Over the course of a few semesters, Nicole Louise Reid, author of In the Breeze of Passing Things (MacAdam/Cage, 2003), discussed her approach to writing, teaching, and life since she earned her MFA in fiction at George Mason in 2001. Her short fiction has appeared in more than two dozen journals, including The Southern Review and Indiana Review. Pisgah Review published an excerpt of her second novel, Hunger, in its winter 2008 issue.
An emailed interview can lack context—people tap at keys . . . somewhere. But Reid’s characters provide a distinct sense of place not only in what they say but how they say it. Evansville, then, where the toe-end of Indiana dangles into Kentucky by a bend in the Ohio River—a river port, a crossroads of Midwest and South, a city with rural on its mind—seems a fitting place for such work. Reid is an associate professor at the University of Southern Indiana, fiction editor at the Southern Indiana Review, and codirector of the RopeWalk Visiting Writers Reading Series at USI and on the board of the RopeWalk Writer’s Retreat in New Harmony. She lives with her husband and their two-and-a-half-year-old three streets from the Ohio, where swallows chase insects and coal barges float by; summer nights, she said, just outside town, fireflies hover above the corn, their winking green glow as big as cow’s eyes against the sky.
Q: You have said you moved around before your family settled in the D.C. area (from Philadelphia to Chicago, Dallas to Appalachia) and collected characters’ voices along the way. Most sound southern—they seem to have the loquacity and turn of phrase I often hear in the Deep South or southern Appalachia. Is that your tendency?
NLR: When I was a kid, I’d listen to my mother answer the phone and knew exactly who she was talking to by her inflection, diction, and appropriated accent. She was unaware of it until I repeatedly guessed at the caller and was always right. Then she became self-conscious and embarrassed. She worried that her friends and acquaintances would think she was making fun of them. I don’t think anyone ever did, but becoming self-aware on the telephone (or in the grocery checkout line) really clammed her up.
I share my mother’s ability to adopt the voice of someone around me. Whatever best friend I had growing up, I talked just like her or him. And once I began reading heavily and writing, I found it even easier to talk like someone else on paper. This isn’t to say my own voice is a blank slate, but any accent is minimal, and because my father grew up with southern idioms and my mother with northern, my speech has always drawn from both. Nonetheless, I was four and five years old in Dallas and five through nine in Blacksburg, Virginia. These are pretty formative years linguistically, and Southern—capital S—voices are what I find richest and most comfortable.
Q: When you start writing, do you hear the voice first, or do you imagine a situation or a character first, or does it depend?
NLR: The chicken or egg question is an interesting and frustrating one. Interesting to know how any writer operates usually or for particular works. Frustrating because the more I think I have the answer, the less it tends to happen that way. The observed subject is never truly the subject in its pure state, right?
Here is what I know about how I have worked in the past: there was always a voice. I always followed it down a sort of rabbit’s hole. In some stories it was ferocious (I’m thinking of a story called “So There” [in Clackamas Literary Review]), in others timid. My very first story attempts sometimes suffered from overindulging whatever first person character was talking, at the cost of plot. Action was difficult for me to figure out; it is so unknown compared to the very known voice of whatever character I am writing. The prospect of having to make something up—what in the world is going to happen!?!—was too big for me to face. Then I’d get into a story, halfway through it even, and halt. That actually happened in a couple.
At that point in “So There,” the first person girl narrating about the nights leading up to her father killing her mother’s brand new baby, says, “This was all a game. So there.” I was writing that to myself, saying the 23 pages of story so far were just a game; ha. I left the computer for the day and came back to the story the next day. I read everything up to that last point and realized my own frustrating search to make meaning of this girl and her fucked-up world was the same search she was on. She truly was saying this was all a game, so there. So I left those lines and kept going. Sometimes action and its mysterious meaning come like that.
More recently, I have been writing with ideas. I’m working on a triptych right now, a series of three linked stories. [“We Want It Back,” in Grain Magazine, and “Sparrow,” which is under submission, form the first two parts.] I began with the most recent in time, then went back 30 years, and am now struggling to write the first in the series set 30 years before that. I find writing with ideas much harder. Following a voice almost always has built-in momentum. When I have a sense that I want to write about a phenomenon or need to lay groundwork (while simultaneously writing a kick-ass stand alone story) as in this first of the triptych, I have to provide my own momentum. And that, that is work.
Because it’s what I’m doing right now, I like to think of this idea-writing as resulting in more complex fiction than voice-writing, but probably it is only different fiction.
Q: When you say you are writing with ideas, do you mean having a purpose or meaning, the way social commentary is ascribed to To Kill a Mockingbird—or is it less concrete than that?
NLR: Oh good question—no, I don’t write with a purpose. As a reader, I find purpose-driven work transparently didactic (even the better, literary pieces) and completely at odds with art, which I think is meaningful because of its detachment from ulterior motive.
This argument’s one I enjoy having even though it becomes incredibly messy at this point because one could say, “But doesn’t art’s detachment imply an argument
(say, that art CAN be detached from social criticism or direction)?”
Still, and as flimsy as this is as an answer, I feel that a writer working with critique at the root of her or his material will impose that critique on the story, on the characters, on the language and scenery, and on the narrative. A story or novel that explores characters and action within (that word “within” implies a kind of limitation here that I don’t intend) a literary aesthetic devoid of polemic will carry a sort of purity to it.
Do I, as a reader, sometimes respond to that kind of writing with a quiet (or hollering) social commentary of my own based on the characters and their contexts? Yes, how can I not? I think the difference for me lies in the sense that a writer wants me to arrive at her or his endorsed answer. I don’t want to be told what to think—I want to figure out my own head, my own world my own way.
As a writer, I abide by this sense that my job is to reveal humanity, not educate it. Ordinarily I have no trouble with this. The last story I wrote (“Once It’s Gone”), however, made me uncomfortable. In the story, a girl has an abortion. Her mother, concerned about saving an abandoned nestling from a pack of roving once-housecats, seems okay with this. The father, who narrates the story, is not the girl’s father; the mother had affairs early in the marriage and the girl is a product of one of those. So despite parenting the girl her 16 years, all of a sudden he feels unentitled to the grief he feels at mourning what could have been his first grandchild. Ach! I really worried that the story would be perceived as a polemic. And it isn’t. At all. Something happened and the reader gets to see how a particular person will react to it. That the something was an abortion, I was sure, however, was going to please some and aggravate others. I wasn’t interested in abortion in coming to write this story, but in the sense a person can develop that a particular grief and mourning does not belong to them. That was and is interesting to me and I wanted to explore that emotional phenomenon. I think if looked at in its entirety, a reader would see the story as simply an exploration. I sure hope so.
I didn’t realize that my second novel might be considered as social criticism until I wanted to use it to apply for a course-release award at my university. After having finished a full draft, I forced myself to do the glossy spin such an application calls for and in writing that, I found that the book can be seen as an indictment of American body image and body standards. I didn’t write the book thinking about it this way, or wanting to change anyone’s mind about what value Americans ascribe to thinness. The book is simply about people who have particularly extreme approaches to food and what it does to their bodies. I can certainly see someone reading the book and thinking differently about the subject, but I hope that will be because the characters have revealed themselves rather than any message I have imposed on the those characters.
Q: So when you say you are working with ideas, in the case of the triptych, you mean you aren’t only following the flow of one voice, you are working within a kind of continuity?
NLR: That’s a good way of putting it. Yeah, working with a certain continuity. In the case of the triptych, the continuity is a set of characters who are part of the universe of Leo (the uncle returning from the dead in “We Want It Back”). The first story in the series, (at present a very messy 22 first draft pages and building), will have Leo as a little kid. So the continuity of this series is a single life, though never is Leo a narrator. (The middle story, “Sparrow,” is narrated in third person from Jilly’s point of view.) I’m finding this writing from ideas or continuity much slower than following a voice—in the latter, the character who speaks is quickly fleshed out by the quality of her or his voice, and that fleshing out, if I’m lucky, can look a lot like or actually be plot. But in writing from ideas, well, I have to have ideas or create them, and I’ve never been very easily creative.
Q: The question of purpose or meaning has come up in workshops; a variation on “I don’t know what to take away from this story.” Do you think that’s coming from the same place—someone who wants stories to make a larger point—or do you think there’s a difference there?
NLR: I guess I’m not sure of an answer to your question. It’s so hard to talk about what a story does or should do, you know? I don’t know of a word for the emotional response of a reader to what she or he reads, and I desperately want a word for that. If that, that wordless effect is “the point,” then I certainly don’t object to wanting a story to have a point, though I don’t think the writer ought to presume to prescribe what that emotional response is (just that there is one). If what is meant by “the point” is actually something instructive (though of course if you show me love in a story, I may very well infer instruction on compassion), then I do think there’s a problem there. Teaching undergraduates, I count myself lucky not to have students ask what they should take away (beyond that emotional reaction) from a story. And, to be honest, I don’t recall my peers in graduate workshops saying that either. Perhaps my experience is an anomaly or the times, they are a-changin’.
Q: How is teaching?
NLR: Teaching is a mixed bag. I don’t think doing anything would make me happier, but it’s a frustrating thing for sure. I teach mixed-genre introductory creative writing classes to sophomores, juniors, and seniors and, because the class fulfills a core requirement for graduation, 80% of them have no desire to write, even less desire to read, and very little business doing either. So I pull out my hair over their inability to construct a sentence, let alone a concrete image or round character. But that other 20% is heaven. I generally try to teach to them, since the rest won’t get it and will move on unswayed by this brush with literary art.
I also teach a fiction workshop and advanced creative writing, and I taught a CW techniques class on the child narrator last fall. What I love about teaching the workshops is seeing a student whose work reaches and being able to guide her or his hand a bit toward something larger than both of us. It’s been in the last couple of years I really have felt capable of that, of instantly seeing what’s missing in a good short story, and being able to articulate that hole to a student along with advice for how to fill it. It’s these short stories that satisfy any doubt I have that I’m in the right profession.
Q: How did you get where you are, associate professor of English and helping to run the RopeWalk program? You seem to have balanced work with writing really well—two novels and a steady flow of stories in journals since you got the MFA.
NLR: Of course I haven’t mentioned the perks that make this job fit so well with being a writer. Summers free, winter and spring breaks off, are lovely and absolutely necessary—especially given that I teach a 4/4
load. Four classes each semester gives me no time for writing. It took a few years to figure that out, and I beat myself up about not writing much if anything during the school year. The solution is to protect those times when school is out and get to work fast!
After getting my MFA at Mason, I took an instructor’s job teaching composition at a school that takes its football so seriously, it wanted me to excuse athletes’ poor performance in my classes. I left after the first semester and returned to the D.C. area, where I adjuncted at five campuses and led workshops at the Bethesda Writer’s Center. Once MacAdam/Cage bought In the Breeze of Passing Things, I went back on the job market for creative writing positions. I took a one-year post at Penn State—The Behrend College in Erie, PA, then was back on the market and came to the University of Southern Indiana in a tenure-track job. I applied for tenure and promotion this past semester and was successful, so I plan to stay at USI if we can do something about the heavy teaching load and I can inherit more control over the Creative Writing programs we have here.
Q: You published some chapters of In the Breeze of Passing Things as short stories before the novel came out; how did that affect the effort to publish the book as a whole?
NLR: Almost all of the chapters from In the Breeze of Passing Things came out as stories in literary magazines before the novel was published. I was writing them with the short story as my form and mode, so each chapter ended with some sort of resolution, even if it was messy enough to suggest itself toward the way a true novel’s chapters often most successfully end mid-act. In other words, while many novels keep readers turning the page by interrupting a dramatic moment with a chapter break, I was ending mine fairly tidily. The reason, I believe, this worked was that the plot of my book had my characters physically moving from place to place, and in each place they’d find a new context of people and circumstances to confront and change or be changed by. So each story-chapter could deal with those new contexts and circumstances and how they alter the main characters while also making a suggestion as to what the main characters’ eventual evolution may be. So a story-chapter worked as a story and the chapter worked as a chapter because subsequent chapters picked up the implications left at chapter’s-end and developed those implications into live dramatic reality.
My second novel (a manuscript I’m often told is too sad for publication) doesn’t operate like this at all and I doubt I could ever write a novel in the story mode again, now that I’ve tackled the messier juggling that a traditional novel’s form requires. I like the simplicity—this word could suggest inferiority but I don’t mean that here at all, just that the task is more ordered—of writing in linked stories, but I also find them confining. Perhaps once I finish the last installment of the triptych novella I’m working on, I’ll transform the stories in to one solid book. I’m afraid I’ve done myself in with their points of view all being different—first, third limited, and third multiple. I really, really hope to find a way for them to meld as they are, or perhaps they will remain a novella-in-stories.
In answer to your question of how publication of my first novel’s stories affected the book’s publication, I’m really not sure. I do know that publication helped get me an agent; she saw one of the story-chapters in Indiana Review and contacted me to ask if I had a longer project. I had just finished my MFA thesis, which was Breeze, and was beginning to query agents. So the timing was good and she ended up placing the book with MacAdam/Cage as soon as the publishing industry returned from its summer break.
Q: I was thinking about the Indiana Review piece in particular; the language is near to poetry, and so much is implied—there’s a lot to unpack. Did you revise from story to chapter—or the other way around? (Or both?)
NLR: There were times in editing the book that I had to take some repetition of information out of the stories in order for them to hang as a cohesive book—repetition of undercurrents like when the dad left, where he went, etc.—and there were times in the editing process that I wrote more (such as implying more of a life outside the house for the Blacksburg cousins). The tone and diction didn’t really change from story to novel, though.
Q: On the second novel—people actually said the book is too sad?
NLR: Yes. A handful of agents and editors. It’s a reaction I don’t really understand. Most of the books, well-loved, classic books I have loved over the years are terribly sad. The end of mine is bleak, but the situation is bleak and to impose a cheerier implication would ring utterly false.
Q: Why the shift from the short story form to the, as you say, messier work of a traditional novel? Or—maybe a better question—why the shift from voice-driven to idea-driven work?
NLR: I think the shift came because I transitioned from graduate school—a time during which all I had to do was read, write, and teach a class or two—to working. At first, I adjuncted at sometimes six schools a semester. Still, that left me more able to write and read than either of the two full-time teaching jobs I’ve had. Certainly the 4/4 teaching load and extensive service I perform in my current position at USI make writing tough. But it’s not just the work. In the five years I’ve been here, I have bought two houses, moved three times, gotten married, and had a son. That’s a lot of flurry competing for my writer mind’s attention. I hope I’ll be able to un-overextend (in addition to being fiction editor of Southern Indiana Review, board member of the RopeWalk Writer’s Retreat, and director of the RopeWalk Visiting Writers Reading Series, I serve as faculty advisor to the Student Writers Union and faculty advisor and managing editor for USI’s student literary and art magazine) soon. So . . . the shift from short story form to a novel may be because instead of writing with focused, daily regularity, my writing time is in spurts spanning months, years even. I tend, now, to introduce far more ideas because a character’s voice, which used to sustain my fiction, modulates over time so I can’t depend on it to carry the work anymore.
Q: Annie Proulx said in an interview at Bookslut a few years ago, “If I get fifteen minutes a day it’s a small miracle.” And you said earlier you have to take advantage of it when you have it. Any other advice for young writers to carve it out?
NLR: I don’t know that I have advice for young writers; everyone’s circumstances are different of course, and everyone’s psyches, too. What I’ve been trying to do for myself is not beat myself up over the lost time to job and family and just plain life. As a friend said to me yesterday, I’m in the taking-things-in mode, filling up on big changes and experiences in my life. On the other hand, what if I could have done better? I probably could have. And what if that’s a book gone? Alan Cheuse used to tell our workshop: write just a page a day, every day, and by the end of one year you’ll have a book. He also would go around the workshop table asking each of us, “Are you a writer today? Did you write?” I love, love, love Alan—he’s a rigorous teacher and generous soul—but few days pass by now that I don’t think of his question and hate myself for the answer. In every area of my life I try to find what works best and after a period of disappointing the rigorous writer in my head, I’m trying to see myself as more than a writer, someone with a lot of roles in addition to being a writer: wife, mother, best friend, daughter, teacher, mentor, editor, reader, citizen, and so forth.
Once I finish the triptych, I may decide to work much smaller (short-shorts, even) something more suited in size to the focus I have at the moment.
Q: Not far down the road from you, Wendell Berry said last year in an interview in The Sun he became a better writer when he figured out he could be perfectly happy not being one—a bit of a Zen koan, maybe, but it seems sound?
NLR: I wish I could be so self-assured. That’s not me. I do wish for it, though. On the heels of a day spent submitting work to contests and journals—something I used to look forward to but now dread because of the quiet hours it entails in which I must constantly assess my writing, try to fit it to the particular markets, and gauge its chances there—life is grim. During the years of and just after graduate school, I wrote and published a few pieces a month.
Ah, a broken record but God, it’s a deep ache.
And when a workshop goes particularly well for a student and I see a revision that I shepherded to breakthrough or find myself editing a submission for SIR and think it’s going pretty swell, I wonder if I should simply hang a different shingle.
But no, it will come back. It does. When I go looking. Writing is the thing I’m most afraid of when I’m not at it. And the thing I take the greatest pride in when I’m good.
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Showing posts with label Interviews. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Interviews. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Ice Cream and Books and Alan
The last post's mention of the Washington Post Magazine reminded me of an article I read a while back that is worthy of sharing here. The story is about Andrew Gifford, a D.C. publisher who's family founded and ran Gifford's Ice Cream and Candy, a franchise of old-fashioned ice cream parlors that once thrived in the D.C. area. Gifford's went from being the hottest spot on a Saturday night in the 1950s to bankrupt in 1985.
Despite suffering from a long-time painful chronic illness, in 2002 Gifford began a small literary press, the Santa Fe Writer's Project. Writer Ray Robertson is quoted in an interview, "Publishers like Andrew Gifford at SFWP are [expletive] heroes." The press published The Fires, written by GMU's own Alan Cheuse. Cheuse is mentioned and quoted in the article. (Also, interviewed here by SFWP, on his novellas.)
Check it out here:
Labels:
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Friday, January 30, 2009
An Interview with Liam Callanan
Liam Callanan received his MFA from George Mason in 2001. Since then, he's had a couple books published, The Cloud Atlas (Delacorte 2004) and All Saints (Delacorte 2007). He directs the graduate creative writing program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Aside from writing, a recent project of his is the Poetry Everywhere animated film series, which he created and co-produces.
Thanks, Liam, for taking the time to answer the questions.
First of all, because it's new and exciting, I'm interested to hear you talk a little about this good-looking project, Poetry Everywhere. I took a while to watch several of the videos online at the PBS site, and I wanted to know how you became involved as a producer. How did the project start up? What's its status right now? Goals for the future? Or maybe could you walk me through production of a video, from its genesis and composition to final placement online or on air or on one of many public buses in the city? I think it's great that so many different groups are working together on this (big and small) and it's admirable that UW-M students (I hope I assumed correctly) can participate in such a thing. Reminds me a little of the work going on over at Ninth Letter, you know?
Poetry Everywhere? It's a fair question, given that the guy behind it all is a novelist. But I'm also a bus rider, and therein lies the story. (A cliche I've always liked, mostly for that verb.)
I live, write, teach and ride buses in Milwaukee, now, and so became an eyewitness to a gradual revolution in transit, which is the proliferation of onboard video screens. They give out route information, but they also provide programming. It seemed to me to be a perfect place to air some poetry, so I gave them a call. The programmers said, great, but it has to be more visually exciting than a guy at a mike in front of a drape -- there's a lot of competition for one's attention aboard a bus -- and so I found a wonderful filmmaker here at UW Milwaukee, Brad Lichtenstein. He drew up a budget, and I went looking for money, and found it at the Poetry Foundation, the publishers of Poetry magazine. They turned out to be an amazing sponsor, not only coming through with financial resources, but great ideas.
Back on campus, we brought in an animation professor, Tim Decker, ex-Fox, ex-Disney, who convened a class of undergraduates. We recorded a number of contemporary poets -- some famous, many not -- and then let the students have at it.
I love the poems, I love my colleagues, but I don't really have a verb for how I feel about the students and what they did. I'm still in awe. We definitely pushed them -- don't feel compelled to be literal in your interpretation; do include every word onscreen (a must for the noisy bus environment) but not in boring closed-caption style. They delivered these works of art that not only amplified the poems, but were something wholly new.
Do you know of any similar programs, such as Poetry Everywhere, that are happening in other cities? Or is there any possibility that your program might eventually expand?
Other than the Poetry in Motion program in NYC -- those print placards, which I understand are being cut back -- I'm not aware of any such programs. But there are definitely other people doing videos of poems, or "video poems," and Shanghai has a Starbucks-sponsored soap opera airing on its metro screens. So yes, expansion is in our future! One of the most gratifying aspects of this program is when other cities contact us about getting involved -- it's a great inversion, poetry driving the mass transit agenda. Who knew literature was so green?
Well, I suppose the poets always did.
Talking about Poetry Everywhere has made me wonder about everything else you're up to, and I'm trying to count how many things you've got going on that I know of: your wife and children, promoting the two novels and hopefully working on a third book(?), teaching undergraduate and graduate classes, directing the Creative Writing Program at UW-Milwaukee, Poetry Everywhere, the occasional literary journal publication, etc. Anything else I'm leaving out?
I'm curious as to how you manage your time, and specifically, when do you have a chance to write? Do you have a current writing project to work on? If so, would you like to share anything about the project?
I think you've got a fairly complete census there. We also have a few more community media/Poetry Everywhere projects in the pipeline, but they don't take up too much of my time yet.
I don't really know how I manage my time. It manages me. I take advantage of every last electronic convenience available to me and insist my students do the same; that helps.
The important part, the writing part -- well, in grad school, I was all about writing every day. Now it's more like every week. Then comes summer, and things get better. Kind of. I also feel like that if I just look hard enough -- in the sock drawer somewhere, or maybe down in the basement, I'll find all this spare time I didn't know I had. I don't know. I feel like it got left behind in the move to Wisconsin.
I've talked a little bit with some of the people I'm working with here at Houston, who've gone through the PhD program at the university, about the PhD vs MFA issue, and I'm curious what you think about it. Is there a difference between the two as far as their purposes? Does the PhD 'defeat' the MFA when it comes to finding 'jobs'? Is that even something worth considering or is it all about the writing? I ask this because one of my friends here suggested that some might think of the PhD as a last ditch attempt...Frankly, I am a little confused; I get anxious when I think about these matters, so I wonder, would you be able to offer an opinion on the whole thing? What's the worth of a PhD in Creative Writing today versus an MFA?
There is a difference between the degrees; I used to think there wasn't. I've certainly become a convert to the notion of the creative writing PhD, which is good, because although I hold an MFA myself, I'm now the coordinator of the country's oldest creative writing PhD programs.
It's not necessarily that one route is better than the other; as I've come to discover, they're different, and thus should appeal to different people with different goals. An MFA is a great degree for someone who wants time to write, people to write with, and would like to have a publishable manuscript in three years, or at least be on a trajectory toward same. A PhD is good for someone who wants time to write but who also is very interested in, and committed to, teaching in a college or university. The PhD we offer at UWM really isn't any different from a 'standard' PhD in English; our students go through all the same theory and pedagogy and lit courses, pass the same foreign language requirement, write the same scholarly papers--and creative work-- along the way. The difference is at the end, when they write creative dissertations -- novels or poetry collections -- instead of a scholarly tome. The whole process takes longer; 4-6 years.
Initially, I was startled by how successful our students were getting jobs. Not because they weren't great -- of course they're great, Go Panthers! -- but because our PhDs were/are able to get tenure-track jobs without books, whereas an MFA needs to have published at least one book before getting a similar position.
Now that you've brought up the idea of having a published book, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how your first book, The Cloud Atlas, went from MFA thesis to publication.
When I finished my MFA thesis, I of course thought I had written a novel. And I remember Susan Shreve, my director, smiling sweetly and patting it and saying, "Lovely. Now, if you want to make this into a book...." I had similar conversations with the other members of my committee, Beverly Lowry and Steve Goodwin, and all of them had wise things to say. I recall Susan pointing out that I'd somehow written an entire novel without any female characters -- legacy of my attending an all-boys high school, I suppose -- and when I added a female protagonist, suddenly, the novel came alive. Beverly pointed out that
I'd spent vast expanses of the novel inside quotation marks -- I'd basically written a 17-hour play -- and Steve noted that I'd made my protagonist a bomb disposal sergeant but never showed him defusing a bomb.
Small things, perhaps, in the retelling, but in actuality, all huge -- and hugely helpful. There would be no novel without those meetings I had that last month of school.
I wound up rewriting the first 100 pages, and adding about 200 more on the back. The thesis and the novel definitely resemble each other, but they're different books. The editor who eventually acquired the book also had comments, but they didn't require as dramatic a rethinking of the narrative as had the earlier round.
For about a dozen years -- starting before Mason -- I'd taught a continuing education course at Georgetown, a writing workshop from 8-10 at night. (Among my students: CNN's Campbell Brown.) It was a rough time slot for all concerned, and some semesters I wondered why I fought my way in and out of Georgetown every night to do it, but when it came time to send out the book, I remembered that one of my students, Nani Power, had gone on to a successful writing career. I contacted her, asked if she'd look at my book. She did, and passed it to her agent, Wendy Sherman, who called not long after.
Some people hear this story and think, "lucky dog -- he got his first novel published lickety-split." (Actually, no one's ever said 'lickety-split' to me, and here I thought, as a child anyway, I'd hear the word all the time when I grew up.)
It's true, that part, the very last part, went relatively fast. But these people didn't see the decade before...
And finally, what advice, if any, do you have for Mason MFA students about to graduate or recently graduated from the program?
Advice? Hmm. To myself: be more prompt in replying to e-mails. To my fellow Patriots? I'll venture out on a limb -- ah, there's the cracking sound; let me start to bounce a bit -- and say, ease up on the blogs.
Not THIS blog, of course, but any blog or news source that causes you undue anxiety. One thing that we never talked about in MFAland that I think crucial to consider is how we, as authors, need to serve as good caretakers of our mental (and, sure, physical) well-being. Sounds like obvious advice, but I don't think a lot of people follow it. Say you'd set yourself and your laptop up on a pretty park bench to get some writing done. Then, about five feet away, a crew starts jackhammering the sidewalk. How long would you stay? How much writing would you get done if you did?
To me, reading about who got what deal with what agent, or who won this prize or even who has advice on how to enter this or that contest -- that's noise I have to avoid.
But again: that's me, to the extent I know myself. Other writers I know thrive on the latest buzz, and really do use it to their career advantage. They know where to submit, now, whom to call tomorrow and where to post their news.
Really, it all gets back to what my Mason profs said, back in the day: do your work. (With the occasional time-out, of course, to correspond with your alma mater's fiction blog.)
~~~
That's all, everyone. Thanks for reading. If you have a chance to attend AWP this year, Liam will be participating in a panel called 'Don't Stand So Close to Me: Controlling Narrative Distance' at noon on Thursday the 12th.
Also, if you haven't yet, please check out the interview that David Heath conducted with Andrew Wingfield.
Friday, June 20, 2008
An Interview with Andrew Wingfield
In his own words, Andrew Wingfield “grew up east of Sacramento, California, in the bumpy transitional zone between the flat floor of the Central Valley and the steep slopes of the Sierra foothills.”[1] A sense of place pervades his work, drawn from the Sacramento where he grew up, the changing neighborhood in Alexandria where he lives with his wife and two boys today, and places he has lived in and traveled through in between. His writing shows this sense, but it also became evident early into our e-mail exchange, in which we discussed his novel, Hear Him Roar, published in 2005, and his current project, a collection of short stories. We talked as well about writing in general; life after the MFA, which he earned at GMU in 1999; and teaching, particularly his work at George Mason’s integrative studies program, New Century College, where he has taught since 2000.
Q: Your novel, set in Sacramento, follows semi-retired biologist Charlie Sayers as he sorts through the region’s cougar dilemma as well as his own restlessness with life, past and present. Not only is your novel set in Sacramento—it seems to capture its essence in terms of setting, environmental issues facing the region, and the mix of personalities you’ve brought to life—locals and transplants, old-school department of fish and game officials and suburban conservationists. It seems like part of your heart is still out there. What brought you out of California, and what brought you to George Mason?
Andrew Wingfield: Yes, California will always have a special pull on me. I imprinted on that Central Valley landscape, that climate, which is so distinctive. The hot, dry summers with their tawny palette of colors. The smell of rice fields burning after the harvest. The joyous relief the fall rains bring. The dense tule fogs in winter. The bright green grasses on the hills in early spring. Those are all part of me. And California is a truly fascinating place—in its diverse natural environments, in its human communities, and in the meanings it holds (and has long held) for so many people. A lot to unpack there.
I left California after my first year of college because I was restless. I had decided to be a lit major, I liked history and art. I wanted to go east, where the “culture” was. I guess I went east in answer to the flip side of the impulse that brings so many young people west, a lot of them right after college. And then I just wandered—Chicago, Bloomington, Madrid, Philadelphia. I’m very attached to more natural landscapes, yet I’ve chosen to live in a lot of heavily populated areas. I just really like cities, too. One of the nonfiction writers I like, Edward Hoagland, shares my dual attraction to cities and wild places. For me, each place has its poetry. Sometimes it takes a while to find it. That’s why I’ve never been much of a tourist or much interested in travel writing (unlike Hoagland). I like to live in a place, to experience it day to day, explore its crannies. Some places reveal themselves very slowly. Madrid is an example. That city takes time. I visited Rome and fell in love in about two hours. In Madrid, a more austere place, I had to get to know the neighborhoods, the tapas bars, the public gardens, the picture collections, the language—and then I was hooked. It took about a year.
What brought me to George Mason? The writing program, especially Alan Cheuse. Alan and I bonded on the phone after I got accepted to the program, I think when we discovered our mutual admiration for Saul Bellow. We developed a real affinity while I was there. I’m still in frequent contact with him. I never planned to stick around as long as I have. The fact that I’m still at Mason is a combination of happenstance and intention. New Century College, the integrative studies program where I teach, was just a few years old when I taught my first class there. I just kind of carved a niche for myself, and I’ve been having too much fun to leave.
Northern Virginia has yielded its poetry slower than anyplace else I’ve lived. Much of the region flat out repulses me and probably always will—you know, the tract house wastelands. But I live inside the Beltway in an interesting, complicated, and changing neighborhood. The stories I’m writing now are set in a community like the one where I live. And I find it increasingly fascinating—and at times, I admit, a bit horrifying—to live hard by the nation’s capital, especially during the Bush years. Until a couple of years ago, everything I wrote dealt with California. Not anymore.
Q: So do you think you are definitely a proponent of “write what you know”? I know, that’s a cliché—perhaps you have a better way of putting it.
AW: I like the way Wright Morris puts it: “Writing is finding out what you don’t yet know about what you know.” I write about places that are familiar to me, but my work is about exploring aspects of these places that hold some mystery. I’m searching for what I don’t yet know about what I know. For instance, I know what it was like for me to grow up between Sacramento and the Sierra foothills as my home landscape succumbed to sprawl, but what would that experience be like for a cantankerous Dept. of Wildlife biologist who’s growing old in that place? How does he, a man beginning to feel the bite of his impending mortality, experience the changes in the land? I can’t know until I write it.
Here’s another example. My wife and I are relatively privileged white Americans. When we decided to make a family, we bought and began renovating a rundown corner store building in a neighborhood just beginning to emerge from decades of blight. I know what it’s been like for me to live in this neighborhood the past eight years. But what does this place mean to a teenage African American girl who lives two blocks away, where blight persists? She’s here because her great-grandparents settled in the neighborhood decades ago, when her great-grandfather started working in the big railyard nearby (blight began when that railyard closed). Curiosity about such a girl led me into one of the stories in my current collection.
Q: Current collection—do you have a short story collection going out? I see you have a story in the Antioch Review this year and one in The Fourth River and another in Prairie Schooner forthcoming—congratulations. Do you have a preference for short pieces like stories and nonfiction articles or a long-term project like a novel?
AW: I have a nearly finished collection of stories that are all set in a “recovering” neighborhood near D.C. Some of them are out in journals, some forthcoming, a couple still looking for homes, and a couple still in process.
I started writing these stories when I became a parent and a professor and my writing time was pretty fragmented. I liked that I could sit down at my keyboard, read the few paragraphs or pages I’d already written, and push forward—using the writing time to write, rather than using it to try and remember what the story was all about, who the characters were, etc.
While writing my novel, I lived with it more fully day to day, week to week, because my life was less complicated and my writing time more regular and predictable. That said, I think I’m more of a novelist by nature. I tend to bite off novel-sized chunks of material. It’s taken me a long time learn the discipline of the short story, to resist the temptation of exploring side characters, subplots, and back stories that can be fatal to a story.
Even now my stories, the ones that work, push against the boundaries of the short story form in terms of the kind of complexity it can accommodate. Novels are roomy, and I like that. Once I wrap up this story collection my next project will be a novel. My life is still complicated and full, but I’ve become a bit more savvy about how to manage it all. Plus, my kids sleep through the night now. That changes everything! I look forward to getting back to the novel.
Q: About your novel, the way each chapter wraps up was very satisfying—finishing, in a last paragraph or even the very last line, with a new thought that reflects the whole, the way a good short story ends or an essay concludes. Do you feel you picked up novel-writing techniques like this instinctively, by reading, or do you think it was more a conscious effort? I am particularly curious how the MFA program influenced the way you approach a novel, if it did—such techniques seem hard to come by in a workshop, for example.
AW: My way of closing chapters is an instinctive thing, as far as I know. It’s certainly not a skill I tried consciously to hone in a workshop setting. Your question about novel writing techniques and workshops is a good one. When I was in the Mason program, every fiction student was working on a novel but every fiction workshop focused on the short story. The craft of novel writing was something I pursued independently for the most part, reading lots of novels, talking about them with Alan, and getting feedback from him on my manuscript. A couple of the lit courses I took also created opportunities to talk about novels from a formal point of view. For obvious reasons, the novel doesn’t lend itself as readily as the short story to the workshop format, but I think it’s important for writing programs to be intentional about helping students develop their novels and study the craft of novel writing.
Q: What about the end product, after you’ve finished it? Some MFA students and alums have said they would have liked more help navigating the publishing world, while others have been adamant that it’s better that we remain focused on the craft. I suspect it’s probably a little like the Appalachian Trail mantra of “hike your own hike,” but can you tell us a little about your own experience getting the book out there?
AW: As an MFA student, I fondly hoped that one of my professors would recognize the brilliance of my work, set me up with an agent, and launch my career for me. I doubt I’m the only person who has ever entertained such a fantasy. To be passive, yet to achieve success—sounds pretty nice! But it’s not realistic, or even desirable. The real service writing programs can provide is helping their students learn how to be smart, active, and persistent about getting their work into the world. Some teachers are pretty good about incorporating this part of the writing life into their workshops. I suspect there should be a short course devoted to it, a required course for the degree. Absent such a course, I poked around for clues on my own, gathering hints wherever I could. A more structured introduction to publishing would have served me well and saved me some time. But, hey, some of the most critical learning happens outside school.
Getting my novel into the world provided me with a kind of crash course on publishing, from which I gleaned some good lessons. I found an agent fairly quickly, and this agent found a junior editor at a commercial press who liked my manuscript. I worked with her to make it shipshape before she showed her bosses, who didn’t like the novel enough to publish it. Big disappointment.
Eventually the agent and I parted ways, and I started searching on my own for small independent presses and university presses that publish fiction. (Agents usually aren’t interested in such presses because there’s not enough money to make it worth their while.) I did some of my searching online, and some of it at conferences on literature and environment. I got to know some writers who shared my interest in environmental themes, chatted up editors at the book display tables, and made myself familiar with their lists.
The landscape and environment of the American West is a big focus for Utah State University Press, the publisher that bought my book. A great fit, but it took some time and effort for me to discover it. The near misses and rejections were tough to take, but I believed in my story, believed I’d find the right editor, the right press, and eventually I did. You have to persist.
So, sure, part of a writer’s education is putting in the time to learn the lay of the land. Who else is writing the kind of stuff you like to write? Where are those writers hanging out? Where are they publishing? How can you get your foot in the door at the places where your work will be valued? I’m not saying, however, that publishing should be the primary focus of students in a writing program. It’s one piece only. The primary focus should be working on the craft—and by craft I mean not just writing, but reading. Most writing students don’t read as much as they should.
Q: On reading, do you find yourself reading in a strategic way to suit your writing? Or do you read what you’re interested in, and the writing follows?
AW: After I wrote the first of my neighborhood stories, and decided it might be fun to write a whole batch of them, I re-read a couple of the place-based story collections that I’d read in the past—Joyce’s Dubliners and Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. Then I read other collections of this kind—Stuart Dybek’s The Coast of Chicago, Maxine Claire’s Rattlebone, Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place, a couple of others. Those books helped give me a feel for this particular niche within the larger genre, which in turn helped me clarify for myself the kind of book I wanted to make. So, that was some strategic reading tied directly to an existing project. But as you say, much of the reading I do feeds my writing in less direct, more mysterious ways. I’m kind of fatalistic about it. I figure if a topic or an author holds interest for me, there must be a reason, and eventually I’ll come to perceive some ways different things I’ve read percolate into my writing.
Q: In our earlier conversation you said teaching for New Century College allows you to investigate topics that feed your writing, and I imagine this in itself lends a great variety to what you read? I’m looking through the courses you have taught, from the 100-level “Community of Learners” to upper-level courses like “Narratives of Nature” and “Conserving Endangered Species: An Integrative Approach” . . .
AW: For years, I’ve been teaching “Self as Citizen,” this freshman course on citizenship and civic engagement. I began teaching it more or less by accident, but I’ve grown hooked on the material over time. I keep seeing the themes of this course—the challenges of tolerance and diversity, individualism vs. community commitment, and so forth—surface in my neighborhood stories. My teaching colors my writing in other ways as well. I have a lot of flexibility in what I teach, and I often team-teach with colleagues whose disciplinary backgrounds differ from my own. I sometimes build a class around a group of readings I want to explore, and often my teaching partners introduce me to material I never would have discovered on my own. Some of the stuff my colleagues want to put on syllabi doesn’t excite me as a reader—academic prose can be pretty dry—but it introduces me to ways of knowing and engaging the world that were alien to me previously. How does a conservation biologist understand a cup of coffee? What kinds of stories do economists tell? This is good exercise for a fiction writer. It stretches the imagination.
Q: About teaching—when I talked to you earlier you gave me some really sound advice about looking for a teaching position, how someone just getting out there with an MFA, with the hope of balancing teaching with writing, might approach it. Can you speak to that a bit, given your experience and that of some of your fellow alumni?
AW: I assume anyone in a graduate writing program is already passionate about writing. If you go into teaching, you should have a passion for that as well, because you’ll do a whole lot of it to support yourself and your writing habit—unless of course you’re independently wealthy or supported by a gainfully employed spouse whose big salary enables you to teach for experience rather than a living. (I’m not independently wealthy, and my wife is a painter. She and I both teach to put food on the table.)
I love writing, of course, but I also really love teaching. It’s work that stimulates me intellectually, as I’ve already said. It also draws me out of my shell, requires me to interact with students and colleagues. For me the give and take of the teaching life is a healthy counterpoint to the solitary work of writing. Also, I like the university atmosphere—the learned people, the visiting writers and speakers, the arts programming, the libraries. These are wonderful resources.
You will probably need to teach a while to find out if the passion is there. That’s fine. Just don’t teach for ten years, letting your writing go dormant, and then look up one day and decide teaching isn’t right for you. What I’m saying is that you should always be strategic, always keep the big picture in mind if you’re a writer who teaches. A few of my peers who came out of the writing program around the same time I did took teaching jobs that paid them peanuts and sucked up all their writing time. That’s a predicament you want to avoid, and avoiding it can be tricky.
One person who seems to have managed the transition well is my fellow Mason writing program alum, Sally Shivnan. Sally graduated the same year I did and now teaches full time at University of Maryland Baltimore County while building up an impressive portfolio of published work. She interviewed me a while back while writing a magazine piece about balancing teaching and writing. I just re-read the piece; it’s full of sound advice, and more thorough than I could hope to be on this topic. Here’s a link.
Q: So—you have taught undergraduates for nearly a decade, you put out your novel in 2005, you’re working on a collection of stories, you’ve written and published a number of personal essays over the last five years, and you look forward to the prospect of getting back into another novel. There is so much in the media now about how students today, and by extension, our future populace, have so much less appreciation for reading fiction or writing a decent sentence, let alone a good piece of creative work (the latter according to a recent Washington Post article). You don’t seem to be buying it?
AW: I was teaching a course with this conservation biologist who has devoted his life to saving species whose populations are pretty much doomed to extinction in the wild. One of the students asked him why he bothers. “What else am I going to do?” the biologist shot back. “Sell Volvos?”
I’m not looking to sell Volvos—I’m not that resigned. But I am pretty realistic about what it means to devote oneself to literary art in these times of iPods and ear buds and young thumbs busily massaging miniature keyboards. As a writer, I don’t fret much over the changing literacies of the young. I write the stories I have to write, according to my own lights, and I try to find a home for them in the world. That’s what I do.
As a teacher, this issue concerns me more. In the 10 or 11 years I’ve taught at Mason (including as a grad student), the students coming in have arrived better prepared academically because admissions standards have risen. But that doesn’t mean they’re more literate, in the conventional sense. They’re not. Oh, they encounter a lot of text and images in their daily lives, and they can be pretty savvy about certain kinds of “reading.” But many of today’s college students arrive on campus with a real deficit of experience when it comes to navigating complicated academic writing, or sophisticated literary works. A big part of my job is helping my students develop some fluency in working with these kinds of texts. It’s a struggle. But it can be very satisfying to see students learn to read and write better. Once in a while the writing bug will bite one of the kids in my class—or, more rarely, it will infect the whole group like a virus—and when that happens, I remember why I bother to try.
Q: Well, I, for one, am glad you are not selling Volvos. You or the biologist. Thank you so much for your time—this has been a great exchange. And again, congratulations on the recent publications, and good luck with the rest of your collection. I’m looking forward to reading what you have out there.
AW: I’ve enjoyed it too. Thanks for your thoughtful questions.
Q: Your novel, set in Sacramento, follows semi-retired biologist Charlie Sayers as he sorts through the region’s cougar dilemma as well as his own restlessness with life, past and present. Not only is your novel set in Sacramento—it seems to capture its essence in terms of setting, environmental issues facing the region, and the mix of personalities you’ve brought to life—locals and transplants, old-school department of fish and game officials and suburban conservationists. It seems like part of your heart is still out there. What brought you out of California, and what brought you to George Mason?
Andrew Wingfield: Yes, California will always have a special pull on me. I imprinted on that Central Valley landscape, that climate, which is so distinctive. The hot, dry summers with their tawny palette of colors. The smell of rice fields burning after the harvest. The joyous relief the fall rains bring. The dense tule fogs in winter. The bright green grasses on the hills in early spring. Those are all part of me. And California is a truly fascinating place—in its diverse natural environments, in its human communities, and in the meanings it holds (and has long held) for so many people. A lot to unpack there.
I left California after my first year of college because I was restless. I had decided to be a lit major, I liked history and art. I wanted to go east, where the “culture” was. I guess I went east in answer to the flip side of the impulse that brings so many young people west, a lot of them right after college. And then I just wandered—Chicago, Bloomington, Madrid, Philadelphia. I’m very attached to more natural landscapes, yet I’ve chosen to live in a lot of heavily populated areas. I just really like cities, too. One of the nonfiction writers I like, Edward Hoagland, shares my dual attraction to cities and wild places. For me, each place has its poetry. Sometimes it takes a while to find it. That’s why I’ve never been much of a tourist or much interested in travel writing (unlike Hoagland). I like to live in a place, to experience it day to day, explore its crannies. Some places reveal themselves very slowly. Madrid is an example. That city takes time. I visited Rome and fell in love in about two hours. In Madrid, a more austere place, I had to get to know the neighborhoods, the tapas bars, the public gardens, the picture collections, the language—and then I was hooked. It took about a year.
What brought me to George Mason? The writing program, especially Alan Cheuse. Alan and I bonded on the phone after I got accepted to the program, I think when we discovered our mutual admiration for Saul Bellow. We developed a real affinity while I was there. I’m still in frequent contact with him. I never planned to stick around as long as I have. The fact that I’m still at Mason is a combination of happenstance and intention. New Century College, the integrative studies program where I teach, was just a few years old when I taught my first class there. I just kind of carved a niche for myself, and I’ve been having too much fun to leave.
Northern Virginia has yielded its poetry slower than anyplace else I’ve lived. Much of the region flat out repulses me and probably always will—you know, the tract house wastelands. But I live inside the Beltway in an interesting, complicated, and changing neighborhood. The stories I’m writing now are set in a community like the one where I live. And I find it increasingly fascinating—and at times, I admit, a bit horrifying—to live hard by the nation’s capital, especially during the Bush years. Until a couple of years ago, everything I wrote dealt with California. Not anymore.
Q: So do you think you are definitely a proponent of “write what you know”? I know, that’s a cliché—perhaps you have a better way of putting it.
AW: I like the way Wright Morris puts it: “Writing is finding out what you don’t yet know about what you know.” I write about places that are familiar to me, but my work is about exploring aspects of these places that hold some mystery. I’m searching for what I don’t yet know about what I know. For instance, I know what it was like for me to grow up between Sacramento and the Sierra foothills as my home landscape succumbed to sprawl, but what would that experience be like for a cantankerous Dept. of Wildlife biologist who’s growing old in that place? How does he, a man beginning to feel the bite of his impending mortality, experience the changes in the land? I can’t know until I write it.
Here’s another example. My wife and I are relatively privileged white Americans. When we decided to make a family, we bought and began renovating a rundown corner store building in a neighborhood just beginning to emerge from decades of blight. I know what it’s been like for me to live in this neighborhood the past eight years. But what does this place mean to a teenage African American girl who lives two blocks away, where blight persists? She’s here because her great-grandparents settled in the neighborhood decades ago, when her great-grandfather started working in the big railyard nearby (blight began when that railyard closed). Curiosity about such a girl led me into one of the stories in my current collection.
Q: Current collection—do you have a short story collection going out? I see you have a story in the Antioch Review this year and one in The Fourth River and another in Prairie Schooner forthcoming—congratulations. Do you have a preference for short pieces like stories and nonfiction articles or a long-term project like a novel?
AW: I have a nearly finished collection of stories that are all set in a “recovering” neighborhood near D.C. Some of them are out in journals, some forthcoming, a couple still looking for homes, and a couple still in process.
I started writing these stories when I became a parent and a professor and my writing time was pretty fragmented. I liked that I could sit down at my keyboard, read the few paragraphs or pages I’d already written, and push forward—using the writing time to write, rather than using it to try and remember what the story was all about, who the characters were, etc.
While writing my novel, I lived with it more fully day to day, week to week, because my life was less complicated and my writing time more regular and predictable. That said, I think I’m more of a novelist by nature. I tend to bite off novel-sized chunks of material. It’s taken me a long time learn the discipline of the short story, to resist the temptation of exploring side characters, subplots, and back stories that can be fatal to a story.
Even now my stories, the ones that work, push against the boundaries of the short story form in terms of the kind of complexity it can accommodate. Novels are roomy, and I like that. Once I wrap up this story collection my next project will be a novel. My life is still complicated and full, but I’ve become a bit more savvy about how to manage it all. Plus, my kids sleep through the night now. That changes everything! I look forward to getting back to the novel.
Q: About your novel, the way each chapter wraps up was very satisfying—finishing, in a last paragraph or even the very last line, with a new thought that reflects the whole, the way a good short story ends or an essay concludes. Do you feel you picked up novel-writing techniques like this instinctively, by reading, or do you think it was more a conscious effort? I am particularly curious how the MFA program influenced the way you approach a novel, if it did—such techniques seem hard to come by in a workshop, for example.
AW: My way of closing chapters is an instinctive thing, as far as I know. It’s certainly not a skill I tried consciously to hone in a workshop setting. Your question about novel writing techniques and workshops is a good one. When I was in the Mason program, every fiction student was working on a novel but every fiction workshop focused on the short story. The craft of novel writing was something I pursued independently for the most part, reading lots of novels, talking about them with Alan, and getting feedback from him on my manuscript. A couple of the lit courses I took also created opportunities to talk about novels from a formal point of view. For obvious reasons, the novel doesn’t lend itself as readily as the short story to the workshop format, but I think it’s important for writing programs to be intentional about helping students develop their novels and study the craft of novel writing.
Q: What about the end product, after you’ve finished it? Some MFA students and alums have said they would have liked more help navigating the publishing world, while others have been adamant that it’s better that we remain focused on the craft. I suspect it’s probably a little like the Appalachian Trail mantra of “hike your own hike,” but can you tell us a little about your own experience getting the book out there?
AW: As an MFA student, I fondly hoped that one of my professors would recognize the brilliance of my work, set me up with an agent, and launch my career for me. I doubt I’m the only person who has ever entertained such a fantasy. To be passive, yet to achieve success—sounds pretty nice! But it’s not realistic, or even desirable. The real service writing programs can provide is helping their students learn how to be smart, active, and persistent about getting their work into the world. Some teachers are pretty good about incorporating this part of the writing life into their workshops. I suspect there should be a short course devoted to it, a required course for the degree. Absent such a course, I poked around for clues on my own, gathering hints wherever I could. A more structured introduction to publishing would have served me well and saved me some time. But, hey, some of the most critical learning happens outside school.
Getting my novel into the world provided me with a kind of crash course on publishing, from which I gleaned some good lessons. I found an agent fairly quickly, and this agent found a junior editor at a commercial press who liked my manuscript. I worked with her to make it shipshape before she showed her bosses, who didn’t like the novel enough to publish it. Big disappointment.
Eventually the agent and I parted ways, and I started searching on my own for small independent presses and university presses that publish fiction. (Agents usually aren’t interested in such presses because there’s not enough money to make it worth their while.) I did some of my searching online, and some of it at conferences on literature and environment. I got to know some writers who shared my interest in environmental themes, chatted up editors at the book display tables, and made myself familiar with their lists.
The landscape and environment of the American West is a big focus for Utah State University Press, the publisher that bought my book. A great fit, but it took some time and effort for me to discover it. The near misses and rejections were tough to take, but I believed in my story, believed I’d find the right editor, the right press, and eventually I did. You have to persist.
So, sure, part of a writer’s education is putting in the time to learn the lay of the land. Who else is writing the kind of stuff you like to write? Where are those writers hanging out? Where are they publishing? How can you get your foot in the door at the places where your work will be valued? I’m not saying, however, that publishing should be the primary focus of students in a writing program. It’s one piece only. The primary focus should be working on the craft—and by craft I mean not just writing, but reading. Most writing students don’t read as much as they should.
Q: On reading, do you find yourself reading in a strategic way to suit your writing? Or do you read what you’re interested in, and the writing follows?
AW: After I wrote the first of my neighborhood stories, and decided it might be fun to write a whole batch of them, I re-read a couple of the place-based story collections that I’d read in the past—Joyce’s Dubliners and Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. Then I read other collections of this kind—Stuart Dybek’s The Coast of Chicago, Maxine Claire’s Rattlebone, Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place, a couple of others. Those books helped give me a feel for this particular niche within the larger genre, which in turn helped me clarify for myself the kind of book I wanted to make. So, that was some strategic reading tied directly to an existing project. But as you say, much of the reading I do feeds my writing in less direct, more mysterious ways. I’m kind of fatalistic about it. I figure if a topic or an author holds interest for me, there must be a reason, and eventually I’ll come to perceive some ways different things I’ve read percolate into my writing.
Q: In our earlier conversation you said teaching for New Century College allows you to investigate topics that feed your writing, and I imagine this in itself lends a great variety to what you read? I’m looking through the courses you have taught, from the 100-level “Community of Learners” to upper-level courses like “Narratives of Nature” and “Conserving Endangered Species: An Integrative Approach” . . .
AW: For years, I’ve been teaching “Self as Citizen,” this freshman course on citizenship and civic engagement. I began teaching it more or less by accident, but I’ve grown hooked on the material over time. I keep seeing the themes of this course—the challenges of tolerance and diversity, individualism vs. community commitment, and so forth—surface in my neighborhood stories. My teaching colors my writing in other ways as well. I have a lot of flexibility in what I teach, and I often team-teach with colleagues whose disciplinary backgrounds differ from my own. I sometimes build a class around a group of readings I want to explore, and often my teaching partners introduce me to material I never would have discovered on my own. Some of the stuff my colleagues want to put on syllabi doesn’t excite me as a reader—academic prose can be pretty dry—but it introduces me to ways of knowing and engaging the world that were alien to me previously. How does a conservation biologist understand a cup of coffee? What kinds of stories do economists tell? This is good exercise for a fiction writer. It stretches the imagination.
Q: About teaching—when I talked to you earlier you gave me some really sound advice about looking for a teaching position, how someone just getting out there with an MFA, with the hope of balancing teaching with writing, might approach it. Can you speak to that a bit, given your experience and that of some of your fellow alumni?
AW: I assume anyone in a graduate writing program is already passionate about writing. If you go into teaching, you should have a passion for that as well, because you’ll do a whole lot of it to support yourself and your writing habit—unless of course you’re independently wealthy or supported by a gainfully employed spouse whose big salary enables you to teach for experience rather than a living. (I’m not independently wealthy, and my wife is a painter. She and I both teach to put food on the table.)
I love writing, of course, but I also really love teaching. It’s work that stimulates me intellectually, as I’ve already said. It also draws me out of my shell, requires me to interact with students and colleagues. For me the give and take of the teaching life is a healthy counterpoint to the solitary work of writing. Also, I like the university atmosphere—the learned people, the visiting writers and speakers, the arts programming, the libraries. These are wonderful resources.
You will probably need to teach a while to find out if the passion is there. That’s fine. Just don’t teach for ten years, letting your writing go dormant, and then look up one day and decide teaching isn’t right for you. What I’m saying is that you should always be strategic, always keep the big picture in mind if you’re a writer who teaches. A few of my peers who came out of the writing program around the same time I did took teaching jobs that paid them peanuts and sucked up all their writing time. That’s a predicament you want to avoid, and avoiding it can be tricky.
One person who seems to have managed the transition well is my fellow Mason writing program alum, Sally Shivnan. Sally graduated the same year I did and now teaches full time at University of Maryland Baltimore County while building up an impressive portfolio of published work. She interviewed me a while back while writing a magazine piece about balancing teaching and writing. I just re-read the piece; it’s full of sound advice, and more thorough than I could hope to be on this topic. Here’s a link.
Q: So—you have taught undergraduates for nearly a decade, you put out your novel in 2005, you’re working on a collection of stories, you’ve written and published a number of personal essays over the last five years, and you look forward to the prospect of getting back into another novel. There is so much in the media now about how students today, and by extension, our future populace, have so much less appreciation for reading fiction or writing a decent sentence, let alone a good piece of creative work (the latter according to a recent Washington Post article). You don’t seem to be buying it?
AW: I was teaching a course with this conservation biologist who has devoted his life to saving species whose populations are pretty much doomed to extinction in the wild. One of the students asked him why he bothers. “What else am I going to do?” the biologist shot back. “Sell Volvos?”
I’m not looking to sell Volvos—I’m not that resigned. But I am pretty realistic about what it means to devote oneself to literary art in these times of iPods and ear buds and young thumbs busily massaging miniature keyboards. As a writer, I don’t fret much over the changing literacies of the young. I write the stories I have to write, according to my own lights, and I try to find a home for them in the world. That’s what I do.
As a teacher, this issue concerns me more. In the 10 or 11 years I’ve taught at Mason (including as a grad student), the students coming in have arrived better prepared academically because admissions standards have risen. But that doesn’t mean they’re more literate, in the conventional sense. They’re not. Oh, they encounter a lot of text and images in their daily lives, and they can be pretty savvy about certain kinds of “reading.” But many of today’s college students arrive on campus with a real deficit of experience when it comes to navigating complicated academic writing, or sophisticated literary works. A big part of my job is helping my students develop some fluency in working with these kinds of texts. It’s a struggle. But it can be very satisfying to see students learn to read and write better. Once in a while the writing bug will bite one of the kids in my class—or, more rarely, it will infect the whole group like a virus—and when that happens, I remember why I bother to try.
Q: Well, I, for one, am glad you are not selling Volvos. You or the biologist. Thank you so much for your time—this has been a great exchange. And again, congratulations on the recent publications, and good luck with the rest of your collection. I’m looking forward to reading what you have out there.
AW: I’ve enjoyed it too. Thanks for your thoughtful questions.
Friday, January 25, 2008
Interview With Jessica Anthony
So a quick note before we get started - this interview with Jessica took place last semester. We began emailing in October, and then things sort of fell off over the holidays. The delay worked out though, as I'm happy to be able to post this now, in 2008, which should be a good year for Jessica.
The Interview:
Could you talk a little bit about the process leading up to your first novel's being accepted for publication? Am I right in saying that McSweeney's Books will publish it this coming spring? Basically, how has the whole experience been so far?
My third year, the Mason faculty awarded me the fiction thesis fellowship, but not for the novel I had proposed about a female bullfighter. They essentially said they were giving me the time, but wanted a different story. I had written a short voice piece for Susan's class that I liked, so I just kind of kept going with it, turned the bullfighter proposal into a short story, and submitted it, along with the first 40,000 words of the "new" book, to McSweeney's for the Amanda Davis Award. After I won, my agent found me, and McSweeney's published the bullfighter story. So I think I was extremely lucky. Not only to have been given the time from the Mason faculty, but then to have so many things fall into place. Of course, then there's the small task of actually finishing the novel. All said, it took four years to write and research, so we were on hold for a while, then last spring my agent sent it out. I received a couple of offers, but in the end went with McSweeney's, not only because they have a truly amazing editor who I felt really “got” the direction I wanted the book to go in, but also because they have a relationship with Grove, who will publish the paperback.
I want to jump away from the book for a moment (though we'll come back to it I hope) and ask you about how you came to study at Mason? Was there a particular "thing" that drew you to the program?
That is hilarious.
You know, I ended up coming to Mason because I met Richard Bausch at Breadloaf, and he gave a lecture on the short story that totally blew me away. I went up to him after the talk and he encouraged me to apply to Mason. I did, was accepted, and was offered a teaching assistantship which made it a no brainer. I also spoke with Alan before I came, and he was incredibly helpful. I loved that all of the faculty liked each other, and spent time out of class together. Plus, the fictioners in my class were truly amazing, and I still keep in touch with many of them. I don't regret a second of it.
What was your favorite aspect of that long writing process? The research? The initial creation? The revising?
I think you're right about the freedom Susan's voice class delivers; it's a model I've used for my undergraduate students, and they're always surprised by how well they can write.
For me, writing a novel is like solving a puzzle, and some of my favorite moments were when I figured out some connection that had been apparent the whole time, just waiting for me to figure it out. I went to some writers' residencies which give you time to write. I would spend whole days just reading and thinking, which was invaluable. Before I'd never really understood or appreciated why it took so long to write a novel, and now I realize that it's the space and time when you're not typing that you really need. Novels need to breathe. You need time to sort out what the hell is going on, to allow the innate, subconscious connections of the novel to present themselves to you, otherwise you just end up typing into an abyss.
But I also loved researching the story, so much so that I had to limit myself to 15-30 minutes of research a day. Half of it takes place in present day Virginia, and the other half in a farcical 9th century Hungary, so I spent a long time reading and thinking about stories and myths about the early Hungarians and the barbarian cultures of the late ninth, early tenth century. I'd just want to read all the time. I found a couple of great primary texts, some in Latin, which had been mercifully translated, and also interviewed medieval historians and Hungarians to make sure I wasn't way off base with the culture and the language. That was a blast. Did you know that the early Hungarians really liked buttons? Buttons are cool and everything, but imagine a whole tribe of proto-Hungarians who really dug buttons. I liked that. They also wore pointy hats and mustaches. So it's true that the life is in the details.
I did not know about the Hungarian fascination with buttons. The pointy hats do seem familiar to me, though I don't know why.
So aside from having a first book deal, what are the details of your life right now? You're teaching in
I've been teaching in some capacity since graduation; comp, lit, intro to creative writing, the fiction workshop. I've been teaching mostly for the
That's interesting about the rented office - it made me think about that Guardian special feature on writers' rooms. I don't know if you've seen it.
What convinced you to move the writing out of the house? And how's that different than writing at home?
That's a great list of writers at the Guardian—I hadn't seen it. The writing space is always kind of amusing to me. I left home to write a while ago. See, I got this dog because sitting at my desk all the time is pretty lonely. I had these very romantic notions about writing with a dog asleep contentedly by my side. What happened, though, was that the dog, being a dog, just wanted to go out all the time. She sat next to me and watched me, and every time I started typing, her eyebrows would lower, darkly. I felt horribly guilty. So I guess you could say that it was because my dog was watching me that I had to get my own space. I love being in a locked room to write knowing that no one knows where you are, and there's no phone or internet. I'll see people sometimes scribbling away in their journals or laptops in cafes and it bewilders me. I can't help but feel like these are people who would rather be seen writing than to actually write. To actually write for me is to disappear into the fiction completely, to deal with the problems of the story in solitude, without having to listen to someone else discuss the temperature of their double macchiato on their cellphone—cafes are great places to read, but not to write.
I think the trick you describe, I mean, establishing your own space, can also be useful for student writers juggling numerous responsibilities. I'm thinking of MFA students working jobs, teaching first-year comp, volunteering at animal shelters, whathaveyou. And a writing space could mean anything from a particular office, right, to that certain time of day when only writing matters.
I mean this as an ideal - I still struggle with managing my time. So when I say I'm thinking of MFA students, I'm actually just thinking of me, in a selfish sort of way.
As far as cafe writing goes, I agree with you in the sense that I'd rather be on my own, alone at the desk, with headphones on, away from distractions, etc. I do know a few writers in the program, though, who regularly meet at cafes and such to write, and that has worked well for them.
Do you have any plans to visit George Mason any time soon, either to read your work or to teach a few workshops as a visiting writer, etc? Have you done that already?
Hey, don't get me wrong! Whatever works is great. If you can write a short story while enjoying a nice hot double-espresso in a cafe or whatever, while standing in line at the grocery store, or while taking a bath, then by all means, do that. I have a friend who can only write when her entire house is clean. She is forever scrubbing grout. I think the point is that I don't know a single writer who doesn't struggle with the time or money problem—and I would advise anyone in the MFA to cherish that amazing time! I'm currently teaching anywhere from 3-6 classes a semester, and working 20 hours for a women's health website, writing about things like Restless Leg Syndrome and hot flashes. So however it works is how you should do it.
I do envy the poets, however. I am suspicious that they have more time than the fictioners (Is that a word? If not, I like it), whose thinking time is always curbed by the necessity to type, or whose thinking is discovered by the typing. I have to say I never felt pressured about my writing time at Mason, and I was a T.A. with 2 classes, read for Candid Yak, edited for Phoebe, and was a participant of an abundance of other fun, important writerly gatherings. The fact that the faculty wants you to be writing above all else is a huge strength of the program—but I also enjoyed the fellow writers I met there so much. My year, 2004, was a great class. There were some really dynamite writers there. People who genuinely loved it.
I would love to come to Mason, as soon as Bill Miller invites me! When the book comes out, I'm hoping to come down and give a reading, visit a workshop, or even just hang out with the MFA-ers.
Wednesday, January 9, 2008
Interview With Danielle Deulen
The following interview appears in the winter issue of Cornerstone, the magazine for alumni and friends of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. Please visit the alumni page here. You can read the rest of the magazine here in PDF form.
A special thank you to Brooke Braun, Director of Communications, College of Humanities and Social Science, who initially contacted us about hosting the interview online. And also thank you to Katie Clare, who conducted the interview. Katie earned her MFA in Poetry fromGeorge Mason University College of Humanities
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*Previous Mason recipients are Juanita Brunk MFA '85, Rebecca Dunham MFA '01, Cynthia Marie Hoffman MFA '03.
A special thank you to Brooke Braun, Director of Communications, College of Humanities and Social Science, who initially contacted us about hosting the interview online. And also thank you to Katie Clare, who conducted the interview. Katie earned her MFA in Poetry from
I've gone ahead and added a few links to the interview, but otherwise the text is unchanged.
Ten Questions with Danielle Deulen, MFA Poetry ’05
By Katie Clare, MFA ‘05
As a recent graduate of Mason’s graduate creative writing program, people often ask me, “What are you going to do with that?” or “Your parents must be thrilled with that career path, right?” After all, in today’s culture we equate happiness and success with fancy cars and big houses. How could someone choose a less certain and more creative path? Frankly, what it comes down to is the uncertain earning potential and the need for an employer. After all, who will hire someone with an MFA? It might be a cliché to consider Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken,” yet it’s worth mentioning. The poem is a commentary on the choices one must make and where those choices lead. Frost’s point is that one road is not better than the other, it’s simply different.
While there are some PhD programs in the arts, the MFA provides the norm for the field. As a terminal degree, an MFA is a serious undertaking that requires significant time and attention. Mason’s nationally recognized creative writing program is no exception. In addition to craft classes, the program has a substantive literature component designed to provide students with a set of strong examples to work from in their own writing. Whatever the degree requirements of an MFA in creative writing, the degree prepares students for a variety of careers by building skills in reading, listening, communicating, and creative thinking. These skills are useful in almost any field, and one cannot deny the utility and importance of the written word as a communication tool. Furthermore, as David Fenza, executive director of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, housed at Mason, writes, “We turn to literature to make our lives bigger.” Indeed, through literature of all sorts, readers expand their world by learning of different travelers, roads, and possibilities, and this, inevitably – or shall I say hopefully – leads to new ideas and fresh perspectives. Again, an ability to locate, respect, and respond to innovative ideas and fresh perspectives is a skill valued by many employers.
The Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, housed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, promotes the importance of the creative path. The institute offers six fellowships each year to young, emerging writers, and the competition for these prized fellowships is fierce. As in previous years, hundreds of applications were submitted, and as in previous years, a Mason alumna has earned one of these coveted spots.
Danielle Deulen completed her MFA in poetry in 2005. She taught as a graduate student and an adjunct, and served as the graduate programs manager in the English Department before heading off to
Q: What attracted you to Mason’s MFA Program?
A: Ah, the question everyone loves to ask. At the time I applied to Mason, I was miserable in my job as a receptionist in
Q: Overall, what was your experience as a Mason student?
A: Mason’s MFA program has a reputation as one of the more academically rigorous programs in the country, especially in poetry. As you might guess from my previous answer, I wasn’t quite prepared for this, so there was some initial scrambling. Even while scrambling, I realized that this kind of rigor was important to understanding my craft. By my final year in the program, I felt I was on solid ground. I suppose this is always the way learning happens for me: a headlong dive followed by great confusion or frustration, and then, finally, illumination. During this process, I found brilliant and engaging faculty who were wonderfully generous with their time and support.
Q: What did you think of Mason’s graduate teaching assistantship (GTA) program? Has teaching played a role in your development as a poet?
A: Mason’s GTA program prepared me for work in the classroom in a way I don’t think a lot of other programs do. I’ve had friends in programs at other schools who complained about being thrown directly into the classroom their first semester. Between classes, such mentors as Terry Zawacki and Zofia Burr, and discussions with MFA faculty about pedagogy, Mason provides the training necessary to becoming a successful teacher. I took my training very seriously – and it took over my life. Learning to temper my impulse to spend all my time and energy on teaching – and none on my poems – has been difficult. Teaching made me a better reader of poems. It has also affected my subject matter, as students show up in my poems quite a bit.
Q: When you were in
A: I’ve always loved reading and the different worlds it allows you to inhabit, so it seemed obvious that I would try to write myself. To be quite honest, I don’t know if I’m more attracted to poetry than any other genre; it’s just the genre I found some small amount of success in…. If I believed I could write a beautiful novel, I’d give it a shot. But it seems disingenuous to think I could write a novel out of nowhere.
Q: Everyone is familiar with the idea of writer’s block. What do you think about this? Where do you find inspiration for your work?
A: I don’t really believe in writer’s block; I believe in incubation. Writers have periods in which they are less productive in the quantitative sense; that is, they’re not producing anything they could show someone. But the mind is always at work. When you’re not writing, you’re gathering or just listening. Eventually, you put these pieces together, and they become something. Personally, I’m inspired by what I read.
Q: So, you’re the recipient of one of the prestigious writing fellowships from the
A: There are many similarities between the English departments of Mason and the university of Wisconsin-Madison. They are both large departments in large universities – many kind and brilliant people all in one place. The biggest difference, I would say, is in the atmosphere of Madison itself, a small college town of about 300,000 people. Outside
Q: Is there a specific component of the
A: I like that there is a teaching component. All fellows teach one creative writing class a semester, which keeps us in touch with a community of learners. The program’s directors are concerned with this – inviting us into the community. Mostly, though, I’m looking forward to reading. Before I received the fellowship, I was working full time and teaching one composition course at night. Between my weekly schedule, commenting on students’ work, and planning for class, I had little time or energy left for reading. I have a long list of books to read and reread, and I’m happily going through them.
Q: The fellowship is designed to give young writers the opportunity to work on a manuscript for publication. What’s your manuscript like? Did it grow out of your graduate-level thesis, or did the thesis simply play a developmental role?
A: I feel as if I’m starting over. I’m focusing more on producing new work than I am salvaging old poems. Who knows what I’ll have by the end of the year. The manuscript I’m trying to pull together is currently titled “Dangerous Fruit.” I’m interested in the biblical story of Genesis, mostly in the role woman plays and how it affects our understanding of the story. For better or worse, at least for the time being, there’s a feminist slant to the manuscript.
Q: Where would you like to be in five years?
A: My main aim is to have a book published; everything else is secondary. Before that, there’s not much of a possibility for any career in the literary world.
Q: I know this is an impossible question, but what role do you think the arts should play in contemporary society? How do you think the general public feels about creative writing?
A: This is an impossible question, and any answer might come out sounding idealistic or pretentious. In my classroom experience, though, it seems students often have some misconceptions about poetry that I’m constantly working against as soon as I enter the room. They seem to believe that poetry is and should be confusing, esoteric, and autobiographical. While it’s true that poetry condenses and plays with language in a way that colloquial speech does not, this is what makes it a pleasure to study. Some poems require more study than others, but that doesn’t mean they are intentionally confusing. Whether a poem is difficult or accessible, it’s important to understand the aesthetic and the time in which the poet is working. This is why we have literature classes. It does no good to read out of context. For example, without a background in physics, you can’t walk into the middle of a physics lecture and expect to understand it. Poetry is the same way, but it seems people don’t apply this logic to the study of poetry.
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*Previous Mason recipients are Juanita Brunk MFA '85, Rebecca Dunham MFA '01, Cynthia Marie Hoffman MFA '03.
Thursday, December 6, 2007
Interview with Matt Ellsworth
I first "met" Matt several months ago right after we had put up the new Phoebe blog - he left us a nice comment on some post or another and invited us to have a look around his own blog, EditWrite. So I did, and found this great essay called "My Annie Dillard Story." But don't read it yet - first scroll down and read his bio and then the interview, which took place over email from late October to late November. Only after that should you head over to his site.
A bio:
Matt Ellsworth graduated from Mason in 2004 with a concentration in fiction. While he was at Mason, he taught freshman composition and a few creative writing classes. He also served as the fiction editor of Phoebe. Since leaving Mason, he has worked with numerous non-profit organizations and spent a brief stint reading slush for Zoetrope: All-Story; he now lives in Arizona with his wife and daughter, and he produces a variety of web and print projects as part of the communications team at a philanthropic foundation, which seeks to support the state's biosciences field. He blogs at EditWrite.
And now, the interview:
On your blog, EditWrite, you've said "though I write to make a living, I love reading more." As I understand it, you're a writer for a non-profit organization in Arizona, and you freelance on the side. Have these responsibilities changed your writing and reading habits since you studied at Mason? If so, how?
Half the time, I think I'm one of those alums who make Bill Miller cringe. I'm definitely screwing up the average for Mason writers who have won the National Book Award for fiction.
I've barely picked up my lucky fiction-writing pencil at all since finishing the MFA, and I certainly haven't read as much as I did in the program. A sense of regret doesn't eat away at the core of my being, but I do miss it and I more fully understand the statement various people have made about the main benefit of the MFA being space and time--the space and time to step outside of a daily slog and learn something about The Writing Life.
Today's excuses for not working on a story or finishing that book gathering dust on my nightstand are pretty good--wife with the flu, two year-old daughter pooping in the shower, big deadline at work, construction crew ripping out the street beneath our bedroom window at 5:30 am. But they're still excuses.
From a more psychological standpoint, I've found over the past couple of years that I don't have a bottomless well of writerly energy. Not that anyone has ever accused me of being Philip Roth, but I'm not. In fact, at times when my writing in the workplace has been most intense, I even have to bail on the simplest, no-imagination-required freelance editing jobs.
The good side of that, to be sure, is that I am writing in the workplace every day. That's enormously gratifying. The work I do now, drafting articles about proteomics and biosurfactants and God knows what else, requires its own skill set, as was the case in my last job as a grant writer for a child-welfare agency. And the skill set I'm honing now does share an ancestor with that of a fiction writer.
But I think what you're saying about this ancestral relationship between fiction writing and professional writing is interesting, and it might be one of those connections MFA students miss in the scramble for fellowships and teaching jobs. Would you care to talk more about the similarities between the two skill sets? How the writing program at Mason prepared you for that transition (if at all)?
Or, if you'd rather a more concrete question, how did you get into grant-writing/non-profit work?
I have one real regret about my time in Mason's program--I made no serious effort to try out professional writing, despite all the opportunities for that in the DC metro area. Probably the most useful action I could have taken as a student would have been to find an internship or part-time job that would have yielded clips. I got a sense of how interesting that writing could be in Alan's literary journalism course (which I think should be required every semester), but by then I was nearly out of the program.
We moved to Berkeley after I finished, where I might have found a job teaching, but I said I wanted to write for a living. For four months, the closest I got was slush-pile reading for Zoetrope, a great experience that did nothing for the checkbook. Eventually, while futilely applying for jobs at grocery stores and REI, and working a few hours a week for an after-school tutoring program, I got my "break." The director of the tutoring program left, and the overarching nonprofit hired me as the replacement. The curse and blessing of such a tiny nonprofit--it had four full-time staff--is how little institutional infrastructure exists to support or restrict you. I was able to build out the tutoring program, get some experience recruiting and managing staff, and when the development director was "released," I started helping out with grant-proposal and report writing, plus some agency print and web publications.
That experience got me a grant-writing position for a much bigger operation, and there training as a fiction writer began to pay off. Richard Ford said something about fiction writing being a kind of impersonation, and my task felt like that: to represent for funders, as if it were mine, the expertise of really talented clinicians and administrators. Essentially, I had to attend to voice and audience. And having spent some time in workshops, it didn't bother me when a program director asked me to include something in a proposal and the chief executive officer told me to take it out. My colleagues apparently found that as impressive as any writing I did.
My work now is different, somewhere between journalism and public relations, but as elsewhere, I'm relying heavily on training as a writer attentive to structure at the narrative and sentence level. I'm amazed at how structurally complex well-written journalism can be, and I'm newly impressed by the art of general-audience science-writing. I've got a long way to go before I'm good at it.
I'd like to quickly talk about Zoetrope, and then move back to your writing, if that's okay.
I don't know the numbers of submissions Zoetrope gets a quarter or whatever, but I somehow have this picture in my head of a walk-in closet kind of room full of boxes of slush-pile stories.
In your experience reading for them, how often did a story make it out of that "room" and into the editors' office? How is that process set up (aside from the agented work, I mean)?
Your image is pretty accurate. The magazine's offices are above the appropriately named Cafe Zoetrope, a wine bar in North Beach, around the corner from City Lights Bookstore and Caffe Trieste--where Coppola supposedly wrote the screenplay for The Godfather.
At least during my short time there, slush-pile reading happened in a small room with a couch, a table, a computer for logging submissions, a big window with a nice cross-breeze, and a wall of metal shelving, filled with cardboard boxes of submissions.
Stories rarely made it out of that room. There wasn't a specific rule, as I recall, but I think it took a second recommendation from a reader to get a story to an assistant editor. I'd estimate I advanced one of every twenty I read. Once in a while, a slush-pile story made it all the way to the magazine.
Still, I took more hope from the process than you might at first think. For one thing, they had an application for would-be readers that included substantive written evaluation of some sample stories, followed by a little interview. So I think they had readers who knew something about reading. Second, because it was hard to place a story in the magazine sans agent, I at least was excited at the prospect, and read carefully and generously, hunting for a gem.
It's nice to hear that Zoetrope had generous readers like you working their submission piles. And hopefully they still do.
Earlier you mentioned missing the kind of writing life that an MFA program creates for its students. Do you have any plans to eventually return to some of those creative projects such a life made possible? I'm thinking of fiction or non-fiction work, even something like a non-fiction project in the manner of that general-audience science-writing you admire?
The last thing I want to do is say I plan to start writing again--I already know plenty of people who say they're going to write but don't. I'd rather be He-Who-Doesn't-Write than He-Who-Intends-to-Write. And yet, I would be deeply disappointed if I never returned to writing fiction. So let me contradict myself: Yes, I'm going to get back to it; I think it will be sooner rather than later. But until I actually do, I probably shouldn't say much.
One thing I will say is that I'm literally where I want to be to write--in the Southwest. I remember Alan asking a question at the second or third meeting of Forms, something along the lines of, what writer serves as your model? The two names that first came to mind for me were Wallace Stegner and Rick Bass. When I first read them, I didn't know how to learn from the technical skills they were employing, but I was enthralled with their intertwining of character and plot with landscape. Emulating them seemed as great a reason to write as any I'd found.
I've only been back in Arizona for a few months, but already I feel myself reconnecting to the landscape, and to the tensions that come from growing hordes of people living in such a fragile, sometimes inhospitable place. I know that "a sense of place" isn't essential for all writers, and probably won't be for me forever, but for now, it's marvelously energizing. If that means Mr. A. A. Knopf in New York City can't make sense of what I write, so be it.
Right, I feel as though I can sort of understand the contradiction there - for me, it grows from a hesitancy to tell people certain things for fear of either those things not working out or, even worse, my then having to actually do those things. In both cases, I'm often faced with the question - "Hey, whatever happened to such and such?" It's a hard question to answer, especially when I'm the one asking it of myself. If that makes sense.
It sounds as though you'll be settled in Arizona for a while then. Are you originally from there?
I'm not an Arizona native, but I grew up and did undergrad studies here, and one branch of my family arrived in the 1860s, looking for gold and building cabins and stealing land from the native population.
Outside of the tribal communities, that kind of longevity in the state is pretty unusual, and it has contributed to my sense of being a "Westerner," though as the population of the Southwest continues to metastisize, that's an increasingly empty designation. (While we're still talking about imaginary writing I haven't done) I do get the sense that the tensions produced by the region's transition and ever-more blurred history might ultimately provide the backlighting for my fiction.
A bio:
Matt Ellsworth graduated from Mason in 2004 with a concentration in fiction. While he was at Mason, he taught freshman composition and a few creative writing classes. He also served as the fiction editor of Phoebe. Since leaving Mason, he has worked with numerous non-profit organizations and spent a brief stint reading slush for Zoetrope: All-Story; he now lives in Arizona with his wife and daughter, and he produces a variety of web and print projects as part of the communications team at a philanthropic foundation, which seeks to support the state's biosciences field. He blogs at EditWrite.
And now, the interview:
On your blog, EditWrite, you've said "though I write to make a living, I love reading more." As I understand it, you're a writer for a non-profit organization in Arizona, and you freelance on the side. Have these responsibilities changed your writing and reading habits since you studied at Mason? If so, how?
Half the time, I think I'm one of those alums who make Bill Miller cringe. I'm definitely screwing up the average for Mason writers who have won the National Book Award for fiction.
I've barely picked up my lucky fiction-writing pencil at all since finishing the MFA, and I certainly haven't read as much as I did in the program. A sense of regret doesn't eat away at the core of my being, but I do miss it and I more fully understand the statement various people have made about the main benefit of the MFA being space and time--the space and time to step outside of a daily slog and learn something about The Writing Life.
Today's excuses for not working on a story or finishing that book gathering dust on my nightstand are pretty good--wife with the flu, two year-old daughter pooping in the shower, big deadline at work, construction crew ripping out the street beneath our bedroom window at 5:30 am. But they're still excuses.
From a more psychological standpoint, I've found over the past couple of years that I don't have a bottomless well of writerly energy. Not that anyone has ever accused me of being Philip Roth, but I'm not. In fact, at times when my writing in the workplace has been most intense, I even have to bail on the simplest, no-imagination-required freelance editing jobs.
The good side of that, to be sure, is that I am writing in the workplace every day. That's enormously gratifying. The work I do now, drafting articles about proteomics and biosurfactants and God knows what else, requires its own skill set, as was the case in my last job as a grant writer for a child-welfare agency. And the skill set I'm honing now does share an ancestor with that of a fiction writer.
But I think what you're saying about this ancestral relationship between fiction writing and professional writing is interesting, and it might be one of those connections MFA students miss in the scramble for fellowships and teaching jobs. Would you care to talk more about the similarities between the two skill sets? How the writing program at Mason prepared you for that transition (if at all)?
Or, if you'd rather a more concrete question, how did you get into grant-writing/non-profit work?
I have one real regret about my time in Mason's program--I made no serious effort to try out professional writing, despite all the opportunities for that in the DC metro area. Probably the most useful action I could have taken as a student would have been to find an internship or part-time job that would have yielded clips. I got a sense of how interesting that writing could be in Alan's literary journalism course (which I think should be required every semester), but by then I was nearly out of the program.
We moved to Berkeley after I finished, where I might have found a job teaching, but I said I wanted to write for a living. For four months, the closest I got was slush-pile reading for Zoetrope, a great experience that did nothing for the checkbook. Eventually, while futilely applying for jobs at grocery stores and REI, and working a few hours a week for an after-school tutoring program, I got my "break." The director of the tutoring program left, and the overarching nonprofit hired me as the replacement. The curse and blessing of such a tiny nonprofit--it had four full-time staff--is how little institutional infrastructure exists to support or restrict you. I was able to build out the tutoring program, get some experience recruiting and managing staff, and when the development director was "released," I started helping out with grant-proposal and report writing, plus some agency print and web publications.
That experience got me a grant-writing position for a much bigger operation, and there training as a fiction writer began to pay off. Richard Ford said something about fiction writing being a kind of impersonation, and my task felt like that: to represent for funders, as if it were mine, the expertise of really talented clinicians and administrators. Essentially, I had to attend to voice and audience. And having spent some time in workshops, it didn't bother me when a program director asked me to include something in a proposal and the chief executive officer told me to take it out. My colleagues apparently found that as impressive as any writing I did.
My work now is different, somewhere between journalism and public relations, but as elsewhere, I'm relying heavily on training as a writer attentive to structure at the narrative and sentence level. I'm amazed at how structurally complex well-written journalism can be, and I'm newly impressed by the art of general-audience science-writing. I've got a long way to go before I'm good at it.
I'd like to quickly talk about Zoetrope, and then move back to your writing, if that's okay.
I don't know the numbers of submissions Zoetrope gets a quarter or whatever, but I somehow have this picture in my head of a walk-in closet kind of room full of boxes of slush-pile stories.
In your experience reading for them, how often did a story make it out of that "room" and into the editors' office? How is that process set up (aside from the agented work, I mean)?
Your image is pretty accurate. The magazine's offices are above the appropriately named Cafe Zoetrope, a wine bar in North Beach, around the corner from City Lights Bookstore and Caffe Trieste--where Coppola supposedly wrote the screenplay for The Godfather.
At least during my short time there, slush-pile reading happened in a small room with a couch, a table, a computer for logging submissions, a big window with a nice cross-breeze, and a wall of metal shelving, filled with cardboard boxes of submissions.
Stories rarely made it out of that room. There wasn't a specific rule, as I recall, but I think it took a second recommendation from a reader to get a story to an assistant editor. I'd estimate I advanced one of every twenty I read. Once in a while, a slush-pile story made it all the way to the magazine.
Still, I took more hope from the process than you might at first think. For one thing, they had an application for would-be readers that included substantive written evaluation of some sample stories, followed by a little interview. So I think they had readers who knew something about reading. Second, because it was hard to place a story in the magazine sans agent, I at least was excited at the prospect, and read carefully and generously, hunting for a gem.
It's nice to hear that Zoetrope had generous readers like you working their submission piles. And hopefully they still do.
Earlier you mentioned missing the kind of writing life that an MFA program creates for its students. Do you have any plans to eventually return to some of those creative projects such a life made possible? I'm thinking of fiction or non-fiction work, even something like a non-fiction project in the manner of that general-audience science-writing you admire?
The last thing I want to do is say I plan to start writing again--I already know plenty of people who say they're going to write but don't. I'd rather be He-Who-Doesn't-Write than He-Who-Intends-to-Write. And yet, I would be deeply disappointed if I never returned to writing fiction. So let me contradict myself: Yes, I'm going to get back to it; I think it will be sooner rather than later. But until I actually do, I probably shouldn't say much.
One thing I will say is that I'm literally where I want to be to write--in the Southwest. I remember Alan asking a question at the second or third meeting of Forms, something along the lines of, what writer serves as your model? The two names that first came to mind for me were Wallace Stegner and Rick Bass. When I first read them, I didn't know how to learn from the technical skills they were employing, but I was enthralled with their intertwining of character and plot with landscape. Emulating them seemed as great a reason to write as any I'd found.
I've only been back in Arizona for a few months, but already I feel myself reconnecting to the landscape, and to the tensions that come from growing hordes of people living in such a fragile, sometimes inhospitable place. I know that "a sense of place" isn't essential for all writers, and probably won't be for me forever, but for now, it's marvelously energizing. If that means Mr. A. A. Knopf in New York City can't make sense of what I write, so be it.
Right, I feel as though I can sort of understand the contradiction there - for me, it grows from a hesitancy to tell people certain things for fear of either those things not working out or, even worse, my then having to actually do those things. In both cases, I'm often faced with the question - "Hey, whatever happened to such and such?" It's a hard question to answer, especially when I'm the one asking it of myself. If that makes sense.
It sounds as though you'll be settled in Arizona for a while then. Are you originally from there?
I'm not an Arizona native, but I grew up and did undergrad studies here, and one branch of my family arrived in the 1860s, looking for gold and building cabins and stealing land from the native population.
Outside of the tribal communities, that kind of longevity in the state is pretty unusual, and it has contributed to my sense of being a "Westerner," though as the population of the Southwest continues to metastisize, that's an increasingly empty designation. (While we're still talking about imaginary writing I haven't done) I do get the sense that the tensions produced by the region's transition and ever-more blurred history might ultimately provide the backlighting for my fiction.
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