“Whatever you do, stay in the room.” So advises Ron Carlson in his book on the craft of writing, appropriately titled Ron Carlson Writes a Story. He knows what world exists on the other side of the door: a world full of televised sports, dirty dishes, iced mochachinos. A world full of distraction from the task at hand. Writing, he argues, is about staying in the room, pushing beyond the point where your eyes glaze over and your fingers refuse to type. That’s where the magic lies.

The first time I encountered a Ron Carlson book, I was a few weeks into my first real job, trying to convince a bunch of high school students that, Of course, The Old Man and the Sea relates to your experiences. You’ve been alive, what, fifteen years? Isn’t Santiago’s grand struggle against the unstoppable approach of death totally obvious to you? A friend of mine had mentioned Carlson’s name, said I might like his stuff. I was spending my Saturdays at The Boston Public Library in Copley Square, grading papers and roaming the stacks, as if somewhere amidst the million books I would find the answer for what I wanted to do with my life. That’s when I plucked Ron Carlson’s The News of the World from the shelf.

Here, at last, were stories I wanted to tell: a father covers his roof in horse manure in order to sustain the myth of Santa Claus; a man is haunted by the faces of missing children staring out from his milk cartons; a husband (whose wife’s name is Story!) drops a basketball in the middle of a lake, then attempts to swim to it in the dark, an act that recreates a sperm’s journey, a ritual intended to remedy his wife’s infertility. The collection even included a story about Donkey Kong! I knew then that I would continue to teach—I had to pay back some loans. But I would write, too. Ron Carlson had given me permission to tell my stories.

So I was particularly excited when I heard that Carlson would be traveling to Ann Arbor in February to read at the University of Michigan as part of the Zell Visiting Writers Series. And I was even more excited to have the opportunity to speak with Carlson during his trip. Like his stories, he has a sly humor that is tempered by his seriousness about the craft of fiction. He speaks like someone you know: your father, your teacher, your coach. He tells jokes, shares advice. At dinner he orders sloppy joes and root beer. He makes you want to stay in the room.

Ron Carlson is the author of four story collections and five novels, including The Signal, which was just released in paperback in June. His work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Pushcart Prize Anthology. His stories and monologues have been featured on NPR’s This American Life and Selected Shorts. Last year he received the Aspen Prize for Literature, an honor previously bestowed on Salman Rushdie. He now lives near Los Angeles and directs the creative writing program at the University of California – Irvine.

Interview:

You’ve been teaching in one capacity or another for forty years. Do you see yourself more as a teacher or a writer, or have the two become so connected that you don’t really separate them in your head?

They have become inextricable, but I was a writer first. I was a young guy, twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five-years-old, who stubbornly taught against the grain. I knew other people who thought that way. You paid the bills with teaching and you wrote, but what happened to me is I went to teach at a prep school. I came out of a big public school in Utah, but I ended up in this all-male prep school in Connecticut [The Hotchkiss School] where I got captured by the men. It was bizarre. I was newly married, twenty-three-years-old, and I ran into these master teachers, these guys who had given their lives over to teaching. It wasn’t like you went home, because you lived at school. It was hard—the preparations were exhausting, and then I had to run a dorm with twenty boys on my floor. Crazy times. I’ll write a novel about that some time.

For example, I couldn’t skate but I ended up coaching the hockey team. We also had Saturday classes. For ten years, I taught grammar to sophomores on Saturday mornings, and I liked it. I became a guy who saw where the leverage was. I was energetic, so I learned how to teach, and I learned how to write underneath it. In my third year, I told the department chair that I quit because I wasn’t writing my book, and he said something ridiculous, he said, “To hell with it, take the spring off, we’ll pay you for the spring, and you don’t have to come back.” He saw the big picture. He said, “You’ve got to be a teacher, but you need to get this out of your system so go.”

So I went to Mexico in March and finished my book [Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald]. I called the school in August and said, “I’m coming back.” I served seven more years and loved it. I wrote my second novel at Hotchkiss, one page at a time. Class ended at 12:40pm, I had hockey practice at 1:30, and I would write in the spaces between. I was a teacher who wrote some books. I was never more alive. I’ve never had two years off to just write. If I hadn’t been a teacher, I’d maybe have four more books. But I would have let all the books go in order to teach.

Going back to those years in the classroom and those boys on Saturday mornings, what literature did you enjoy teaching?

There wasn’t much experimentation. You didn’t bring in anything new. I spent ten years reading and learning to love everything I should have read in college—all the Victorians, all the Romantic poets. It fed me in a way that I couldn’t tell you. We read The Odyssey every year. Moby Dick. Then you bring it up to Death of a Salesman, Gatsby. Winesburg, Ohio was particularly poignant in a prep school setting.

What is it like to reach a point in your career where your own books have become part of some schools’ required reading?

Well, it advances the discussion. Now that people have read my work, it’s a privilege. And it’s always a bit of a surprise because everybody knows more about you than you’re used to.

Supposing that you aren’t the author for a minute, are there any Ron Carlson stories you’d enjoy teaching or sharing with students?

I’m teaching a graduate class this winter called “Forty Stories and One Poem.” That course is oriented on the question “How was that story made?” I’m only interested in how the story was made. Yeah, it bleeds out, and people are going “Wow,” but I say, “Hold the ‘wow.’ I don’t care about the ‘wow.’”  Where does the story start? How does the writer move back? What’s the transition? I’m all nuts and bolts and craft, and I love to share my stories that way. I’d love people to read “Blazo” [from Plan B for the Middle Class] that way or the stories in At the Jim Bridger. I’ve been to a lot of reading groups where people have read my novels, and that’s illuminating. I rarely talk as a writer. I’m always talking as a teacher.

Can you recall a book from your youth that brought you to writing, not necessarily one that made you say, “I want to be a writer,” but “This is the kind of writing I want to do”?

Someone just gave me Robert Stone’s book of stories Fun with Problems, and I read the first paragraph and I put it down and went to write. So Stone, and Thomas McGuane’s The Bushwhacked Piano. That book is uneven, but even at its low points it’s higher than anybody else.

What I try to do as a teacher, and what I loved as a young writer, is seeing what is possible. When I think of my influences, I think of Richard Brautigan. I think of Ionesco. I think of Cheever. There’s something lovely about being brutally sincere. Simple honesty. Hemingway was a powerful influence when I was in college, but you’ve got to be careful when reading Hemingway. You can’t read him too early. You should really hold the Hemingway until you’re twenty-five. There are also parts of Fitzgerald that I read in college that still get me, passages where he lets go: the center sections of his story “May Day” and  “The Sensible Thing.” That’s where I began to see the viable connection between language and emotion.

In terms of your own writing, you’ve said that the key to success is “surviving the draft,” a process you’ve equated to a refusal to drown. Do you have any tips for those of us out there in the water?

They say that teaching creative writing is a series of offering tips, but I’m not sure that’s true. I think the way forward is always remembering why you wanted it, why you wanted to write. You’ve also got to marry yourself to subjects that have your total attention. That’s so easy to say. It’s like saying, “Find the right person to marry.” But success lies in this 100 percent commitment, even when the writing feels comical or odd. Your desire allows you to stay with the project, allows you to stay in the dark, to survive in the dark. If you’re always in the light when you’re writing a story, it’s probably not a story I’d care to read. One of the reasons we continue this very delicious mystery of talking about creative writing is that you can’t learn about the dark by turning on the lights. Everybody has to go off into the dark. And the reason we’re doing it is not for glory, but for our love of our material. That’s the cornerstone.

You’ve described the stories in your first collection, The News of the World, published in 1989, as “wishful,” and you’ve said that when writing them your imagination “took a sunny turn.” About ten years after that book’s publication, you gave an interview in which you said, “I’m a nice guy, but that’s an impulse I’m slowly conquering.” How is that working out for you?

What you want as a writer is to earn your turns, to earn all the changes. Even when I was in my “sunny” stage, there’s a lot of rube in my stories. If you write a lot, you’ll see that you weren’t even aware that you were writing about the person you would become or the person you had been. A writer has to play with a full deck. You can’t just play with the face cards. You have to reach. A writer’s progress isn’t linear. You don’t go two, four, six, eight. Now I think there’s a clear light and a clear shadow in my work. That’s what you want. Readers are smart, and they want to be taken seriously. They don’t want a gratuitous nod at the good and the bad. I’ve never tried to do that. So-called “happy endings” are very difficult. I don’t even know what a happy ending is. But a dark ending can also be facile in a literary sense. You know, “Cheryl would never be the same again.”  Really? I’m not so sure.

The best writing is recording. We begin with what we know, and we move toward what we don’t. I think that’s fiction’s role. The life I’ve led wants me to be an optimist, but that’s my life. It doesn’t mean I can turn the music up at the ending of every story. I know about craft choices. I know how stories function. What we’re looking for at all times is honesty presented in language so that we can see the world again. Can you surprise me again with something I already know? It’s more important to be real than nice or bad.

You spent a lot of time in your four story collections writing about domestic life: families, husbands, wives, suburbia. Your last two novels in many ways are books without roofs. In other words, they’re stories that take place almost exclusively outdoors with people sleeping in tents, under the stars. Why do you think you’ve gone in this direction as a writer?

I don’t know. I wanted to write a book about work, and that’s Five Skies. I did some temporary work at a fair once where we put up seating and took it down and put up fences and took them down. It was bizarre. So I wrote a page of dialogue, and I’d been reading Rick Bass, and one character asks another, “Did you ever make anything that lasted?” And then I wrote a section about a truck sliding through a snow fence, and it was visceral. I could feel that. About halfway through I saw the real arc of the story, and I freaked out. I called my editor and said, “You’ve got to understand, this book, there aren’t any women in it, and it’s all out of doors, and it’s in the West, and it’s about work. It’s not going to fit.” And he said, “Go. Go nuts.” So I wrote the book, and I was very happy with its reception.

In fact, last year, Five Skies followed best-selling novels such as The Kite Runner and The Secret Life of Bees as the “state book” for the Read Across Rhode Island program. How were you involved in the events surrounding this program?

First of all, those people are the sweetest people of all time. Whenever you go somewhere and meet readers in a room, those are special people. I went to Rhode Island twice for events and it was a dream. We had so much fun. At one of the colleges they had a lecture, and somebody analyzed the book, and somebody cooked all the food from the book, and they acted out a chapter. They were nuts. Then I went to a breakfast later in the year—maybe five hundred people—and some of my old students were there. One guy was in his fifties, he’s a surgeon, and he had skated for me at Hotchkiss.

Does it help with your future projects to think back on the anxiety you felt while writing Five Skies now that it has been so well received?

Yes. That’s why it’s better to remember that you’re only as good as your thinking. In the current world with all the noise, the Internet, and so on, it can be problematic for writers. A lot of things want to divide you. People should talk about that more. A writer can’t multi-task. Multi-tasking is like saying, “I quit.” It’s a phrase people use to explain why they’re doing two things poorly. Both of my last books were received well and got some recognition, but that has nothing to do with what’s next. It’s like flipping a coin. You can stare at that tails for an hour, and it won’t affect what happens next. I’m trying to stay calm about the book I’m writing now because it’s kind of flat, but that’s going to be the way it is. There’s nothing particularly sexy about this next book and that’s OK.

That’s interesting because a lot of people reacted to The Signal by labeling it a thriller. Do you see the book that way or is that description too limiting?

It’s very difficult. I have trouble saying what a book is. I say The Signal is a backpacking book, and that’s good for me. I made a decision while writing The Signal that I was going to add some voltage, so I put in some higher profile plot points. It was a really interesting decision when I realized there’d be firearms. I didn’t want it to just be two characters in the woods. I wanted other issues, so I used what I know about writing to make the rest of it have a purchase in credibility. So, yeah, I pumped it up at the end. If it was my only book ever, I might not have done that. But then I thought, “Come on, you’re going to write more books, so let’s put it in.” There was something fun about it. When you tie a knot like that, and then untie it, it’s a kind of pleasure.

Let me throw a Ron Carlson quote at you as a way to address your writing process. You said, “I’m not going to wait for eight months of free time to write a great big book. That would be like a snake eating a pig. I want to nibble. I want to eat every day.” Still nibbling?

Absolutely. On the best days, I can get ninety minutes or 700 words. You use whatever ritual you can find. You push. I’ve written some stories five sentences a day for a hundred days. A lot of days I’d stop in the middle of a word. I’d know how to pick up, because I knew how to spell. But during my busiest times at school, I have to keep myself alive with blips, maybe only two days a week. Ultimately, the goal is to be working more days of the week than not.

I’d like to ask about the ways that your love of movies has influenced or hovered in the background of much of your writing. A number of your characters are connected to Hollywood in some way, either as professionals or as movie-lovers, and several of your works include epigraphs that are from films. What kinds of movies interest you, and how has your appreciation for on-screen stories affected your writing?

In my formative years, movies were something you saw rarely. You saw them once, or if they were on TV, you made sure to watch. I loved horror movies and all the old science fiction. It was the 1950s, so we had It Came From Beneath the Sea, and all that stuff got me. It still does, because that’s what I rent on Netflix. It’s pathetic. Someone will come over and I’ll say, “You want to see the octopus that attacked San Francisco?”

Really, all culture has affected my writing. Songs, stories, especially ballads, Western ballads. I grew up in a time when we had a monolithic culture. We all had the same twenty references in television, in movies, in song. And now there’s such a multiplicity, such huge diversity.

In a long-ago interview you mentioned that you were working on a screenplay for your story “Life Before Science.” Then, in 2008, your story “Keith” was made into a movie. Many readers have also suggested that Five Skies and The Signal would translate well to the screen. Do you see more Hollywood in your future?

All my work is under option, and I wish them the best, but I’m not following it. There’s one piece I have that I’d like to write the screenplay: my story “Beanball.”  I did write a screenplay for my novel The Speed of Light and there are inquiries about that every few years. Really, film is just a windfall. When someone buys the rights to your book, you’ve got to let go. My plate’s full with teaching. If I was worried about money, I might go scrambling, but I’ve been blessed not to do that. I never had to write anything for money because I had a job and that allowed me to write crazily. I had to write and not let my students know what I was writing. And I’ve been lucky. I’ve published just about everything I ever wrote. So, no, I don’t plan on doing anything in particular for the movies. I would much rather spend the day at my house having a pot of coffee, having gotten in my six hundred words. Maybe go to the post office on my bike, call a friend, write for a bonus hour. That really is the center of my life.

Further Links and Resources:

• Read Ron Carlson’s story “At Copper View,” which was originally published in Five Points Vol. V, No. 1. This story was collected in At the Jim Bridger. It was also one of fifty stories short-listed for a 2001 O. Henry Prize.
• You can also read Carlson’s introduction to the Fall 2006 issue of Ploughshares, in which he discusses what makes a good story.
• Here is a 2009 interview with Carlson from the New West website where he discusses his new novel, The Signal.
• Listen to an audio version of Carlson’s Christmas story “The H Street Sledding Record.”
• Ron Carlson describes teaching as “an act of investigation,” much like the process of writing itself, in this brief clip about teaching in the UC-Irvine writing program:
• Here is an interview with Ron Carlson from UC-Irvine’s 2009 Literary Orange Festival:
• Watch The Gold Lunch, a short film by Joanna Kerns adapted from Ron Carlson’s story:

photo by Moriza (flickr cc)

Why do people read fiction? That’s what one user asked recently on Metafilter, a popular community weblog:

I don’t understand human behavior. Why do people read and watch fiction books and dramas? It seems like a waste of time.

The question garnered over 50 responses—most of which were elegant and eloquent explanations of the value of fiction:

from Ash3000:

To know that a character is like us, and their inner life includes the same cringing that ours does – or, conversely, to know that they are utterly free of our thinking habits – provides an avenue wherein we can compare ourselves to other humans in a way that non-fiction, and documentary film, can not quite do. Non-fictional narrative will always be an approximation of another, real-life person. That person will either be presenting him or her self (and therefore can never be truly open), or is being presented by another (and therefore, like us, incapable of being fully understood from the outside).

from wheat:

Travel broadens the mind. Fiction gives you a chance to see things from a different perspective. It also, both intentionally and inadvertently, reveals a lot about the person and the historical context in which it was created. You can learn quite a bit about a culture by the stories it tells itself, including many things that are harder to get at from any other direction. On top of that, there’s the enjoyment of narrative itself (who doesn’t like a good story?) and the enjoyment of seeing language itself used well and/or used in novel ways. This latter isn’t limited to fiction, of course, but it’s often more on display in fiction, especially since modernism. Fiction also gives us some common frames of reference for discussing real-world problems, especially ethical ones. Fictional characters and the situations in which they find themselves can (and often do) provide a springboard for discussion of real-world problems.

from bukvich:

There is a great explanation in Walter Kaufmann’s Critique of Religion and Philosophy. (This is closely paraphrased.) If Napoleon could return from the dead and read any of his biographies his first response would be something like “my secret is safe”. If Natasha Rostov could return from the undead and read War and Peace her first response would be something like “oh god they knew”.

There is a psychic interior present in a well-written novel which is beyond the ken of a library full of psychological case studies.

from misha:

Escapism–fiction lets us see a life we don’t lead, and imagine what that would be like.

Catharsis–fiction helps us work through painful solutions in our life by seeing what others do in similar circumstances.

Romance–fiction gives us the Cinderella, happily-ever-after fairytale ending, as well as reminding us what that heady, exhilarating feeling of falling in love is like if it has been a while.

Mystery–fiction gives us puzzles to solve and analyze to keep our minds working in different ways.

Psychology–fiction shows us how others’ minds work, what motivates them or shapes their actions every day.

Humor–fiction makes us laugh at the absurdity of life.

Insight–fiction helps us to know ourselves better by giving us characters that we can either relate to, admire, learn to respect or hate outright, and then makes us think about how why we feel the way we do.

That’s just off the top of my head.

from dpcoffin:

[T]he absolutely best experience that fictional reading provides for me, then and now, is the experience of eloquence. Fiction still seems to be the most likely reading experience in which I’ll find my own experiences—particularly my most mysterious and elusive experiences—given clarity, form and voice in words, either in explication or poetry, or pure situational symbolism. This is the pure magic, beyond that of a good tale well told. It’s the pleasure of verbal and emotional mastery perfectly fused. No matter how good or how enjoyable I’ve ever found non-fiction writing to be, it’s never ascended to the heights of eloquence I’ve found in great fiction.

The responses gave me some great answers for the next time someone asks me why I spend so much time reading—and writing—about people that “aren’t even real.” But more importantly, this discussion reminded me of why I write fiction, and why fiction is so important.

Katherine Anne Porter (Papers of Katherine Anne Porter, U of Maryland Libraries Special Collections)

Each week, The nonprofit Library of America offers a free short story, readable online in PDF form. The current “Story of the Week” is “The Charmed Life”< by Katherine Anne Porter. Other recent features include “Charles” by Shirley Jackson (who—yes!—wrote more than just “The Lottery”), the early story “The Cut-Glass Bowl” by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and The Wives of the Dead” by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Each story is also accompanied by some commentary that helps set the story in context. This seems like a great—and free—way to discover some lesser-known pieces by well-known American writers. See the current story and all archived pieces on the LOA website, sign up to have the stories sent to you, or follow The Library of America on Facebook to get updated when a new story is posted.

Many thanks to FWR contributor Erika Dreifus of Practing Writing for pointing us to this great resource.

But the less commercially viable fiction became, the less it seemed to concern itself with its audience, which in turn made it less commercial, until, like a dying star, it seems on the verge of implosion. Indeed, most American writers seem to have forgotten how to write about big issues—as if giving two shits about the world has gotten crushed under the boot sole of postmodernism.

Now, Jay Baron Nicorvo takes on Genoways in Guernica, defending writing programs:

If fiction is indeed faltering, the university system isn’t at fault, nor are the navel-gazing writers who come out of it. [...] What MFA programs do graduate are people who have mastered some of the uses of written English. And while this mastery might not be the most lucrative skill set, I would argue that it is the skill most widely applicable to making an honest living. Words are everywhere. If you can manage them well, chances are there’s a job for you, even in this economy.

The real culprits, Nicorvo argues, are quite different:

[Editors] attempt to herd the mob because they no longer know how to reach the reader. [...] New media is the internet, and publicity and marketing departments have little central control over the flow of information. Amateur reviews of a book on Amazon are as important if not more so than the professional assessments in Publishers Weekly. And so what do editors do? They cling to what’s working, if not working well—blockbusters. The dominant, dysfunctional business model for movies has been adapted for books. [...]

If there’s anything that’s killing American fiction, it’s not MFA degrees and the institutions that bestow them. It is this: the third degree.

Editors at large houses, like investment bankers at big banks, have for some time been acquiring from the third degree. They no longer acquire according to their tastes—they’re lucky if they can even distinguish their tastes from what their bosses and the bottom line demand. Because editors can’t know which books average opinion genuinely thinks are the best, not until said books climb the bestseller lists or make the shortlist for one of the few major awards, editors are left to anticipate anticipations.

Genoways isn’t totally wrong—there is plenty of self-centered fiction out there. But Nicorvo’s right, too: it’s hard for good work to get out there if editors won’t take a risk on it. Writers may need to “stop being so damned dainty and polite” and “treat writing like [their] lifeblood instead of [their] livelihood,” as Genoways puts it. But so do editors.

At least we know the fight over what’s killing fiction is alive and well.

The online version (along with a slideshow of images from the store) is available at no cost on P&W’s website…but if you want a print copy, Poets & Writers‘ special offer to Fiction Writers Review readers (only $12 for a year-long subscription) is still up for grabs; if you order through this page before May 15, you’ll get the current issue featuring Women & Children First. Regardless of when you order, a subscription will show support for independent bookstores everywhere.

Here’s an excerpt from Jeremiah’s Women & Children First profile:

photo by Jeremiah Chamberlin

When I walked into Women & Children First, the feminist bookstore that Linda Bubon and her business partner, Ann Christophersen, founded more than thirty years ago, the overriding feeling I experienced was one of warmth. And it wasn’t because Chicago was having a late-winter snowstorm that afternoon. From the eclectic array of books stacked on tables, to the casualness of the blond wood bookcases, to the handwritten recommendations from staff below favorite books on the shelves, everything feels personalized; an atmosphere of welcome permeates the place.

In the back of the store, a painted sign showing an open book with a child peering over the top hangs from the ceiling, indicating the children’s section. Not far away, a similar sign, this one of a rainbow with an arrow below it, points toward the GLBTQ section. Despite these signs—not to mention the name of the store itself—Women & Children First carries more than books for women and, well, children.

And here’s Linda Bubon, on her (and the bookstore’s) future:

Linda Bubon / photo by Jeremiah Chamberlin

I’m a bookseller, but I’m a feminist bookseller. Would I be a bookseller if I were going to run a general bookstore? I’m not sure. Sometimes I think, “What will I do if the store is no longer viable?” And I think that rather than going into publishing or going to work for a general bookstore, I would rather try to figure out how to have a feminist reading series and run a feminist not-for-profit. Because the real purpose of my life is getting women’s voices out, and getting women to tell the truth about their lives, and selling literature that reflects the truths of girls’ and women’s lives. Sometimes we’re abused; we have to talk about that. Sometimes we take the bad road in relationships; we have to talk about that. Sometimes we’re discriminated against in the workplace; we have to talk about these things. Violence against women in the United States and worldwide has not stopped. We don’t have a feminist army to go rescue women in Afghanistan—would that we did.

The goal of my life has been to get the word out, to understand women’s lives. We have to continue to evolve and change if we’re to have a full share, and if our daughters are to have a full share of the world.

FWR at AWP 2009 (holding my photo. I had pneumonia!)

AWP 2010 in Denver is just days away, and Fiction Writers Review will be there. Stop by our table at the bookfair, sign up for our mailing list, win loot from the FWR store, and check out our panel with the editors of Waccamaw, The Emerging Writers Network/Dzanc, and storySouth on Saturday from noon to 1:15 (Granite Room: Hyatt Regency, 3rd Floor):

S163. Evolution of the New Media: Online Literary Journals and Websites in 2010. (Dan Albergotti, Dan Wickett, Jeremiah Chamberlin, Terry Kennedy) This panel examines the evolution of online publishing and literary promotion via digital media in the 21st century. Dan Wickett and Jeremiah Chamberlin will discuss ways their sites have developed an extended literary community for emerging writers, while Dan Albergotti and Terry Kennedy will address how aesthetics of online journal design and presentation have evolved in recent years.

Denver-based writers: even if you’re not registered, the bookfair is FREE and open to the public on the last day of the conference (Saturday, April 10).

We hope to see many of you soon!

This morning I woke to hear the sad news that Barry Hannah had died. He was 67, and the apparent cause was a heart attack, according to the Jackson Free Press. Barry had had several bouts with cancer over the last ten years, yet I was still shocked to hear that he was gone. I guess I’d come to think of him as oddly invincible.

Maybe it’s also because Barry’s prose felt like it was carved out of stone. Not weighty, but permanent. With a hint of the divine. That crazy Old Testament kind of divinity that’s equal parts kindness and cruelty, lust and humor. Especially humor. Who else could open a collection of stories as Barry did his 1978 masterpiece, Airships, with a passage like this:

When I am run down and flocked around by the world, I go down to Farte Cove off the Yazoo River and take my beer to the end of the pier where the old liars are still snapping and wheezing at one another. The line-up is always different, because they’re always dying out or succumbing to constipation, etc., whereupon they go back to the cabins and wait for a good day when they can come out and lie again, leaning on the rail with coats full of bran cookies. The son of the man the cove was named for is often out there. He pronounces his name Fartay, with a great French stress on the last syllable. Otherwise you might laugh at his history or ignore it in favor of the name as it’s spelled on the sign.

I’m glad it’s not my name.

For many young writers, this was our first encounter with Barry’s work. His voice hooked you deep. I was in college when this book was pressed upon me and my now brother-in-law, Dean Bakopoulos, by Elwood Reid. This was the late 1990s. Dean and I were undergrads at the University of Michigan, both eager to be writers but still sorting out exactly how to go about the task. Elwood, who was finishing his MFA at the time, took us under his wing to show us the way. For Elwood, who’d once been a college football player, that meant work. Lots of work. And by “work” I mean reading. Barry Hannah. Larry Brown. Rick Bass. Amy Hempl. Mary Gaitskill. The collections piled up.

But there was something about Barry’s work that stood out. An urgency in the prose that punctured your heart. “Water Liars” is a great story, but when I hit the second one in the collection, “Love Too Long,” I was gone.

My head’s burning off and I got a heart about to bust out of my ribs. All I can do is move from chair to chair with my cigarette. I wear shades. I can’t read a magazine. Some days I take my binoculars and look out in the air. They laid me off. I can’t find work. My wife’s got a job and she takes flying lessons. When she comes over the house in her airplane, I’m afraid she’ll screw up and crash.

For a college kid, Barry bored down through the mantle to the molten core of what it meant to feel. He still does. Typing his words you can feel the anguish and energy. Further down this page, the narrator, nearly beside himself, writes, “I want to sleep in her uterus with my foot hanging out.” It’s an image that makes you wince, but it’s also oddly tender. What it is is honest.

I experienced both sides of Barry’s honesty when I was a student of his in 2003 at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. The day of my workshop, we moved around the table in usual fashion–what’s working, what isn’t. Janet Peery was co-teaching the session, and among the group were writers such as Ben Percy, Lisa Lerner, Dave Koch, Forrest Anderson, Karen McKinnon, and John Struloeff. I was giddy to be in the room with one of my literary heroes. And while the others were offering feedback on my writing, I stole the occasional glance to see how Barry was reacting. Most of the time he spent flipping fairly idly through my pages. So perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised when, upon his turn to speak, he began gutting the opening paragraph of the prologue to the novel I’d been working on. Sentence by sentence, word by word, he worked like a butcher, cutting back the fat. Let’s just say that there wasn’t much meat left when he got down to the bone. Or, rather, he showed me that there hadn’t been much muscle to begin with. Would it be too much to say I felt eviscerated along with my work?

Yet it wasn’t cruel. It was honest. And when the furnace of my face cooled I saw that he was mostly right.

But I didn’t want my teacher and literary icon to have this impression of my work (I swear, the rest was better). So, later that night, during the evening cocktail hour, I slipped him one of my stories, one which I’d been carrying around for the better part of an hour rolled up in my fist, wrinkled and creased. And when I finally got the nerve to give it to him, I tried hard to assure him that this wasn’t extra work. Nothing I was looking for feedback on. Nothing he even had to read during the conference. Just, well, something I wanted him to have. And I’m sure I must have said something inane like, “I hope you enjoy it.” As if it were some sort of gift. Walking away, I was certain that I had made things worse.

And the next morning, when Barry found me at breakfast, I was more than sure of my mistake. “Here, kid,” he said, handing the story back to me across the table. Without another word, he walked off. Cut to blistered cheeks again. In front of an entire table of your peers, Barry Hannah has just returned the story you gave him the evening before, the story meant to redeem you. “Thanks, but no thanks,” is what you read in this gesture. And in that moment you imagine escaping back to Michigan several days from now–it’s a nice, long trip from Tennessee, one that will give you plenty of highway to replay this moment over and over and over.

Yet when I unrolled my story, he’d scrawled this across the top in loopy script: “I enjoyed greatly. I’m nominating it for Best New American Voices.” Simple. Generous. An unasked for kindness. And I realized that it wasn’t about you in that classroom; for Barry it was about the work.

At the end of his fantastic interview with Barry in Tin House last year, Tom Franklin asked the author how his teaching has changed over the years. Here is Barry’s response:

It’s gotten a lot simpler. The things that I do well in my own work, I didn’t ever think about, because I’d been trained on good storytelling and helped by a few good teachers. But outside of beginning, middle, and end and “thrill us,” what is there to teach? There’s no theory, there’s nothing that guarantees publication. I’ve never been interested in intellectual experiments. I prefer to thrill people in their guts rather than in their heads. With some of the MFA writing I read now, I wonder, “My God, didn’t anybody get it across that you’ve got to entertain?” You’re fortunate if what entertains you entertains the crowd also.

It’s impossible for me to behave as if I were thirty-five when I was writing Airships–it’s impossible. And I must say you don’t necessarily gain a lot by age; you sometimes are in danger of becoming the old hack plagiarizing his own former work. That’s probably why the old often bore people, they just say the same damn things over and over, and they just deal in truisms. That’s the mass of America, one truism after another. For instance, the word motherfucker is a truism now. It’s just empty. It used to be an exciting word because it’s the worst thing you can imagine, you know? But now it’s just a weak flat noun.

It may be just my time of life, but I’ve been teaching better, I hope. My essays have gotten better. But what I want is what I had in Airships and High Lonesome and Bats Out of Hell and Captain Maximus: joy. Joy, just joy, just jump in there because you’re onto it. You’ve gotta write it. You feel it deep in the pit of your stomach.

Thank you, Barry.

From the Sewanee Writers’ Conference on March 2, 2010:

We are saddened to hear that Barry Hannah, a great friend of the conference, passed away on Monday, March 1. Barry was a member of the fiction faculty at Sewanee in 1999, 2000-2003, and 2006. He visited the conference to read in 2004, 2005, 2007, and he was scheduled to read at this summer’s conference.

One of the finest writers in American letters, Barry Hannah published eight novels—Geronimo Rex (Alfred A. Knopf, 1972—winner of the William Faulkner Prize), Nightwatchmen (Viking, 1974), Ray, The Tennis Handsome (Alfred A. Knopf, 1981, 1983, respectively), Boomerang, Never Die (University Press of Mississippi, 1986 and 1990), Hey Jack! (Dutton, 1992), and Yonder Stands Your Orphan (Grove/Atlantic, 2001). His story collections are Airships, Captain Maximus (Alfred A. Knopf, 1978 and 1985), Bats out of Hell, and High Lonesome (Grove/Atlantic, 1993 and 1996).

Barry’s readings at Sewanee were always the highlight of the conference, and his openness with all participants spoke to his generosity. We will miss him greatly.

• You can read the New York Times obituary here.
• The Mississippi Review has an interview with Hannah from 1996.
• At Wired for Books, you can hear Hannah read from his stories “Water Liars” and “That’s True”.
• The Oxford Conference for the Book, which begins March 4th, is dedicated to Barry Hannah. Writers such as Tom Franklin and Amy Hempel will discuss his life and work.

Postscript:

Like many writers who’ve been inspired and influenced by Barry’s work, I’ve spent much of the past few days pulling his books off the shelf to reread favorite stories and passages. I’ve been carrying my copy of Airships around with me since Tuesday, like some sort of totem. It’s inscribed with a simple message from Barry: “Yours to hell and back.” Part promise, part confession. It’s a simple line, but it matters. And it reminded me how much Barry cared about the line. Particularly those clean, simple, honest lines: “I’m going to die from love.” Who else could end a story like that and truly mean it?

I think it was the honesty of Barry’s work that drew so many of us to him. And I also think the many memorials and tributes that have poured out since news of his death are a testament to not only his great talent, but also his generosity and his kindness. He had damn high standards, but as long as you were willing to be true to the art you were good in his book.

And so to celebrate Barry’s influence, and also with the hopes of bringing new readers to his fiction, we decided to republish this essay as a feature. We also wanted to take this opportunity to recognize some of the sites that have been paying homage to Hannah this week, as well as those publications that have supported his work for years. Thank you.

• Matthew Simmons from HTML Giant was one of the first to bring news of Barry Hannah’s passing, and he has a wonderful tribute to the author that unfolded as we learned of his death.
• Alec Niedenthal subsequently put together a collection of remembrances for the same site entitled “There are Dry Tiny Horses Running in My Veins: Mourning Barry Hannah,” which includes not only his recollections and those of Michael Bible and Lincoln Michel, but also a selection from this post of mine. Many thanks for that.
• Lincoln Michel has a great round-up of links to work by and about Hananh on The Faster Times.
• One of those pieces that stands out is a wonderful compilation in Vanity Fair by Claire Howorth, which includes remembrances of Hannah by such writers as Richard Ford, Jim Harrison, Amy Hempl, Matt Wieland, and Wells Tower.
• There’s also a great essay on The Rumpus by A.N. Devers about Hannah, grieving, and the memory of our teachers.
• And a wonderful anecdote about idolizing Hannah from Kevin Wilson on his blog.
• Just a few weeks ago Elwood Reid wrote a brief review for Three Guys One Book about how the collection Airships affected him when he read it for the first time. He writes, “Airships didn’t change my life, it rewired my idea of the sentence and what a short story could and should do.”
• To hear Hannah talk about his work and the writing life, you can read Tom Franklin’s 2009 Tin House interview, or Mark Smirnoff’s 2001 interview from The Oxford American.
• Wells Tower also has a beautiful portrait of Hannah and the trip he took with the author to visit Larry Brown’s grave in 2008 for Garden & Gun.
• For more on Hannah’s writing style itself, read “Among Mutinous Helium Bursts Around Saturn: Barry Hannah’s dangerous syntax,” an essay by Jamie Quatro, which appeared in the September 2009 Southern Lit issue of The Oxford American.

• And last, but certainly not least, here is “Water Liars,” the opening story from Barry Hannah’s 1978 collection, Airships (reprinted with permission from Grove Press on the Garden & Gun website).

Of Special Note: Hannah’s influence on American Letters will be celebrated in Oxford at the 17th Annual Oxford Conference for the Book, which begins March 4. The conference had been dedicated to the author’s work and life, and will take place as planned. Scheduled to speak are such writers as Beth Ann Fennelly, Tom Franklin, John Grisham, Hendrik Hertzberg, Mark Jarman, JoAnne Prichard Morris, Mark Richard, Cynthia Shearer, Wells Tower, and Steve Yates. Here is Richard Howorth’s tribute, which had originally been written to be delivered at the conference. Howorth is the owner of Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi, and a long-time friend of Hannah.

As you know, we’re big fans of Poets & Writers Magazine around here. So we’re excited to announce that this magazine has generously agreed to offer our readers a special subscription rate of only $12. The reason for this offer is to help build support for a new series in P&W called “Inside Indie Bookstores,” written by our Associate Editor, Jeremiah Chamberlin. Each issue will feature an important independent bookstore around the country. The first to be profiled will be Square Books, of Oxford, Mississippi.

We hope that you will take advantage of this great deal. You’ll not only be getting the magazine at one-third the normal price, but you’ll also be showing your support for our Independent Bookstores. Simply put: the more support we can gather for the series, the more publicity we can give to bookstores during this tough economic time.

It’s also a great way to show what a devoted readership we have at FWR. So please help us spread the word!

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During McGurl’s September visit to Washington University in St. Louis, Mary Stewart Atwell sat down with the author to discuss the place of creative writing within the English department, why Hemingway could not have been a professor, and what Henry James would have thought of MFA programs.

Interview

MARY STEWART ATWELL:  For readers who haven’t read the book, could you talk broadly about how and why you decided on this project?

MARK MCGURL:  Sure. My first book is on early twentieth century American writers and—to put it simply—their relation to the market. And as I was finishing it up, I just kept thinking about how one option that Faulkner, for instance, didn’t have was teaching creative writing. He went out to Hollywood to make some money; he didn’t really have the option of being a creative writing teacher. Then it occurred to me what a shockingly large-scale change that was in literary history. It was the rise of this new form of, well, “patronage” isn’t an exact term for it, but an institutional space where writers can now be found. And then I went and looked for the book on that topic and didn’t find it, so I thought I’d do it myself.

That’s always a good moment.

It was. Though there were a few things that were helpful, thankfully, so I didn’t have to do everything myself. But I had the idea of actually looking at the creative writing program, and asking in what ways has it mattered to postwar literature that writers have had an increasingly intimate relation to the university.

You did your doctorate at Johns Hopkins, which has an excellent graduate program in creative writing.  Did you interact with those writers when you were a student?

A little bit, but only incidentally. Unlike certain places where there’s a long tradition of interweaving creative and critical practice, Hopkins is a place where the people on the English literature side of things are very distinctively not creative writers. When I was there, literary study was almost predicated on not taking the author’s point of view. We were looking at literature from historical perspectives, where often enough a writer might not know what he or she is doing, or how he or she is being conditioned by historical forces. So when creative writers would end up in class, it was always an interesting moment—and not always the most comfortable one, I have to say. You have a teacher and graduate students who are looking at literature in a certain way, and then there would be people from the creative writing program who, in general, had a quite different orientation toward literature. Hopkins is a sort of extreme example of physical proximity between the creative writers and the critics, but with very little overlap in their daily business.

I wonder if that discomfort has something to do with the length of the institutionalized apprenticeship in literary studies as opposed to creative writing.  The academic path is such an elaborate and structured one, whereas creative writing seems to pride itself on not being formalized to the same extent.

I think that’s true. Your typical PhD in literature spends six or seven years, sometimes eight, taking classes, and then completing their exams, and then writing the dissertation and defending it. And the timeframe of your typical MA or MFA program is much, much shorter. Of course the PhD in creative writing, which is the newest thing, begins to change that difference a little bit. But for the moment, by and large, they’re very different career paths, and that difference continues even into the level of the faculty. Creative writing faculty and scholarly faculty begin to confront questions like, “How much should one have published, and what kind of things should one have published, to earn tenure?”  I don’t have really good answers to these questions. It throws the usual standards for measurement of accomplishment out of whack, because nobody knows how to judge a chapbook or a book of poems or a novel in relation to a scholarly work. It’s an interesting dilemma for a lot of departments.

Reading reviews of your book, I only found one where the reviewer identified herself as a fiction writer. But I know that it’s been of tremendous interest to writers. I was wondering what kind of responses you’ve gotten from writer friends or writers in the audience when you give a talk.

Now that the book is out, it’s starting to get some attention from writers. In the years that I was working on it, it was interesting and to some degree a little bit disappointing to me how little attention it received from creative writers. For a while I thought, “OK, I’m writing this book on creative writing and no creative writers are going to be interested in it at all.” That’s turning out not to be the case, and I’m very happy about that.  It’s definitely a scholarly book—there are diagrams, after all—but I definitely was hoping to start lots of conversations about the relation between scholarship and creative writing. The short answer is that it’s just now that I’m realizing creative writers are reading the book in substantial numbers–and that’s probably because of how the traffic patterns of this profession work. I’ve never presented work at AWP; I’ve always been at the MLA, so I’ve been interacting with scholars, not writers, along the way. Now that the book is out, the audience is transforming, which is nice.

To extend this subject, maybe we can talk about the response to your work that Eileen Pollack published in American Literary History. She’s a fiction writer publishing, in this case, in a journal with a historical focus, which seems to reaffirm some of your points about the breakdown, as creative writing is institutionalized, of divisions between scholarship and creativity.

Eileen Pollack

And I would say that that was a very productive exchange, at least from my perspective. We came at Flannery O’Connor from very different positions, but she really knows her stuff. She gave her own alternative readings, which I found in many cases very persuasive. So even though she was critically responding to my article, in a sense defending Flannery O’Connor from my sarcasm—

From your attack—

Well, I didn’t exactly attack Flannery O’Connor, but I was certainly giving a reading that O’Connor wouldn’t have given of herself. My emphasis was on the way that her stories encode what is almost an erotics of discipline—she certainly wouldn’t have fessed up to that, I don’t think. And Pollack came in and reoriented it toward what O’Connor herself would have said about what she was trying to do. But I thought that that exchange was high-quality. I’m proud of my article, and I thought that her response was very intelligent. So that was a hopeful moment for me. It was a good example of a meeting between a scholar and a creative writer who is able to respond to the scholar from the point of view of the writer.

Your reviewers, both critical and creative, seemed surprised that you’re not trying to tear down the institution of the creative writing program—that you’re actually very complimentary about the effect of the program on postwar literature. Why do you think that is?

Yeah, why is that? One of the interesting things about the creative writing program is that it’s sort of schizophrenic. On the one hand, we’ve gone from zero to 350-something programs in this country in a seventy year span, so clearly they serve some important purpose, and people like them, or they wouldn’t be multiplying the way they are. But then on the other hand, it’s been the easiest thing in the world to insult them. The prejudices against institutionalizing creativity are so profound. The essentially romantic myths of the artist as above all an individual voice go so deep that the default feeling about creative writing programs—certainly from outsiders, but even to a certain degree from insiders—is to loathe them. People are embarrassed by the whole spectacle of institutionalizing creativity, and taking something that would be a romantic, mysterious, deep enterprise and putting it in school. It seems to make it much less sexy.  Those biases are deeply embedded, so when people hear about a scholar who has written a big book on creative writing, the instantaneous assumption is that of course I’m going to be trying to bury creative writing once and for all so I can get rid of these creative writers who irritate me at faculty meetings. To me, that approach—tearing down creative writing—never seemed like an interesting way to go. But it’s not that I would reject every critique of the creative writing program. The book’s not a celebration of it either—there’s lots of airing of all of the discomforts around the idea of institutionalizing literature. But it seemed to me that it was important not to begin with the predictable criticism of creative writing programs as making writers predictable.

I thought that was very refreshing, and it made me want to ask you about a remark you made in another interview—that, unlike some of the writers you discuss, you “love institutions.” As more and more program graduates are hired as creative writing instructors, I imagine that more and more of them will feel at home in institutions, and happy to have health insurance. How will that change the model of the creative writing teacher as the outside within the inside?

I think that’s a really interesting question. In The Program Era, I start in the early twentieth century and come all the way forward. Through the bulk of that time, most creative writing teachers have not been products of creative writing programs. However, you’re quite right that there’s starting to be sort of a perfect circle, as people who went to MFA programs now teach in them. And one would expect that that would entail a certain diminishment in the essential tension between the two, because the majority of people will have lived the truth that there actually isn’t a contradiction between being an artist and being a teacher. The example that I talk about in the book is Robert Olen Butler—he’s not an MFA product, actually, but he struck me as someone whose practice is very harmoniously related to his creative writing instruction, so much so that there seemed to be a blurring between writing exercises he gave his students and his published short stories. He would be just one example of a future we could look forward to, in which these stark contradictions would start to diminish. On the other hand, it may be that romantic notions of creativity are so profound, so deeply built into our understanding of being a literary artist, that it might be that the tension will persist. We’ll see.

One of the things that I think the book does particularly well is talk about how race, gender and class work into this model of the proudly iconoclastic writing teacher. Early on, you say, “the conviviality of the workshop and the direct involvement of others in the writing process are a threat, for some, to the ‘fetishized unique imagination’ of the mythical heroic male artist on the craggy mountaintop.” If we follow up on this, I wonder if there’s a way in which really teaching creative writing as craft (as opposed to facilitating talent) implicitly feminizes the instructor. Does this explain why, with the exception of Kay Boyle, so many of the writers who claim discomfort with institutionalization are upper-class white men?

I think that’s certainly true, especially when we look at the 50’s and 60’s.  You’re talking about a period where the immediate precedents for being a great writer are Hemingway and Faulkner.  These are very guy guys, especially Hemingway. With that model, it’s going to seem that to move creative writing into the classroom will entail feminization. Hemingway belongs at war, or at the bullfight, anywhere but in the classroom. Whether it will continue to be a source of tension, I don’t know. But it’s certainly true that for some people, institutionalization feels like feminization and domestication. They were wild men, out hunting, and now here they are in an office, having office hours.

Given the pressure of student demand, why isn’t creative writing a bigger part of the English department? What tensions are keeping that from happening?

Different reasons. First of all, the drag of history. The modern research university is founded on the idea of assembling positive knowledge of the world and how it works. In the context of literary studies, we don’t necessarily feel like we’re making progress like they do in the sciences, but nonetheless there’s a model of accumulating knowledge of human history. Creative activity doesn’t seem to partake in that same project at all. It may involve accumulating knowledge of oneself and the creative process, but it’s a different kind of activity. It took a series of revolutions in the understanding of what universities are supposed to do to make a space for the arts on campus. That’s why there’s a lag, and then when we move forward, it’s not clear that popularity alone should be the criterion for what the university teaches. It’s definitely one of creative writing’s strongest suits, though: “The kids love us.” That’s very powerful, and that virtually guarantees that it will be a healthy enterprise moving forward.

I wonder how the pressures of the current economy are reacting on the idea of creative writing as the pleasure center within the university. In Louis Menand’s review of your book in The New Yorker, he talks about the relation of creative writing to management theory. It’s been suggested that training people in creative thinking makes better white-collar workers. To this end, there are more boutique and pre-professional programs than ever before; Iowa State has an MFA in Writing and the Environment, and Northwestern has an undergraduate program in Creative Writing for the Media. Does encouraging people to develop job skills along with their creative talents seem like a good thing for the institutions, or will it destroy creative writing’s mystique?

It’s no doubt a smart thing to do. When you have hundreds and hundreds of programs, there’s this absolutely natural desire to start differentiating. You want to find a niche within this field where it’s getting harder and harder to stand out. Almost all of the top programs have been around for many years—and so what do you do if you’re Iowa State and you’ve got the University of Iowa down the road? Personally, I don’t think that anyone should worry about ruining the mystique. These new programs are interesting experiments. This would be really tough to pull off, but I’m waiting for the first program in Graphic Fiction. That’s clearly a booming sector.

Your book ends with the idea that good and well-staffed writing programs will continue to produce good writers, but I’d like to hear your thoughts about how some of the changes of the last twenty years have changed creative writing instruction. What do you think of the popularity of low residency programs, for instance? What about programs that move creative writing into lower levels of the educational system, like Writers in the Schools?

Well, one plausible story about how creative writing instruction started is that it started in the lower levels of the schools. It started in the early twentieth century in progressive elementary schools. So Writers in the Schools has a very long tradition behind it, and if creative writing is returning to its roots and flourishing, that’s a good thing. In elementary schools, “teaching to the test” is an ever more depressing reality, and artsy classes like Music are being eliminated from the curriculum because of economic pressures to produce kids who are good at math. The low-res programs are an interesting phenomenon too. The students are still in the real world; they’re not trapped in the ivory tower, and that does seem to have some virtues. On the other hand, low-res programs are a really good deal for the schools that have them.

They make a lot of money.

Yeah, they’re kind of a cash machine. But I can see the virtues for the students, and I can also look at it cynically and see the practical inducements to having a creative writing program that’s always going to run in the black, whereas at the best traditional programs nobody pays.

Charles McGrath in the New York Times suggests that in your book you elide the process of tuition—of what precisely is taught in the workshop.  This seemed to me like one of those criticisms that take you to task for not doing something that you’re not trying to do, but I did make me wonder about how you set the limits of your project. For instance, did you ever consider including non-American writers like Chekhov or Alice Munro, who though not program graduates are so deeply part of the program aesthetic?

First of all, I don’t think that was a very responsible review. My speculation is that he looked at my book and thought, “Ah, great, here’s a book that is going to allow me to trash creative writing programs the way I want to.” Then he read it and was made crazy by the fact that I refused to do the simplistic thing he wanted me to do. So he does it anyway and calls creative writing programs Ponzi schemes, which is just ridiculous. There’s actually a lot in the book about creative writing instruction. There’s a lot about the relation of Ken Kesey and Wallace Stegner, very detailed accounts about what Kesey thought he had learned from Stegner. And then when I get to Robert Olen Butler, I talk a lot about his ideas on creative writing instruction and the way they start to blur with his own work. So part of me just wants to object and say that that was a very hasty and shoddy piece of work.

Comparing you to a collection of craft-based essays from Tin House seemed pretty strange.

It’s a scholarly book from a scholarly press, and he seems to be blaming me for that.  He finds the most theory-ish sentence he can find and then quotes it as if it’s characteristic of the book. On the other hand, it was in The New York Times, so it helped me sell books.

That’s the best revenge.

Right, there’s no such thing as a bad review in the New York Times—isn’t that what they say? But to get back to the original question, about setting the limits of the project. It was difficult enough that I talk about it in the introduction, and then I return to the topic near the end, because I’m well aware that calling a book The Program Era asserts this sort of totality. The field is so huge that I was always preoccupied with the fact that I’m telling only a small part of the story. So the simplest thing to say is that I accepted limitations as they presented themselves to me. I followed my instincts. But it was occurring to me throughout the book, for instance, that it would be really interesting to have an oral-historical dimension. A lot of the people who were involved in creating these programs are still around, and could be interviewed. But I had to make a decision that it was not going to be that kind of book—that I was going to restrict myself to the archive. I just had to accept the fact that when the book came out, there were going to be some people who were going to say, “I was there, and you got it totally wrong!” That kind of thing is inevitable, and any project has to accept a certain number of limitations. The most obvious one in my book is the banishment of poetry. The story of poetry in the creative writing program is in a way the more obvious way to go, because nobody can make money as a poet. The poet’s need for the university is all the more intense. But I thought, well, if I go down the poetry road, this will be even longer. You can’t pay attention to everything all the time, so here are the ground rules: I’m interested in fiction; I’m interested in American writers, because the creative writing program until recently has been an American phenomenon. So my tendency, when you say, “Could you have included Chekhov?”, is to say, “Yeah, that would have been great. It would have been a 520-page book instead of a 480-page book, but it would have been wonderful.”  Carver loved Chekhov; Chekhov in some ways is underneath Hemingway and the later generation of minimalist writers. So I hope someone else does Chekhov in the American Writing Program, because that would be a great story.

Though it was outside your stated limitations, one writer I do sense informing this study is Henry James, who was the subject of your first book, The Novel Art, and is name-checked frequently in The Program Era, but not discussed at length. Why is James so important to the institutionalization of creative writing? Are the novels produced by the program in some sense “art novels,” as you discuss them in The Novel Art?

Henry James, portrait by John Singer Sargent

Really?  You don’t think his class prejudices would come out?

OK, maybe. He would approve of there being two or three creative writing programs.  And he might question the wisdom of putting one in Iowa. But he was somebody who liked the idea of author societies and group identification, and part of what goes along with his idea of professionalizing artists is a sense that that is how you earn your authority. You earn your authority through knowing your stuff, right? So a medical doctor is an authority because he’s been certified. Although novel writing will never be as professionalized as medicine—you’ll never need a license to practice fiction—it’s analogous. One earns authority through doing one’s homework and having the right level of self-conscious relation to one’s art. As opposed to a more loosey-goosey, doing-what-comes-naturally approach to writing, which in James’s view produced a lot of shoddy novels that were technically thoughtless.

You have a reputation as an inspiring and unconventional teacher, and your scholarly style itself is rather unconventional. You use the occasional curse word, and several times in your book you praise postwar literature’s “awesomeness.” Do you see it as part of your job to encourage your student’s creativity as scholars?

Yes, but I don’t necessarily think of it in terms of encouraging their creativity as much as encouraging enthusiasm. I want to communicate to them that it can be cool and fun to have interesting interpretations of things. That said, when I give paper prompts one of them is always to make up your own idea. I tell them that if ever a teacher was going to reward them for taking a chance doing something crazy, this is the class. The only ground rule is that it has to require an analogous amount of effort to writing a normal paper. Depressingly few students actually take me up on it, but that in itself is interesting. The assignment shows them how hard it is to be creative. So they hardly ever do it, but I like to issue the invitation, at least.

You talk a lot in the book about the “meta-genre” novel, and in your talk on Tuesday you said that a lot of the exciting work in contemporary literature was going on in that form. Does that indicate productive cross-pollination between the literary and non-literary, or is it just a way for program writers to demonstrate their superiority to genre fiction and genre fans?

Should MFA programs branch out to include genre fiction writers?

What fiction did you enjoy reading or rereading for this project?  Was there anything you really had to slog through?

If I find something intellectually interesting, I tend to like it.  That’s why I’m not trustworthy.  That’s why, when in the book I declare the unparalleled greatness of postwar fiction, I kind of mean that, but take it from whence it comes.  Anything that intrigues me, I enjoy.

Further Resources

- In this podcast, critic Louis Menand discusses The Program Era and the teaching of creative writing.

- Have you considered attending an MFA program? If so, don’t miss the recent comprehensive guide to creative writing programs from Poets and Writers, as well as a more quantitative ranking by Seth Abramson of the top fifty programs in the United States.

- If you’re shopping for one of McGurl’s books, order from your local independent bookstore.

“Popular art is the dream of society; it does not examine itself.” –Margaret Atwood

copyright: George Whiteside

When I was a teenager first flirting with the idea of a writerly life, I used to listen to radio plays with my mother, who’d listened to them as a child, before TV became popular. (We couldn’t afford video games, so I was condemned to be a nerd anyway.) I remember one particular radio play—the only one I do remember, actually—in which two writers talked about how their work would be received in the future.

One writer, exceptionally pompous, declared himself a genius and took it as fait accompli that the future would validate his opinion. The other writer, more humble and sincere, wasn’t so worried about that. He just wanted to write and be a happy guy. Through some sci-fi device they were able to see into the future, and the humble writer turned out to be the better recognized of the two while his pompous counterpart was revealed as a self-aggrandizing hack.

That’s how I remember it, anyway (I’ve tried without success to track down this radio play, so I don’t know whether I’m completely perverting it) and I recall it now when I think about this observation by Atwood–an author who writes fiction that is both literary and immensely popular–on popular art. The perceived differences between literary and popular fiction can cause a lot of strife between writers (and within writers), especially since there’s no clear correspondence in either direction between popularity and literary merit. Books that sell well aren’t necessarily popular, and books that don’t sell well aren’t necessarily literary. Atwood’s description of popular art makes me think less about a boundary between literary and popular than about the function of self-examination, a topic which is much more fertile than artificial distinctions for enabling discussions of what art and literature can mean in a society. The process of a work examining itself—as well a society examining itself through such work—takes place not only in the time of a work’s release but in its future, and it sheds light on how we differentiate between those aesthetic objects history deems popular and those it deems art.

If we take popular fiction as society’s dreams that don’t examine themselves, as we may infer from Atwood, can we then take literary fiction as the dreams that do examine themselves? This is no better a dividing line than how many copies a book sells. A work of fiction can be received as literature by history even if it doesn’t involve a great deal of self-examination. Lautreamont’s Maldoror and Huysmans’ Against Nature, for instance, come across as so atavistic that they hardly seem self-aware, let alone self-examining. William S. Burroughs’ cut-ups, though they foster an intense examination of form and language, can barely be said to examine a societal dream in and of themselves. Nor can “found” works like Kenneth Goldsmith’s American Trilogy: The Weather, Traffic, and Sports.

At the opposite ends of the spectrum, plenty of works examine themselves to the point of paralysis but never earn the moniker of “literature” because they are unreadably introverted or just plain awful. Self-examination of a societal dream, then, is neither a prerequisite for—nor a guarantee of—literary fiction. Yet the dividing line between “self-examining” and “non-self-examining” fiction is apt if we include the reader in the formula, as we absolutely must. The works we call literature share the quality of stimulating reflection in the reader, so the reader’s self examination bears more consideration than that of the text itself. The narratives that invite us to reflect on ourselves and our world are the ones that we—and I mean a historical “we” here—deem to be literary, and the ones we don’t end up being called popular. (Or, perhaps, they get called nothing at all because history forgets them.)

Since the works we end up calling literature are chosen by history, the label that ends up on a work is really out of the author’s hands. We can try our hardest, being as high-toned or as hip as we wish, but the issue of whether we’ve created lasting works of literature will be settled decades after we’re dead. It will often be settled and re-settled for each new generation and era; George Eliot and Robert Burns, for instance, both experienced periods of great posthumous acclaim and periods when they’ve been considered afterthoughts. Dickens, called a popularizer by some in his time, is a classic example of the reader’s historical role in literature. We lionize his work today because it has made people examine themselves and their culture. Dickens created fiction that captured its zeitgeist and gave opportunities for reflection, and the historical mass of readers has taken him up on it.

But Dickens wasn’t the only writer who tried to capture a zeitgeist on the page. A lot of us do that and believe we’re creating lasting literature, and not all of us succeed because it’s ultimately not us who can determine whether we’ve captured the zeitgeist or not. The pompous self-aggrandizer in the aforementioned radio play made the mistake of trying to short-circuit the historical, reader-centered process of determining what makes literature. He was famous and adored by the critics—surely he felt some kind of right to believe that, didn’t he?—yet it was his humble counterpart that history chose instead.

I’d like to claim that I’ve always played the role of humble counterpart, but I’ve certainly engaged in my share of pomposity and literary snobbishness. This was especially true in my twenties, when I looked down with great scorn on popular art of all kinds. If it wasn’t literary—if it didn’t examine itself, to borrow Atwood’s phrase—then I was dead set against it. This is common among the ranks of would-be writers, in part because we often have to defend ourselves for throwing our energy into the literary life–especially when our work achieves no popular acclaim or financial reward. If we’re undiscovered or unsuccessful, it’s easy to declare ourselves misunderstood geniuses and presume that we’re creating literature when we can’t truly know. It’s pure self-protection.

I was glad to cling to that belief, to give myself an underdog’s bravado and push myself through the doubt of my formative years, but I am gladder still to grow out of it. Often I feel a cloud of such snobbery hanging over literary fiction, and that cloud bothers me because there are repercussions for this genre if its practitioners don’t sufficiently acknowledge the reader’s role. We already know that literary fiction is becoming more and more of a niche market, which means we’re losing our readers. Why separate them even further from us by acting like they aren’t central to literature? The course of literary fiction depends on present and future readers, and yet some writers act as if they aren’t important—only the community of fellow writers matter. I’ve heard (second-hand) of one writer telling students that “If your book sells more than five hundred copies, you’ve done something wrong,” and this assures me that the kind of snobbery I felt in my twenties is still very much alive today.

But writers who arrogate literature on the basis of their own obscurity—more plentiful in academe than outside of it—forget that rejecting the marketplace and the reader doesn’t guarantee the creation of lasting literature. Ultimately this approach leads to a disconnect between readers and writers, which we see all over America, and probably across the world. Statistics on reading for pleasure in the US show a decline all across the board, as the NEA’s 2007 study shows, and if we aren’t worried about the consequences of making literary fiction too exclusive, then we should look at the example of poetry. Forty years ago, poetry seemed happy to academicize and Balkanize, splitting up into factions that were happy as long at they had a fiefdom somewhere. Today, poetry is struggling for readers who aren’t poets, and we have resorted to putting poems in elevators, buses, and subways to create a readership.

I don’t think this has to happen to literary fiction, and it won’t as long as the body politic of its practitioners keeps the reader in mind. I’m not suggesting that we pander to readers by giving them predictable, market-driven entertainments. I mean that we should write—and send our work out into the world—like the humble counterpart in the radio play. We need to acknowledge the reader’s historical role in establishing the course of literature, and acknowledge the fact that what history deems literary and what it doesn’t will often spring from the same pen.

Further Resources

- Via Random House’s website, read an excerpt from Margaret Atwood’s latest novel, The Year of the Flood (Nan Talese, 2009); if you’re shopping for a copy, click here to buy from your local indie bookstore.

- For Novel Journey, Mary E. Demuth weighs the words “literary” and “timeless.”

- At the Tomorrow Museum, Joanne discusses a panel at MIT’s The Future of Entertainment 3, considering the role that fan culture plays in the success of a literary novel.

- The American Book Review (30.2) offers a collection of writers’ thoughts on the future of literary fiction.

- The Onion weighs in: “Novelists Strike Fails To Affect Nation Whatsoever”

- At Blogcritics.com, readers argue the merits of literary and popular fiction.

- Is Electric Literature “the future of literary fiction”?