Nadelson is the Hallie Ford Chair in Writing at Willamette University. He also teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA Program at Pacific Lutheran University. He lives in Salem, Oregon. A former student of Scott’s, I took his short story workshop as an undergraduate at Willamette. This interview took place over e-mail in September and October 2011.

SCOTT NADELSON: I think what happened when I started listening to Dylan was that I heard language—carefully constructed language—in a context I couldn’t easily categorize or contain. I was one of those high school kids who didn’t care much about anything, or didn’t know that you could care about anything; I went to school, did my homework some of the time, watched a lot of TV, and listened to music as loud as I could. Until then, any kind of written language I didn’t understand I’d quickly find frustrating and abandon; if I understood it too easily, then I’d dismiss it as not worth my time. When I listened to music, I hardly paid attention to the lyrics; if anything they were a way of following the melody and singing along to the beat. But Dylan put language forward in a way I couldn’t ignore even if I wanted to. In the best of his songs, his lyrics were mysterious and evocative but also precise, playful, full of emotion, unsentimental. Plus there was an energy in the progression of words, in their rhythm, in the layers of imagery they unfolded that seemed to contain more meaning than the words or images themselves. I was surprised to find so much pleasure and tension in the way language could be approachable one moment and then move just out of reach the next.

I’d listen to, say, “Chimes of Freedom,” and I’d feel like I was getting a pretty good handle on it—the speaker hears in peals of thunder bells tolling freedom for the downtrodden masses—and then out would come these lines that were so gorgeous and baffling that my head would empty of all rational and simplistic thought: “Through the mad mystic hammering of the wild ripping hail / the sky cracked its poems in naked wonder.” I’m sure it’s because I already was drawn to music that I was open to lines like this, that I was willing to let them seep into me, even if I couldn’t quite grasp them; if I’d read them on the page, I probably would have turned away. But once Dylan’s voice got into my head, along with the possibility that language could make me feel something even if I didn’t know why, I was soon more open to other forms of writing as well.

At that point, of course, I still mostly wanted to be a rock star with really cool hair. But now I also wanted to be one who could write a song that made you forget to breathe.

You’re not the first writer to list Dylan as an early influence. I think it speaks to that community’s ethos as not only poets, but storytellers. I’d argue that many of Dylan’s songs – “Tangled Up In Blue” comes to mind – are condensed stories. Do you agree? (As a side note, speaking of influences, when I looked up “Chimes of Freedom,” realizing I didn’t know much about its origins, I learned that Dylan himself wrote the song after reading Rimbaud.)

Absolutely. In those early years Dylan owed a lot to Rimbaud and the beat poets, but he was also a terrific storyteller. He had a gift for pacing and distilling narrative down to its essence. Some of his best stuff is narrative: “Tangled Up in Blue,” for sure, and pretty much everything else on Blood on the Tracks; “Ballad in Plain D”; most stuff on John Wesley Harding and especially on The Basement Tapes.

I once read an interview with Dylan, or maybe I heard another songwriter talking about it—or, who knows, maybe I made it up—in which he claimed that he hated nothing worse than story-songs. In response, the interviewer, somewhat in shock, listed off a number of those songs with narrative impulses, and Dylan snapped, in near rage, “Those aren’t story-songs! They’re ballads!”

What I love about that anecdote is that it suggests Dylan saw himself working in a particular narrative tradition; the idea wasn’t to stuff a story arc into a five minute song, but to use and update the ballad form to explore contemporary narratives. I think it’s because he understood the form so deeply, had listened to and sung old ballads so many times that he absorbed their narrative rhythms, their pacing, their compression and mystery, that his narrative songs don’t feel dated like those of a lot of his contemporaries.

I’m curious whether your experience as a reluctant reader influenced your teaching methodology? Did that perspective give you any insight into how to reach students who don’t think literature is relevant to their lives?

That’s a great question. It may be an exaggeration, but I’ve often believed that literature saved my life; I was heading down a fairly self-destructive path when I got serious about reading and writing, and discovering something that meant so much to me allowed me to refocus my energy in positive directions. And that has definitely affected the way I approach teaching and the way I think about education generally. The reason I never cared about literature when I was young was that no one made me understand that I should or could care; teachers just told me I had to learn that a simile uses “like” or “as” and that Shakespeare wrote in iambic pentameter. They didn’t tell me why those things mattered. The problem, I think, was that by the time I started school the study of literature had become divorced from the physical, emotional, and intellectual experience that literature is meant to create. No one talked about how Hamlet had moved them, or how Huckleberry Finn had made them laugh; they just talked about whether Hamlet really went crazy and about the symbolism of the Mississippi River. Above all, no one talked about loving literature, and if you don’t love something, what’s the point of spending hours reading and talking about it?

So in my teaching life, I try to express this love as much as possible. The work I choose to share with my students is work that moves me, that haunts me, that mystifies me, and I try to always return our conversations to the students’ actual experience reading a story or poem: where and how it made them nearly cry, where and how it sped up their pulse, where and how it suggested connections that made their heads spin. I try to remind writing students that they should find joy in the process, and if they can’t, then writing might not be the best pursuit for them. I think people should devote their lives to things that matter so much to them that they can’t imagine doing anything else. And education should be a means to discovering and deepening those passions; it should help people find the things that are going to make them want to get out of bed on difficult mornings. The most successful writing class I can imagine is one in which I help beginning writers find a reason to face a blank page when the words aren’t coming easily.

That sounds like a worthy outcome for more experienced writers as well. It isn’t a coincidence that writing is often described with religious terminology—i.e. Joyce Carol Oates’ The Faith of a Writer. So much of writing is facing that blank page or disconnected jottings, and, to quote Lorrie Moore, “trudg[ing] ahead in the rain, regardless.”

In a recent interview on The Nervous Breakdown you revealed (to yourself) that you’re a “floundering” writer. You said, “Most of the time I feel like I have no idea what I’m doing, no idea where my ideas are leading me, but I’m stubborn about following them through, and eventually, if I’m lucky, the effort leads me somewhere interesting.” Can you share how you keep yourself motivated even when you are “floundering”? I love the image of a struggling Eudora Welty cutting apart her drafts, re-arranging them, and then piecing them back together with straight pins. Do you have any rituals or tricks to share?

I guess the thing that keeps me going, even during the most frustrating periods, is that I love process more than product. Whenever I’m stuck, or confused about where a story is heading, I try to return to those things in writing that bring me the most joy: odd perceptions, tense dialogue, obsessive thought. I try to have fun riffing on a little scene or quiet conflict and not worry about whether anything will come of it. And small, unexpected discoveries spur me on to search for more discoveries. Even if an idea finally crumbles to dust—which happens all too often—I usually have other little scenes or conflicts in mind, and the promise of those small discoveries gets me to sit down and work every chance I get.

I wish I could say I had useful tricks or rituals. I love that image of Welty with her cut-up drafts, too. My process is much less delicate, more bludgeon than straight pin. I often just keep going back to the beginning of a story or essay I’m struggling with, trying to find the right angle in. I write forward until I get stuck, then start again, from a slightly different angle. I often end up with as many as fifty false starts before I find my way to the end of a first draft. I used to resist this process, and I still sometimes find it maddening, but now I think it’s mostly productive: what happens is that in writing these false starts I’m working to find the right storytelling voice, the one that can carry the material, that can access the characters and conflicts in the most effective way for the story. It’s rare that I find this voice on the first few tries, in part because I don’t know the characters well enough yet to understand their most crucial concerns. There’s probably a more efficient way of going about it, but I just keep beating my head against a piece until something opens up or it gives me such a headache that I have to set it aside.

The other thing I do when I’m having trouble finding my way is to look for models, especially in old favorites. If I’ve just had a terrible writing morning, I’ll pull down a Leonard Michaels story, for instance, and within a few minutes I’m in such awe, experiencing such pleasure in his voice, in the movement of his prose, that I’m already wanting to get back to work. It’s not that I then try to write a Leonard Michaels story; but that a Leonard Michaels story is even possible, that such a thing can exist, makes me so grateful and excited that whatever setback I’ve just experienced, even if it’s a significant one, soon feels diminished in comparison.

You have an impressive publication history. This September saw the release of your third story collection, and a book of autobiographical essays is forthcoming in March 2013. Considering that you balance teaching in addition to your writing, to what do you credit your prolificacy?

If I can credit anything it’s mostly stubbornness and obsession. Teaching and writing take a lot of energy, and often the same kind of energy, and doing both at the same time means putting in long hours and feeling stretched thin. I sometimes wish I could give myself a break during the school year, and not try to write while I’m teaching, as some writers I know do, but I’ve come to find I really need the work as part of my daily life. I’m not a terribly religious person, but writing has become something of a spiritual practice for me, like meditation, or maybe more like mental yoga, and without it I feel ungrounded. A few days without it, and I’m pretty quickly at loose ends. A week, and I’m miserable, and my wife starts begging me to get back to work.

Do you have a specific schedule or just grab the time when you can?

Until my daughter was born, I had a pretty regular writing schedule; I’ve managed to keep my mornings free to write for a couple of hours before having to turn to other things. With a now one-year-old, that has changed quite drastically. I almost never have more than an hour of unbroken time, and I’ve had to adjust the way I work. Now I’ll write for half an hour, forty-five minutes at a stretch, but I still try to do it every day if I can. What I’ve found is that I used to waste an enormous amount of time. I’d putter around for half an hour, looking at books on my shelves, staring out the window, before I’d get down to serious work. If I do that for thirty seconds now, I know quickly I’m going to lose whatever time I’ve got. I’m sure that puttering was useful to get me in a certain mindset, but now it seems like a luxury I’ve had to leave behind. Right mindset or not, I’ve got to get typing.

Because I work in short(ish) form, I never write an entire draft of a book at once. In fact, I usually don’t even know I’m working on a book until well into the process. I just work on stories or essays, usually a couple at a time in different draft stages, until I have a number of them that start to speak to each other, and then I start thinking about the whole. So by the time I’m working on something I’m calling a book, much of it is already in late draft stage, and some of it might even be close to finished. Then it becomes a matter of filling in gaps, smoothing rough edges between pieces, thinking about a larger arc.

You’re known for placing your stories in your native New Jersey, even though you’ve lived in Oregon since 1996. Beyond writing what you know, to what do you owe this fascination with your birthplace? What is it about writing in absentia that appeals to you?

When I started writing, I never thought New Jersey would become such a central part of my fiction, but now I write very few stories that aren’t set there. And hardly any of my stories have characters who haven’t come from the place where I grew up. I do think part of this is familiarity, or at least that’s the way it started. But more important is how the setting has evolved in my imagination over the past fifteen years. New Jersey has become less an actual place in my fiction than a state of being, a kind of limbo between the great city and the vast continent, where people are caught between retreat and full engagement with life and all its uncertainty. What the place offers me is a setting ripe with quiet tension and internal conflict, as well as a metaphor for the illusion of safety and security amidst the chaos of human intimacy and connection.

I sometimes send my New Jerseyans off into foreign lands, and a different kind of tension arises when they bring their baggage of fear and repressed desire into places where they can no longer contain the contents. In the new book, for example, I’ve got a kid with his grandparents in Jerusalem, and there all hell can break loose when his family conflict plays out against the backdrop of a much wilder setting than the one he’s left behind. But the conflict is still one that evolves in and out of his New Jersey state of being—I can’t imagine him coming from anywhere else.

Do you ever research places you’re writing about, or do you write from your memory and imagination?

The research I do is almost always a result of necessity. I need to know the name of a certain street, or remember where a lake is located in relation to a mountain, or look at a picture of a church in Zurich, and then I do the most cursory possible Internet searching to find the crucial piece of information or something that’s a close approximation. In other words, I let my imagination lead me and use research only to fill in gaps; but as soon as a gap is filled, I go as quickly as possible back to the imagination. Being a writer has meant never being an expert on anything, but having the barest trivial knowledge and surface understanding of a whole bunch of different things.

How does a story benefit from being set in a specific place as opposed to an anonymous city?

It really depends, I think. There can be something very freeing about using a landscape that’s open, that doesn’t restrict you to a particular set of geographic and cultural markers. Think how much more exciting Kafka’s vision of America is than if he’d actually known what New York City looked like. But using a real place can offer all kinds of opportunities for texture, for tensions that arise out of a character’s relationship to that place and to a reader’s associations with it. I do think it takes a certain kind of imagination to create a place out of nothing and to make it specific and real enough that a story can inhabit it. For me, having an actual place to work off of allows my imagination to focus on the things that concern me more—a character’s internal struggle, for example, or a failed communication between characters. I’d much rather spend my time imagining what a character thinks or does than what street he needs to take to get to the center of town.

That said, I do use some made up New Jersey towns in my stories, in order to give myself leeway to move buildings around, or make a place grittier than it might be in real life, or add some quirky details. But readers are more ready to accept them as real because I’ve put them in a geographic location that has certain set features and associations.

Aftermath’s epigraph features selections from the work of two poets (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Stephen Dunn). The selections are apt and closely mirror the collection’s eponymous theme. Were you reading Longfellow and Dunn while completing the collection, or did the relevance strike you later?

Both the Longfellow and Dunn quotes came after the book was finished, pretty much accidentally. I discovered the Longfellow poem when I was getting ready to send the manuscript out—I wanted to make sure there weren’t any other books called Aftermath, and when I searched the title, up came Longfellow. And I almost fell out of my chair when I read it and saw how beautifully it evoked the feeling I was trying to capture in the stories. The Dunn came soon after and was even more random; an acquaintance posted a link to it on Facebook, and once again I couldn’t believe how perfect it was, how it went straight to the heart of loss and acceptance and a begrudging carrying on—in fact, it did in a few lines so succinctly what I’d tried to do in nearly three hundred pages, that I nearly despaired and considered sticking the manuscript in a drawer. But like all good writers, I decided that if I couldn’t beat them, I’d steal from them, and I went from having no epigraph to having two.

Do have a habit of reading poetry? If so, do you think it affects your prose in any way?

Poetry was my first literary love—after Dylan—and I do read a lot of it, though not in as deliberate a way as I do fiction or nonfiction. Usually I let friends recommend something, or I pick up something at random in a bookstore, and devour a poem or two while I’m pacing my office before class starts. I have a lot of admiration for and envy of what some poets are able to do—the distillation, the direct line to emotion and depth of engagement with the sensual world, the associative leaps and structural experimentation. And I know the more poetry I read, the more closely I pay attention to the rhythm of my sentences, the interplay of sound and syntax and breath.

What advice would you give your younger self?

I think it would be the same advice I give myself now, whenever I feel frustrated or lost, whenever I worry that I’ll never write another decent book or story or sentence: Don’t take yourself too seriously.

I once had a teacher who told me a story about a conversation he had with Grace Paley. He was working with her while at Stanford, complaining to her about how badly the writing was going, how tortured he was by the process. And she turned to him and said, “You don’t have to do it, you know. No one’s sitting around waiting for your next story.”

It may be devastating to realize that no one but you is going to care if you stop writing. But it’s also wonderfully freeing. All pressures and expectations drop away. You don’t have to worry about shaping the future of literature or saving the world. You can just put one word after another for the simple pleasure of making something out of nothing.

Further Links & Resources

Note

[1] “Angle of Vision: A Conversation With Scott Nadelson.” Trachodon Magazine. January 2011.

Image: Storymatic.com

Here’s a great gift for a young writer, a game buff, or a teacher. The Storymatic provides 500 cards suggesting characters, images, and events to lead players into a story:

First, draw two gold cards. Combine the information on the two cards to create your main character. For example, if you draw “surgeon” and “amateur boxer,” your character is a surgeon who is also a boxer. Next, draw one or two copper cards. Let the information on the cards lead you into a story. Wild cards are interspersed throughout, and they prompt you to go in directions you might not ordinarily go.

Writer-friends can get together for a night of improv storytelling; teachers can use this as a fun class activity; those just starting to tinker with words can use it as a near-infinite series of prompts. Or you could use it yourself as a writing exercise to launch your workday.

Available from Storymatic.com. And check back here at FWR every day in December for more bookish gift-ideas!

Orientation, his long-anticipated story collection recently out from Faber and Faber, shows off this unique set of nimble narrative chops, so it’s no surprise that pieces from the collection have appeared in Best American Short Stories, Best American Mystery Writing, and The Pushcart Prize anthology. In addition, he’s been the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a finalist for a National Magazine Award in fiction. Via phone from his home in Moscow, Idaho, where he is on the fiction faculty at the University of Idaho, Daniel and I talked about craft, teaching, and MFA haters.

Interview

Michael Shilling: Among other writers, you’ve been one of these “best kept secrets” whose collection is deeply anticipated. How does it feel for Orientation to finally be out?

Daniel Orozco: It’s nice. [Laughs.] I never thought I’d get this collection published.

Considering that you’re a short story writer, and how little publishers want to publish short story collections, it’s quite an achievement. Was finding a publisher an arduous process?

For a long time, publishing people told [writers], “Hey, these stories are great, but do you have a novel? Because nobody wants a short story collection.” So yeah, I pretty much gave up on the idea that I’d get the collection published, and that was the reason I started a novel, out of a kind of career necessity. But then I finally found an agent who told me she could sell the collection, but we had to wait until, as she said, the stars lined up. And they did. So it’s just fantastic.

Your stories really run the structural gamut, and those structural choices create different emotional tones and narrative priorities. Taking “Officers Weep” as an example, how do you think those choices affected the way those stories ended up?

Every story that I write feels like a kind of experiment. The challenge in crafting a story is how to engage a reader emotionally, intellectually, experientially. I’m always looking for some kind of challenge, some kind of structural or narrative constraint to try and figure out. For “Officers Weep,” it was, Can I tell a story that is written in the form of a police blotter? And in a way the structure determines how the story’s gonna go. So yes, I begin with form and then fill in with character and engagement. Jerome Stern talks about the “shapes of fiction,” and I think that’s a good analogy, because I need a shape for the story and then I start figuring out what’s going to happen in it.

That approach is refreshing. I think a lot of writers are afraid of playing with structure because of self-consciousness, these false distinctions between the “realistic” and the “experimental,” and if they play around with structure it’ll be seen as a gimmick. As if a gimmick is always bad.

Right! I mean, the story “Orientation” is a gimmick. You can only do it once for a limited amount of pages, and the same goes for “Officers Weep” because I can’t do a series of stories structured as police blotters. But so what? All that matters is that a story, whatever the structure, must be grounded in the humane.

Agreed. Other stories in the collection also have specific structural choices. Like, in “Somoza’s Dream,” we jump around in time somewhat, but it still manages to have a pretty tense momentum. How did that story come together?

The first drafts of “Somoza’s Dream” were much more expansive. There were flashbacks to Somoza’s childhood, for example, so I was going to move back and forth in time more. But it read more as a biographical story, and I decided to abandon that thematic approach because I figured out that I was trying to make this man who wasn’t very interesting more interesting that he was. So once I gave up this autobiographical framing, I started populating the story with people around him. I knew that I wanted to begin with the assassination and then return to it, but that was pretty much the structural demand I made upon the story. Once I had that in place, other elements of the writing started coming together.

So why Somoza? Did you have a particular interest in the Nicaraguan revolution?

The story came from a couple of places. To start, it came out of an exercise at Bread Loaf, in a class taught by Reginald McKnight about telling lies convincingly, which I decided to do through historicality. I did a three-page scene about G. Gordon Liddy.

I have a Liddy story too!

Really? Yeah, he’s a fascinating character to take on. So I had him meeting Somoza, and then over the years the story shifted focus solely to Somoza. Also, my family is from Nicaragua, and I thought it would be interesting to engage with something from my political and cultural past, and really put the screws to this guy, really run him down because he really was a bad guy, and I had a lot of fun just “writing” him.

The agreed history is just one story, right?

Yeah. I mean, E.L. Doctorow says that history is a story, between the historian and his facts. So in writing a story based on historical figure, it’s interesting, the line between when you stick to the facts and render it with a certain verisimilitude and when you veer away.

Writers such as Jim Shepard have gone a long way in getting people to de-snobify about this false difference, or at least acknowledge the much more porous relationship between fiction and history.

Absolutely, and of course, nobody ever nails him for anything because he does his research, and [from a storytelling angle] his work is so imbued with the specificity and personal experience of the characters, who more often than not are on the periphery of historical events–which is a very smart approach.

Let’s talk about “Shakers,” which I thought was a really subtle use of the earthquake described in the story as a metaphor for “shakings,” be they personal or geological.

Yeah! [Laughs.] You know, an earthquake that huge would never happen, so it immediately becomes a metaphorical thing. It was a way of bringing all these individual and solitary lives together. So though you have these separate stories of individuals in solitude, you have them all gathered in one place, reacting to this one event, and touching on what we talked about before, that structural component was what drew me to whether I could write it or not.

Was the story ever longer? I ask because it reads like you had ten characters, and you closed your eyes and pointed at four and worked with them. Like there could have been six other people that you could have equally expanded upon and connected.

That’s great to hear that it reads like it could have gone on and on, because I’m not one of those writers who sits down and writes seventy pages and then gets it down to twenty. Me, I write two pages and get it up to twenty, and that’s how “Shakers” went, though I wrote it in five weeks, which is the fastest I’ve ever written a story.

That’s interesting, because it reads like it took a extraordinary effort of discipline to bring it down to the length it is—it could have been a novella.

I did want it to read that way, fluid in a sense, like it could have gone anywhere. I probably had one or two narrative lines that I cut out, but yes, there was something unusual about the writing of “Shakers,” organic and intuitive, different than any other story I’d written. It felt like a gift.

Which is nice, because they usually feel more like births. [Both laugh.] Another thing about the story I loved was that it felt, through this confluence of the personal and natural, like you were telling a geographic history of California, an accounting of the really different landscapes that make up California. It reminded me of that Pavement song off Crooked Rain, “Unfair,” which takes on this same confluence.

Cool! They must have read John McPhee.

Doubtless. And both the song and your story end up being celebrations of California.

Yeah, I mean one of the reasons I enjoyed writing “Shakers” so much was in rendering these landscapes. I’ve lived in Idaho for eight years and I miss California – its vastness – and so in the story I really wanted to revel in that vastness.

It reads like a love letter.

It is, very much so. And what better way to write a love letter to California than via an earthquake?

You couldn’t get much more integral to California than an earthquake. Even the ending, with the guy in the desert who’s probably going to die, [he] has this surge of love for the natural beauty around him as he wastes away with his broken leg. It’s weirdly funny, a demented commercial for the California tourist board, like, “California, right on!”

Yes! The ending is ironic but it’s also true. You know, I like combining the absurd and the profound, and I like that the story accomplishes that.

“Shakers” isn’t the only story that speaks to matters of place and geography. For example, “Only Connect,” which is so infused with the essence of Seattle, however abstract that sounds. Living here, I can tell you that you captured something on the page that encapsulates this temperate rain forest so well, and so mysteriously.

Yeah, and that story is the love letter to Washington.

Not surprising that it was published in Ecotone, considering the magazine’s focus on “place” in fiction, where setting is more the foundation of the story more than, say, character or humor or plot. “Only Connect” could only happen in Seattle and the surrounding areas it touches on, like Bellingham and Astoria.

It reminds me of what Flannery O’Connor said, which is that you can do whatever you want on the level of theme, but that the world of the story has to be real. You know, I tell my students that a story doesn’t work unless you ground it in a physical world that is concrete, that we can really imagine.

What are your thoughts on teaching?

You know, my goal on both the undergraduate and graduate level is not primarily to select the best writers and nurture them and bring them into the world. My goal is not to baptize the ones with the gift and tell the others, I’m sorry, my son, you must go to vocational school. That’s not the job. Ultimately teaching writing is the flip-side of teaching reading, by which I mean creating readers who are able to critically and thoughtfully respond to texts.  On the undergraduate level especially, I try to dispel that, number one, your opinion about a story matters. No. I don’t care if you like it or not–how does it work? This is about learning craft. Number two, students think, well, I can write whatever I want. No, you can’t. The short story is a very demanding, exacting form – once you understand what went into crafting that story, then you understand where your response comes from, and that makes you a smart reader.

That echoes what Robert Coover said, that his job as a writing teacher is to make better readers.

And if better writers are the result, that’s great too. Of course, that’s particular to the graduate level, where you’re aiming to find people capable of mastering the craft. On the graduate level, it can be very gratifying because the level of discussion and engagement is deeper.

More specifically, what about the arguments for and against MFAs?

I guess my rather benign defense of MFA programs in response to that question stems from my . . . um, irritation with writing programs being singled out as needing defending.  So: Can you really teach writing?  Well, it depends on whom you’re teaching it to.  You can’t teach writing to anybody, but you can—just as in the teaching of medicine or engineering—teach it to somebody who has the drive to learn it and the knack to get better at it.  The difference is that if you don’t show evidence of the drive and the knack, you get drummed out of medicine and engineering.  We in writing aren’t quick to do that, because writing isn’t just a thing you learn, it’s a thing you do.  It takes two or three years to get an MFA, and within that time the drive and the knack may be either fully present or they may be submerged, hidden, yet to surface.  I’m not going to shut somebody down just because they’re not at the top of their game.  (If somebody did that to me years ago, I wouldn’t be a writer, and you wouldn’t be interviewing me.)

I’m not saying that everybody who gets an MFA eventually becomes a writer; most don’t.  But laying the groundwork in craft and technique, mentoring everybody—rather than separating wheat from chaff—can certainly help the ones who stick with it.  To paraphrase the character Joe Gideon in Bob Fosse’s great allegory of writing programs, All That Jazz: I may not make you a good dancer, but I can make you a better dancer.

People like to have a strong opinion on MFAs in one direction or the other. With the haters, I often feel like, Really? People trying to become better humans in this tiny, unrenumerative way? That upsets you?

There are worse things to do than graduate someone with an MFA and send a bad writer out into the world. You know, you send out a bad engineer or a bad doctor and then you’ve got problems.

That’s why you don’t get an MFA in being a doctor. Really, MFA stands for Victimless Crime. [Both laugh.]

If I have a truly gifted undergrad, I will mention the MFA to them as something they might consider. But for other students who want to keep writing, I’m reminded of what a teacher told me, which is “Find your metaphor.” You know, find something else you’re good at to do while you write.

So you’ve got the collection out in the stores—unless you’re superstitious about talking about works in progress, would you mind talking about what you are working on now?

I won’t go into too much detail, but I am working on a novel, and am soon going out to UCross in Sheridan, Wyoming, where I’ll spend four weeks there focusing on it.

Sweet Sheridan. I was in a pretty epic snowstorm there once.

That’s why I’m going in August. [Laughs.] I’ve been working on it for about five years, then had to leave it for six months or so while we were getting the collection out, but now I’m full-bore on it, with due date looming. I started it grudgingly, out of necessity, but I have enjoyed figuring out the structure of the long form.

Jesus, novels are tough to write, huh?

They really are.

It’s like, musicians call it “running on blues power.” It’s just such an act of faith and love and inspiration, but you’re not sure if you’re actually running on, you know, quality [both laugh]. Considering that before this project you’ve always written short stories, has writing a novel made you appreciate them equally? Do you have a preference?

At this point I do prefer short stories to novels, both writing them and reading them. Not to take away from the novel, but like I said, the short story is a very precise, exacting form that’s also very artificial. I think the novel is more organic—it’s longer and baggier—and so for me it’s much harder to write a novel. I have had a hard time being engaged with it for five years, sustaining this interest, but I’m genuinely excited about this novel and eager to get back to work on it.

Further Links & Resources

Daniel Orozco / image from the University of Idaho's website

• Read J.T. Bushnell’s review of Orozco’s debut collection. In it, he writes: “Orientation is, without question and without hyperbole, one of the best books I’ve ever read. I can’t find words emphatic enough that aren’t already printed on its dust jacket, but I can assure you that all the words there are true.”
• You can also check out our most current features on other debut collections right here.
• Or check out some of our favorites from Story Month.
• For more on this author’s work, visit Professor Orozco’s University of Idaho page.
• Read some vintage Orozco: his story “I Run Every Day” published a decade ago in the fall 2001 issue of Zoetrope (Vol 5, No 3).
• I’ll take some Chemical Brothers and a side of zither with that, thanks: Largehearted Boy features Orozco’s sonic selections for his stories in their fabulous Book Notes series.
• And be sure to pick up a copy of Orientation: And Other Stories at your local indie bookstore.

Janet Peery

For me, the beauty of Janet (besides her flowing hair and karaoke skills, obviously) is that she forces students to name things, to make the abstract concrete. She won’t tolerate imprecise language, lazy writing, limp sentences.  I think her “Janet-isms” are in keeping with that. A lot of her funny sayings, some of them her own creations and others drawn from a lifetime of reading and study, concisely label common student writing flaws.

Another former writing instructor once wrote in the margin of one of my stories, “I’m bored.” Fair enough. But, for me, that criticism was never helpful. After all, I didn’t set out to write a boring story, and I left the workshop without a clue how to fix the problem, only that I had a BIG problem. My story was boring.

I’ve disagreed with Janet’s advice before, but because she is so clear in her own direction, I’ve never left her side feeling hopeless about a story. (Well. There was one story, but that one was baaaad.)   Janet holds writers to a high standard: name the “thing” and name it correctly. But she holds herself to that same high standard in delivering her feedback. Janet would never say, “I’m bored.” She would say, “Mary, oh sister of the Ozarks, you’ve written yourself a worm boy story. Here’s the fix.” (And then she would ask for department gossip and tell me about the time some family member stole a favorite picture, but that’s for another article.)

I reached out to some of Janet’s other former students for help compiling a list of Janet-isms:

Productive cul-de-sacs: Moments in workshop or class where you get entirely off the craft topic at hand to delve deeply into a marginally related topic, like the vast differences in the many translations of Madame Bovary and what that ultimately tells us about the power of precise imagery in narrative (and the importance of buying good translations). syn. teachable moments. [Andrea Nolan]

Worm Boy Stories: In which the main character lies flaccid in the present action, only to tunnel into his personal history, and then back into the present and then back into the past, over and over again, with nothing of interest every happening in the present action. [Andrea Nolan]

Alarm Clock: A cheap excuse for a literary device when the author has (a) run out of ideas or (b) realizes that his/her plot is unrealistic. Alarm clocks most often appear at the beginnings of novels, when the author is unsure of how to effectively begin in medias res, or at the ends of novels, when the author recognizes that the plot is untenable and the only possible resolution is to have the protagonist wake up from a dream. In both cases, the reader feels cheated. [Rebecca Lauren Gidjunis]

Orange-Carpeted Churches: A lot of us have them in our pasts, these ugly, outdated fire-and-brimstone places. In fiction, they can make for effective front-loaded conflict. In real life, they can make for decades of therapy. [Rebecca Lauren Gidjunis]

F.A.T. (Feelings, Actions, Thoughts): Too often, when dialogue exchanges are meant to carry the tension, they don’t, simply because the exchanges—however good they are on the surface—are out there in the air and not tied to feeling. This can result in a generic kind of talking heads dialogue that, sure, fills up space, but doesn’t ground character in the “what matters” to the character, which is where true tension comes from—not from the snark and snipe and back and forth of bickering, arguing, or even plain old conversation. Think of it in sports terms. The feeling is the ball. Keep your eye on it. And direct your reader’s eye to it. [Dana Staves]

The Three D’s: The moment when a character does, declares, or decides something. The crisis action must hinge on some action, some conscious decision, some transformative moment in the story, to which all prior events lead, and from which all future events will spring. The crisis action begins the ripple effect—it is the stone hitting the water. [Dana Staves]

Some of Janet’s best advice comes via e-mail in the middle of the night, often in response to a desperate plea. (“I can’t finish my thesis. I can’t.”) She delivers other gems (and, let’s be honest, zingers!) in the margins of stories. Here are a few common refrains that we remember, years after leaving Janet’s class:

From Mary Westbrook:

• Good writing depends on “emotion recollected in tranquility.” An Adirondack chair is a fine place to spend an afternoon.
• Objects are powerful in fiction. Tears are not. When you have the urge to make a character cry, do better. Let her do something else instead.
• Also, let your characters be bad.
• Be specific. Learn the exact name of a tree or a bug or a household object and use it.

From Rebecca Lauren Gidjunis:

• Triangles are good.
• Make your characters say “no” to each other.
• Put your characters in a small space and make them stay there and fight it out.
• Fiction is no place for moral imperatives.
• Sometimes teachers are guideposts and we’d do well to follow the signs, but sometimes they’re roadblocks and we’re best served by running over them and flipping them the bird on our way to better places.

From Joanna Eleftheriou:

• Make sure the deck isn’t stacked against any one character, because that makes it too easy for the reader to choose someone to root for.
• Read a poem before going to sleep. You’ll wake up a better writer.
• No teacher will make you a better writer “only reading will.”
• Bring drama to every sentence.
• Honor our shared language by looking words up.

From Andrea Nolan:

• Start a story as close to its ending as you can. Janet would put a cup of water (or whatever was on hand) in the middle of the table, to show how there is no drama iin that; it would take a lot of maneuvering to put that water at risk. But if you put that same cup at the edge of the table, you feel the drama. The edge is where you grab your reader, and the story is how and why the water gets pushed off the edge, and what happens when it does (or how does the water avoid being pushed over the edge?).

From Dana Staves:

• You are your own best teacher. It’s from your own mind the best solutions rise and once that story-problem solver synapse lays down its path in your brain, you’ll have taught yourself something you won’t forget. Better, I’m saying, to solve things yourself.

• Read Mary Westbrook’s interview with Janet Peery in our archives.
• Find Janet Peery’s books at an indie bookstore near you.

“To stimulate, to argue, to celebrate, to explain, to describe, to amuse, to popularize new ideas, to keep the conversation going—these are part of the job and a large part of the ideal to which any good book reviewer will always aspire.”

–John Gross, New York Times Book Review Editor; editor of the special 100-year anniversary issue of the NY Times Book Review

Robin Becker. From author's personal archive.

I designed the graduate seminar The Writer as Critic: Reviewing Contemporary Poetry, Fiction & Non-Fiction (English 570, in Penn State lingo) as a way to bring my grad students into the national conversation about literature. I wanted them to learn the skills needed to navigate the world of literary publishing, a world they hope to enter.  Today, that world includes editors, publicists, marketing managers, publishers, interns, Web designers, and other techies as well as writers. Where to start? My own experience had led me to book reviewing. Years ago, just as my first book entered production, I asked a more experienced poet how to get my book reviewed. She replied, “Review other people’s work. That way, you participate in the conversation.”

Students in our MFA Program at Penn State arrive full of energy and enthusiasm for their genre—poetry, fiction, and non-fiction—but have yet to discover their own gifts for discerning and practical criticism. Entering the book reviewing seminar, they cannot imagine the confidence with which they will complete the semester. They gain this confidence by generating a number of productive correspondences with editors and publishers, which lead to the publication of five (sometimes more!) book reviews. Along the way they request books from publicists, query editors, write and revise reviews in seminar, and celebrate one another’s successes. Many students build relationships with editors and presses that continue long after the MFA. Many go on to “dual” lives as creative writers and reviewers.

In preparation for each semester, I forge partnerships with independent, small press, and university publishers, as well as magazine editors. We familiarize ourselves with texts and series that don’t receive attention in the mainstream press and which have, increasingly, taken over the publishing of literary poetry, fiction, and non-fiction.  Our partnership with editors at literary magazines means that an editor agrees to read and consider for publication one review by each student in the class. With a decade of experience (and superb student publications) on which to draw, I find most editors receptive to partnering with my seminar class.

We begin the semester by reviewing two books—one poetry, one prose—in 200-word and 500-word versions. (My partnerships enable me to distribute, on the first day of class, copies of these texts.) While students revise and polish these 500-word reviews for publication, they query journal editors on possible venues for publication. Simultaneously, students write to publicists and editors at publishing houses to acquire books for the upcoming 750-word review and the two 1,500-word reviews.

Students keep detailed logs of correspondence with editors and publishers. At the close of the semester, they hand in final portfolios with logs for all five major projects (two 500-word reviews, one 750-word review, and two 1,500-word reviews) as well as copies of finished reviews.

Below is an article on the class by a former student, Amee LaBrie, who is now the director of marketing & communications at University of Pennsylvania, which conveys the essence of the class from a grad student’s perspective. The article appeared on the website Penn State Live.

WHERE BOOK REVIEWERS GET THEIR START

“This will be the most demanding and rewarding course you will take in graduate school.” Those are among the first words Robin Becker utters when she enters English 570, a course in book reviewing for graduate students in English and creative writing. Her prediction, as it turns out, appears true. Almost every student in every book reviewing class she teaches places at least one (if not several) book reviews in serious literary journals, including places like The Harvard Review, Prairie Schooner, and Mid-American Review.

Becker, professor of English and women’s studies, has published numerous poetry collections including Venetian Blue, The Horse Fair, and All-American Girl, and she has a reputation among graduate students as a challenging mentor. Laura White, a third year fiction student, joined the class forewarned about the work it requires. “A student from a previous class told me to expect the class to be a full time job,” she said. “That’s an exaggeration, of course, but not an extreme one.”

Becker structures her course with several key goals. First, students learn the basic skills for beginning the book reviewing process. This includes contacting publishing houses for review copies of their newest publications, learning what literary journals are most likely to be interested in a particular book, and querying editors to read reviews. Along with these challenges, students must write pieces of varying lengths (anywhere from the 200 word reviews seen in Publisher’s Weekly to feature length reviews like those in The Nation). In this way, when they leave the class, students take with them the ability to market their reviews to a wide range of review publishers. However, reviews do not get sent to editors until they receive the approval of the editorial board comprised of fellow class members.

Graduate student Allison Schuette explains this part of the class as being where “very intensive revision happened. Everyone signs off on the longer reviews before we send them to Robin, who then signs off on the reviews before they go to an editor. In other words, the reviews are pretty perfect by the time they make it into the mail.”

Finally, the class inspires conversation and interaction among students about writing in general, writing schedules, angles to take in a particular review, questions to answer, and the literal exchange of books and information about what journals might be interested in one review or another.

Another of Becker’s students, Robin Mozer, delineates the validity of her experience in the class. “This has been by far my most productive semester ever. The schedule has forced me to become a more organized, more deliberate writer and learn how to manage my time for looming deadlines. I’ve also gotten my first publication ever in this course. It’s done wonders for my confidence as a writer.”

Though the class fills almost immediately, Becker can only teach it every other year. She demands as much of herself as she does of her students, meeting with them several times over the semester, offering detailed suggestions and revisions, and continually asking them about their progress with editors.

“It’s been very rewarding for me as a teacher,” Becker says. “I think people took very seriously my request that they make the effort to have at least three pieces accepted for reading. We’ve got fifteen weeks to do this great thing. The rigor pays off and you can see it in the numbers of reviews that students are getting placed, you can see it in the confidence with which they go about their lives as writers, and you can see it in the quality of reviews that we’re getting out of the revisions.”

Laura White sums up her perspective of English 570. “Taking Robin’s class is like a writing boot camp and I can say now, at the semester’s end, that we’re all in excellent condition. Our writing has obviously improved. But it’s not just about the writing. I’ve come to consider book reviewing as an important, on-going aspect of an engaged writer’s life.”

• You may have heard that the MFA at Penn State was being cut. Not so! The Huffington Post reports on a public statement by William Cobb, the program’s director:
  

  In this our 25th anniversary year, I’m glad to announce that our MFA Program is very much alive and well, and will continue to receive considerable financial support, including fellowships, teaching assignments, and full tuition waivers. [...] In fact we are not retracting but expanding, with two new degree options in the works–an integrated BA/MA creative writing degree and a combined MFA/PhD–in addition to our traditional two-year MFA. [...] In these difficult times in which many universities are facing budget cutbacks, ours is a triumph of persistence and support for the creative literary arts.

• Want to read more thoughts on reviewing? Browse our archives:
  - “Some Thoughts on Reviewing Poetry in 2011,” by Keith Taylor
  - “The Good Review,” by Jeremiah Chamberlin
  - “An Education in Book Reviews,” by Stacey D’Erasmo
  - “Owl Criticism,” by Charles Baxter

In his 1994 book Peddling Prosperity, the economist Paul Krugman offered an analogy that I have never been able to forget. He suggests that modern economics, which he fondly calls a “primitive science,” has reached about the same level of development that medicine reached in 1900.

Medical researchers had, by that time [1900], accumulated a great deal of information about the human body and its workings, and were capable of giving some critically usefully advice about how to avoid disease. They could not, however, cure very much. Indeed, the doctor / essayist Lewis Thomas tells us that the most important lesson from medical research up to that time had been to leave diseases alone—to stop traditional “cures,” like bleeding, that actually hurt the patients.

By such a standard, what level has the teaching of creative writing reached? Not the twenty-first century, certainly. And probably not the close of the nineteenth century, either. We teachers and students can probably lay fair claim to have “accumulated a great deal of information” on writing processes, canonical literature, common student problems and the like. In our classrooms, we can feel proud that we can create a nexus of workshops, readings, discussions, and wise words that provide encouragement and inspiration for dedicated aspiring writers. Yet I wouldn’t feel comfortable claiming that our field has worked out which techniques do and do not “hurt the patients.” And I am sure that schools of the other arts have more reliable and codified methods of teaching than ours.

Such a limited state of knowledge should lead to humility, and openness to new ideas. I always feel peculiar when teachers attack their peers’ techniques, outlooks, and rubrics, either on panels or in print. How can we already know what doesn’t work? We have barely invented leeches.

Of all the aspects of creative writing pedagogy, the only ones that deserve attack are the ones that seem to be blocking the field’s development, the articles of faith that underpin what we do now, and prevent us from doing something more effective.

One assumption that seems particularly pre-enlightenment is the one, unfortunately, that underlies the entire workshop method—the belief that instruction in creative writing must come after the act of writing. Students must first write, then we must teach them how to make what they have done better. Only after they have offered the class a complete poem, story etc. can the teacher get involved. But a look at the teaching methods of other arts suggests that this assumption is almost certainly false. Painters can be taught to understand perspective, as a principle above and beyond any specific paintings that might use it. Comp 101 students can be shown how topic sentences provides a skeleton for an argument. There must be a set of principles, vague or otherwise, that underlie the various genres of creative writing, and which we can teach to students. It is impossible to read the best books on plot, on style, on point of view, and not think—this is teachable. Someone could talk me through this book, set me exercises, and I would learn. Yet many teachers are hostile to such an view of creative writing, because they believe such principles would either limit students’ originality, or do not exist.

Why has creative writing pedagogy struggled to produce its own principles? One reason is that our literary genres, and thus our courses, are too broad. In each class of the “same” genre, students hand in radically different works—using different tools, seeking different goals. Surely the skills needed—and I intend no value judgement here, merely to point out differences—to write something like this and this, or this and this, are quite separate. No wonder, given this vibrant muddle, that teachers feel bewildered offering general instruction. If students will submit such a wild collage, we will have to advise them post-creation, not pre, because we have no idea what is coming next. Yet, if a teacher was to offer, instead of a “fiction workshop,” a “third person close workshop,” suddenly techniques, principles, and models would appear, and seem less arbitrary impositions than conclusions drawn from the genre itself. “Fiction” is probably not teachable, but the “William Trevor short story” may be.

External constraints may prevent us offering classes focused enough to be comprehensible to ourselves and our students. But, if creative writing pedagogy wishes to enter the eighteenth century, first we should recognise that the different rooms of our art are built on principles which are communicable to learners, then we must find and catalogue those principles, and then design courses that will allow us to teach them.

I have a problem telling stories. Sometimes in my excitement it’s difficult to gauge how much detail a friend, or a reader, actually needs to know. Because while not all details are important to understanding the events, to me, often the details are the most interesting part. So, if I’m trying to describe how late the train was, so late that it made me miss my doctor’s appointment, instead I might end up talking more about the argument I eavesdropped on while waiting for that train, and the maroon, bedazzled pumps of the woman who was hissing at her partner. After all, which was more significant?

So, sometimes when I’m writing, if I want to tell a story, I’ll do it two ways: first as a summary of the events. In this summary I get to make digressions, remark on the weather, those fabulous shoes, and generally wind my way through the narrative. Then, I’ll put that aside, and write the scene. Here, the peanut gallery has to shut up. What actually happened? What did those arguing people say to one another? Stripped down, what is it about this experience that mattered?

Of course most narratives mix summary and scene, and eventually, that’s what happens as I bring a little of my inner monologue, my incessant and nosy noticing, back into the scene. Sometime’s I’m not sure what mattered most about an experience until I try to put it into words. Having two representations can help test out how the truth of the moment comes through in both maximalist and minimalist form.

Exercise: Write a summary of a specific experience. Then, write a scene of that same experience.

• If you missed the first two installments of “Get Writing” this month, you can view them in our archives—and check back next Friday for our final installment.
• For more exercises, there’s also our previous round of “Get Writing,” including this lovely exercise by Charlotte.
  ]]> http://fictionwritersreview.com/blog/get-writing-scene-and-summary-minimalist-and-maximalist/feed 0 http://fictionwritersreview.com/blog/under-the-influence-of-sands-hall http://fictionwritersreview.com/blog/under-the-influence-of-sands-hall#comments Thu, 22 Sep 2011 13:00:02 +0000 Erika Dreifus http://fictionwritersreview.com/?p=25041
  

  Image via author website

  Immersed in a 9-to-5, year-round office job since early 2007, I haven’t led a fiction workshop for some time. But if I should inhabit that particular teaching role again, I’d want to remind myself how the job is best done. Ideally, I’d do that by sitting in on one of Sands Hall’s workshops.

  I met Sands when I enrolled in her “Tools of the Writer’s Craft: Novel” workshop at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival in 1997. I subsequently returned to Iowa to take other workshops of hers. We’ve stayed in touch, and I’m proud to say that we’re friends.

  In her fiction workshops, Sands excels at every staple that I’ve found scattered—all too often, all too piecemeal—in other instructors’ classes. She shares excellent reading lists and excerpts. She explains craft elements clearly. She assigns superb exercises. She provides extensive, incisive feedback on each manuscript in writing and in conference. And she negotiates the emotions and tensions that writers often bring to workshops with ease, equanimity, and kindness.

  What makes Sands a writing teacher to emulate is not only that she offers her students all of the above, but also that she—atypically, in my experience—emphasizes another crucial element: how to read and respond to other writers’ manuscripts and prepare critiques. Back in 1997, she made a convincing case for the benefits of mastering the art and craft of the critique. Even better, she gave us the tools to begin doing so.

  Our workshop packet opened with 14 typed pages on “The Workshop Process.” Pages five to eight bore the essential subtitle “Preparing a Manuscript for Discussion in Workshop.” Other subsections included “For the Writer Whose Work is Being Discussed,” “Regarding Novel Segments,” and “Regarding Workshop Leaders, and the Occasional ‘Bad’ Workshop.”

  You don’t have to be enrolled in a Sands workshop to access all of this wisdom. Another version appears at the beginning of her 2005 book, also called Tools of the Writer’s Craft (and the subject of this Q&A on my website).

  So if I were to begin leading workshops again, I could simply study my copy of Tools of the Writer’s Craft. But I’d much rather visit one of Sands’s classrooms and experience anew the magic of a workshop that “works” so beautifully. To be once again “under the influence” of the gracious, generous, and gifted Sands Hall.

  ---

  Further Reading:
  • Learn more about Sands Hall at her website
  • Read Sands Hall’s story “Hide and Seek” from the Iowa Review
  • Learn more about Erika Dreifus at her website
  ]]> http://fictionwritersreview.com/blog/under-the-influence-of-sands-hall/feed 1 http://fictionwritersreview.com/essays/writer-as-athlete-%e2%80%93-teacher-as-coach http://fictionwritersreview.com/essays/writer-as-athlete-%e2%80%93-teacher-as-coach#comments Wed, 21 Sep 2011 13:00:32 +0000 Valerie Laken http://fictionwritersreview.com/?p=25825 coaching, not just teaching, young writers.]]>

  I’ve always loved the connotations of the word workshop. There’s refinement in a seminar and hierarchy in a master-class, but a workshop brings to mind sawdust and power tools. A bunch of unshaven people in greasy jumpsuits. To call a class a workshop implies that we’ll replace or reinforce theoretical lessons with the practical work of making and fixing tangible objects: the machines that texts are.

  At advanced levels especially, workshop courses tend to proceed manuscript by manuscript, like a fix-it shop where we poke around under the hood, trying to understand how this particular engine works and what can be done to make it run better.

  For people who love workshops, like me, this problem-solving methodology is not just instructive, it’s fun. Stimulating. In fact, part of what made me sure I wanted to be a writer—and a writing teacher—was the pleasure I experienced in workshop, helping my peers and students solve those problems.

  But a funny thing happened after I spent a few years loving life in writing workshops. With each semester my work grew more careful, more conventional, more narrowly proscribed. My weirdest, most experimental work came and went before I’d finished my first semester of grad school. Back then I would have said my writing was becoming more refined, and that’s certainly true. But in retrospect I also think that my fears were setting in, eroding the courage borne of naïveté that I had enjoyed as a younger writer.

  I had genuinely masterful teachers, and they ran their workshops with respect, imagination, generosity, and vast expertise. I honestly don’t think they could have done a better job. And yet by the time I graduated, whenever I sat down to write a sentence, my head was instantly flooded with the voices of my workshop peers and teachers. The biggest thing I learned in grad school, it seemed, was a powerful, paralyzing sense of all the mistakes I was about to make in my next paragraph. Ideas for stories kept coming and coming, but when I tried to put them on paper I didn’t just dry up—I experienced genuine panic. This lasted for years.

  The worst part was, I could hardly admit it to anyone. The very notion of writer’s block is often treated, in serious academic workshops, as a weakness or lack of discipline experienced only by hacks and amateurs. And maybe it is. But something tells me it strikes the best and worst of us. And if writers don’t learn to overcome the anxieties that stop them from writing, then every other skill we teach them will be for naught.

  **

  Conversations about process, self-motivation, and confidence sometimes crop up in private student-teacher conversations, but they rarely find an official place in the curriculum of advanced academic workshops. A lot of us—students included—consider those touchy-feely, self-expression, free-your-imagination conversations and exercises to be well beneath us. We relegate them to the domain of adult-education workshops and Write Your Novel in 30 Days! books, and to the self-help land of Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way franchise.

  In college I took a one-day workshop with a National Book Award-winning visiting writer who asked if we could take a moment at the beginning of class to meditate. She rang a bell. After she closed her eyes, we all shot hysterical glances at one another and tried to keep straight faces. And, I’m ashamed to say, we pretty much wrote off everything she said for the next hour as the rantings of a weird hippie.

  Some of my peers later studied with a wonderful writer and teacher who asked them, on the first night of workshop, to map out their story ideas in crayon on big sheets of paper. They left the classroom incensed. “I didn’t go to grad school,” one student said, “to draw pictures.” Perhaps she’d been trying to release them from their normal approach to story creating. Who knows. But that professor spent the rest of the semester trying, and never quite succeeding, to rebuild her credibility, her authority.

  In “serious” academic workshops, the actual act of writing occurs at home, in secret—or it doesn’t occur at all. Everyone jokingly acknowledges that “Of course you’ll spend the first few days after workshop or the first several months after grad school feeling overwhelmed, defeated, reluctant to write. That’s just how it goes.” The tough ones will find a way back to their computers and notebooks, and the rest, well… who knows what happens to them? The rare student who works up the nerve to actually ask how to overcome writer’s block risks shame, risks being written off. And anyway, the usual response boils down to little more than, “Sit at your desk and just do it.”

  

  Despite all our declarations to students that masterful texts result from rigorous revision and don’t just fall from the sky, academic workshops imply that first drafts, at least, fall from the sky. Beyond the stage of “Intro to Creative Writing,” we spend very little time helping students develop the skills to generate those first drafts.

  I suspect this is partly because the pedagogy associated with overcoming doubt and generating raw material is tainted by its associations with self-help, therapy, nurturing, self-expression, and spirituality. I sense, too, that each of these areas is tinged with connotations of femininity. I know part of what makes me afraid to engage with those topics in workshop is my reluctance to play the nurturing female role. To teach these psychological, or yes, even spiritual skills is to risk losing our credibility as serious writers and professors. But if we continue to cede this territory to “unserious” workshops and, out of fear, convention, or prejudice, avoid teaching the psychological strategies required of life-long writers, I think our students miss out on some skills that are essential to the success, survival and sanity of any writer.

  **

  

  During my painful, frightened, depressed years as a blocked writer, I ended up spending quite a bit of time watching TV. The Tennis Channel, to be specific. Watching the two to five hours of a tennis match, you can actually see and hear (as you can’t in most sports) the tremendous physical and emotional highs and lows that players go through. They are unhidden by helmets or pads, and the downtime between points and games allows for intense close-ups of each player as she strategizes, scolds herself, or simply melts down. Most importantly: each player is alone. Coaching of any kind during a match is prohibited in most pro tournaments. Whatever strategy, motivation, support, or composure a coach in any other sport might offer has to come, in tennis, from within the player herself.

  

  In other words, the coach’s job involves teaching players to develop the inner resources to overcome fear and frustration, to maintain confidence, and to keep a clear, focused mind under extraordinarily challenging circumstances.

  When a player fails at this, when a wildly talented, well-trained player loses his confidence or the rhythm of his serve, everyone watching can see it, plain as day. The coach grits his teeth in impossible frustration, and spectators scream advice and encouragement, but the player has already lost, in his head, and hears none of this. Players who truly lose their confidence, for good, stumble from loss to loss, all their talent and training and a lifetime of grueling work made meaningless because their brains have gotten in the way. Head cases, people call them. Every sport has them, every fan mourns them. Sportscasters whistle under their breath and suggest sports psychologists, a change of coaches, a change of racquets, a change of anything.

  

  Sometimes when I watch a player I love lose a tough, pivotal match I think, “Thank God as writers the game never ends; there is always the chance to revise something and get it right.” The story will wait until we get our heads on straight—or so we like to think.

  Other times, in periods of frustration or boredom with my writing, I think, “What a great thing it would be to have the game just be over and done with. Take a shower, go to bed, start over the next day with a clean slate. No manuscript hanging over your head, unfinished, unfinished, unfinished.”

  A player might review a lost match on game tape or in her bad dreams for years to come, but she cannot actually revise it. The psychological make-up of the successful athlete has to include the ability to put the last match behind her. To learn from it and drop it and move forward.

  

  In the academic, manuscript-based workshop, we tend to train students in a different psychology: revise, revise, and then revise some more. As the writer and pedagogy theorist Anna Leahy writes in a description of her teaching methods, “Most importantly, I treat everyone’s work as unfinished, always.”¹ The typical methodology of the academic workshop puts the manuscript before the writer; people talk about “what the text is trying to do” and sometimes don’t even look at the writer when they offer their feedback. Sometimes it seems that the serious workshop serves to perfect texts, not develop writers. Or, it serves texts directly, and writers only indirectly. We tend to disregard the fact that some manuscripts aren’t worth perfecting and should perhaps be chalked up as a loss so the writer can freely move on to the next match.

  If the primary focus of academic workshops is to highlight what isn’t working in the manuscript, and through constant emphasis on revision imply that the work is never done, may never be done, after a few years of taking workshops students must end up feeling that they’ve been on one interminable losing streak. No wonder they walk through the halls in despair; no wonder they lose their confidence and retreat, relying on skill sets they’ve been told they are good at, rather than expanding the limits of their art. Who wouldn’t?

  I’m not saying that revision—and the endurance needed for multiple revisions—isn’t important. Of course it is. My point is merely that there are psychological components to teaching and learning to write, whether we acknowledge them openly in our classrooms or not. And if we focus mainly on fixing the fleeting problems of each manuscript, we may overlook the more enduring problems of each student. And that’s dangerous and inefficient, because the problems in each student of course create—and recreate—the flaws and limitations in their manuscripts, or sometimes prevent them from producing a text in the first place. We acknowledge that athletes need psychological strength and skills as much as physical ones. Why would writers—those “athletes of perception,” to quote Robert Stone—be any different?

  _{Leahy, Anna. Power and Identity in the Creative Writing Classroom: The Authority Project. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2005, p. 14.}

  

  Editor’s Note: This essay originally appeared, in slightly different form, as part of the AWP 2011 Panel “Beyond the Workshop: Revising, Revamping, Rejecting the Workshop Model.” The panel also included fellow writers and teachers, Margaret Lazarus Dean, Charles Baxter, Liam Callanan, and Patrick O’Keeffe. Please check back this Friday, September 23, when FWR will publish Liam Callanan’s talk from that same panel.

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  Further Links & Resources

  

  • Interested in pedagogy? C’mon, we won’t rat you out. FWR published an extensive round-table discussion on teaching creative writing in the 21st Century with Cathy Day, Anna Leahy and Stephanie Vanderslice. Here are links to Part I and Part II.
  • Read Kate Kostelnik’s review of Does the Writing Workshop Still Work?, which takes a look not only at the current workshop model, but the potential for change – nay, revolution – of the system.

  

  • Valerie Laken is the author of the novel, Dream House, and the 2010 story collection Separate Kingdoms. Read a 2009 interview with Valerie here on FWR, and check out additional interviews, reviews, and more at valerielaken.com.
  ]]> http://fictionwritersreview.com/essays/writer-as-athlete-%e2%80%93-teacher-as-coach/feed 5 http://fictionwritersreview.com/blog/under-the-influence-of-arnost-lustig http://fictionwritersreview.com/blog/under-the-influence-of-arnost-lustig#comments Wed, 21 Sep 2011 13:00:20 +0000 Charles Conley http://fictionwritersreview.com/?p=25758
  

  Arnost Lustig

  I was the worst writer in my MFA program my first year.  I know this thought isn’t unique, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t true.  My confidence was shot.  I was lost as a writer and so concerned with impressing my teachers and fellow students that I had abandoned whatever it was that made me worth accepting into the program in the first place.

  The following summer, I attended the Prague Summer Program, where Arnost Lustig was my workshop teacher.  We began each class with jokes.  We wrote a fable every day.  We read (after a fashion) Aristotle’s Poetics.  We discussed fairy tales and fables and Arnost’s favorite writers—Kafka, Borges, Mann, and others.  Our writing assignments were short, read and critiqued aloud.  Arnost would ask questions like “Is it interesting?” or “Was this funny?”  Interesting!  Funny!  These are workshop questions?

  The only assignments we turned in were fifteen lines we’d write about the previous class.  Aside from assuring us that they wouldn’t be shared with the rest of the students, there was little guidance.  I believe he read them, but he never commented, never even returned them.  My first one started with something Arnost had said at our initial meeting—Suddenly and from out of nowhere there came a bad wolf.  This was how I felt: surprised, vulnerable, challenged.  Rereading those lines, I understand how badly I needed to hear the questions he’d asked—Why are you a writer?  What would you say to earn your way into heaven? I see how quickly even Arnost’s sentence rhythms infected my own.  I shared these assignments with a friend from that class, and she called them my love letters to Arnost.  Though I didn’t know it then, she’s right.  I hope Arnost saw that as well.

  

  Arnost passed away in February.  He wasn’t the only great teacher I’ve had—I’ve been blessed in that department—but at a time when I was overly concerned with questions of form and point of view and style and finding my voice, he was there to remind me to tell a story.  When I teach Intro to Fiction, that’s the class I try to teach.  I know I come up short, but I can’t be the only one trying to pass on Arnost’s lessons.  Maybe between the lot of us, we can come close.

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