Mirrors, and Mothers Daughters. She is a book reviewer for The Washington Post and is on the board of PEN Center USA West. She has a Ph.D. in American literature from UCLA, where she is an adjunct professor of English. Her awards include the prestigious Robert Kirsch Body of Work Award (1993) and a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction. She currently lives in California. Lucky person!
There are certain writers you know without ever meeting them. It's not necessarily because they articulate their vision and expose themselves in their works (though that certainly helps), but more often because the artists who really grapple with-and are invariably in touch with-life are the sorts of artists that audiences fall in love with. It is easy to love Carolyn See, whether you are a fan of her fiction, or her weekly book reviews in The Washington Post, or her non-fiction, or if you are lucky enough to be one of her students. She is, in short, the type of writer that you'd die to have a drink with, so that you might pick her brain, hear her opinions, and possibly glean a tiny bit of insight from her teeming mind regarding how to write, and more importantly, how to live. Fortunately for all the folks who would kill to meet her, especially those who have read her work, and most especially everyone else who should read it, she has done every aspiring artist a favor by making her wisdom easily available in what will certainly be considered one of the most indispensable books about writing, "Making A Literary Life."
Murphy: Unlike most books that talk about the author's "process"--which invariably, and necessarily, often apply only to said author's acumen and are therefore neither applicable nor particularly encouraging--you talk about the small stuff, the less romantic (i.e., less clichéd) nuts and bolts of the million little things that make up a writer's world, and the effort required to produce real work. How much of this successful presentation of "Making A Literary Life" the result of dissatisfaction with other books you've read (or heard about) by writers or is it safe to say you *had* to write one of your own?
See: I absolutely love Annie Lamott's "Bird by Bird," of course. But outside of that marvelous chapter when she says your life won't "change" when you publish, I missed stuff about how she managed to actually make a living -- I'm not even sure those are the right words --as a writer. I think many writers -- although they talk about it to each other all the time in kind of an aimless way -- don't really KNOW why or how they made it as a writer; they harbor the dreadful thought that it may be some peculiar fluke. (Or they take the tiresome attitude that they made it because they're GENIUSES, and so the common person need not even apply.) The teachers who repeat how hard it is are telling the truth. They experience it as hard because it's hard for them to do it.
I have the disconcerting experience of having come to all this from the outside, of having had to learn a lot of this stuff from scratch, and then, luckily, having had a fair amount of pleasant moments and some success. MLL is like a beginning cookbook. It only attempts to talk about the basics.
Oddly enough, except for "Bird by Bird" I don't like books on writing very much. For instance, E.M. Forster is probably my favorite writer, but I find "Aspects of the Novel" fairly insufferable. Writers can get awfully pompous when they talk about their craft.
Murphy: Put another way, you talk about the "dirty work" involved in creating a beautiful product. Any workshop professor or self-help screed can talk about how much toil and trouble writing transcendent work requires, but you do your students/readers a real service by not only acknowledging the *work* involved, but by taking the time to offer suggestions and more than a handful of tricks from your own hat.
See: I don't think of it as "dirty work." I do think that writing -- and maybe all activities we're crazy about and committed to -- offers up an opportunity to experience the entire human condition. There's the inspiration when you're doing something you're absolutely crazy about and the words seem like honey to you, and the despair when they don't. There's the rage when you get rejected. The revenge, which very often, you get to indulge in. There's the calming activity of reading an eleventh draft, and there, you find a word that's out of place. There's the nerve it takes to go up to someone at a party and say, "I'm a fan!" There's the fun of doing your taxes, seeing the money you made or didn't. The envy when you think someone else is getting more attention that he or she deserves. The charity when you buy a book from a writer in trouble. Mainly, OF COURSE, the beauty of the vision when it comes to you. But it's about a lot more, and less, than the vision.
Murphy: You do a marvelous job of demystifying the "aura" of the artist. It could be said with only a fraction of facetiousness that you are not only a writer's writer, but also a writer-who-reads-writers-who-write-about-writing's-writer! In terms of the advice you offer, I think you hit upon the all-important balance that any sort of artistic endeavor demands, and at once you are able to make the act of writing accessible and real, but also reveal the underlying, redemptory enigma: by doing the work, and having FUN doing it, you are almost inexorably making your life more "artistic". In this sense, only good things can come of this.
See: Today, and this is probably about a week before war breaks out, I spent the afternoon at my women's group (I mention it at the end of MLL). We've been meeting for eight years. We're writers and artists and psychologists and television people. There's a woman who makes art objects, "aterns," from the ashes of folks who have been cremated. Very smart, kind and stylish women! We eat great food and drink a lot of wine and laugh ourselves sick and sometimes cry, and talk about our lives.
So today we talked about Rome, autism, a GORGEOUS man named Dean, a girl who got her first violin, a persistent cough, obsessive compulsive behavior, more about that gorgeous Dean, how science is making blind men see, and how the UCLA Medical is trying to screw us. Then, back to Dean. Hugs and kisses all around. Laughing and more laughing. In the kitchen, toward the end, we mentioned how we hadn't talked once about the war, the horror, the sorrow the sadness. It was all raspberries and wit and silliness and lust and love, and ART, because that's what we MAKE, and Mr. Rumsfeld just had to find somebody else to scare. At least for this one afternoon.
Murphy: One of the pieces of advice you give is to write one thousand words a day, five days a week for the rest of your life. It's hard to imagine too many folks (particularly folks who have made some sort of attempt at serious fiction) offering any resistance to this. On the other hand, you advocate the regular practice of composing "charming notes" to writers, editors and/or agents. What would you say to people who, even after reading your book, resist this?
See: "A thousand words a day, and one charming note, five days a week, for the rest of your life." The "18 minute chili" version of the writer's life I mention in MLL. First, the notion is figurative. It's what we OUGHT to do, not necessarily what we always do... It varies, with the exigencies of life. And there are other pieces of "advice" in MLL that don't get nearly the attention that the '''charming notes" do, for instances, building a mailing list, starting a savings account for when your first book comes out, planning that first trip to New York hour by hour, etc. It's as though people read about the "charming notes" and just STOP. Then they argue about whether or not they can do it. I could mention that another way to address the problem of not knowing anyone in the writing/publishing world is to move to New York, intern at a publishing house, live in squalor, and get to know everyone without ever having to lick a stamp.
Murphy: If you could succinctly summarize the trajectory (thus far!) of your writing life, how different is it from what you imagined, as an earnest but unpublished author? How is it better? Worse? What things (possibly not mentioned in the book) would you have changed?
See: What I imagined about a literary career were conditioned by my own innocence and the cultural imperatives of the moment in time when I was twenty or so. All I could really look to as a woman -- and I didn't even really think of it that way -- was Virginia Wolfe and Kay Boyle. Or E.M Forster or Nathanael West. Or, I had the example of my hard drinking, charming, womanizing dad, who was a "failed" writer until he turned 69. So I had hazy fantasies of tea parties and T.S Elliot, and afternoons in Paris cafes -- the usual stuff.
Then I became obsessed with creating the perfect literary life here in LA, and writing the life that I saw around me, and writing about it again. And again. The interesting thing is that the world allowed me to do it. That is, I've been able to publish all my adult life, and the rewards have been unexpected. At an evening when I was talking about MLL, a woman came up to me and said, "Golden Days helped me to live through the end of the world." I said thanks, and she said, "No, I mean, I had a paperback with me when I was in Burundi when the Hutu and the Tutsi were slaughtering each other, and Golden Days gave me hope." So that was better than ten thousand E.M. Forsters coming to tea ...
Murphy: What is a stronger enemy of writing: fear or rejection? Or are both of these things ultimately some of the primary motivations?
See: The strongest enemy of writing, in my opinion, is neither fear nor rejection but the voice inside us who cries WHO CARES? And I think the most important thing is that when we write we have to be the one who cares. Rejection is awful but not fatal. Or, it's fatal but not awful.
Murphy: MFA or No-MFA? Any comments or opinions for the folks who are adamant (pro OR con) about the value of MFA programs?
See: It depends what you want from life, where you live, whether you can afford it, what kind of person you are. From my own personal bias, I'd say the dynamic is all wrong: People should be paying YOU to write, not vice versa. And I hate to think of having to sit in a classroom to "learn" how to write. Other people swear by the process, though.
I do think that if you're not at Columbia, NYU, Iowa or maybe Irvine, you're wasting time and money. (Unless you just don't want to be lonely and don't have a better place to spend your time. There's nothing wrong with that...That's why I got my Ph.D.) Murphy: As a teacher, what are some of the biggest mistakes students make? What are some strategies you've seen (from students and/or your own experience) that have been successful? *Feel free to elaborate on examples you list in your book!*
See: As far as I can see, the biggest mistake students make is to ignore the facts of their own lives. They love to write about places they've never been, people they've never met, things they've never even gone through -- through the eyes of an 83 year old mentally ill Turkish person, for instance. That's not a mistake exactly, but it's misguided. Immensely misguided.
Murphy: Again, as a teacher, if you had to say: has the writing of your students gotten better over time? Worse? The same? What positive trends have you noticed? What awful ones? Is it true to presume that regardless of genre or generation, good writing (and good writers) tend to find their way?
See: I know doomsayers are forever saying that students now are uncouth and unlettered and stupid and dumb and WHATEVER, but I don't buy it. People are just about as smart or dopey now as they ever were. My late great life partner, John Espey, used to love to tell a story that dated from the thirties when he was a very young English professor: One of his colleagues came in to the office in a tizzy, saying about some student that he "didn't know a gerund from a gerundive!" John kept mum, and didn't mention that he didn't either...
Murphy: If you had to say which writer influenced you most, and which book, what would they be? Any other notable influences, artistic or otherwise?
See: I began reading E.M.Forster in my early twenties, and because I came from a very raggedy-ass childhood, I was impressed with his calm, sometimes impassioned insistence that there WAS a standard of good behavior in the world, that there were definitely decent people and jerks, and that one has the choice to at least strive to be a decent person. I didn't know about his social class when I first read his books, or his gender preference. But I saw his hatred of muddle and bullies and even his hatred of housekeeping. I saw his love of books and flowers and friends, and that you could build lives around these things. So he was my hero then, and is, to a great extent, even now.
For the past four or five years I've listened to nothing except the complete works of Elmore Leonard in my car. He's saved my life; literally, when I was suicidal, emotionally, when I was bone-dead, spiritually, when I was brokenhearted. The man is a genius. His worlds are perfect, and perfectly controlled. There's no smarter storyteller writing right now. His dialogue is like diamonds. (I'm just listening to "Swag" right now as two armed robbers bicker like an old married couple. It's a healing experience.)
Murphy: Are there any other books on writing that you'd recommend? Any writers you learned to emulate or imitate?
See: Of course, Anne Lamott's wonderful book is terrific. And I'm very fond of Julia Cameron's "The Artist's Way." And Terry Brooks' new "Sometimes the Magic Works" is swell. But I think I've structured my own writing life around how Virginia Wolfe did hers. Write in the morning (1,000 words), do something concrete in the literary life in the afternoon...
Make sure your own life is worth recording in some way...
Murphy: How has the task of reviewing other books influenced or affected the way you write? The way you read? The way you respond to criticism?
See: Of course, as a reviewer, when I'm writing a novel, I hear the bad review of it trilling merrily along in my head as I write. (But that could just as easily be my mother's voice.) As a novelist, I think I'm 100 per cent kinder to people I'm reviewing than many others, since I have a real idea of how much work and yearning goes into the writing of any book, even a bad one. But the REAL thing I've learned as a reviewer is that in the MOST PROFOUND SENSE reviews don't matter. People misread them, forget the name of the book and the author, couldn't care less, remember a good review and think it was a bad review and vice versa. It's another example of the solipsism of the literary life. We're under the delusion that somebody gives a shit. Somebody, profoundly, doesn't.
Murphy: Toward the end of the book you comment that delusion "*has* to be in the mix for us to get anything done at all", and on the same page reiterate that "(writing) is a marriage". In other words, as always, a balance between inspiration and dedication has to be sought. But without that initial ambition, or arrogance, most of us might never venture onto the daunting white page, no?
See: Everyone is delusional, all the time. For one thing, each of us thinks we're the center of the universe, whether we're writers or not. Golfers think the world is golf. Rumsfeld thinks the world is bombs. The pope thinks the world is the Catholic Church, presumably. I can't help but think the world is literary fiction, but WHY NOT? I have a dear friend, an activist cab driver, who thinks the whole current war is actually a conspiracy of the big cab companies to take over the little cab companies.
by Sean Murphy
An Interview with Carolyn See
Carolyn See is the author of several novels, including The Handyman, Dreaming," Making History, Golden Days, Rhine Maidens, Blue Money, The Rest is Done with Mirrors, and Mothers Daughters. She is a book reviewer for The Washington Post and is on the board of PEN Center USA West. She has a Ph.D. in American literature from UCLA, where she is an adjunct professor of English. Her awards include the prestigious Robert Kirsch Body of Work Award (1993) and a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction. She currently lives in California. Lucky person!
There are certain writers you know without ever meeting them. It's not necessarily because they articulate their vision and expose themselves in their works (though that certainly helps), but more often because the artists who really grapple with-and are invariably in touch with-life are the sorts of artists that audiences fall in love with. It is easy to love Carolyn See, whether you are a fan of her fiction, or her weekly book reviews in The Washington Post, or her non-fiction, or if you are lucky enough to be one of her students. She is, in short, the type of writer that you'd die to have a drink with, so that you might pick her brain, hear her opinions, and possibly glean a tiny bit of insight from her teeming mind regarding how to write, and more importantly, how to live. Fortunately for all the folks who would kill to meet her, especially those who have read her work, and most especially everyone else who should read it, she has done every aspiring artist a favor by making her wisdom easily available in what will certainly be considered one of the most indispensable books about writing, "Making A Literary Life."
Murphy: Unlike most books that talk about the author's "process"--which invariably, and necessarily, often apply only to said author's acumen and are therefore neither applicable nor particularly encouraging--you talk about the small stuff, the less romantic (i.e., less clichéd) nuts and bolts of the million little things that make up a writer's world, and the effort required to produce real work. How much of this successful presentation of "Making A Literary Life" the result of dissatisfaction with other books you've read (or heard about) by writers or is it safe to say you *had* to write one of your own?
See: I absolutely love Annie Lamott's "Bird by Bird," of course. But outside of that marvelous chapter when she says your life won't "change" when you publish, I missed stuff about how she managed to actually make a living -- I'm not even sure those are the right words --as a writer. I think many writers -- although they talk about it to each other all the time in kind of an aimless way -- don't really KNOW why or how they made it as a writer; they harbor the dreadful thought that it may be some peculiar fluke. (Or they take the tiresome attitude that they made it because they're GENIUSES, and so the common person need not even apply.) The teachers who repeat how hard it is are telling the truth. They experience it as hard because it's hard for them to do it.
I have the disconcerting experience of having come to all this from the outside, of having had to learn a lot of this stuff from scratch, and then, luckily, having had a fair amount of pleasant moments and some success. MLL is like a beginning cookbook. It only attempts to talk about the basics.
Oddly enough, except for "Bird by Bird" I don't like books on writing very much. For instance, E.M. Forster is probably my favorite writer, but I find "Aspects of the Novel" fairly insufferable. Writers can get awfully pompous when they talk about their craft.
Murphy: Put another way, you talk about the "dirty work" involved in creating a beautiful product. Any workshop professor or self-help screed can talk about how much toil and trouble writing transcendent work requires, but you do your students/readers a real service by not only acknowledging the *work* involved, but by taking the time to offer suggestions and more than a handful of tricks from your own hat.
See: I don't think of it as "dirty work." I do think that writing -- and maybe all activities we're crazy about and committed to -- offers up an opportunity to experience the entire human condition. There's the inspiration when you're doing something you're absolutely crazy about and the words seem like honey to you, and the despair when they don't. There's the rage when you get rejected. The revenge, which very often, you get to indulge in. There's the calming activity of reading an eleventh draft, and there, you find a word that's out of place. There's the nerve it takes to go up to someone at a party and say, "I'm a fan!" There's the fun of doing your taxes, seeing the money you made or didn't. The envy when you think someone else is getting more attention that he or she deserves. The charity when you buy a book from a writer in trouble. Mainly, OF COURSE, the beauty of the vision when it comes to you. But it's about a lot more, and less, than the vision.
Murphy: You do a marvelous job of demystifying the "aura" of the artist. It could be said with only a fraction of facetiousness that you are not only a writer's writer, but also a writer-who-reads-writers-who-write-about-writing's-writer! In terms of the advice you offer, I think you hit upon the all-important balance that any sort of artistic endeavor demands, and at once you are able to make the act of writing accessible and real, but also reveal the underlying, redemptory enigma: by doing the work, and having FUN doing it, you are almost inexorably making your life more "artistic". In this sense, only good things can come of this.
See: Today, and this is probably about a week before war breaks out, I spent the afternoon at my women's group (I mention it at the end of MLL). We've been meeting for eight years. We're writers and artists and psychologists and television people. There's a woman who makes art objects, "aterns," from the ashes of folks who have been cremated. Very smart, kind and stylish women! We eat great food and drink a lot of wine and laugh ourselves sick and sometimes cry, and talk about our lives.
So today we talked about Rome, autism, a GORGEOUS man named Dean, a girl who got her first violin, a persistent cough, obsessive compulsive behavior, more about that gorgeous Dean, how science is making blind men see, and how the UCLA Medical is trying to screw us. Then, back to Dean. Hugs and kisses all around. Laughing and more laughing. In the kitchen, toward the end, we mentioned how we hadn't talked once about the war, the horror, the sorrow the sadness. It was all raspberries and wit and silliness and lust and love, and ART, because that's what we MAKE, and Mr. Rumsfeld just had to find somebody else to scare. At least for this one afternoon.
Murphy: One of the pieces of advice you give is to write one thousand words a day, five days a week for the rest of your life. It's hard to imagine too many folks (particularly folks who have made some sort of attempt at serious fiction) offering any resistance to this. On the other hand, you advocate the regular practice of composing "charming notes" to writers, editors and/or agents. What would you say to people who, even after reading your book, resist this?
See: "A thousand words a day, and one charming note, five days a week, for the rest of your life." The "18 minute chili" version of the writer's life I mention in MLL. First, the notion is figurative. It's what we OUGHT to do, not necessarily what we always do... It varies, with the exigencies of life. And there are other pieces of "advice" in MLL that don't get nearly the attention that the '''charming notes" do, for instances, building a mailing list, starting a savings account for when your first book comes out, planning that first trip to New York hour by hour, etc. It's as though people read about the "charming notes" and just STOP. Then they argue about whether or not they can do it. I could mention that another way to address the problem of not knowing anyone in the writing/publishing world is to move to New York, intern at a publishing house, live in squalor, and get to know everyone without ever having to lick a stamp.
Murphy: If you could succinctly summarize the trajectory (thus far!) of your writing life, how different is it from what you imagined, as an earnest but unpublished author? How is it better? Worse? What things (possibly not mentioned in the book) would you have changed?
See: What I imagined about a literary career were conditioned by my own innocence and the cultural imperatives of the moment in time when I was twenty or so. All I could really look to as a woman -- and I didn't even really think of it that way -- was Virginia Wolfe and Kay Boyle. Or E.M Forster or Nathanael West. Or, I had the example of my hard drinking, charming, womanizing dad, who was a "failed" writer until he turned 69. So I had hazy fantasies of tea parties and T.S Elliot, and afternoons in Paris cafes -- the usual stuff.
Then I became obsessed with creating the perfect literary life here in LA, and writing the life that I saw around me, and writing about it again. And again. The interesting thing is that the world allowed me to do it. That is, I've been able to publish all my adult life, and the rewards have been unexpected. At an evening when I was talking about MLL, a woman came up to me and said, "Golden Days helped me to live through the end of the world." I said thanks, and she said, "No, I mean, I had a paperback with me when I was in Burundi when the Hutu and the Tutsi were slaughtering each other, and Golden Days gave me hope." So that was better than ten thousand E.M. Forsters coming to tea ...
Murphy: What is a stronger enemy of writing: fear or rejection? Or are both of these things ultimately some of the primary motivations?
See: The strongest enemy of writing, in my opinion, is neither fear nor rejection but the voice inside us who cries WHO CARES? And I think the most important thing is that when we write we have to be the one who cares. Rejection is awful but not fatal. Or, it's fatal but not awful.
Murphy: MFA or No-MFA? Any comments or opinions for the folks who are adamant (pro OR con) about the value of MFA programs?
See: It depends what you want from life, where you live, whether you can afford it, what kind of person you are. From my own personal bias, I'd say the dynamic is all wrong: People should be paying YOU to write, not vice versa. And I hate to think of having to sit in a classroom to "learn" how to write. Other people swear by the process, though.
I do think that if you're not at Columbia, NYU, Iowa or maybe Irvine, you're wasting time and money. (Unless you just don't want to be lonely and don't have a better place to spend your time. There's nothing wrong with that...That's why I got my Ph.D.) Murphy: As a teacher, what are some of the biggest mistakes students make? What are some strategies you've seen (from students and/or your own experience) that have been successful? *Feel free to elaborate on examples you list in your book!*
See: As far as I can see, the biggest mistake students make is to ignore the facts of their own lives. They love to write about places they've never been, people they've never met, things they've never even gone through -- through the eyes of an 83 year old mentally ill Turkish person, for instance. That's not a mistake exactly, but it's misguided. Immensely misguided.
Murphy: Again, as a teacher, if you had to say: has the writing of your students gotten better over time? Worse? The same? What positive trends have you noticed? What awful ones? Is it true to presume that regardless of genre or generation, good writing (and good writers) tend to find their way?
See: I know doomsayers are forever saying that students now are uncouth and unlettered and stupid and dumb and WHATEVER, but I don't buy it. People are just about as smart or dopey now as they ever were. My late great life partner, John Espey, used to love to tell a story that dated from the thirties when he was a very young English professor: One of his colleagues came in to the office in a tizzy, saying about some student that he "didn't know a gerund from a gerundive!" John kept mum, and didn't mention that he didn't either...
Murphy: If you had to say which writer influenced you most, and which book, what would they be? Any other notable influences, artistic or otherwise?
See: I began reading E.M.Forster in my early twenties, and because I came from a very raggedy-ass childhood, I was impressed with his calm, sometimes impassioned insistence that there WAS a standard of good behavior in the world, that there were definitely decent people and jerks, and that one has the choice to at least strive to be a decent person. I didn't know about his social class when I first read his books, or his gender preference. But I saw his hatred of muddle and bullies and even his hatred of housekeeping. I saw his love of books and flowers and friends, and that you could build lives around these things. So he was my hero then, and is, to a great extent, even now.
For the past four or five years I've listened to nothing except the complete works of Elmore Leonard in my car. He's saved my life; literally, when I was suicidal, emotionally, when I was bone-dead, spiritually, when I was brokenhearted. The man is a genius. His worlds are perfect, and perfectly controlled. There's no smarter storyteller writing right now. His dialogue is like diamonds. (I'm just listening to "Swag" right now as two armed robbers bicker like an old married couple. It's a healing experience.)
Murphy: Are there any other books on writing that you'd recommend? Any writers you learned to emulate or imitate?
See: Of course, Anne Lamott's wonderful book is terrific. And I'm very fond of Julia Cameron's "The Artist's Way." And Terry Brooks' new "Sometimes the Magic Works" is swell. But I think I've structured my own writing life around how Virginia Wolfe did hers. Write in the morning (1,000 words), do something concrete in the literary life in the afternoon...
Make sure your own life is worth recording in some way...
Murphy: How has the task of reviewing other books influenced or affected the way you write? The way you read? The way you respond to criticism?
See: Of course, as a reviewer, when I'm writing a novel, I hear the bad review of it trilling merrily along in my head as I write. (But that could just as easily be my mother's voice.) As a novelist, I think I'm 100 per cent kinder to people I'm reviewing than many others, since I have a real idea of how much work and yearning goes into the writing of any book, even a bad one. But the REAL thing I've learned as a reviewer is that in the MOST PROFOUND SENSE reviews don't matter. People misread them, forget the name of the book and the author, couldn't care less, remember a good review and think it was a bad review and vice versa. It's another example of the solipsism of the literary life. We're under the delusion that somebody gives a shit. Somebody, profoundly, doesn't.
Murphy: Toward the end of the book you comment that delusion "*has* to be in the mix for us to get anything done at all", and on the same page reiterate that "(writing) is a marriage". In other words, as always, a balance between inspiration and dedication has to be sought. But without that initial ambition, or arrogance, most of us might never venture onto the daunting white page, no?
See: Everyone is delusional, all the time. For one thing, each of us thinks we're the center of the universe, whether we're writers or not. Golfers think the world is golf. Rumsfeld thinks the world is bombs. The pope thinks the world is the Catholic Church, presumably. I can't help but think the world is literary fiction, but WHY NOT? I have a dear friend, an activist cab driver, who thinks the whole current war is actually a conspiracy of the big cab companies to take over the little cab companies.
The Literary Life and How To Live It
The Literary Life and How To Live It
by Sean Murphy
An Interview with Charles Salzberg
This series is honored to have an opportunity to speak with a true Renaissance man--and virtual embodiment of the literary life--writer and editor Charles Salzberg. A typical day for Charles involves reading the work of his students and evaluating novel and short fiction manuscripts, and all while trying to find time for his own work. Not unlike most dedicated writers, he finds that he is always writing, even when he isn't actually writing. Living and working in New York City obliges one to multi-task, mentally as well as physically, and Charles has found that some of his best ideas come to him when he is far away from the computer.
After graduating from Syracuse University with a degree in English, Charles broke into the world of magazine writing: New York Magazine, Esquire, New York, GQ, and a variety of others. This experience eventually led to books, the most recent ghostwritten book making the NYT bestseller list. Charles has been a Visiting Professor of magazine writing at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, and currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence, The New York Writers Workshop, and the Writer's Voice. Despite his considerable experience and expertise in the world of non-fiction, fiction remains his true love, and he has a novel under consideration by M. Evans.
Murphy: Charles, among many other things, you've worked as a teacher and have been involved in more than a few successful writing workshops. How that has influenced your writing, helped it or hindered it?
Salzberg: Overall, it's helped my own writing. Seeing what works and doesn't work with other writers, no matter how good or how experienced, can't help but make you a better writer. You learn to take things apart, and if you do that and then try to put them back together, you learn how things really work. Now this doesn't necessarily mean you can always do that, but thinking about it is good nevertheless. Also, it's inspiring to deal with other writers and see them grow. I never fail to come home from a class energized, though that doesn't necessarily mean I sit down and write. In fact, I'll do just about anything to avoid writing-but I think that just goes with the territory.
Murphy: As a teacher, if you had to say: has the writing of your students gotten better over time? Worse? The same? What are the most common mistakes you see young writers making?
Salzberg: I have people who take classes with me over and over and I'm pleased to say that almost all of them have improved. This isn't necessarily because I'm a great or even good teacher, it's because they work at improving. They listen to what the others in the class say, weigh the suggestions, which means they're thinking about writing, and then try to make those suggestions work in their own work. And sometimes, you can learn more critiquing someone else's work than you can when your work is critiqued-which is what I meant by improving my own writing.
I'm also fortunate in that several of my students have gone on to publish books or magazine articles. For instance, Lauren Weisberger (The Devil Wears Prada) started her book in my classes, though it wasn't a book and it wasn't fiction at first. She just came in and started writing these fascinating essays about working in the magazine world. But there are lots of others who are publishing now, sometimes more than I am, which is very rewarding.
The most common mistake, by far, is telling not showing. Another is people who can't organize a thought, which means they can't organize a sentence or a paragraph or a page. And a third is people who think writing means they have to learn another language. Nope. I think some of the best advice I've ever seen is: Write the way you speak, but on your best day, not your worst.
Murphy: As an editor, you evaluate novel manuscripts for Algonkian, and others. Can you tell us something about the evaluation process? What do you look for? Is your intent to determine what is preventing the ms from being a publishable product?
Salzberg: It's not easy to talk about the evaluation process, because it changes with each manuscript I receive. I can tell you how I go about it, though. The first thing I do is note the competency of the writing. No matter how good a story might be, if the writer can't tell it well, it's not going to travel. Conversely, if the writing is terrific, the story sometimes matters less. Next, I look at the book as a whole--does the story hold together? Is it interesting? Is the voice compelling? Are the characters believable? Do the characters act and interact in a way that makes sense? But overall, it's just a matter of having done much too much reading over the years and getting a "gut" feeling about a book. It's kind of like one of the Supreme Court Justice's comment on pornography--I know it when I see it.
Once I've answered at least some of those questions, I'll make suggestions as to how I think the book can be improved. It's funny, because the word "publishable" doesn't mean much to me because so much that is eminently publishable isn't published, and that often has nothing to do with the quality of the book or the writing. Instead, it has to do with the commerciability of a novel, and that's impossible to predict. So, what I try to do is help writers write the best possible book they can write--and then, like a child, they just send it off into the world and see if it can find a home. Unfortunately, there are no guarantees...would that there were.
Murphy: By the way, which publishing houses and agencies do you work with?
Salzberg: Viking/Penguin, Dell, Simon and Schuster, Henry Holt, St. Martin's, M. Evans, Hyperion; and agencies include Trident Media Group, Peter Rubie Agency, Graybill & English, and the Spieler Agency, among others.
Murphy: What are some of the typical mistakes you see writers making with novel manuscripts? Weak hooks? Flat settings? Character and conflict issues?
Salzberg: Typical mistakes, include flat, unrealistic dialogue, motivations that don't make sense, telling rather than showing, lack of detail, boring writing, uninteresting characters, plots that don't hold together, and clichés. Man, I could go on and on, but I won't.
Murphy: Your book that made the NYT bestseller list. What can you tell us about it?
Salzberg: The last book I wrote was as a ghostwriter, so I can't really divulge the title, though it's been on the non-fiction NY Times bestseller list for the past two weeks. An agent I'd worked with before approached me and asked if I'd be interested in this project and, because it involved sports, politics, business and literature, I jumped at the opportunity. And, as with other books I've ghostwritten or walked on as a collaborator, it turned out to be a terrific experience.
Murphy: You are the first person profiled for "The Literary Life" who has had experience ghostwriting. Please talk about that, including pros and cons that the average writer and/or reader might not necessarily associate with that endeavor?
Salzberg: I got into ghosting accidentally. A friend had written a profile of a famous men's designer and he wanted her to write his book. But she had just taken a magazine editorial job and she suggested me. He met me for fifteen minutes, took a liking to me, although I knew absolutely nothing about men's fashion, which to me consisted of choosing which T-shirt went with my jeans. It turned out to be a wonderful experience in terms of working with this man. But it taught me that ghostwriting can be a nightmare if you're working with the wrong person. It also taught me that I had to submerge my feelings about how the book should be written, because I was hired as the "voice" of another person. My magazine work came in handy, because when you write for magazines you have to take on the voice of that particular magazine and, in many cases, submerge your own style-not always the case, but certainly the majority of magazines don't cotton to individual, idiosyncratic voices.
Okay, the pros: It's usually a nice paycheck and if the book goes wrong, your name isn't on it so you don't get the blame, i.e., the stigma attached to your career. Another pro is that you get to learn about something you wouldn't necessarily learn about, and it might even be something that's interesting.
The cons: working with the wrong kind of person: someone who micro-manages; someone who thinks they should be writing the book, not you. Another con, if the book does extremely well, critically or commercially, your name isn't on it, though everyone I've worked with gave me a nice credit inside the book.
Murphy: You started out at New York Magazine. How did that come about? And where did that take you?
Salzberg: You know, getting into magazine work was absolutely accidental. I was an English major in college and always wanted to write serious, literary novels. Unfortunately, when I got into the real world I realized that I could do that or I could eat and pay rent, but I couldn't do both at the same time. So I had to go out and get a job. And since, as a lit major, I had no discernible skills other than typing and being able to string sentences together, I took a friend's advice and got a job in the mail room at New York magazine, with promises that I'd move up quickly to an editorial position. To me, at that age, late 20s, quickly meant three months. Other than sorting and delivering mail, shining the occasional chandelier and moving furniture around, it was a great experience because I got to shoot the breeze with writers like John Simon, Ken Auletta, Jon Bradshaw, Steve Brill, and catch glimpses of Pete Hamill, Norman Mailer and Gay Talese-this was the heyday of New York, when the legendary Clay Felker was still the editor.
I used to watch the writers roll in around ten, ten-thirty, drink coffee, smoke cigarettes, talk on the phone, shoot the breeze with the editors, then go to lunch at noon and come back at three, smelling of alcohol, then leave the building no later than 4:30, and I thought, hell, I can do that. So I pitched an editor a few ideas, she asked me to do one during my lunch hour and I did. They didn't buy it but assigned me another one that they did, and I sold that first one to the Daily News Sunday magazine, so I was off and running as a freelance writer.
Murphy: You've written some very successful non-fiction. Presumably that grew out of the magazine writing? How difficult is it for a novice to break into the magazine writing world?
Salzberg: For me it was easy, too easy, to break in. I was kind of cocky and thought I had it made, what with publishing the first two pieces I wrote-without any journalism background-and to major periodicals, for somewhere in the neighborhood of $1,500, which wasn't bad in those days. But for the rest of that year I think I only made another $1,500, so I came down to earth pretty quickly. But once I had those clips, I was in pretty good shape and other major assignments came, slowly at first, but then things picked up.
Murphy: Lastly, and far from least important, you are also a fiction writer, and have described it as your first love. Do you find that writing less "creative" material helps you maintain a focus and drive to attempt polished fiction?
Salzberg: At first, I looked down on journalists and non-fiction writers because I thought, "what's so hard about that?" But I learned that any kind of writing stretches your muscles. And I think I became a better fiction writer because of writing non-fiction, especially writing to word counts. I learned how to be more economical, more precise, more attentive to detail, all things that are very important to fiction writers. And I also learned that there isn't that much difference between writing fiction and non-fiction-there's a big crossover, using fictional techniques for non-fiction writing. I hate the term "creative non-fiction," but I'm afraid there is some truth in that.
Murphy: Other work(s) on the way?
Salzberg: I finished a quirky detective novel, called Swann's Last Song, a while ago and it's been with a publishing house for over a year, during which time I've done a couple of revisions. If it is accepted, I'll have to write a sequel--part of the deal. I also co-wrote a kids' movie, which was just made, so we might do a sequel to that, too. Otherwise, I'm very busy reading for all the writing classes I teach.
Murphy: If you had to say which writer influenced you most, and which book, what would they be? Any other notable influences, artistic or otherwise?
Salzberg: Without a doubt, Saul Bellow-I remember when I was just a kid picking up books like The Victim, or Henderson the Rain King, or Seize the Day, or Herzog-and then, one of the most significant influences on me as a writer was Nabokov's Lolita, which I can read over and over again and still not get everything out of it that's there. And Bernard Malamud's The Fixer, or his short stories. I could go on, but I won't...
Murphy: MFA or No-MFA? Any comments or opinions for the folks who are adamant (pro OR con) about the value of MFA programs?
Salzberg: I spent two weeks in an MFA program and quit. It's not that I'm anti MFA, I think that if you want it, fine. You'll need it if you want to teach; or if you want to network. But I think the way you really learn to write is to read, read, read-and then write, write, write. Writers groups or writing classes, if you get a good teacher, will do just as much for you as an MFA. Did Saul Bellow get an MFA? Ernest Hemingway? F. Scott Fitzgerald? Philip Roth? Margaret Drabble? Vladimir Nabokov? It's a relatively new phenomenon. But again, I would never suggest that someone who wants an MFA not get one. I just don't think it'll necessarily make you a better writer.
Murphy: Has your experience tended to demystify the publishing process (for good or bad-or both) or has it made it even more special?
Salzberg: Absolutely, yes, it has demystified it, but certainly not made it more special. Every writer I know talks about getting out of the business, doing something else. But unfortunately, most of us have no other marketable skills. Today, most of publishing is about making money, not necessarily publishing good books. And that's sad. But there is hope-small presses, University Presses and other independent publishers are now filling those roles. Unfortunately, I think publishing has gotten Hollywood-ized, shooting for the blockbuster.
Murphy: Lastly: any advice for aspiring writers?
Salzberg: Read, read, read. Then write, write, write. Then rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. And never give up. Perseverance, that's the key.
by Sean Murphy
An Interview with Charles Salzberg
This series is honored to have an opportunity to speak with a true Renaissance man--and virtual embodiment of the literary life--writer and editor Charles Salzberg. A typical day for Charles involves reading the work of his students and evaluating novel and short fiction manuscripts, and all while trying to find time for his own work. Not unlike most dedicated writers, he finds that he is always writing, even when he isn't actually writing. Living and working in New York City obliges one to multi-task, mentally as well as physically, and Charles has found that some of his best ideas come to him when he is far away from the computer.
After graduating from Syracuse University with a degree in English, Charles broke into the world of magazine writing: New York Magazine, Esquire, New York, GQ, and a variety of others. This experience eventually led to books, the most recent ghostwritten book making the NYT bestseller list. Charles has been a Visiting Professor of magazine writing at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, and currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence, The New York Writers Workshop, and the Writer's Voice. Despite his considerable experience and expertise in the world of non-fiction, fiction remains his true love, and he has a novel under consideration by M. Evans.
Murphy: Charles, among many other things, you've worked as a teacher and have been involved in more than a few successful writing workshops. How that has influenced your writing, helped it or hindered it?
Salzberg: Overall, it's helped my own writing. Seeing what works and doesn't work with other writers, no matter how good or how experienced, can't help but make you a better writer. You learn to take things apart, and if you do that and then try to put them back together, you learn how things really work. Now this doesn't necessarily mean you can always do that, but thinking about it is good nevertheless. Also, it's inspiring to deal with other writers and see them grow. I never fail to come home from a class energized, though that doesn't necessarily mean I sit down and write. In fact, I'll do just about anything to avoid writing-but I think that just goes with the territory.
Murphy: As a teacher, if you had to say: has the writing of your students gotten better over time? Worse? The same? What are the most common mistakes you see young writers making?
Salzberg: I have people who take classes with me over and over and I'm pleased to say that almost all of them have improved. This isn't necessarily because I'm a great or even good teacher, it's because they work at improving. They listen to what the others in the class say, weigh the suggestions, which means they're thinking about writing, and then try to make those suggestions work in their own work. And sometimes, you can learn more critiquing someone else's work than you can when your work is critiqued-which is what I meant by improving my own writing.
I'm also fortunate in that several of my students have gone on to publish books or magazine articles. For instance, Lauren Weisberger (The Devil Wears Prada) started her book in my classes, though it wasn't a book and it wasn't fiction at first. She just came in and started writing these fascinating essays about working in the magazine world. But there are lots of others who are publishing now, sometimes more than I am, which is very rewarding.
The most common mistake, by far, is telling not showing. Another is people who can't organize a thought, which means they can't organize a sentence or a paragraph or a page. And a third is people who think writing means they have to learn another language. Nope. I think some of the best advice I've ever seen is: Write the way you speak, but on your best day, not your worst.
Murphy: As an editor, you evaluate novel manuscripts for Algonkian, and others. Can you tell us something about the evaluation process? What do you look for? Is your intent to determine what is preventing the ms from being a publishable product?
Salzberg: It's not easy to talk about the evaluation process, because it changes with each manuscript I receive. I can tell you how I go about it, though. The first thing I do is note the competency of the writing. No matter how good a story might be, if the writer can't tell it well, it's not going to travel. Conversely, if the writing is terrific, the story sometimes matters less. Next, I look at the book as a whole--does the story hold together? Is it interesting? Is the voice compelling? Are the characters believable? Do the characters act and interact in a way that makes sense? But overall, it's just a matter of having done much too much reading over the years and getting a "gut" feeling about a book. It's kind of like one of the Supreme Court Justice's comment on pornography--I know it when I see it.
Once I've answered at least some of those questions, I'll make suggestions as to how I think the book can be improved. It's funny, because the word "publishable" doesn't mean much to me because so much that is eminently publishable isn't published, and that often has nothing to do with the quality of the book or the writing. Instead, it has to do with the commerciability of a novel, and that's impossible to predict. So, what I try to do is help writers write the best possible book they can write--and then, like a child, they just send it off into the world and see if it can find a home. Unfortunately, there are no guarantees...would that there were.
Murphy: By the way, which publishing houses and agencies do you work with?
Salzberg: Viking/Penguin, Dell, Simon and Schuster, Henry Holt, St. Martin's, M. Evans, Hyperion; and agencies include Trident Media Group, Peter Rubie Agency, Graybill & English, and the Spieler Agency, among others.
Murphy: What are some of the typical mistakes you see writers making with novel manuscripts? Weak hooks? Flat settings? Character and conflict issues?
Salzberg: Typical mistakes, include flat, unrealistic dialogue, motivations that don't make sense, telling rather than showing, lack of detail, boring writing, uninteresting characters, plots that don't hold together, and clichés. Man, I could go on and on, but I won't.
Murphy: Your book that made the NYT bestseller list. What can you tell us about it?
Salzberg: The last book I wrote was as a ghostwriter, so I can't really divulge the title, though it's been on the non-fiction NY Times bestseller list for the past two weeks. An agent I'd worked with before approached me and asked if I'd be interested in this project and, because it involved sports, politics, business and literature, I jumped at the opportunity. And, as with other books I've ghostwritten or walked on as a collaborator, it turned out to be a terrific experience.
Murphy: You are the first person profiled for "The Literary Life" who has had experience ghostwriting. Please talk about that, including pros and cons that the average writer and/or reader might not necessarily associate with that endeavor?
Salzberg: I got into ghosting accidentally. A friend had written a profile of a famous men's designer and he wanted her to write his book. But she had just taken a magazine editorial job and she suggested me. He met me for fifteen minutes, took a liking to me, although I knew absolutely nothing about men's fashion, which to me consisted of choosing which T-shirt went with my jeans. It turned out to be a wonderful experience in terms of working with this man. But it taught me that ghostwriting can be a nightmare if you're working with the wrong person. It also taught me that I had to submerge my feelings about how the book should be written, because I was hired as the "voice" of another person. My magazine work came in handy, because when you write for magazines you have to take on the voice of that particular magazine and, in many cases, submerge your own style-not always the case, but certainly the majority of magazines don't cotton to individual, idiosyncratic voices.
Okay, the pros: It's usually a nice paycheck and if the book goes wrong, your name isn't on it so you don't get the blame, i.e., the stigma attached to your career. Another pro is that you get to learn about something you wouldn't necessarily learn about, and it might even be something that's interesting.
The cons: working with the wrong kind of person: someone who micro-manages; someone who thinks they should be writing the book, not you. Another con, if the book does extremely well, critically or commercially, your name isn't on it, though everyone I've worked with gave me a nice credit inside the book.
Murphy: You started out at New York Magazine. How did that come about? And where did that take you?
Salzberg: You know, getting into magazine work was absolutely accidental. I was an English major in college and always wanted to write serious, literary novels. Unfortunately, when I got into the real world I realized that I could do that or I could eat and pay rent, but I couldn't do both at the same time. So I had to go out and get a job. And since, as a lit major, I had no discernible skills other than typing and being able to string sentences together, I took a friend's advice and got a job in the mail room at New York magazine, with promises that I'd move up quickly to an editorial position. To me, at that age, late 20s, quickly meant three months. Other than sorting and delivering mail, shining the occasional chandelier and moving furniture around, it was a great experience because I got to shoot the breeze with writers like John Simon, Ken Auletta, Jon Bradshaw, Steve Brill, and catch glimpses of Pete Hamill, Norman Mailer and Gay Talese-this was the heyday of New York, when the legendary Clay Felker was still the editor.
I used to watch the writers roll in around ten, ten-thirty, drink coffee, smoke cigarettes, talk on the phone, shoot the breeze with the editors, then go to lunch at noon and come back at three, smelling of alcohol, then leave the building no later than 4:30, and I thought, hell, I can do that. So I pitched an editor a few ideas, she asked me to do one during my lunch hour and I did. They didn't buy it but assigned me another one that they did, and I sold that first one to the Daily News Sunday magazine, so I was off and running as a freelance writer.
Murphy: You've written some very successful non-fiction. Presumably that grew out of the magazine writing? How difficult is it for a novice to break into the magazine writing world?
Salzberg: For me it was easy, too easy, to break in. I was kind of cocky and thought I had it made, what with publishing the first two pieces I wrote-without any journalism background-and to major periodicals, for somewhere in the neighborhood of $1,500, which wasn't bad in those days. But for the rest of that year I think I only made another $1,500, so I came down to earth pretty quickly. But once I had those clips, I was in pretty good shape and other major assignments came, slowly at first, but then things picked up.
Murphy: Lastly, and far from least important, you are also a fiction writer, and have described it as your first love. Do you find that writing less "creative" material helps you maintain a focus and drive to attempt polished fiction?
Salzberg: At first, I looked down on journalists and non-fiction writers because I thought, "what's so hard about that?" But I learned that any kind of writing stretches your muscles. And I think I became a better fiction writer because of writing non-fiction, especially writing to word counts. I learned how to be more economical, more precise, more attentive to detail, all things that are very important to fiction writers. And I also learned that there isn't that much difference between writing fiction and non-fiction-there's a big crossover, using fictional techniques for non-fiction writing. I hate the term "creative non-fiction," but I'm afraid there is some truth in that.
Murphy: Other work(s) on the way?
Salzberg: I finished a quirky detective novel, called Swann's Last Song, a while ago and it's been with a publishing house for over a year, during which time I've done a couple of revisions. If it is accepted, I'll have to write a sequel--part of the deal. I also co-wrote a kids' movie, which was just made, so we might do a sequel to that, too. Otherwise, I'm very busy reading for all the writing classes I teach.
Murphy: If you had to say which writer influenced you most, and which book, what would they be? Any other notable influences, artistic or otherwise?
Salzberg: Without a doubt, Saul Bellow-I remember when I was just a kid picking up books like The Victim, or Henderson the Rain King, or Seize the Day, or Herzog-and then, one of the most significant influences on me as a writer was Nabokov's Lolita, which I can read over and over again and still not get everything out of it that's there. And Bernard Malamud's The Fixer, or his short stories. I could go on, but I won't...
Murphy: MFA or No-MFA? Any comments or opinions for the folks who are adamant (pro OR con) about the value of MFA programs?
Salzberg: I spent two weeks in an MFA program and quit. It's not that I'm anti MFA, I think that if you want it, fine. You'll need it if you want to teach; or if you want to network. But I think the way you really learn to write is to read, read, read-and then write, write, write. Writers groups or writing classes, if you get a good teacher, will do just as much for you as an MFA. Did Saul Bellow get an MFA? Ernest Hemingway? F. Scott Fitzgerald? Philip Roth? Margaret Drabble? Vladimir Nabokov? It's a relatively new phenomenon. But again, I would never suggest that someone who wants an MFA not get one. I just don't think it'll necessarily make you a better writer.
Murphy: Has your experience tended to demystify the publishing process (for good or bad-or both) or has it made it even more special?
Salzberg: Absolutely, yes, it has demystified it, but certainly not made it more special. Every writer I know talks about getting out of the business, doing something else. But unfortunately, most of us have no other marketable skills. Today, most of publishing is about making money, not necessarily publishing good books. And that's sad. But there is hope-small presses, University Presses and other independent publishers are now filling those roles. Unfortunately, I think publishing has gotten Hollywood-ized, shooting for the blockbuster.
Murphy: Lastly: any advice for aspiring writers?
Salzberg: Read, read, read. Then write, write, write. Then rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. And never give up. Perseverance, that's the key.
An Interview with Todd Pierce
The Literary Life and How To Live It
by Sean Murphy
An Interview with Todd Pierce
Talk about your Jack-of-all-trades: Writer, teacher, advocate for unpublished writers. Too good to be true? Nope. Todd Pierce epitomizes the literary life, and should stand as a role model for any aspiring fiction writer. Versatile enough to publish short stories while simultaneously setting his sights on novels, he brings a passion and erudition to his work, as well as the classroom, where he teaches fiction writing.
To a large and appreciative, and mostly anonymous, fan base across the country, Todd is known and loved as the mastermind behind the website Literaryagents.org. This site is an invaluable resource for writers seeking publication, and agents on the lookout for new talent. That Todd has taken it upon himself to keep this site alive and active well after his own publishing career has progressed is a testament to the type of artist, and individual he is.
Winner of the IAP Award for Fiction, a Kingsbury Fellowship, and the Charles Angoff Award, Todd James Pierce holds degrees from the University of California at Irvine (MFA), Oregon State University (MA), and Florida State University (PhD). He is the author of two novels, THE SKY LIKE TAMRA BLUE (2006) and THE AUSTRALIA STORIES (2003) and the co-author of the forthcoming textbook BEHIND THE SHORT STORY (2005). His work has appeared in books published by Penguin, University of Iowa Press, and NCTE Press and in magazines such as Fiction, The Georgia Review, Indiana Review, The Missouri Review, North American Review, Poets & Writers, Shenandoah, and Story Quarterly. He is an assistant professor at Clemson University, and his personal website is toddjamespierce.com
SM: First and foremost, for folks who might understandably know you primarily from your Lit Agents website, let's celebrate the fact that you are also a published writer! Not only is your novel THE AUSTRALIA STORIES available in bookstores everywhere, it has received critical praise and clearly found a receptive audience. Are you satisfied with the reaction(s)?
TP: Yes, I'm pleased that there have been lots of positive reviews. Moreover, I'm pleased that people read the book, enjoyed it, found it interesting. At a reading in Portland, a man came up to me and said, no one has ever written a book that contained so much of his own experience before. That was a good moment. That was one of the moments that made being on the road worthwhile. Publishing a book is a strange mix of art and commerce. I wish writing was entirely about the art. When I'm in my room, writing a chapter or a story, it is entirely about the art. It is about the love of a good story, the exploration of a complex character. But publishing those stories or those chapters is not only about art. It's about books as well.
I went on the road and did about forty readings when my novel, The Australia Stories, came out-that helped generate reviews in newspapers. I also appeared on regional NPR. Being on the road is invaluable for exposure: people will show up to readings (really, they will), and there is no question that readings will introduce readers to your work. I had some nice experiences. In Vegas, there was a good turn out, maybe forty people. Same in San Diego and Seattle. There were some readings with just a few people-maybe four or five. One stormy Tuesday in North Carolina, only two. At Dutton's, in Los Angeles, there was a small crowd, maybe ten or eleven people. I sold nine books there. But I had a chance to talk to the booksellers at Dutton's-really, wonderful knowledgeable book people-and a week or two later, when I called back, they had sold all forty copies of the book and ordered more. Those sales were a gift. Even while I was on the phone, I was thinking, at least forty people are reading my novel in Los Angeles. This happened because the staff at Dutton's got behind the book and hand sold it.
I had a similar experience at Books and Books in Miami, one of the best bookstores in the southeast. The store's owner, Mitchell Kaplan, arranged a reading for me on a Sunday night and helped promote it. Not only did he arrange it he attended it as well. He had some flattering things to say about my book and promised to read it when he had a chance. Six weeks later, at a reading in California, a couple came up to me who had already read the book. (I was always amazed when anyone came to a reading who'd already read the book. I wondered, how did they find it?) When I asked where they'd purchased the book, they told me that, while vacationing in Florida, they had visited Books and Books where a young man-judging by their description, none other than Mitchell Kaplan-told them, "If you leave this store with only one book, leave with this book." In short I was totally blown away that a bookseller had so actively helped place my books into the hands of readers. I think what I'm trying to say is this: when you publish your book, go out on the road. Meet the readers. Meet the booksellers. You'll be placing yourself into the hands of very generous people who love good books as much as you do.
SM: Has your experience tended to demystify the publishing process (for good or bad-or both) or has it made it even more special?
TP: Having a book come out is a great excuse to get out there and give readings. I think I had pretty realistic expectations for my book. No one should have any illusions: it's an increasingly tight market-particularly for literary fiction. Things have changed a lot since the mid-80's-for art in general, but especially for books and the publishing industry. I've known people who've recently published first books, and I came equipped with the understanding that it's wise to assume that all the pressure is on YOU to promote your book. Naturally, your publisher will do what they can, but if you go into it with an accurate appraisal of how things work and how much competition there is, you can only help yourself by being involved. For instance, my publisher set up a handful of readings for me, but I set up more than thirty myself.
SM: Other work(s) on the way? (Feel free to discuss works in progress, works already completed, ETC.)
TP: I've been working on a novel for about a year and a half, and I hope to have that done in the near future. My agent, Richard Parks, is currently shopping around another short-story collection. At the moment the collection is called Newsworld. We'll see if that title sticks once the book is sold. I like the title very much. But titles are always a tricky thing.
SM: So you've already completed another collection of new short stories?
TP: Yes. I love short stories; I love reading them; I love writing them. In a perfect world, I'd write even more short stories, but the reality is that short story collections don't sell well. Especially short story collections that aren't linked or tightly themed. It's a shame, but it's a trend we've seen get worse in the last decade. I was at Barnes & Noble recently and when I looked at the new fiction section, in four bookcases there were two collections of short stories and the rest were novels. Nowadays, short fiction simply isn't being published; certainly not at the rate it used to be. But having said that, I left Barnes & Noble that day with three books-two short story collections and a novel. The collections were amazing-David Means' new collection and a first collection (but second book) by David Benioff. I think that's what short stories are becoming-they're becoming a form for lovers of the form.
David Means has been able to make a reputation for himself exclusively as a short story writer, but that's rare now. In terms of publishing, most short story contracts are piggybacked onto novel contracts. That's the primary way that they are accepted by New York houses. With university or independent presses, it's different.
SM: Many people, as previously mentioned, would know you from Literaryagents.org, which you describe as a "low-tech, straight-forward guide to literary agents". How did this incredible resource come to be?
TP: I created it for a class I was teaching at Florida State several years ago, and it sort of exploded. It began getting tens of thousands of hits a month. I look at this project as a useful thing I can put back into the community, and it only takes about one day of concerted effort per month. Every day I get two or three e-mails thanking me, so that makes it worth the time invested. I think for people outside the publishing world, this is useful information, and I'm looking to provide simple, straightforward advice.
SM: Any plans on turning the site into something-dare I say "bigger"? A book perhaps?
TP: I don't know! I've thought about writing a book on agents/agenting, but there are so many good ones already out there, you know? Who knows. I know the word-of-mouth reception (from agents and writers alike) is positive; agents feel more comfortable getting queries, because in order to find this site in the first place, it's a safe assumption that the writer has at least some knowledge of the industry, or is at the very least fairly serious about finding representation.
SM: Presumably you've received kudos-from both agents who can essentially advertise their services, as well as writers who are looking for agents-for the work you've done. Would you care to shed any insight you've gained: the proverbial good, bad and ugly, concerning agents, who are, fairly or not, often thought of as aloof and inaccessible?
TP: The site has been running for about seven years, and I've certainly learned a great deal. For starters, I can appreciate how difficult it would be to become an agent. There is a tremendous amount of pressure on these people, and they constantly have to make difficult decisions. I have known agents who take on books they don't necessarily love but know will sell, as opposed to books they might love but will have serious challenges selling to an editor/publisher. There is only so much time, and it is a business. I've seen a lot of excellent agents drop out because it's such a hard business. I do love getting e-mails from people who have met or found agents and then had books sold via my site. That's a great feeling.
SM: You are now teaching. Has this experience enriched your own writing? I've talked to many writers, who also teach, and there seems to be an inevitable push-and-pull in terms of time and energy, and teaching (probably like any other profession) can be seen as something that contributes and distracts from the craft of writing. Thoughts?
TP: I love teaching. I love those moments when students-perhaps for the first time-understand how to write a story. Teaching fiction writing also is always a useful way to remember or reinforce the basics-the craft of writing. I'm always reminded to think about ways to utilize these tools in my own work. After you've written for a while, you sort of internalize the lessons you've learned, so it's nice to be around people who are writing. Of course, teaching does take a lot of time and energy. I try to keep myself on a strict schedule to ensure that I'm writing as much as I need to be.
SM: Again, as a teacher, if you had to say: has the writing of your students gotten better over time? Worse? The same? What positive trends have you noticed? What awful ones? Is it true to presume that regardless of genre or generation, good writing (and good writers) tend to find their way?
TP: Movies have definitely done a great deal to ruin fiction in college workshops. Maybe "ruin" is not the right word. New writers should take in everything-genre books, literary books, movies, drama, music, documentaries. When I was an MFA student I kept season tickets to the LA Opera because I wanted to have a better understanding of how opera presented stories. But when a new writer's inspiration is too focused on something other than literature or writing-say, films for example-they can spend a lot of energy attempting to translate the style of film-particularly its style of dialogue and visual presentation-into prose fiction. It usually doesn't work well. Film relies exclusively on scene. In fiction, the narrative dances between summary narration and scene. Film strongly relies on objective representations of characters, placing the audience as witnesses to a story. Fiction relies on internal representations, attaching the audience to a subjective point of view of one character. It's a subtle but significant paradigm shift. When I first began teaching workshops, Pulp Fiction distracted a lot of writers. More recently the Kevin Smith movies have done the same thing. A lot of the elements that make for a great movie, whether it's dialogue or style, don't necessarily translate into the short story, especially for the novice.
SM: MFA or No-MFA? Any comments or opinions for the folks who are adamant (pro OR con) about the value of MFA programs?
TP: It depends on what you want out of an MFA program.
I think many people move blindly into MFA programs hoping that the MFA will lead to publication. All MFA programs help students develop their writing. That's the important thing. Most all MFA programs have at least a few students who have gone on to publish a book.
But in terms of publishing, I'd say there are currently about a dozen, maybe fifteen MFA programs that will genuinely help young writers move toward book-length publication-with agents and editors coming in to meet with the class, establishing connections for down the road. Depending on your own personal goals, such opportunities to work with publishing professionals may or may not be important for you. But you should know what an MFA program can realistically offer before attending.
Beyond those dozen or fifteen schools, there are a number of programs out there where you get two or three years where you can write and teach, and this is obviously very useful for many people. I think many people many people find this experience invaluable-having a couple years to write and enjoying the company of other people who value writing.
What I'm trying to get at is this: there are over one-hundred MFA programs in the country, all of them different. And the differences are significant. If you want to attend an MFA program, start looking at what each school offers. Each year the AWP (Associate Writing Programs) puts out a guide to graduate programs in creative writing (www.awpwriter.org). And when you've narrowed down your selections to four or five programs, find out everything about each school-its graduates, its teachers, the courses you'll be taking. Highly-ranked MFA programs are extremely competitive, so make sure to submit a very strong audition packet of fiction with your application. And let each school know your reasons, specifically, for applying to their school.
But before attending an MFA program you need to have a realistic understanding of what that MFA program is able to offer you-in terms of funding, class offerings, workshops, the prospects for your life as a writer or a teacher of writing after you receive the degree.
At times, I loved my MFA workshops. At times, I hated them. At times, I despised them. The advice I received in them flattered me, frustrated me, infuriated me, stifled me. But I know this: the experience made me a better writer. It took me years after receiving the MFA to publish a book. But I wouldn't have published that book without the training I received in the MFA program.
SM: Who would you recommend as some of the better writers currently producing fiction?
TP: As I mentioned, I read a lot of short stories. I love Updike, and have returned to his stories often. Lorrie Moore, Richard Ford, Robert Olen Butler, Alice Munro, Charles Baxter, Richard Bausch. I would say, as a short story writer, there is a sort of insular geekiness, where you tend to know who is producing the best work in that community, and I enjoy it and want to support it.
As for new relatively new writers, I love the work of George Saunders, Stacey Richter, Aimee Bender, and Adam Johnson.
SM: If you had to say which writer influenced you most, and which book, what would they be? Any other notable influences, artistic or otherwise?
TP: Updike is very important; I read him all the time. I think Richard Ford and Robert Olen Butler both have very traditional, enveloping voices. They both bring a dramatic sense of urgency to their stories and create a strong interiority for each of their characters, and I respond to that. When I was younger, Bret Easton-Ellis and Jay McInerny were big influences. We're talking back in high school. I read Bright Lights, Big City several times. Once I started avidly reading, I read everything I could. These days I'm more picky, but I tend to take recommendations from other writers, or reviewers that I trust.
SM: If you could succinctly summarize the trajectory (thus far!) of your writing life, how different is it from what you imagined, as an earnest but unpublished author? How is it better? Worse? What things would you have changed?
TP: I didn't realize when I was younger how long it would take to write book-length manuscripts, how hard the process really was. I wish I had understood the place of the short story earlier on, what I was getting myself into! I wouldn't change anything, I'd have done the same thing, but maybe it would have been impossible to even predict the ways in which short stories have sort of been marginalized.
As far as how things have changed, I'd say that back in the 80's the industry was not as formalized or competitive; now getting books published is not unlike actors trying to get minor roles in movies. Early on I heard a writer who was teaching an MFA class explain that there are typically six students in a class per year, and that two of them will eventually publish, two of them will teach or be in a related field, and two of them will finish the program and want nothing more to do with it. That's held up fairly consistently in my observations over the years. But the business of writing at the university level has changed considerably. In the mid-80's the MFA programs exploded across the country. In 1995 I attended the AWP Conference in Newport News, Va., and there were about six or seven hundred people there.
These days there are four or five thousand people coming to these conferences.
SM: Lastly: any advice for aspiring writers?
TP: There is no better way to examine the human condition than carefully written fiction. As our nation changes-and our national identity is changing-I think fiction will be an important tool by which we examine those personal changes, both in our actions and in our intentions.
I'd say that there are actually too many good short stories out there right now (not too few); there are just so few places to publish them. There are, I think, about 125 MFA programs in the USA right now, and a beginning writer has to ask: what am I going to do to take the skills I'm learning and individualize them, how am I going to incorporate my talent into a vision that I can express in my fiction? For younger writers, I think it's an exciting time to be creating fiction. No one has written the great book(s) about being a young twenty-something in 2004 or 2005. As the world changes, there are new experiences to write about, which ties into finding your voice and your vision, and creating original work that people will want to read.
For writers just starting out-I'd encourage anyone to start sending stories out. Try magazines; try the small presses; try literary journals; for novelists try to find an agent. Work on your stories all the time; keep them in the mail. Find a couple of writers who have a writing/publishing life that you would like to emulate-someone who is five or six years down the road: talk to them and listen to their advice, they'll understand what you are going through and they may have some useful insight.
When I was an MFA student, I had the opportunity to attend the Squaw Valley Writers Conference three years in a row. The last year I attended, I told one of the new writers, a friend I'd made earlier that year, that my main observation about writing and publishing after attending the conference for three years was this: "The main reason writers don't get published is because they give up-give up writing, give up sending their work out. Just give up." This past summer that same writer called me. I hadn't talked to him in a couple years. He told me he had a first book coming out, and when he was frustrated with the writing, he would often remember that-about giving up. "So guess what," he told me on the phone, "I didn't give up."
That, I believe, is the only way to approach the difficult process of writing fiction. By continually refusing to give up.
by Sean Murphy
An Interview with Todd Pierce
Talk about your Jack-of-all-trades: Writer, teacher, advocate for unpublished writers. Too good to be true? Nope. Todd Pierce epitomizes the literary life, and should stand as a role model for any aspiring fiction writer. Versatile enough to publish short stories while simultaneously setting his sights on novels, he brings a passion and erudition to his work, as well as the classroom, where he teaches fiction writing.
To a large and appreciative, and mostly anonymous, fan base across the country, Todd is known and loved as the mastermind behind the website Literaryagents.org. This site is an invaluable resource for writers seeking publication, and agents on the lookout for new talent. That Todd has taken it upon himself to keep this site alive and active well after his own publishing career has progressed is a testament to the type of artist, and individual he is.
Winner of the IAP Award for Fiction, a Kingsbury Fellowship, and the Charles Angoff Award, Todd James Pierce holds degrees from the University of California at Irvine (MFA), Oregon State University (MA), and Florida State University (PhD). He is the author of two novels, THE SKY LIKE TAMRA BLUE (2006) and THE AUSTRALIA STORIES (2003) and the co-author of the forthcoming textbook BEHIND THE SHORT STORY (2005). His work has appeared in books published by Penguin, University of Iowa Press, and NCTE Press and in magazines such as Fiction, The Georgia Review, Indiana Review, The Missouri Review, North American Review, Poets & Writers, Shenandoah, and Story Quarterly. He is an assistant professor at Clemson University, and his personal website is toddjamespierce.com
SM: First and foremost, for folks who might understandably know you primarily from your Lit Agents website, let's celebrate the fact that you are also a published writer! Not only is your novel THE AUSTRALIA STORIES available in bookstores everywhere, it has received critical praise and clearly found a receptive audience. Are you satisfied with the reaction(s)?
TP: Yes, I'm pleased that there have been lots of positive reviews. Moreover, I'm pleased that people read the book, enjoyed it, found it interesting. At a reading in Portland, a man came up to me and said, no one has ever written a book that contained so much of his own experience before. That was a good moment. That was one of the moments that made being on the road worthwhile. Publishing a book is a strange mix of art and commerce. I wish writing was entirely about the art. When I'm in my room, writing a chapter or a story, it is entirely about the art. It is about the love of a good story, the exploration of a complex character. But publishing those stories or those chapters is not only about art. It's about books as well.
I went on the road and did about forty readings when my novel, The Australia Stories, came out-that helped generate reviews in newspapers. I also appeared on regional NPR. Being on the road is invaluable for exposure: people will show up to readings (really, they will), and there is no question that readings will introduce readers to your work. I had some nice experiences. In Vegas, there was a good turn out, maybe forty people. Same in San Diego and Seattle. There were some readings with just a few people-maybe four or five. One stormy Tuesday in North Carolina, only two. At Dutton's, in Los Angeles, there was a small crowd, maybe ten or eleven people. I sold nine books there. But I had a chance to talk to the booksellers at Dutton's-really, wonderful knowledgeable book people-and a week or two later, when I called back, they had sold all forty copies of the book and ordered more. Those sales were a gift. Even while I was on the phone, I was thinking, at least forty people are reading my novel in Los Angeles. This happened because the staff at Dutton's got behind the book and hand sold it.
I had a similar experience at Books and Books in Miami, one of the best bookstores in the southeast. The store's owner, Mitchell Kaplan, arranged a reading for me on a Sunday night and helped promote it. Not only did he arrange it he attended it as well. He had some flattering things to say about my book and promised to read it when he had a chance. Six weeks later, at a reading in California, a couple came up to me who had already read the book. (I was always amazed when anyone came to a reading who'd already read the book. I wondered, how did they find it?) When I asked where they'd purchased the book, they told me that, while vacationing in Florida, they had visited Books and Books where a young man-judging by their description, none other than Mitchell Kaplan-told them, "If you leave this store with only one book, leave with this book." In short I was totally blown away that a bookseller had so actively helped place my books into the hands of readers. I think what I'm trying to say is this: when you publish your book, go out on the road. Meet the readers. Meet the booksellers. You'll be placing yourself into the hands of very generous people who love good books as much as you do.
SM: Has your experience tended to demystify the publishing process (for good or bad-or both) or has it made it even more special?
TP: Having a book come out is a great excuse to get out there and give readings. I think I had pretty realistic expectations for my book. No one should have any illusions: it's an increasingly tight market-particularly for literary fiction. Things have changed a lot since the mid-80's-for art in general, but especially for books and the publishing industry. I've known people who've recently published first books, and I came equipped with the understanding that it's wise to assume that all the pressure is on YOU to promote your book. Naturally, your publisher will do what they can, but if you go into it with an accurate appraisal of how things work and how much competition there is, you can only help yourself by being involved. For instance, my publisher set up a handful of readings for me, but I set up more than thirty myself.
SM: Other work(s) on the way? (Feel free to discuss works in progress, works already completed, ETC.)
TP: I've been working on a novel for about a year and a half, and I hope to have that done in the near future. My agent, Richard Parks, is currently shopping around another short-story collection. At the moment the collection is called Newsworld. We'll see if that title sticks once the book is sold. I like the title very much. But titles are always a tricky thing.
SM: So you've already completed another collection of new short stories?
TP: Yes. I love short stories; I love reading them; I love writing them. In a perfect world, I'd write even more short stories, but the reality is that short story collections don't sell well. Especially short story collections that aren't linked or tightly themed. It's a shame, but it's a trend we've seen get worse in the last decade. I was at Barnes & Noble recently and when I looked at the new fiction section, in four bookcases there were two collections of short stories and the rest were novels. Nowadays, short fiction simply isn't being published; certainly not at the rate it used to be. But having said that, I left Barnes & Noble that day with three books-two short story collections and a novel. The collections were amazing-David Means' new collection and a first collection (but second book) by David Benioff. I think that's what short stories are becoming-they're becoming a form for lovers of the form.
David Means has been able to make a reputation for himself exclusively as a short story writer, but that's rare now. In terms of publishing, most short story contracts are piggybacked onto novel contracts. That's the primary way that they are accepted by New York houses. With university or independent presses, it's different.
SM: Many people, as previously mentioned, would know you from Literaryagents.org, which you describe as a "low-tech, straight-forward guide to literary agents". How did this incredible resource come to be?
TP: I created it for a class I was teaching at Florida State several years ago, and it sort of exploded. It began getting tens of thousands of hits a month. I look at this project as a useful thing I can put back into the community, and it only takes about one day of concerted effort per month. Every day I get two or three e-mails thanking me, so that makes it worth the time invested. I think for people outside the publishing world, this is useful information, and I'm looking to provide simple, straightforward advice.
SM: Any plans on turning the site into something-dare I say "bigger"? A book perhaps?
TP: I don't know! I've thought about writing a book on agents/agenting, but there are so many good ones already out there, you know? Who knows. I know the word-of-mouth reception (from agents and writers alike) is positive; agents feel more comfortable getting queries, because in order to find this site in the first place, it's a safe assumption that the writer has at least some knowledge of the industry, or is at the very least fairly serious about finding representation.
SM: Presumably you've received kudos-from both agents who can essentially advertise their services, as well as writers who are looking for agents-for the work you've done. Would you care to shed any insight you've gained: the proverbial good, bad and ugly, concerning agents, who are, fairly or not, often thought of as aloof and inaccessible?
TP: The site has been running for about seven years, and I've certainly learned a great deal. For starters, I can appreciate how difficult it would be to become an agent. There is a tremendous amount of pressure on these people, and they constantly have to make difficult decisions. I have known agents who take on books they don't necessarily love but know will sell, as opposed to books they might love but will have serious challenges selling to an editor/publisher. There is only so much time, and it is a business. I've seen a lot of excellent agents drop out because it's such a hard business. I do love getting e-mails from people who have met or found agents and then had books sold via my site. That's a great feeling.
SM: You are now teaching. Has this experience enriched your own writing? I've talked to many writers, who also teach, and there seems to be an inevitable push-and-pull in terms of time and energy, and teaching (probably like any other profession) can be seen as something that contributes and distracts from the craft of writing. Thoughts?
TP: I love teaching. I love those moments when students-perhaps for the first time-understand how to write a story. Teaching fiction writing also is always a useful way to remember or reinforce the basics-the craft of writing. I'm always reminded to think about ways to utilize these tools in my own work. After you've written for a while, you sort of internalize the lessons you've learned, so it's nice to be around people who are writing. Of course, teaching does take a lot of time and energy. I try to keep myself on a strict schedule to ensure that I'm writing as much as I need to be.
SM: Again, as a teacher, if you had to say: has the writing of your students gotten better over time? Worse? The same? What positive trends have you noticed? What awful ones? Is it true to presume that regardless of genre or generation, good writing (and good writers) tend to find their way?
TP: Movies have definitely done a great deal to ruin fiction in college workshops. Maybe "ruin" is not the right word. New writers should take in everything-genre books, literary books, movies, drama, music, documentaries. When I was an MFA student I kept season tickets to the LA Opera because I wanted to have a better understanding of how opera presented stories. But when a new writer's inspiration is too focused on something other than literature or writing-say, films for example-they can spend a lot of energy attempting to translate the style of film-particularly its style of dialogue and visual presentation-into prose fiction. It usually doesn't work well. Film relies exclusively on scene. In fiction, the narrative dances between summary narration and scene. Film strongly relies on objective representations of characters, placing the audience as witnesses to a story. Fiction relies on internal representations, attaching the audience to a subjective point of view of one character. It's a subtle but significant paradigm shift. When I first began teaching workshops, Pulp Fiction distracted a lot of writers. More recently the Kevin Smith movies have done the same thing. A lot of the elements that make for a great movie, whether it's dialogue or style, don't necessarily translate into the short story, especially for the novice.
SM: MFA or No-MFA? Any comments or opinions for the folks who are adamant (pro OR con) about the value of MFA programs?
TP: It depends on what you want out of an MFA program.
I think many people move blindly into MFA programs hoping that the MFA will lead to publication. All MFA programs help students develop their writing. That's the important thing. Most all MFA programs have at least a few students who have gone on to publish a book.
But in terms of publishing, I'd say there are currently about a dozen, maybe fifteen MFA programs that will genuinely help young writers move toward book-length publication-with agents and editors coming in to meet with the class, establishing connections for down the road. Depending on your own personal goals, such opportunities to work with publishing professionals may or may not be important for you. But you should know what an MFA program can realistically offer before attending.
Beyond those dozen or fifteen schools, there are a number of programs out there where you get two or three years where you can write and teach, and this is obviously very useful for many people. I think many people many people find this experience invaluable-having a couple years to write and enjoying the company of other people who value writing.
What I'm trying to get at is this: there are over one-hundred MFA programs in the country, all of them different. And the differences are significant. If you want to attend an MFA program, start looking at what each school offers. Each year the AWP (Associate Writing Programs) puts out a guide to graduate programs in creative writing (www.awpwriter.org). And when you've narrowed down your selections to four or five programs, find out everything about each school-its graduates, its teachers, the courses you'll be taking. Highly-ranked MFA programs are extremely competitive, so make sure to submit a very strong audition packet of fiction with your application. And let each school know your reasons, specifically, for applying to their school.
But before attending an MFA program you need to have a realistic understanding of what that MFA program is able to offer you-in terms of funding, class offerings, workshops, the prospects for your life as a writer or a teacher of writing after you receive the degree.
At times, I loved my MFA workshops. At times, I hated them. At times, I despised them. The advice I received in them flattered me, frustrated me, infuriated me, stifled me. But I know this: the experience made me a better writer. It took me years after receiving the MFA to publish a book. But I wouldn't have published that book without the training I received in the MFA program.
SM: Who would you recommend as some of the better writers currently producing fiction?
TP: As I mentioned, I read a lot of short stories. I love Updike, and have returned to his stories often. Lorrie Moore, Richard Ford, Robert Olen Butler, Alice Munro, Charles Baxter, Richard Bausch. I would say, as a short story writer, there is a sort of insular geekiness, where you tend to know who is producing the best work in that community, and I enjoy it and want to support it.
As for new relatively new writers, I love the work of George Saunders, Stacey Richter, Aimee Bender, and Adam Johnson.
SM: If you had to say which writer influenced you most, and which book, what would they be? Any other notable influences, artistic or otherwise?
TP: Updike is very important; I read him all the time. I think Richard Ford and Robert Olen Butler both have very traditional, enveloping voices. They both bring a dramatic sense of urgency to their stories and create a strong interiority for each of their characters, and I respond to that. When I was younger, Bret Easton-Ellis and Jay McInerny were big influences. We're talking back in high school. I read Bright Lights, Big City several times. Once I started avidly reading, I read everything I could. These days I'm more picky, but I tend to take recommendations from other writers, or reviewers that I trust.
SM: If you could succinctly summarize the trajectory (thus far!) of your writing life, how different is it from what you imagined, as an earnest but unpublished author? How is it better? Worse? What things would you have changed?
TP: I didn't realize when I was younger how long it would take to write book-length manuscripts, how hard the process really was. I wish I had understood the place of the short story earlier on, what I was getting myself into! I wouldn't change anything, I'd have done the same thing, but maybe it would have been impossible to even predict the ways in which short stories have sort of been marginalized.
As far as how things have changed, I'd say that back in the 80's the industry was not as formalized or competitive; now getting books published is not unlike actors trying to get minor roles in movies. Early on I heard a writer who was teaching an MFA class explain that there are typically six students in a class per year, and that two of them will eventually publish, two of them will teach or be in a related field, and two of them will finish the program and want nothing more to do with it. That's held up fairly consistently in my observations over the years. But the business of writing at the university level has changed considerably. In the mid-80's the MFA programs exploded across the country. In 1995 I attended the AWP Conference in Newport News, Va., and there were about six or seven hundred people there.
These days there are four or five thousand people coming to these conferences.
SM: Lastly: any advice for aspiring writers?
TP: There is no better way to examine the human condition than carefully written fiction. As our nation changes-and our national identity is changing-I think fiction will be an important tool by which we examine those personal changes, both in our actions and in our intentions.
I'd say that there are actually too many good short stories out there right now (not too few); there are just so few places to publish them. There are, I think, about 125 MFA programs in the USA right now, and a beginning writer has to ask: what am I going to do to take the skills I'm learning and individualize them, how am I going to incorporate my talent into a vision that I can express in my fiction? For younger writers, I think it's an exciting time to be creating fiction. No one has written the great book(s) about being a young twenty-something in 2004 or 2005. As the world changes, there are new experiences to write about, which ties into finding your voice and your vision, and creating original work that people will want to read.
For writers just starting out-I'd encourage anyone to start sending stories out. Try magazines; try the small presses; try literary journals; for novelists try to find an agent. Work on your stories all the time; keep them in the mail. Find a couple of writers who have a writing/publishing life that you would like to emulate-someone who is five or six years down the road: talk to them and listen to their advice, they'll understand what you are going through and they may have some useful insight.
When I was an MFA student, I had the opportunity to attend the Squaw Valley Writers Conference three years in a row. The last year I attended, I told one of the new writers, a friend I'd made earlier that year, that my main observation about writing and publishing after attending the conference for three years was this: "The main reason writers don't get published is because they give up-give up writing, give up sending their work out. Just give up." This past summer that same writer called me. I hadn't talked to him in a couple years. He told me he had a first book coming out, and when he was frustrated with the writing, he would often remember that-about giving up. "So guess what," he told me on the phone, "I didn't give up."
That, I believe, is the only way to approach the difficult process of writing fiction. By continually refusing to give up.
An Interview with Stephen Goodwin
The Literary Life and How To Live It
by Sean Murphy
An Interview with Stephen Goodwin
Stephen Goodwin is one of the very rare and precious forces that anyone who appreciates exceptional writing would do well to celebrate. Whether you know him, have read him, or even heard of him, it is very possible that you've felt his influence. A respected writer of fiction and nonfiction, and a popular and well-regarded writing teacher, Goodwin has also made his mark-albeit in his unassuming and quietly confident fashion-as an eloquent advocate for the arts. It would, in short, be difficult to reside in the DC Metropolitan area and not have encountered his work, or felt his presence in the efforts of one of his successful students. Goodwin the writer is, not surprisingly but still refreshingly, very much like Goodwin the teacher: intelligent but unpretentious, enthusiastic but soft-spoken, connected but humble, equal parts southern gentleman and beltway insider. His latest novel Breaking Her Fall has received first-rate reviews in the press, and props from Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Ford, who celebrates Goodwin's achievement as "a true and good story of human frailty and imperfection survived."
Stephen Goodwin is a professor of creative writing at George Mason University and the author of two previous novels and a nonfiction book. His short fiction has appeared in Shenandoah, Sewanee Review, Georgia Review, and Gentleman's Quarterly; his reviews and nonfiction have been published in the Washington Post and Country Journal. Goodwin has also directed the literature program at the National Endowment for the Arts, and he served two terms as president of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation.
SM: First off, congratulations on your new novel! I heard some positive blurbs on NPR and all the reviews I've read have been uniformly outstanding.
SG: Thanks. There have been some good reviews, and I've learned that the best place to have a book mentioned is NPR -- because the audience for NPR is much the same as the audience of readers.
SM: Publisher's Weekly proclaims that this is your first novel in over two decades. Did you know you were going to write another novel (or, this novel) and work on it for a long time, or what reason(s) would you offer for the long time between books?
SG: Honestly, I thought I'd never write another novel. The difference on this one was that I decided starting out that I wasn't going to do it unless it was ready to come. I think I ruined fiction writing for myself by trying to force it, and I wasn't going to do that again.
SM: Did you find the process of composing a novel more arduous this time? Less? Did you feel more comfortable and/or confident as an established writer and teacher, or did that augment the self-induced pressure any committed artist feels?
SG: I felt more comfortable this time through, but not because I felt "established." The books that had been of interest to me for a while before writing this were books like "Feast of Love," by Charlie Baxter, and "We Were the Mulvaneys," by Joyce Oates. These books are full of feeling, unlike so many contemporary novels that wouldn't be caught dead in the vicinity of a real emotion. To me the passion in Baxter and Oates was liberating, and in "Breaking Her Fall" I decided I wouldn't shy away from emotion, or try to make it seem less messy than it really is. At that point the book was easy to write -- though I still had the problem of trying to put these messy feelings into a story.
SM: Writing and Teaching: I would imagine with your experience you'd be able to give a clinic on how to maintain balance between the demands of impressionable students and the demands of one's own restless muse. Care to elaborate on that?
SG: The answer is, it's impossible to keep a balance. A lot of teachers I know just don't try to write during the semester because it's so damn frustrating.
SM: Any plans to write a book on writing?
SG: Nope.
SM: If you could succinctly summarize the trajectory (thus far!) of your writing life, how different is it from what you imagined, as an earnest but unpublished author? How is it better? Worse? What things would you have changed?
SG: It's turned out completely differently from what I imagined -- which was that I would somehow walk in the footsteps of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, or at least George Plimpton. That I'd live in glamorous places, write dozens of books, catch big fish! I have caught a few fish, but I've also lived through a time when the novel has been languishing on its deathbed. Don't misunderstand me -- there are wonderful novels written now, but there aren't many readers for them. Fiction writing has become a marginal activity in our culture, while movies and TV have all the money and glamor and power. I was slower than many of my friends -- some of whom took off for Hollywood -- to realize that writing books was a tough way to make a buck, almost an impossible way. Thank god the universities have supported writers! I happen to believe that writers still do the essential work of telling the truth, which is not something of great concern to the moviemakers.
SM: MFA or No-MFA? Any comments or opinions for the folks who are adamant (pro OR con) about the value of MFA programs?
SG: It's always seemed strange to me that anyone would be ADAMANT about this. Many of our best writers have come from writing programs, and I don't think you can argue that workshops harm people. I've seen many people make huge leaps in workshops. The danger of MFA programs is more subtle and insidious -- it's the culture, it's the fact that there are now enough writing programs so that a writer can put together a career without ever having to reach the "common reader," or the public. I've heard writers claim that they don't ever consider their audience, but I think that's bull. And I think there's a huge difference between imagining that you write for a group of people of exquisitely refined sensibilities as opposed to a group of busy, active, smart folks who probably only have time to read a handful of novels in a year. I know that I wanted Breaking Her Fall to get to the "common reader," and I happen to know several common readers-my mother and my sister, for starters-they're always in a book.
SM: Again, as a teacher, if you had to say: has the writing of your students gotten better over time? Worse? The same? What positive trends have you noticed? What awful ones? Is it true to presume that regardless of genre or generation, good writing (and good writers) tend to find their way?
SG: I know that I see better students now than I did 20 years ago, but are they better writers? Time will tell. It's an unusual thing for a writer in an MFA program to be fully evolved. I have a friend, Robyn Wright, who won national awards as an MFA student, and now that she's been out of the program for five years she's writing things that are completely different -- and better, I'd say. But it takes a while for most fiction writers to hit their stride. As for trends, the huge favorite among students is still the first person, present tense narrative, though it's being pressed by an apparently urgent need that people now feel to write their memoirs. Really, I keep talking to young writers for whom that is the major project.
SM: If you had to say which writer influenced you most, and which book, what would they be? Any other notable influences, artistic or otherwise?
SG: In "Breaking Her Fall", there is a lot of music -- lots or references to Eva Cassidy and Eric Clapton. I was playing their music at the time, and I think that something about the way they engage with their art made its way into my work. I hope so. Singers and musicians let it spill out; they can't shy away from emotion, and that's the quality that I was listening for. I had their music playing the whole year that it took me to write that book.
SM: Who would you recommend as some of the better writers currently producing fiction?
SG: I've already mentioned Charlie Baxter and Joyce Oates -- amazing writers, both of them. I'd also like Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen, Richard Bausch, and Jane Hamilton as writers whose next book I will snap up.
SM: Any comments on the autobiographical elements in any of your novels?
SG: Only this: I decided a long time ago that I wouldn't read any book about someone whose life wasn't more interesting than my own. I wouldn't write one, either.
SM: Lastly: any advice for aspiring writers?
SG: One, remember that when you decide o write, you are starting down a long and winding path. Writing is a way of life and if you want to get to be any good, you have to keep following the path. Two, make sure you have some good companions on the journey.
by Sean Murphy
An Interview with Stephen Goodwin
Stephen Goodwin is one of the very rare and precious forces that anyone who appreciates exceptional writing would do well to celebrate. Whether you know him, have read him, or even heard of him, it is very possible that you've felt his influence. A respected writer of fiction and nonfiction, and a popular and well-regarded writing teacher, Goodwin has also made his mark-albeit in his unassuming and quietly confident fashion-as an eloquent advocate for the arts. It would, in short, be difficult to reside in the DC Metropolitan area and not have encountered his work, or felt his presence in the efforts of one of his successful students. Goodwin the writer is, not surprisingly but still refreshingly, very much like Goodwin the teacher: intelligent but unpretentious, enthusiastic but soft-spoken, connected but humble, equal parts southern gentleman and beltway insider. His latest novel Breaking Her Fall has received first-rate reviews in the press, and props from Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Ford, who celebrates Goodwin's achievement as "a true and good story of human frailty and imperfection survived."
Stephen Goodwin is a professor of creative writing at George Mason University and the author of two previous novels and a nonfiction book. His short fiction has appeared in Shenandoah, Sewanee Review, Georgia Review, and Gentleman's Quarterly; his reviews and nonfiction have been published in the Washington Post and Country Journal. Goodwin has also directed the literature program at the National Endowment for the Arts, and he served two terms as president of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation.
SM: First off, congratulations on your new novel! I heard some positive blurbs on NPR and all the reviews I've read have been uniformly outstanding.
SG: Thanks. There have been some good reviews, and I've learned that the best place to have a book mentioned is NPR -- because the audience for NPR is much the same as the audience of readers.
SM: Publisher's Weekly proclaims that this is your first novel in over two decades. Did you know you were going to write another novel (or, this novel) and work on it for a long time, or what reason(s) would you offer for the long time between books?
SG: Honestly, I thought I'd never write another novel. The difference on this one was that I decided starting out that I wasn't going to do it unless it was ready to come. I think I ruined fiction writing for myself by trying to force it, and I wasn't going to do that again.
SM: Did you find the process of composing a novel more arduous this time? Less? Did you feel more comfortable and/or confident as an established writer and teacher, or did that augment the self-induced pressure any committed artist feels?
SG: I felt more comfortable this time through, but not because I felt "established." The books that had been of interest to me for a while before writing this were books like "Feast of Love," by Charlie Baxter, and "We Were the Mulvaneys," by Joyce Oates. These books are full of feeling, unlike so many contemporary novels that wouldn't be caught dead in the vicinity of a real emotion. To me the passion in Baxter and Oates was liberating, and in "Breaking Her Fall" I decided I wouldn't shy away from emotion, or try to make it seem less messy than it really is. At that point the book was easy to write -- though I still had the problem of trying to put these messy feelings into a story.
SM: Writing and Teaching: I would imagine with your experience you'd be able to give a clinic on how to maintain balance between the demands of impressionable students and the demands of one's own restless muse. Care to elaborate on that?
SG: The answer is, it's impossible to keep a balance. A lot of teachers I know just don't try to write during the semester because it's so damn frustrating.
SM: Any plans to write a book on writing?
SG: Nope.
SM: If you could succinctly summarize the trajectory (thus far!) of your writing life, how different is it from what you imagined, as an earnest but unpublished author? How is it better? Worse? What things would you have changed?
SG: It's turned out completely differently from what I imagined -- which was that I would somehow walk in the footsteps of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, or at least George Plimpton. That I'd live in glamorous places, write dozens of books, catch big fish! I have caught a few fish, but I've also lived through a time when the novel has been languishing on its deathbed. Don't misunderstand me -- there are wonderful novels written now, but there aren't many readers for them. Fiction writing has become a marginal activity in our culture, while movies and TV have all the money and glamor and power. I was slower than many of my friends -- some of whom took off for Hollywood -- to realize that writing books was a tough way to make a buck, almost an impossible way. Thank god the universities have supported writers! I happen to believe that writers still do the essential work of telling the truth, which is not something of great concern to the moviemakers.
SM: MFA or No-MFA? Any comments or opinions for the folks who are adamant (pro OR con) about the value of MFA programs?
SG: It's always seemed strange to me that anyone would be ADAMANT about this. Many of our best writers have come from writing programs, and I don't think you can argue that workshops harm people. I've seen many people make huge leaps in workshops. The danger of MFA programs is more subtle and insidious -- it's the culture, it's the fact that there are now enough writing programs so that a writer can put together a career without ever having to reach the "common reader," or the public. I've heard writers claim that they don't ever consider their audience, but I think that's bull. And I think there's a huge difference between imagining that you write for a group of people of exquisitely refined sensibilities as opposed to a group of busy, active, smart folks who probably only have time to read a handful of novels in a year. I know that I wanted Breaking Her Fall to get to the "common reader," and I happen to know several common readers-my mother and my sister, for starters-they're always in a book.
SM: Again, as a teacher, if you had to say: has the writing of your students gotten better over time? Worse? The same? What positive trends have you noticed? What awful ones? Is it true to presume that regardless of genre or generation, good writing (and good writers) tend to find their way?
SG: I know that I see better students now than I did 20 years ago, but are they better writers? Time will tell. It's an unusual thing for a writer in an MFA program to be fully evolved. I have a friend, Robyn Wright, who won national awards as an MFA student, and now that she's been out of the program for five years she's writing things that are completely different -- and better, I'd say. But it takes a while for most fiction writers to hit their stride. As for trends, the huge favorite among students is still the first person, present tense narrative, though it's being pressed by an apparently urgent need that people now feel to write their memoirs. Really, I keep talking to young writers for whom that is the major project.
SM: If you had to say which writer influenced you most, and which book, what would they be? Any other notable influences, artistic or otherwise?
SG: In "Breaking Her Fall", there is a lot of music -- lots or references to Eva Cassidy and Eric Clapton. I was playing their music at the time, and I think that something about the way they engage with their art made its way into my work. I hope so. Singers and musicians let it spill out; they can't shy away from emotion, and that's the quality that I was listening for. I had their music playing the whole year that it took me to write that book.
SM: Who would you recommend as some of the better writers currently producing fiction?
SG: I've already mentioned Charlie Baxter and Joyce Oates -- amazing writers, both of them. I'd also like Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen, Richard Bausch, and Jane Hamilton as writers whose next book I will snap up.
SM: Any comments on the autobiographical elements in any of your novels?
SG: Only this: I decided a long time ago that I wouldn't read any book about someone whose life wasn't more interesting than my own. I wouldn't write one, either.
SM: Lastly: any advice for aspiring writers?
SG: One, remember that when you decide o write, you are starting down a long and winding path. Writing is a way of life and if you want to get to be any good, you have to keep following the path. Two, make sure you have some good companions on the journey.
An Interview with Christopher Coake
The Literary Life and How To Live It
by Sean Murphy
An Interview with Christopher Coake
It seems safe to predict that Chris Coake is a writer to watch out for. With his first book, a collection of short stories entitled We're in Trouble coming out in spring 05, and several projects in the works, there should be ample opportunity for readers to become familiar with him. It is also easy to wish Chris all the success he seems certain to achieve due to his obvious amiability and enthusiasm. While it might be understandable for a hard-working writer on the verge of a breakthrough to have an air of confidence, if not arrogance, Chris seems genuine, and genuinely humble about the work he's done and the recognition he's beginning to receive. Sometimes good guys do finish first, and the smart money is on Mr. Coake making waves well into the future. Chris is currently studying and teaching at Ohio State University, and will begin teaching English at the University of Nevada, Reno, next January. His work has appeared recently in The Gettysburg Review and will be featured in the forthcoming Best American Mystery Stories 2004 collection.
SM: Please talk about your upcoming projects for publication.
CC: Last summer I sold my first book, a collection of short stories titled We're in Trouble. It's coming out from Harcourt in April, 2005, and so far it's also been bought by four foreign markets-the UK (Penguin UK is the publisher), Germany (Random House Germany), France (Albin Michel), and Italy (Guanda). We have nibbles in other countries as well. The book's made up of seven stories, three of which are nearly novella-length. I wrote most of them in the last four years, which means that, with two exceptions, they've gone through the workshopping process at Ohio State, where I'm just finishing up my MFA.
One of the stories- "All Through the House," which was originally published last summer in The Gettysburg Review-is going to appear in the Best American Mystery Stories 2004 collection, due out in October '04.
I'm actually in the curious position of still trying to place some stories from the book in journals. It all came together so quickly that I haven't had a chance to find homes for some of them-which isn't helped by their length, either. Barring some last-minute acceptances, only four of the seven will have been published by the time of the book's release.
SM: Has your experience tended to demystify the publishing process, or has it made it even more special?
CC: Hm. Yes, and yes, I think. I know a heck of a lot more about publishing-about the process of putting a book together, seeing it sold, etc.-than I did a year and a half ago, and the possession of that knowledge can't help but demystify things. I've met my editor at Harcourt, Ann Patty, who is a twenty-five year publishing vet-back in the day, she told me, she discovered V.C. Andrews, and she just had a bestseller last year with Yann Martel's The Life of Pi-and though I pretty much owe her my career, she's not at all terrifying or aloof. I've been a journal editor (I edited Miami University of Ohio's journal Oxford Magazine for a year, and I've helped out on OSU's The Journal), so I know all about that process. (Submitting to journals was demystified the first time I found a couple of story submissions that had slipped into the wrong pile in my office at Miami, bearing six-month-old postmarks.) But book publishers-they're another story. Up until recently they were gods up on mountaintops.
I'm the product of two graduate writing programs: I got my MA at MU-Ohio, and now I'm at Ohio State, and one of the benefits of being in programs like these is that a young (or, rather, beginning) writer gets to consult with people who have published books, who've climbed the mountaintop. My advisor and mentor at OSU, Michelle Herman, even teaches a class in literary publishing, the whole purpose of which is demystification. (She taught the course last year, and managed to talk Ann Patty into coming to visit Columbus; Ann did her best to lay bare the process).
But all the same, that this has happened to me in the first place makes me feel-I don't know, I'm not a religious person, so I won't say "blessed" . . . but the word has some aspects that I like to it, in that I do feel as though this book, my career, has been helped and guided by people with a lot more of a clue than me. Michelle and I share an agent, because Michelle thought my work was ready and told me to send it along. That I finished a book at all is due to Nick Hornby, who was a guest instructor here, and mentioned me to his publisher on his way out of the country, and that sent me scrambling to compile a complete work. (Though his US publisher turned me down, the indefatigable Mr. Hornby is responsible for my UK and Italian contracts; Penguin and Guanda are his publishers, too. He's also giving We're in Trouble its first review, in his September column for The Believer.) My agent, Marian Young, is terrific, both a taskmaster and a great person to bounce ideas off of; she's the one who got the book sold so fast-we had an offer five weeks after I gave her the manuscript.
I don't want to be disingenuous-I wrote the stories to begin with, and none of this would have happened if they were awful. But all the same, a year and a half ago I was an MFA student stuck in his room-like a lot of other folks here who are good enough to have books-wondering if anyone would ever care, and without this community of people with more power and savvy around me, I might very well still be that lonely guy in his room. So in answer to your question, that help feels "special," and always will.
SM: Any other works on the way?
CC: Yeah, a couple of things. Random House Germany bought a novel-to-come from me, and I'm working on one right now, an expansion of one of the stories from the book. (Which got its start as a contraction of a failed novella.) I've got a couple of years to deliver anything, yet. That novel, though, looks more and more to be a long project (it's about a Slovenian Himalayan mountaineer, which is exactly not what I am, personally) requiring years of research. So I want to do something more local-something that doesn't require me to read a book to finish writing a page. I write a lot of novellas, and I have ideas for more; if only they sold better I could say I'm only a few months away from a second collection. I'm also starting to delve into non-fiction, which so far has been more rewarding than I would have guessed. I've finished a long essay my agent wants to send out; in fact I'm taking a break from revising it to do this interview.
I've also been working on editing an anthology-a compilation of contemporary literary fiction that deals, directly or indirectly, with cancer. But that's been back-burnered for a while, until my collection has had its time. To be honest, I still need more time to read for the anthology, anyway. We might try to market it with my novel manuscript, a couple of years down the road.
SM: Has teaching enriched your writing?
CC: Yes, a big yes. This would be a good time to mention that I am soon to be a teacher by profession; in January I'm starting work as an assistant professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno. I'll teach predominantly creative writing, which I find thrilling.
I've taught a lot of composition over the years, and though I like it, and seem to be good at it, comp demands a lot of time. Unreal amounts of time, particularly if you're teaching first-year college students. A good comp teacher has to urge students to revise, and revise, and revise; and that teacher has to read and reread and reread, and all the while these essays are going to be projects the students did under duress. No matter how positive students are about learning, very few dream of doing four revisions of a paper about, say, an analysis of a television commercial. So the papers, with a few notable exceptions, tend to drag. Now, that's not to say that teaching comp doesn't have rewards-but let's just say the rewards are subtle and spaced far apart, sometimes.
But a creative writing workshop is different. Students may write at all levels of achievement, but most of the time a story on the table in workshop represents work they're proud of, excited about. Passionate about, worried about. And that makes the vibe different. A good workshop hums; everyone's always thinking out loud. And the neat and sideways thing about fiction workshops is that-done well-they do teach other skills. I've seen students learn more about critical thinking in a workshop setting than they do in comp, again and again, simply by dint of the subject at hand, and their investment in it. A good workshop feels to me like a very pure distillation of the college experience-what I always thought the college experience ought to be, when I was a student. (Which explains why I'm going to have two advanced degrees in creative writing myself.) And having a part in that, being in the room with people who are actually learning, and excited to be learning, leaves me hopping with good energy and optimism that I can take back t0 my own writing.
Plus there's the element of having to walk the walk-if I'm vehemently arguing something for my students' benefit, then I'm forced, constantly, to sharpen those opinions. To hone my aesthetic, such as it is. Teaching workshop keeps me on my toes. (Which is only going to get more fraught in April; so far my students haven't had access to my writing, and I'm curious and a little terrified of the moment that will sooner or later come, when a student in my writing workshop waves my own book at me and points out nine examples of how I don't follow my own advice.)
SM: In your estimation, has the writing of students gotten better over time? Worse? The same? Trends? Is it true to presume that regardless of genre or generation, good writers tend to find their way?
CC: I haven't been teaching that long, all told, so it's hard for me to judge student writing on an historic scale. I think it's probably demonstrable that educated Americans, as a whole, write more poorly than they did back in the day-that we're suffering from too much video intrusion and Internet overuse and all of that. But I do think whether writing is bad or good has more to do with underlying ideas than with technical virtuosity, and that, by that measure, the number of truly creative people-people whose ideas and stories are worth reading-is probably the same from generation to generation. (I base this observation on absolutely no research whatsoever, incidentally.) Schools that interviewed me for teaching jobs asked what my criteria would be for admitting students to writing programs, and I answered truthfully that I'd want students with obvious passion, and/or a topic-a sense of immediacy and need in their work. Technical stuff (how to, for instance, make graceful transitions between the past and past perfect tenses) can be taught easily. The hard work is in shaping passions, guiding students deeper into those passions in search of complexity.
I just read Tobias Wolff's wonderful novel Old School, which is about bad writers in a private boys' school in the sixties. It's an amazing book, and it answers your question with subtleties I can't approach.
I can only talk about a couple of obvious trends-and keep in mind that I've only taught undergrads to this point. The big one, the one I'm guaranteed to see in every class, is the Hemingway style: Terse minimalism about heavy drinking and bafflement about women and general malaise. I see that a lot more than the more austere Carver-esque minimalism I had expected to see. The other--or maybe it's an offshoot-is that a lot of students are imitating Chuck Palahniuk these days, which means Hemingwayesque terse sentences mixed with a kind of aggressive surrealism. Other trends: students want trick endings; I hear The Sixth Sense referenced a lot. (It's safe to say that even English majors are more comfortable discussing movies than books.) More than a few want to write shared-world stories--drawing on mythology from Dungeons and Dragons or Everquest. Vampires are always popular. I see a lot of dialogue that can trace its origins back to Quentin Tarantino.
SM: MFA/No MFA? Any comments or opinions for the folks who are adamant (pro OR con) about the value of MFA programs?
CC: I still see the occasional book review in the New York Times that insists on beating the old, dead horse, about how MFA programs produce the same Carveresque minimalism, or the same high-gloss, low-wattage boring blah blah blah. (The typical review in this vein almost always goes on to express surprise: Despite writer X's MFA background, imagine this reviewer's surprise upon finding X's stories to be thrilling and inventive and new . . .) On the part of mainstream reviewers, this always stinks of laziness: setting up the straw man and knocking it down, rather than thinking up a real intro. It's not as though there's still any legitimate debate about whether writing programs ought to exist-the genie's out of the bottle; the programs aren't going away. There are well over a hundred writing programs in the country, producing thousands of writers, and by sheer dint of numbers some of those writers are going to be spectacular, and some of them are going to be high-gloss, low-wattage. And I might point out that a lot of bad, boring books were published in the days when a hundred grad programs weren't there to take the blame for them.
And anyway: writing programs don't make people rich. My monthly check at Miami of Ohio, back in '93, was about $650.00. I had a lot of time, yes, along with a lot of bills and not a lot of food, and a number of MFA students-particularly the young ones without reserves of cash-struggle in the same way today, and will ten years from now, too.)
I've been through two programs, and visited a lot of others, and I can say that, based on my experience, the idea of programs espousing a particular style-of producing "cookie-cutter fiction"-is past its prime. Miami let me experiment wildly. OSU let me experiment wildly. The growing number of programs in this country means that a lot of MFA-holders have been hired up to teach the new generation; my guess is that many programs are taught by people who themselves are rebelling against the styles of generations past.
So I guess it's fair to say that I am a strong proponent of the MFA system. I see it do a lot more right than wrong. But you must keep in mind my bias; I wouldn't be where I am without the help my own programs have provided me.
SM: What writers do you particularly enjoy and/or have most profoundly influenced you?
CC: I've already mentioned Tim O'Brien-his The Things They Carried was one of those books that changed everything, when I read it in 1993. It opened doors for me, showed me that fiction had more possibilities than I'd ever imagined.
I've mentioned Powers and Wallace, too. Galatea 2.2 and Infinite Jest are both remarkable books. Tobias Wolff, too: he's someone to whom most writers I know pay close attention. Alice Munro has been a huge influence on me. I'd read about five of her stories without "getting it," and then all of the sudden, six years or so ago, the light clicked on, and I read her Selected Stories in a few sittings. Munro breaks every rule there is, and she does it politely and subtly. She's amazing. Cormac McCarthy's recent stuff is great, but if he never writes another book I think he'll go to the pantheon for Blood Meridian.
A short list of names of other people I've read avidly, which should only be viewed as incomplete: George Saunders, Andrea Barrett, Toni Morrison, Denis Johnson, Steven Millhauser, Don DeLillo, Nick Hornby.
My profs at OSU are people who I think need more attention, and they all have new books out, or forthcoming: Lee K. Abbott, Michelle Herman, Erin McGraw, Lee Martin. This isn't just a plug-these people write really vital and beautiful literature. When I was a freshman at Ball State University my comp professor, Dennis Hoilman, taught us Joyce's "The Dead." That was the story that switched me over from writing genre to trying to write lit, and I still love it.
I should have mentioned Joyce Carol Oates up above. She was the first "lit" author I read on my own recognizance, and I still think she's great.
SM: Any other notable influences, artistic or otherwise?
CC: I'm a huge film buff, and, like anyone of my generation (people who grew up with an intimate relationship to the screen) I have a deep, romantic, sometimes troubled and codependent relationship with the movies. But great movies have influenced me as much as books have. Pulp Fiction, for instance, I saw at Miami University, right when I was first having my creative imagination really pushed open. I still write a lot of a-chronological stuff because of it. I'm not even going to attempt a comprehensive list of influential movies. But I will mention Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter, from 1997, which is hands-down my favorite film, ever. I don't feel the need to make movies, but when I came out of the theater I found myself wishing I'd made that one. To this day I feel possessive of that film, like somehow I had a hand in it. That I have been in something of a spiritual relationship with Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films goes without saying. They're flawed, yes, but for all that they feel perfect.
SM: If you could succinctly summarize the trajectory (thus far!) of your writing life, how different is it from what you imagined, as an earnest but unpublished author? How is it better? Worse? What things would you have changed?
CC: 'll have to give a complicated answer in a lot shorter form than it deserves. I'll start by saying that when I was younger I thought writing would make me rich. I idolized not just Stephen King's writing, but his fame; I figured that my eventual career would go like his did, and that by the time I was forty I'd be living in a house that had secret passages, and that I'd work like King does, in an office above an indoor pool.
But that didn't happen, obviously. I just finished my first year living as a guy whose writing has paid for things he enjoys, but I'm not rich, and I understand I'm not likely to be. It's safe to say that my book's most valuable service has been to give me access to a job I like, with a good salary. Assuming I don't screw up on the way to tenure, I see myself as very happy with that job, with Reno, with teaching, for a long time to come. And let me say that, after five years in grad school and six years working in a used bookstore, the idea of my time at the computer being lucrative is still mind-blowing. The grad programs I've been to have been uniform in their blunt assessment of the market for literary fiction and for jobs teaching literary fiction. Just two years ago I was resigned to leaving OSU for a job doing something not at all related to writing. Dorothy Allison (add her to my list of influences above) visited our program, and told us a story about a writer she admires who drives a bread truck by day and writes at night, because he likes the smell of bread; he gets, she said, a lot of thinking done on his routes. All of us MFAers in the room were looking at each other and nodding and thinking that wasn't such a bad gig. So for me to have gone from thinking that, to being here in my present life, still makes my head spin. I have moments where I have to convince myself that it all really happened.
And of course nothing has really happened yet; the book is still on its way; I'm still a month from being able to walk into a Borders and see my name in a table of contents. So maybe a year from now this whole answer will be invalid. I don't know.
One thing I've avoided mentioning so far is that my life prior to a year ago was very difficult. I am a widower; I lost my wife, Joellen Thomas, to cancer in 1999. We met as grad students at Miami U. So when I say that I often have to sit back and ask myself what the hell happened, that's a big part of the reason why.
It's a sad story, and I don't want to tell it all here, but I can say this: I had nearly stopped writing during my relationship with Joellen. That wasn't her fault; what happened was that I was in a job I liked, and living with a woman I loved, and at that time I was content to get fat and lazy. It was a lot easier to sit on the couch and watch television at night than it was to spend two hours writing. I had a few finished stories I liked, and every few months I'd rouse myself and send them out, but I rarely produced anything new. In retrospect I had only one story that was any good, and it's scary to look back and see it as the link between that time and this one.
As it happened I'd sent that one story out right before Joellen's cancer recurred for the final time. And one of the places I'd sent it was to The Journal at Ohio State, a few blocks from our apartment. I promptly forgot about it. Then-just two days after we found out Joellen was terminal-I came home to a message from Michelle Herman that my story had been accepted. I don't believe in fate, though a lot of people around me who do point to that string of events as evidence. I look at it this way: in the middle of awful, awful times, in the middle of the worst luck there is, one good thing happened. My wife got to hear it, and the news gave her some happiness. And I had something to think about, and after Joellen was gone, I had something to build on. As it happened I met with Michelle Herman a few months after Joellen died, and she arranged for me to take her workshop as a continuing ed student, and then I decided to dive back into school, and Michelle talked me out of Utah and into Ohio State, which is where everything changed for me.
So I think it's fair to say that at almost every turn my career has gone differently than I'd imagined it going. In 1999 I couldn't have imagined that just five years later I'd have a book on the way, and a job in the mountains, and a woman I love (I am in a long-term relationship with a woman named Stephanie Lauer) going with me.
It's hard for me to look back, too. We're in Trouble isn't overtly about cancer, but Joellen's death is all over that book. Every story is about loss, and a couple are about these kind of hapless men who have outlived the women they love. A lot of people I know look at my story as inspiring, and sometimes I think so too, but just as often it's a source of tremendous guilt. My success came out of tragedy, but it's also built on tragedy. I used what happened to me. It's fair to say that in 1999 I wouldn't have imagined that, either. For the most part I'm a happy guy . . . I just don't want to forget what brought me here. The debts I owe.
SM: Any advice for aspiring writers?
CC: h, boy. Here goes (and keep in mind that I am recycling almost all of this from advice that's been passed on to me): The world is full of people who will tell you how difficult writing and publishing is. Believe them; never look away from the truth of this business. But also find and listen to people who will believe in your potential, people who think that you've got it in you to break through the poor odds. Whether that means going the MFA route, or surrounding yourself with supportive and well-read friends, is up to you to decide. It goes without saying that you have to believe in yourself; I just think it's impossible to keep believing in yourself without others who believe in you, too.
Next I'd say this: Good criticism is a luxury. You'll almost certainly find people (parents, significant others) who will love what you do, no matter what it is. But make sure that among your circle of readers are two or three people who can tell you when you've failed, and who can tell you why. And if you are in, or considering going to, a writing program, go with the understanding that you will be criticized, and with the willingness to let that happen. You'll be better for it.
The inverse is true, too: if you're the sort of writer who is overly self-critical, then find someone trusted who can tell you to quit screwing around and put it in the mail. I'm not the sort of writer who will tell anyone to write every day. I don't write every day; I write when I feel I'm going to do good work, and I know myself well enough that this isn't really a cop-out I use to play video games or go book-shopping, instead of writing. But I do think aspiring writers should learn their best possible work habits and adhere to them. If you need to write every day, then for the love of Pete write every day. I will say that even though I don't write every day, I work on writing every day: I turn potential stories over in my head; I do research; I read books and think about whether I liked them or loved them or hated them. I keep a journal---sporadically--in which I try to dissect what I think about books and my own work, and why.
But just in case, I'll end with something Roger Ebert (who is a very fine writer) once wrote, which I keep pinned to the wall above my computer: "The muse comes during composition, not before."
by Sean Murphy
An Interview with Christopher Coake
It seems safe to predict that Chris Coake is a writer to watch out for. With his first book, a collection of short stories entitled We're in Trouble coming out in spring 05, and several projects in the works, there should be ample opportunity for readers to become familiar with him. It is also easy to wish Chris all the success he seems certain to achieve due to his obvious amiability and enthusiasm. While it might be understandable for a hard-working writer on the verge of a breakthrough to have an air of confidence, if not arrogance, Chris seems genuine, and genuinely humble about the work he's done and the recognition he's beginning to receive. Sometimes good guys do finish first, and the smart money is on Mr. Coake making waves well into the future. Chris is currently studying and teaching at Ohio State University, and will begin teaching English at the University of Nevada, Reno, next January. His work has appeared recently in The Gettysburg Review and will be featured in the forthcoming Best American Mystery Stories 2004 collection.
SM: Please talk about your upcoming projects for publication.
CC: Last summer I sold my first book, a collection of short stories titled We're in Trouble. It's coming out from Harcourt in April, 2005, and so far it's also been bought by four foreign markets-the UK (Penguin UK is the publisher), Germany (Random House Germany), France (Albin Michel), and Italy (Guanda). We have nibbles in other countries as well. The book's made up of seven stories, three of which are nearly novella-length. I wrote most of them in the last four years, which means that, with two exceptions, they've gone through the workshopping process at Ohio State, where I'm just finishing up my MFA.
One of the stories- "All Through the House," which was originally published last summer in The Gettysburg Review-is going to appear in the Best American Mystery Stories 2004 collection, due out in October '04.
I'm actually in the curious position of still trying to place some stories from the book in journals. It all came together so quickly that I haven't had a chance to find homes for some of them-which isn't helped by their length, either. Barring some last-minute acceptances, only four of the seven will have been published by the time of the book's release.
SM: Has your experience tended to demystify the publishing process, or has it made it even more special?
CC: Hm. Yes, and yes, I think. I know a heck of a lot more about publishing-about the process of putting a book together, seeing it sold, etc.-than I did a year and a half ago, and the possession of that knowledge can't help but demystify things. I've met my editor at Harcourt, Ann Patty, who is a twenty-five year publishing vet-back in the day, she told me, she discovered V.C. Andrews, and she just had a bestseller last year with Yann Martel's The Life of Pi-and though I pretty much owe her my career, she's not at all terrifying or aloof. I've been a journal editor (I edited Miami University of Ohio's journal Oxford Magazine for a year, and I've helped out on OSU's The Journal), so I know all about that process. (Submitting to journals was demystified the first time I found a couple of story submissions that had slipped into the wrong pile in my office at Miami, bearing six-month-old postmarks.) But book publishers-they're another story. Up until recently they were gods up on mountaintops.
I'm the product of two graduate writing programs: I got my MA at MU-Ohio, and now I'm at Ohio State, and one of the benefits of being in programs like these is that a young (or, rather, beginning) writer gets to consult with people who have published books, who've climbed the mountaintop. My advisor and mentor at OSU, Michelle Herman, even teaches a class in literary publishing, the whole purpose of which is demystification. (She taught the course last year, and managed to talk Ann Patty into coming to visit Columbus; Ann did her best to lay bare the process).
But all the same, that this has happened to me in the first place makes me feel-I don't know, I'm not a religious person, so I won't say "blessed" . . . but the word has some aspects that I like to it, in that I do feel as though this book, my career, has been helped and guided by people with a lot more of a clue than me. Michelle and I share an agent, because Michelle thought my work was ready and told me to send it along. That I finished a book at all is due to Nick Hornby, who was a guest instructor here, and mentioned me to his publisher on his way out of the country, and that sent me scrambling to compile a complete work. (Though his US publisher turned me down, the indefatigable Mr. Hornby is responsible for my UK and Italian contracts; Penguin and Guanda are his publishers, too. He's also giving We're in Trouble its first review, in his September column for The Believer.) My agent, Marian Young, is terrific, both a taskmaster and a great person to bounce ideas off of; she's the one who got the book sold so fast-we had an offer five weeks after I gave her the manuscript.
I don't want to be disingenuous-I wrote the stories to begin with, and none of this would have happened if they were awful. But all the same, a year and a half ago I was an MFA student stuck in his room-like a lot of other folks here who are good enough to have books-wondering if anyone would ever care, and without this community of people with more power and savvy around me, I might very well still be that lonely guy in his room. So in answer to your question, that help feels "special," and always will.
SM: Any other works on the way?
CC: Yeah, a couple of things. Random House Germany bought a novel-to-come from me, and I'm working on one right now, an expansion of one of the stories from the book. (Which got its start as a contraction of a failed novella.) I've got a couple of years to deliver anything, yet. That novel, though, looks more and more to be a long project (it's about a Slovenian Himalayan mountaineer, which is exactly not what I am, personally) requiring years of research. So I want to do something more local-something that doesn't require me to read a book to finish writing a page. I write a lot of novellas, and I have ideas for more; if only they sold better I could say I'm only a few months away from a second collection. I'm also starting to delve into non-fiction, which so far has been more rewarding than I would have guessed. I've finished a long essay my agent wants to send out; in fact I'm taking a break from revising it to do this interview.
I've also been working on editing an anthology-a compilation of contemporary literary fiction that deals, directly or indirectly, with cancer. But that's been back-burnered for a while, until my collection has had its time. To be honest, I still need more time to read for the anthology, anyway. We might try to market it with my novel manuscript, a couple of years down the road.
SM: Has teaching enriched your writing?
CC: Yes, a big yes. This would be a good time to mention that I am soon to be a teacher by profession; in January I'm starting work as an assistant professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno. I'll teach predominantly creative writing, which I find thrilling.
I've taught a lot of composition over the years, and though I like it, and seem to be good at it, comp demands a lot of time. Unreal amounts of time, particularly if you're teaching first-year college students. A good comp teacher has to urge students to revise, and revise, and revise; and that teacher has to read and reread and reread, and all the while these essays are going to be projects the students did under duress. No matter how positive students are about learning, very few dream of doing four revisions of a paper about, say, an analysis of a television commercial. So the papers, with a few notable exceptions, tend to drag. Now, that's not to say that teaching comp doesn't have rewards-but let's just say the rewards are subtle and spaced far apart, sometimes.
But a creative writing workshop is different. Students may write at all levels of achievement, but most of the time a story on the table in workshop represents work they're proud of, excited about. Passionate about, worried about. And that makes the vibe different. A good workshop hums; everyone's always thinking out loud. And the neat and sideways thing about fiction workshops is that-done well-they do teach other skills. I've seen students learn more about critical thinking in a workshop setting than they do in comp, again and again, simply by dint of the subject at hand, and their investment in it. A good workshop feels to me like a very pure distillation of the college experience-what I always thought the college experience ought to be, when I was a student. (Which explains why I'm going to have two advanced degrees in creative writing myself.) And having a part in that, being in the room with people who are actually learning, and excited to be learning, leaves me hopping with good energy and optimism that I can take back t0 my own writing.
Plus there's the element of having to walk the walk-if I'm vehemently arguing something for my students' benefit, then I'm forced, constantly, to sharpen those opinions. To hone my aesthetic, such as it is. Teaching workshop keeps me on my toes. (Which is only going to get more fraught in April; so far my students haven't had access to my writing, and I'm curious and a little terrified of the moment that will sooner or later come, when a student in my writing workshop waves my own book at me and points out nine examples of how I don't follow my own advice.)
SM: In your estimation, has the writing of students gotten better over time? Worse? The same? Trends? Is it true to presume that regardless of genre or generation, good writers tend to find their way?
CC: I haven't been teaching that long, all told, so it's hard for me to judge student writing on an historic scale. I think it's probably demonstrable that educated Americans, as a whole, write more poorly than they did back in the day-that we're suffering from too much video intrusion and Internet overuse and all of that. But I do think whether writing is bad or good has more to do with underlying ideas than with technical virtuosity, and that, by that measure, the number of truly creative people-people whose ideas and stories are worth reading-is probably the same from generation to generation. (I base this observation on absolutely no research whatsoever, incidentally.) Schools that interviewed me for teaching jobs asked what my criteria would be for admitting students to writing programs, and I answered truthfully that I'd want students with obvious passion, and/or a topic-a sense of immediacy and need in their work. Technical stuff (how to, for instance, make graceful transitions between the past and past perfect tenses) can be taught easily. The hard work is in shaping passions, guiding students deeper into those passions in search of complexity.
I just read Tobias Wolff's wonderful novel Old School, which is about bad writers in a private boys' school in the sixties. It's an amazing book, and it answers your question with subtleties I can't approach.
I can only talk about a couple of obvious trends-and keep in mind that I've only taught undergrads to this point. The big one, the one I'm guaranteed to see in every class, is the Hemingway style: Terse minimalism about heavy drinking and bafflement about women and general malaise. I see that a lot more than the more austere Carver-esque minimalism I had expected to see. The other--or maybe it's an offshoot-is that a lot of students are imitating Chuck Palahniuk these days, which means Hemingwayesque terse sentences mixed with a kind of aggressive surrealism. Other trends: students want trick endings; I hear The Sixth Sense referenced a lot. (It's safe to say that even English majors are more comfortable discussing movies than books.) More than a few want to write shared-world stories--drawing on mythology from Dungeons and Dragons or Everquest. Vampires are always popular. I see a lot of dialogue that can trace its origins back to Quentin Tarantino.
SM: MFA/No MFA? Any comments or opinions for the folks who are adamant (pro OR con) about the value of MFA programs?
CC: I still see the occasional book review in the New York Times that insists on beating the old, dead horse, about how MFA programs produce the same Carveresque minimalism, or the same high-gloss, low-wattage boring blah blah blah. (The typical review in this vein almost always goes on to express surprise: Despite writer X's MFA background, imagine this reviewer's surprise upon finding X's stories to be thrilling and inventive and new . . .) On the part of mainstream reviewers, this always stinks of laziness: setting up the straw man and knocking it down, rather than thinking up a real intro. It's not as though there's still any legitimate debate about whether writing programs ought to exist-the genie's out of the bottle; the programs aren't going away. There are well over a hundred writing programs in the country, producing thousands of writers, and by sheer dint of numbers some of those writers are going to be spectacular, and some of them are going to be high-gloss, low-wattage. And I might point out that a lot of bad, boring books were published in the days when a hundred grad programs weren't there to take the blame for them.
And anyway: writing programs don't make people rich. My monthly check at Miami of Ohio, back in '93, was about $650.00. I had a lot of time, yes, along with a lot of bills and not a lot of food, and a number of MFA students-particularly the young ones without reserves of cash-struggle in the same way today, and will ten years from now, too.)
I've been through two programs, and visited a lot of others, and I can say that, based on my experience, the idea of programs espousing a particular style-of producing "cookie-cutter fiction"-is past its prime. Miami let me experiment wildly. OSU let me experiment wildly. The growing number of programs in this country means that a lot of MFA-holders have been hired up to teach the new generation; my guess is that many programs are taught by people who themselves are rebelling against the styles of generations past.
So I guess it's fair to say that I am a strong proponent of the MFA system. I see it do a lot more right than wrong. But you must keep in mind my bias; I wouldn't be where I am without the help my own programs have provided me.
SM: What writers do you particularly enjoy and/or have most profoundly influenced you?
CC: I've already mentioned Tim O'Brien-his The Things They Carried was one of those books that changed everything, when I read it in 1993. It opened doors for me, showed me that fiction had more possibilities than I'd ever imagined.
I've mentioned Powers and Wallace, too. Galatea 2.2 and Infinite Jest are both remarkable books. Tobias Wolff, too: he's someone to whom most writers I know pay close attention. Alice Munro has been a huge influence on me. I'd read about five of her stories without "getting it," and then all of the sudden, six years or so ago, the light clicked on, and I read her Selected Stories in a few sittings. Munro breaks every rule there is, and she does it politely and subtly. She's amazing. Cormac McCarthy's recent stuff is great, but if he never writes another book I think he'll go to the pantheon for Blood Meridian.
A short list of names of other people I've read avidly, which should only be viewed as incomplete: George Saunders, Andrea Barrett, Toni Morrison, Denis Johnson, Steven Millhauser, Don DeLillo, Nick Hornby.
My profs at OSU are people who I think need more attention, and they all have new books out, or forthcoming: Lee K. Abbott, Michelle Herman, Erin McGraw, Lee Martin. This isn't just a plug-these people write really vital and beautiful literature. When I was a freshman at Ball State University my comp professor, Dennis Hoilman, taught us Joyce's "The Dead." That was the story that switched me over from writing genre to trying to write lit, and I still love it.
I should have mentioned Joyce Carol Oates up above. She was the first "lit" author I read on my own recognizance, and I still think she's great.
SM: Any other notable influences, artistic or otherwise?
CC: I'm a huge film buff, and, like anyone of my generation (people who grew up with an intimate relationship to the screen) I have a deep, romantic, sometimes troubled and codependent relationship with the movies. But great movies have influenced me as much as books have. Pulp Fiction, for instance, I saw at Miami University, right when I was first having my creative imagination really pushed open. I still write a lot of a-chronological stuff because of it. I'm not even going to attempt a comprehensive list of influential movies. But I will mention Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter, from 1997, which is hands-down my favorite film, ever. I don't feel the need to make movies, but when I came out of the theater I found myself wishing I'd made that one. To this day I feel possessive of that film, like somehow I had a hand in it. That I have been in something of a spiritual relationship with Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films goes without saying. They're flawed, yes, but for all that they feel perfect.
SM: If you could succinctly summarize the trajectory (thus far!) of your writing life, how different is it from what you imagined, as an earnest but unpublished author? How is it better? Worse? What things would you have changed?
CC: 'll have to give a complicated answer in a lot shorter form than it deserves. I'll start by saying that when I was younger I thought writing would make me rich. I idolized not just Stephen King's writing, but his fame; I figured that my eventual career would go like his did, and that by the time I was forty I'd be living in a house that had secret passages, and that I'd work like King does, in an office above an indoor pool.
But that didn't happen, obviously. I just finished my first year living as a guy whose writing has paid for things he enjoys, but I'm not rich, and I understand I'm not likely to be. It's safe to say that my book's most valuable service has been to give me access to a job I like, with a good salary. Assuming I don't screw up on the way to tenure, I see myself as very happy with that job, with Reno, with teaching, for a long time to come. And let me say that, after five years in grad school and six years working in a used bookstore, the idea of my time at the computer being lucrative is still mind-blowing. The grad programs I've been to have been uniform in their blunt assessment of the market for literary fiction and for jobs teaching literary fiction. Just two years ago I was resigned to leaving OSU for a job doing something not at all related to writing. Dorothy Allison (add her to my list of influences above) visited our program, and told us a story about a writer she admires who drives a bread truck by day and writes at night, because he likes the smell of bread; he gets, she said, a lot of thinking done on his routes. All of us MFAers in the room were looking at each other and nodding and thinking that wasn't such a bad gig. So for me to have gone from thinking that, to being here in my present life, still makes my head spin. I have moments where I have to convince myself that it all really happened.
And of course nothing has really happened yet; the book is still on its way; I'm still a month from being able to walk into a Borders and see my name in a table of contents. So maybe a year from now this whole answer will be invalid. I don't know.
One thing I've avoided mentioning so far is that my life prior to a year ago was very difficult. I am a widower; I lost my wife, Joellen Thomas, to cancer in 1999. We met as grad students at Miami U. So when I say that I often have to sit back and ask myself what the hell happened, that's a big part of the reason why.
It's a sad story, and I don't want to tell it all here, but I can say this: I had nearly stopped writing during my relationship with Joellen. That wasn't her fault; what happened was that I was in a job I liked, and living with a woman I loved, and at that time I was content to get fat and lazy. It was a lot easier to sit on the couch and watch television at night than it was to spend two hours writing. I had a few finished stories I liked, and every few months I'd rouse myself and send them out, but I rarely produced anything new. In retrospect I had only one story that was any good, and it's scary to look back and see it as the link between that time and this one.
As it happened I'd sent that one story out right before Joellen's cancer recurred for the final time. And one of the places I'd sent it was to The Journal at Ohio State, a few blocks from our apartment. I promptly forgot about it. Then-just two days after we found out Joellen was terminal-I came home to a message from Michelle Herman that my story had been accepted. I don't believe in fate, though a lot of people around me who do point to that string of events as evidence. I look at it this way: in the middle of awful, awful times, in the middle of the worst luck there is, one good thing happened. My wife got to hear it, and the news gave her some happiness. And I had something to think about, and after Joellen was gone, I had something to build on. As it happened I met with Michelle Herman a few months after Joellen died, and she arranged for me to take her workshop as a continuing ed student, and then I decided to dive back into school, and Michelle talked me out of Utah and into Ohio State, which is where everything changed for me.
So I think it's fair to say that at almost every turn my career has gone differently than I'd imagined it going. In 1999 I couldn't have imagined that just five years later I'd have a book on the way, and a job in the mountains, and a woman I love (I am in a long-term relationship with a woman named Stephanie Lauer) going with me.
It's hard for me to look back, too. We're in Trouble isn't overtly about cancer, but Joellen's death is all over that book. Every story is about loss, and a couple are about these kind of hapless men who have outlived the women they love. A lot of people I know look at my story as inspiring, and sometimes I think so too, but just as often it's a source of tremendous guilt. My success came out of tragedy, but it's also built on tragedy. I used what happened to me. It's fair to say that in 1999 I wouldn't have imagined that, either. For the most part I'm a happy guy . . . I just don't want to forget what brought me here. The debts I owe.
SM: Any advice for aspiring writers?
CC: h, boy. Here goes (and keep in mind that I am recycling almost all of this from advice that's been passed on to me): The world is full of people who will tell you how difficult writing and publishing is. Believe them; never look away from the truth of this business. But also find and listen to people who will believe in your potential, people who think that you've got it in you to break through the poor odds. Whether that means going the MFA route, or surrounding yourself with supportive and well-read friends, is up to you to decide. It goes without saying that you have to believe in yourself; I just think it's impossible to keep believing in yourself without others who believe in you, too.
Next I'd say this: Good criticism is a luxury. You'll almost certainly find people (parents, significant others) who will love what you do, no matter what it is. But make sure that among your circle of readers are two or three people who can tell you when you've failed, and who can tell you why. And if you are in, or considering going to, a writing program, go with the understanding that you will be criticized, and with the willingness to let that happen. You'll be better for it.
The inverse is true, too: if you're the sort of writer who is overly self-critical, then find someone trusted who can tell you to quit screwing around and put it in the mail. I'm not the sort of writer who will tell anyone to write every day. I don't write every day; I write when I feel I'm going to do good work, and I know myself well enough that this isn't really a cop-out I use to play video games or go book-shopping, instead of writing. But I do think aspiring writers should learn their best possible work habits and adhere to them. If you need to write every day, then for the love of Pete write every day. I will say that even though I don't write every day, I work on writing every day: I turn potential stories over in my head; I do research; I read books and think about whether I liked them or loved them or hated them. I keep a journal---sporadically--in which I try to dissect what I think about books and my own work, and why.
But just in case, I'll end with something Roger Ebert (who is a very fine writer) once wrote, which I keep pinned to the wall above my computer: "The muse comes during composition, not before."
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