Interviews

Found in Willow Springs 56

February 11, 2005

Jeffery Dodd, Elise Gregory, and Adam O’Connor Rodreguez

A CONVERSATION WITH GERALD STERN

Photo Credit: Lucky Life by Gerald Sterns

Kate Daniels has described Gerald Stern as a “post-nuclear, multicultural Whitman for the millennium—the United States’ one and only truly global poet.” He may have had little choice in the matter. Born in 1925 to Jewish immigrants from the Ukraine and Poland, he grew up in an ethnically diverse Pittsburgh, where he became friends with the poets Jack Gilbert and Richard Hazley. After World War II, Stern spent time in Western Europe before taking his first teaching job in the mid-1950s.

In the five decades since, Stern has published fourteen volumes of poetry, including Everything is Burning (2005), American Sonnets (2003), and This Time: New and Selected Poems, which won the National Book Award in 1998. His other honors include the Lamont Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship, three NEA awards, a fellowship from the Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Ruth Lilly Prize. He is also the author of a memoir, What I Can’t Bear Losing (2003). He has taught at Temple University, Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence College, and, before retiring in 1995, the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa.

“You read between the lines,” Stern says, “and discover what the character and personality of another writer is.” Reading between the conventional rhythms and understated images of his own lines, we find a poet who examines justice and injustice, cruelty and tenderness, conformity and freedom, as well as the vibrancy of memory. His work derides provincialism and points to a world of experiences beyond American borders and transcendent of temporal limits. Stern has lived in this rich world, and his poetry calls attention to its failures, beauties, and curiosities without fear, shame, or sentimentality. His is an unapologetically cosmopolitan voice, speaking to a world in need of softer dividing lines.

It is that world, the international and intellectually imagined, that we agreed to discuss on a sunny Friday afternoon. Mr. Stern was gracious enough to be interviewed in his room at the Ridpath Hotel, in downtown Spokane, Washington.

JEFF DODD

Many of the poets you refer to in What I Can’t Bear Losing share an understanding of having a communal experience while also feeling their own “foreignness.” Nazim Hikmet, Miklós Radnóti, Hugh MacDiarmid—none of their books get much airtime, even among Americans who know a lot about poetry. Which other poets do you believe deserve more attention in America?

GERALD STERN

Foreign poets that we customarily read, the main one’s Rilke. But most people who read Rilke don’t know he was a Czech Jew, not Ger- man. Of course, he was very much taken with the Slavic spirit, spent some time in Russia, flirting not with the political movement but with the emotional side of the Slavic syndrome. Then the second echelon of people we read are some French poets, like Apollinaire, 19th-century poets like Lautréamont, though more for the specialist. Then down on the third level, particularly in the past thirty or forty years, South Americans, some Spanish poets like Lorca, Neruda, and so on. So, we don’t know Portuguese poets. Occasionally, a person from Bulgaria or Portugal or even Africa will win a Nobel Prize and for a minute or two we’ll read their novels or their poems. America is not to be condemned for this; it’s so huge, it’s a world unto itself—there’s no time, and there’s no space, and it’s not part of our education.

The book I’m reading now, by Alexander Wat, a Polish poet, is an extended 400-page interview he did with Czeslaw Milosz. Wat grew up in Poland, in Warsaw, and he was a Polish-Jewish intellectual. He had an education like most of us here—a humane, cosmopolitan, European education. But to be Polish and have this is very different than having grown up in Kansas City. His first language was Polish, but he also knew Yiddish, though he probably didn’t think it was a foreign language nor a complete language; it was just what was spoken in the house. How could it be a complete language? But it is another language. And Germany’s right on the border, so he knew German. Yiddish is merely a version of 12th-century German. Mix in some Hebrew, some Slavic words. He knew Russian, French, Italian, and Spanish. And the distinction between Russian and Ukrainian—they’re literally separate languages. Much closer, say, than Italian and Spanish. But we don’t have that equivalent closeness in languages in Western Europe and the United States. So he knew eight languages. And when he was in prison—and he was in prison most of his adult years—a Russian would be in his cell, and he would know if the person was from Belarus, or White Russia, or Odessa, and he would know Ukrainian, and he would know if the person was a Jew—there are a thousand different forms, replicas, shadows, shades to pick from; it’s a little bit more boring here. We have our McDonalds.

We don’t have shades to pick from; things are more uniform. So a writer reflects this, reflects the complications. If you’re Dutch, you don’t just read Dutch literature. How about Danish literature—you’re not going to learn Danish? You’re not going to learn Swedish? You’re not going to learn English? French? Most American poets don’t know other languages, not well enough to, say, speak them or read them. Phil Levine knows Spanish. Bly knows Spanish and some German, a little Swedish. But I can name many well-known American poets who don’t know any foreign languages, let alone classical languages, because we didn’t have that kind of education. So this is part of our problem, if it is a problem.

Pound was born in 1885, I think, and was deeply aware of this. When he was in his late teens, early twenties, he saw America as a desert. One of his fairly early poems, in Personae, which preceded Cantos—the poem went something like this: “What would it be like if America read the Classics?” But Pound was a blowhard and an asshole, also a great poet, and an autodidact, and pushed his crazy ideas. He’s very American. He acted like he was the only one who ever studied Chinese, who ever read Provençal poetry, he’s going to teach everyone what to do and how to do it. That’s another kind of American provincialism. Pound was a provincialist. And it was Gertrude Stein who said the most wonderful thing of Pound. She called him the village—not idiot—the village…I can’t remember the word. She was aware that he was somewhat of a provincial, at the same time that he preached universalism. And he knew German and French and he lived in France and England. But he was always self-conscious of it. You see, Wat would not be self-conscious. He would just assume—of course you know Russian and Ukrainian and Lithuanian and Bulgarian and French; what else is there? But Pound would be conscious of the fact that he had read the Provençal poets. Proud of it. And he was a great student, particularly of the Spanish, Italian—Romance languages. So he had that. But his influence on that score was not long-lasting. Because most people didn’t listen to him at all. It’s a hard culture to change.

DODD

Is there a comparison between Pound’s early career and Hugh MacDiarmid’s, leading up to this sort of political willfulness, that in some ways destroyed their careers?

STERN

Of course, MacDiarmid didn’t have the recognition. I knew MacDiarmid; I met him in Scotland. I lived for a year there. I met him by accident, because my former wife, Pat, and I were living in an apartment owned by some Scottish communists. So, we got introduced to the group of Scottish Marxists. Most of them were painters, a few poets. The leader of them was Hugh MacDiarmid, whose real name was Christopher Grieve. And on May Day we marched down the main streets of Glasgow. I visited him several times in his little farmhouse, which was halfway between Glasgow and Edinburgh. He complained a lot—Pound got all the attention and he didn’t. They both were strongly interested in politics; they were on different sides. They were both weird, crazy. Although MacDiarmid was not a racist. MacDiarmid’s strangeness was that he was both a nationalist and a cosmopolitan at the same time. How could you be a communist, and thus believe in internationalism, and, at the same time, try to promote a new, local, language that was spoken in southwestern Scotland and be a Scottish nationalist? Because those were the particulars of his life; there’s no logic or reasonableness to it. They wrote in Lallans and they made up their own words. Presumably, these words had some root or connection with the area of Scotland called Ayreshire, which is where Robert Burns was from. When you read some of the poems produced by those poets, you have to read the footnotes. They were communists, but this was not a people’s poetry. They were intellectuals, learned intellectuals.

One of the things I learned over there is that Scotland is a totally different country than England. We used to go to the movies in Scotland, and at the end of the movie, when they played “God Save the Queen,” the Scots all walked out, because Queen Elizabeth II was not Queen Elizabeth II of Scotland. Because Queen Elizabeth I was a bastard Queen; she was not Scottish. She usurped Mary. The Scots speak a different language, really think differently than the English. And they have bad press by the English who are the dominant party—they say Scots are tight, when Scots are liberal, generous, lovely, beautiful people. And MacDiarmid, I love his poetry. It has a good spirit; he had a good spirit. Pound didn’t have a good spirit.

The problem with Pound lovers is that they either ignore or make excuses for his politics. They make a mystery, even a mysticism, a kind of priestly religion, out of his cultural and realistic views, and they hold him up as the great exemplar. But the spirit of the man was not kind. He was not a kind or loving human being. There’s no reason a poet has to be a kind, loving human being, but I like kind and loving people. I like generous, kind, loving, decent, honest, authentic people, and I believe those qualities willy-nilly show up or don’t show up in a poet. Some things in Pound are marvelous. I learned from him, as all my con- temporaries did, about the efficiency of language, how to use language efficiently and sharply, to make poetry as efficient as prose. Not to be decorative, poetic, learning who to read to do that. Learning to read differently. Learning to read Chaucer, and not to trust the Romantics as much as we did. I learned a lot from him.

But I didn’t learn kindness, generosity.

When they talk about the Cantos, they generally say it’s a failed poem, but Pound didn’t intend for it to be a failed poem. He spent forty to fifty years at it. So, he’s a failed poet. Do you say The Canterbury Tales is a failed poem? Or the Comedia is a failed poem? And so Pound lovers, such as my friend Jack Gilbert, will say that in the Cantos, there are perfect lyrics interspersed among the other crap. And I don’t read the crap—newspaper articles from 1906, statements overheard in a bar in 1912, memoirs of Confucius, letters of Madison or Adams, whatever else the Cantos are made of—I read those beautiful little lyrics, forty lines here, twenty lines on paradise, 200 lines on suffering. Pound lovers go on to say the most beautiful section of the Cantos is the Pisan Cantos, written when Pound was incarcerated by the American army and didn’t have any books with him—I think he had one book, Confucius, to read. Well, first of all, reading Confucius was idiotic. I mean, the idea that this guy, Pound—from where, Idaho?—was preaching Confucius when he was sixty to seventy years old is so weird. Confucius was a Chinese Puritan who believed in order. I’m not interested in Confucius. I mean, fuck Confucius. I’m much more interested in how the Chinese produced Zen, or Lao Tse. Why Confucius—“To have order in the state you must have order in the family?” Where did Pound have order in his family? What is this craziness he was talking about? Where’s the order in the state? Or in the city? Was there order in his city? Order in his state? There were a bunch of Nazis over the border, right? It’s totally crazy to preach that—Bob Hass and Jack Gilbert and whoever else sitting there, going, “Great poet. Preaches Confucius.” Assholes! Preaching Confucius, number one. Number two, the Pisan Cantos are highly sentimental, self-pitying poems. “What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross…?” There’s an beautiful lyric, but I don’t trust it; I don’t trust a voice if it’s extremely sentimental. At one point, Pound had a phrase, “Oh, let an old man die,” and he was sixty-two years old, plenty of life ahead of him. That was sentimental, self-pitying. I think we should’ve shot him as a traitor. That would have been the appropriate thing—we should’ve shot him. It was a mistake not to shoot him. And we should’ve shot some other poets while we were at it. Now, I still read Pound. I enjoy reading Pound. I love the crazy stuff. Because I’m the kind of person who reads The New York Times cover-to-cover—crossword puzzles, ads. In Pound, I like the Madison, the Monroe. Of course, I don’t like the Confucius. And Chinese scholars say Pound’s Chinese was terrible. And he was a rotten anti-Semite son of a bitch, and that’s unforgivable. It’s just stupid, goddamn dumb. You can’t be a great poet and be dumb. Period.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ

Another poet controversial in his home country, Nazim Hikmet, came up several times in your autobiography. Do you feel a special connection to him?

STERN

I do feel a special connection with Hikmet. I don’t know how I would like him as a person. I think I would like him. You know, you read between the lines and discover what the character and personality of another writer is, and say “I like that guy. He’s human. He’s on the same wavelength.” He has a poem, he’s a quivering old man, he’s sixty-three, and he’s in a railroad station, in a restaurant, and the waitress comes to him, and he’s writing in the waitress’ voice: “This old man’s sitting there, looking sick, I’d love to help him order, talk to him, he looks lonely.” Hikmet was so pure, so available. That was one thing I liked so much about him. And I like the humanity he expresses while in jail. He was in jail for years and years. He was a prisoner of the Turkish government, he was a communist. That’s a problem for me: I hate communism. I don’t hate it for the same reason the stupid Republicans do or the stupid Democrats. I hate it because it’s senseless—a kind of fake utopia that preaches one thing, then ends up utterly repressive. Certainly, all the communist systems we’ve seen have been incredibly insecure and oppressive. Yet Hikmet remained a stubborn communist until the end. But maybe his experience in Turkey was even worse than it might have been, in his imagination, in Russia, and he certainly got special treatment there. So what he saw was not the inside of the prison, but a hall where he was glorified and given medals. It’s his humanity that I love. He remains one of the great European poets of the 20th century.

The more I read the Eastern European poets, the more I relate to them. I’m not really an internationalist, I don’t know that much about them, but the more I read German poets after the war, Polish poets, Russian poets before the breakup of the Iron Curtain, the more I connect with them. And actually, when I look at my own life, I’m still an Eastern European. My family’s only been here for 100 years. Exactly 100 years. And I grew up in Pittsburgh, American-raised, whatever the hell that means—to be American. But I realize now I’m somewhat of a foreigner. The fact is I’m a Jew. But I didn’t grow up in a Jewish world; I grew up at the beginning of the Midwest, Pittsburgh, where the Jew is an oddball, by and large. I was kicked in the ass daily.

ELISE GREGORY

If you had published American Sonnets outside the United States, how do you think it may have been received?

STERN

I have no idea. The whole issue of publishing outside the United States—we’re such a huge country. There are so many English-speaking countries—Australia, England, Canada—we forget they’re there. We dominate. I was in Canada, nominated for a prize a couple of years ago, and I’ve been exposed to a lot of Canadian poets and it’s a whole beautiful world up there, some good and some bad poets. I was nominated for a prize for that book, American Sonnets. It was very well received there. But, you know, Canada’s so much like the United States. I’ve discovered over the years how significant the local is in poetry. We’re such a large country, I might write about fauna in New Jersey or streets or customs there, and you in Spokane, Washington might not understand it or vice versa, let alone the world at large. It also depends on the issue of what kind of poetry one writes. Unlike Yeats, Seamus Heaney, a marvelous poet, is more of a “local” poet. Yeats was more of a “general” poet. Yeats was more English. And during his life, maybe his Irishness was a little bit ignored. It came more to the forefront later. But he’s more of a—not generic—but general poet. There’s nothing about, say, “Sailing to Byzantium” that is not as relevant to someone living in Chicago as it would be to someone living in Dublin. But, when Seamus Heaney writes about fence posts, or gates, or vehicles in Northern Ireland somewhere, he uses the local dialect, the language for it; it doesn’t resonate—or as George W. Bush would say, “resignate”—the same way as it might if he used a more general language. And it may be that Seamus Heaney, as an illustration, is deliberately using a language like that in opposition to the universal providence that has come through as a result of technology. My language tends to be, among these two, more local maybe, if you were to appraise me. So that someone in England might read it but would maybe have a more complicated time reading it. But yet, to tell you the truth, my poetry is not unavailable. On one level, it’s very available. So I find people, surprisingly enough, in Israel, Germany, Ireland, who respond very strongly to it.

DODD

You speak of Pound certainly in a different tone than I’ve heard you discuss W. S. Merwin. One thing they have in common, however, is an early love of the Provençal poets, and Merwin has described how he came to love the Provençal poets through a visit with Pound. You say also, in What I Can’t Bear Losing, that you have an affection for the Provençal poets. Could you talk more about older European poetic traditions and how they influence contemporary poets?

STERN

Yeah, Merwin knows that poetry from the inside. He has a house in France. He knows French like he knows English. He knows it inside out. It’s a whole separate culture, Cathar culture. I wrote a poem a number of years ago about the city of Albi, where the Albigensian Crusades happened, when the northern French descended on the southern French and destroyed their culture, their Protestantism. That’s the culture, generally speaking, that produced the Provençal poets. It was a great and beautiful literature. Dante considered writing the Comedia in Provençal. One of Dante’s Cantos is in Provençal. I was in that area of southern France twelve or thirteen years ago, traveling with my son. We went to some town, the wind was blowing among some oak trees, I took a little nap in the grass, my son woke me up and said, “Dad, these signs are in Italian.” I said, “That isn’t Italian; take a closer look.” It’s Provençal, which is close to Italian, it’s close to French, close to Latin. I’ve read the poets, tried to read them in Provençal. I’ve never studied it the way Merwin has. I had a student at Iowa who really got into that stuff, who knew Provençal poetry. It was wonderful. It’s a complicated, lovely culture. The physical world they lived in was just so beautiful, the weather was lovely—it remains a kind of happy, sweet poetry. It was a blessed time. Of course, they had more complications than you’d think. But their devotion to love, what it stood for, their special vocabulary, particular rhyme forms. It was a big influence on Italian literature and the literature of Spain and all of Europe.

GREGORY

Earlier, you spoke of several modernist poets. Most of the modernists were interested in epics and spent much of their lives completing these great epics—

STERN

Would-be great epics. Are you thinking of H.D.?

GREGORY

Williams’ Paterson—

STERN

If we were really getting into it, we’d have to make a distinction between the long poem and the epic. Then we would have to talk about what an epic is, or has been at least—just because an epic had to be one thing 1,000 years ago doesn’t mean it has to be the same thing today. And it used to be that a poet, all through his career, take Keats, felt he had to write his long poem, his epic. That was a poet’s challenge—whether he was Spenser, Chaucer, Tennyson—he had to write his long poem. Keats wrote some long poems, they’re wonderful to read. Endymion. But the ones we know most of all are the Odes. And some letters, some sonnets.

I was interested in writing an epic from the word “go.” When I was in France in my early twenties, I was working on a very long poem, a ridiculously long poem, called Ishmael’s Dream—Ishmael, the lost soul, the exile’s dreams. It was a total failure. Then, during my early thirties, I wrote a long poem called The Pineys, which goes on for almost 100 pages. It’s a study of the White House, a study of the presidency, a study of our culture. The Pineys is the name of a group of people who lived in southern New Jersey during the 18th, 19th, and part of the 20th centuries, at a distance from what we call “civilization.” America is in love with this kind of living, whether it be in Kentucky or northwestern New Jersey. Except that the Pineys are not an ethnic group. It was a mixture of Indian, Irish, African-American, and English, and they happened to be remnants of the industrial culture that existed in southern New Jersey in the 18th and 19th centuries, where iron ore was first produced and boats were made. It was America’s first West. People fled the major cities, particularly Philadelphia, and went off into the woods and lived there in squalor. So my poem was about the Pineys running the White House. But it just went on and on forever. It was a madness. I sort of threw that poem away. In 1965, I started to get into the poems that are now “my poems,” starting with Rejoicings, the first book in my selected poems.

In more recent years, I wrote a long poem called “Hot Dog.” Is that an epic? What’s an epic? Does it have to have a hero that reflects the beliefs of a culture? Or a heroine? Does it have to have a tragic quality? It would have that if this were a course in the epic. We describe what an epic is by describing what they were and making generalizations about them. But that doesn’t describe the epic of the future. Hot Dog was a woman, an actual person, probably dead now, a beautiful thirty-two year-old African-American woman who lived on the streets. She should’ve been in an institution, but she was out sleeping on the cold sidewalks. She was the “hero.” Right now, though, I’m interested in the short poem. You’re familiar with my last book of poetry, American Sonnets, but I’ve written another book called Everything is Burning, coming out in a month or so, and I’m now writing another one; I’ve got twenty or so poems toward whatever that will be called. One is a long poem called “The Preacher.” A crazy long poem based on Ecclesiastes.

Many of my contemporaries are interested in the long poem: Merwin is interested in the long poem; Phil Levine has written some very interesting long poems; Ashbery has; Olson. Jack Gilbert has never written a long poem, he’s not interested in that. O’Hara hasn’t. I don’t know how to talk about it; I’m not qualified. Somebody in some English Department in Albuquerque should talk about the distinction between the long poem and the epic. Make connections with American Indian hymns, Vedic hymns.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ

You said Pound was an autodidact, as you also were, as far as writing—

STERN

I’m a follower of Pound. A Pounder.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ

Clearly. But do you think a writer can still self-educate?

STERN

Yeah, why not. There are too many writing schools, too much conformism. Too much everybody acting like everybody else. Make some mistakes, waste ten years. I wasted twenty-five years. I have regrets about it. I wasted a lot of time. When I was twenty-two, I could’ve gone to Iowa, Stanford, Bennington, like many of my contemporaries. Phil Levine went to Iowa, Donald Justice. Some did, some didn’t. Later on, everyone went to school. It just struck me and my friends—Jack Gilbert and Richard Hazley, who was the third one among us, and by the way, the best poet, though he didn’t have the will, the stubbornness to make it, which is really what counts, forget about being gifted—that Iowa was ridiculous—God gave us this talent, the muse. What, we’re going to submit to a group of idiots who say, “Take out the second line and make a different ending there, don’t make that rhyme?” What’s that got to do with the price of tea in China? But that reticence comes out of shyness and arrogance. Pure arrogance. I think I should’ve studied up here in Washington with Theodore Roethke, whom I really loved. I should’ve done that. Jack Gilbert finally did that, but he did it by accident. Jack went from Pittsburgh to the West Coast because his girlfriend got a job at Mills College, in Oakland, so he settled in San Francisco, in Berkeley. There were a bunch of other poets around—a guy named Allen Ginsberg, guy named Robert Creeley, a guy named Robert Duncan. Gilbert was educated there by them. And I maybe should’ve gone. I have some regrets I didn’t do that. But, then I think, maybe I wouldn’t have had what I did have. It depends on my mood, whether I regret or don’t regret.

DODD

You mentioned poetry schools, MFA programs, in the United States. I don’t think many people consider that a major trend of education in Europe—

STERN

It’s started. They’re imitating America now. In England and Ireland, particularly. Of course the French think we’re insane to study poetry- writing in school. I see the problem as simple: the problem with MFA programs is not MFA programs, it’s that they’re located in universities.

And a university is an institution that is always conformist, conservative, rule-driven. So, if you are studying in Montana, or Alabama, or Iowa, or Arizona, or Massachusetts, and you’re in an MFA program, you’re at a university, or you’re a person who works for the university…. What in the hell’s a poet doing in a university? I got my first university job in Philadelphia, at Temple University, when I was thirty years old—I had squandered my twenties—and I decided, well, I’m going to settle down and get a real job. I remember I was exiled from the main campus to a satellite campus. It was the art school. I was the one-man English Department at the Temple University Art School, which is now called Tyler School of Fine Art, one of the leading art schools in the country. My colleagues were painters, sculptors, printmakers. My students smelled of paint and turpentine. There was a freedom there that I loved. They weren’t wearing three-piece suits. I remember one guy saying to me, a mentor of mine, he wanted me to be successful, get tenure, finish my Ph.D., go to MLA, smile at the annual picnic, and spend my life writing ridiculous little articles on Matthew Arnold. He said to me—I was wearing a pair of corduroy pants I’d bought in Italy, I loved them; they were wide-wale—“You can’t dress like that.” Now, you understand, in the 1960s, ten years later, you could dress like that. You had a different oppression then. He was quite serious. I couldn’t understand what he was saying. Finally, I learned I had to wear a suit or a jacket and a nice shirt and a briefcase. Oppression takes different forms. Some are more subtle. You might get a provost or a dean or a president of a college who’s hip. He might even say “fuck.” He might like rap music. God knows what. But let us not kid ourselves. [Sings: “Let us not kid ourselves. ”] That is a problem. And I don’t know the solution.

The problem is you get a degree. Most schools use creative writing students as cash cows. They use writers, make them study theory, or whatever you study in English Departments, take written exams, do various other compromising things they consider appropriate. There can’t be such general rules for a poet. There’s nothing wrong with learning two foreign languages, but what if you don’t want to learn any and be that kind of a poet? Or you don’t want to be a critic, or a teacher? There’s nothing wrong with being a critic or a teacher. It’s kind of nice. But what if you choose to go a different route? What it you don’t know what route you’re going to take? This is part of the problem. Maybe it’s not the major problem, maybe it’s the conformism. You know, before I went to Iowa, I kept getting phone calls. They asked, “Why aren’t you applying for this job?” And I said, “Well, for two reasons: one, you’re too far from New York; and, two, I don’t know yet if I really believe in teaching writing.” (Although I had taught it at Columbia; Sarah Lawrence) But I don’t know to this day if it’s a good thing. It’s nice to have a community. That’s the best thing about MFA programs: a community of more or less young people who exchange books and tears. That’s great! And it’s good to be exposed to someone a few years older than you who has a few books published who can tell you about his or her experiences. That can’t hurt you. That’s the general model, and in our day and age, the form it takes is the MFA. Maybe that will change.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ

In the essay, “Some Secrets,” you say you admire the relationship that can form between an older writer and a younger writer. Did you write What I Can’t Bear Losing in part to connect to younger writers?

STERN

Absolutely. Because I’m writing out of a knowledge of something that’s gone forever. You’re talking about memory, and I just want to give away what I’ve accumulated, my treasure trove. And isn’t that what you do with poetry, give away your treasure trove? I guess I also just wanted to write it all down. I’ve been going through my papers recently, and I discovered so many essays I had written and didn’t publish. Twenty or so. They’re very political.

DODD

In the introduction to Passing Through, Stanley Kunitz addresses the question of politics in poetry, when someone asks him, “Why aren’t your poems more political?” He says the very act of writing poetry is political. To what extent do you believe writing poetry is political?

STERN

He does say that. But Stanley Kunitz does not address political issues the way that Bly did in the 1960s, or Levertov, or Sam Hamill, who organized Poets Against the War, as a kind of industry. I mean, Stanley was a conscientious objector. Stanley took enormous political stances—he came from an urban environment, but he lived on a farm and raised his own food. That’s a political act. It says something about rejectionism, says something about consumerism. That’s a really strong political statement. He’s essentially a beautiful lyric poet, a tragic poet, who celebrates certain accidents of his life: loneliness, lots of grief. I guess all the major poets today celebrate grief.

DODD

Do we have a choice?

STERN

We don’t have much of a choice. Anger and grief. I think we can identify poets we can say shouldn’t be political, or aren’t so.

DODD

In the most recent edition of Poetry, Clare Cavanagh has sort of a remembrance of Milosz, and writes that when she was going through his papers shortly after he died, she found a copy of the latest Harry Potter book on his desk. What’s on your desk that might surprise us?

STERN

I don’t read light literature. A lot of my friends read murder mysteries, do crossword puzzles. I’m totally a bore. I don’t play games. I just get bored. That’s a wonderful question, just let me think. I do a lot of drawings. They’re crazy, they’re pornographic, erotic, wild drawings, drawings everywhere. I collect little objects, my house is full of objects. Pottery. Putting them in juxtaposition, creating a collection.

GREGORY

Yesterday, you said you were a “language poet.” I wonder if you could expand on that?

STERN

What I’m really saying is that I can’t stand Charles Bernstein and others of his ilk, claiming the word “language” to describe what they do. It’s so banal, absurd, and we accept it. What the fuck is going on? Language? We’re doing language now. I know that term has a special meaning that’s difficult to explain, but the reason it’s hung on so long, the reason people still talk about it, is that no one can explain it, be- cause it doesn’t really exist! I’m responding to that, saying, “I am the language poet.” But I’m also saying that I begin with language. I don’t begin with ideas, I don’t begin with images. I begin with words. I let the words transform me, carry me, literally, to places and experiences. Occasionally, I’ll actually think of an experience, relive an experience. You’ll read a poem that might describe an experience, but it starts with language. Language is everything.

DODD

Do you find techniques used by language poets, or elliptical poets, or whatever label we put on them, dishonest?

STERN

In a certain sense, all poetry is trickery. Dylan Thomas said, “In my craft or sullen art. ” It’s a craft as well as an art. It’s an artifice. It’s a weird thing. On the one hand, it’s an artifice, a very artificial construct, and on the other hand it’s that which is holy and profound and for which Stalin throws you in prison. How can it be both things at the same time? Well that’s the mystery. It can be a prayer, it can be used in a religious service. And at the same time, it can be a carefully constructed exercise in egotism, some Japanese poet, sitting crosslegged with his quill. It’s all those things at once. And there’s a reason poets should be kept out of the state, by Plato and Stalin and others: poets make people very nervous. They’re finally not just subversive, they’re frightening.

Found in Willow Springs 55

OCTOBER 28, 2004

Brian O’Grady and Adam O’Connor Rodriguez

A CONVERSATION WITH LAN SAMANTHA CHANG

Photo Credit: University of Iowa

Lan Samantha Chang was born to Chinese immigrants, who left China when the communist government came to power in 1949. Her parents moved to the small Midwestern city of Appleton, Wisconsin. Chang said that since her Midwestern youth, she’s “constantly been moving, perhaps unconsciously to replicate my parents’ experiences.” Her books—a collection of stories, Hunger (1998), and the novel Inheritance (2004)—demonstrate a desire to not only learn about and replicate her family and cultural history, but also to discover more about how culture and family relate to identity.

She holds a BA in East Asian Studies from Yale, an MPA from Harvard, and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop—an experience she said was “the best thing I ever did.” She is currently the Briggs-Copeland Lecturer at Harvard University.

Ms. Chang was interviewed over lunch at the Silver City Grill, a restaurant in the Ridpath Hotel, downtown Spokane, Washington. Before the interview, we discussed politics, moving, then her writing process.

ADAM O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ: What does an “on” writing week look like for you?

LAN SAMANTHA CHANG: I’ve been fortunate to be able to get up and write right away. So, an “on” week for me would have me waking up in the morning with very little interaction with people and working for three or four hours—until my mind gets tired. For a long time, I lived in a studio apartment, so it was basically twelve feet from my bed to my writing desk. I kind of liked that. I felt like my life was focused in a way it no longer is. When I first moved to Cambridge—because of the high price of real estate—I wrote in my office at school. I think writing at school slowed me down, because of the internet. I would turn on the computer and worry that somebody had written me an e-mail; that would take up a few minutes and divert my mind. When I’m really “on,” I write before I check my e-mail. And I’ve organized my life so the e-mail is at school and I don’t have access at home. After I started living with somebody in my studio apartment, it was hard to work at home so I worked at school. I think that’s one of the reasons the last part of my novel took so long to write.

BRIAN O’GRADY: Did you move as you were finishing Inheritance?

CHANG: I moved constantly while I was writing the novel. I wrote the first draft of the novel in California. Then I moved to Iowa City for seven months. I moved to New Jersey for about a year. One month, I lived in Wyoming. That was my official residence, because I was between apartments at the time. Then I moved from there to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a year, then I moved to Iowa City for a year, then I moved back to Cambridge and finished it there.

O’GRADY: With so much moving around, how long did it take to complete the novel?

CHANG: Seven years. And I probably lost a year to those moves. Every time I moved, I lost at least two months. One month to pack up, the other to get settled.

O’GRADY: Did that throw your writing off?

CHANG: It didn’t throw my writing off—teaching threw me off. Starting a new teaching job can disrupt my rhythm, depending on the intensity of the experience. Another thing that disrupts me is changes in my non-writing life. Getting married, that was a disruption. But other writers I know say it’s possible to make these adjustments and figure out a way to get the work done. I think the challenge for writers is figuring out how to write and live at the same time. That’s why graduate school is great. Even though you don’t realize it, you have so much time. It’s really wonderful. Later, you look back and think “Lord, I could’ve done so much more.” I could be wrong, but in general, that seems to be the case.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ: In the novel, Inheritance, people move a lot, too. Do you think that’s related to your real life?

CHANG: I think that because of the material I covered in the novel, moving was a structural challenge I had to overcome as I wrote. My characters were born in the eastern coastal area of China, then they moved to in- land China, then to the eastern part again but to a different city, then Taiwan, then two different parts of the United States. I think that was a typical pattern for a person born of that era and of that particular class or group. There’s a whole group of immigrants to the United States who left China in the late 1940s or even 1949, when the communists came to power, moved to Taiwan, then came to the United States for their educations. And they all know each other; it seems like they do anyway. Whenever I run into their children, it always turns out they had some- thing in common with my parents. It was a little diaspora. Their lives were highly mobile. My mother, for example, moved 26 times before she was 18. After that, she moved to the United States, met my father and settled in Wisconsin.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ: Are they still there?

CHANG: They’re still there. I think that’s because my mother needs to feel like she belongs to a place. Although she’s never said so in so many words, I think their moving around so much when they were young has made them appreciate being in one place, whereas I grew up in Wisconsin, was born and raised in Wisconsin, went to high school in Wisconsin. And since then, I’ve constantly been moving, perhaps unconsciously to replicate my parents’ experiences. But I think it’s more that I’ve followed my writing opportunities, and I haven’t had any control—but no, that’s not true: it’s not that I haven’t had control; it’s that I’ve chosen to fol- low the opportunities with nothing to tie me down. Until now. Now I’m married. Now I work in Cambridge. We’ve moved to Somerville, bought a place to live. And we still don’t feel tied down. We feel like we could move. We feel like we could still be free.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ: Did Inheritance mirror your own family’s history?

CHANG: It’s not a family history. In fact, there’s almost nothing in the book that happened to my family. But my father’s brother was actually a communist. And my father did find out about it sort of accidentally. Not in the same way Li Ang discovers his brother’s a communist. What happened to my father was, he and his brother spent some time traveling when they were young, for college, because the Japanese had encroached upon the north and had occupied Beijing, where they were from. People left the occupied territories in groups, and one of the groups was an educational movement. The universities tried to move to southwestern China, where the new capital was, and form their own interim, wartime university. My father was part of that university. So he left home pretty early on. But his path led him away from his brother, to Taiwan. My father wasn’t a communist but he wasn’t a nationalist, either. He was apolitical, so he left China because he thought there would be upheaval and trouble when the communists took over. There was a period from 1949 until the 1980s when China was basically out of reach to the average person who didn’t live there. My father had no news of his family at all. Then when Mao died, the country began to slowly open up. My father found news of his family and went to visit them, at which point he learned his brother had died. And he also came to understand that his brother had been a very active communist party member. He returned to China in the early 1980s, and when he was there, while looking at some publication, he saw a list of high-level communist officials and saw the name of a guy he knew growing up, his brother’s best friend. And he realized that somehow the two of them had become communists together. This was so interesting to me—because I knew so little about my father’s family—that it worked into my mind. I was writing about a country divided by politics and war, and it seemed that writing a book about a divided family would be an accurate view. I wanted to write about the intersection between something very large and a very intimate story, so that was one of the ways I was able to access such an intersection.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ: While Inheritance might not be a “political” novel, it has a definite interest in politics in so many ways—family, sexual politics—but also the politics of immigration. How did the political changes in China affect the families and eventually push them to America?

CHANG: That is something that has happened as long as immigrants have been coming to the United States. Pressure—often political—in their home country pushes a people out in search of a better life, and, as I said, I think my parents belonged to a certain wave generated by civil war, the fall of nationalism, and the rise of communism. That’s interesting to me. I think about all immigrant writers, especially the wave of Jewish writers after World War II…

O’GRADY: I wanted to ask you about that. You mentioned in an interview that you had a real interest in second generation Jewish immigrants.

CHANG: When I was first learning to write, I was deeply influenced by a Bernard Malamud story called “The Magic Barrel.” I don’t know why the story stuck with me as much as it did, except that there’s a deep sense of longing there. In the story, Leo Finkle’s parents are both dead, and there’s a sense that, while he’s living alone, he needs to move on, and yet he doesn’t know how to find somebody with whom to do that. I think that sort of isolation, cultural isolation, affected me, as did the character Pinye Salzman, a sad marriage broker who smells like fish and has an unpleasant home life, who is trying to work miracles for this young man and eventually does. The fairy tale quality of the story seems to have combined the contemporary life of New York at the time with a sense of long ago and far away. It speaks of the idea of an “old country.” The emotional resonance of post World War II Jewish writers really speaks to me. Phillip Roth’s first book was really important to me while I was learning to write as well. I read an introduction he wrote to an anniversary edition of Goodbye, Columbus. In the introduction, he said that he was completely taken with the idea of departure, obsessed with the idea of leaving, at the time. And really, the book is about leaving your culture and holding on to your culture and I think that really struck me at different points of my life. Particularly because in studying writing, in becoming a writer, I was essentially leaving behind some of the hopes of my parents.

O’GRADY: You’ve talked a little about the assimilation issue and how that ties in with your interest in Jewish writers after World War II. How does that play out in your stories?

CHANG: I think assimilation is a central issue only in one of my stories, one called “The Unforgetting.” It’s about a Chinese family that moves to the Midwest and tries to leave their old life, but as time goes on, they find that they can’t forget the old life. Meanwhile, their son, who was raised American, does what Americans do: leaves home. I think that captured some of my feelings about assimilation—that it’s necessary to a certain extent, but at the same time, it’s a tremendous loss. I mean, it can be a particular loss in the relationship between parents and children and different generations of immigrants.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ: Related to that, I read that you visited China for the first time as an adult. Did you feel more like an American visiting a foreign country, or more of a “homecoming” feeling?

CHANG: I felt both like an American and a person coming home. We entered China by flying into Hong Kong, then we flew into Guilin, which is in central southern China. It’s a region famed for its scenery, and I recognized the oddly-shaped mountains from beautiful pictures my parents had hung in our living room. But I could tell the people there saw me as a foreigner, since I was clearly raised somewhere else—I didn’t speak the local dialect, and my Chinese is a little awkward. So I felt odd. But as we went further north, closer to where my father was from, I felt more and more at home. China’s a huge country, and the people everywhere are different. People up north are taller—you could say generally they tend to be taller and look more like me. As we got closer to where my father was from, I felt that I was encountering some familiar element I couldn’t explain, partly because the people started to look more like me and the dialect became more familiar, sounded more like my father’s dialect. Actually, he doesn’t speak a dialect, he speaks Mandarin with a Beijing accent. And as we went toward Beijing and then Xi’an, I felt as if I really was discovering where my family came from. I then met my father’s family and there were a lot of similarities, even though we were essentially strangers. I think in that way, it was a homecoming. And I remember going to Shanghai, where my mother’s from, and seeing all the buildings and places I had read about or she had told me about, so I had the feeling I was going someplace familiar.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ: Do you think that homecoming feeling inspired what Xiao Hong felt in Inheritance when she returned to China to visit her aunt?

CHANG: I do. And it’s also a feeling that many people have told me about.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ: Were any of the place descriptions of China based on what you saw when you were there?

CHANG: Almost all. The description of Chongqing, the description of the landscape around there, the Yangtze River, the description of West Lake, were things I had seen. I will say, though, there were certain descriptions I had to completely invent. For example, I was in a bomb shelter when I was in Chongqing. I went to a couple of them, but I was never in one when it was being bombed at night.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ: That would’ve been hard to simulate.

CHANG: Right, exactly.

O’GRADY: The gambling in the book—did you do research?

CHANG: Well, I went to Las Vegas and I played Paigao.

O’GRADY: They have that in Vegas?

CHANG: Yeah, and it’s actually all over in California, too. I learned a lot about it when I was living in California. And I asked my mother about it. She had played it as a child on New Year’s. It’s sort of a child’s game, but it can be quite devastating. Basically the host either wins or loses big, and it’s entirely up to chance; there’s no skill involved. Not like poker, where there’s some skill involved. Paigao isn’t like that.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ: You say your mother knew how to play, but in Inheritance, only the men get to play.

CHANG: Well, the men were the ones who got to leave home and start gambling, although women gambled all the time, too. I mean, my grandmother was a huge Mahjong player; she played constantly. According to my mother, they would start in the morning and play until early morning, go to sleep, then get up and start playing again. I don’t understand what the pleasure was. I’m not interested in games. But my father is interested in games, and my parents play Mahjong now that they’re retired.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ: So you didn’t have much fun in Vegas?

CHANG: Not really. I’m not a gambler by nature. It seemed to me that after I’d been writing the book for a while, I realized one of the interesting aspects of the book was that there was an element of extreme chance that was represented by the game, and an element of extreme control, which was Junan, the main character. She was obsessed with trying to control the outcome, control the outcome to the point where she made the biggest mistake of her life—

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ: She took it to her death, really. That was the one sad thing I felt about the ending. I felt that a lot of things in the book were resolved happily, though bittersweet. But Junan stuck to her guns until the end.

CHANG: She really did. See, I like her for that. I mean, I was interested in a certain kind of characterization, character development different from the psychological model that says someone undergoes a transformation, or that we, as readers, must understand more deeply the psychological reasons for the characters’ behaviors. And I feel that in my book, no one really undergoes a psychological transformation. Well, several of the characters do not undergo psychological transformations. Particularly Junan. She is the same; however, we see her in so many settings that we learn more about the degree and the nature of her obsessions. That is a different kind of character development.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ: But I think as a reader, I rooted for Yinan to reconcile with Junan. Her not achieving reconciliation set a different tone for the end of the book.

CHANG: I like the idea of acknowledging that there are things that are not settled by our lives, and there are questions that can’t really be resolved. That feels more real to me than the idea that everything can be happily resolved. I don’t know, because I haven’t died yet. I don’t know what that’s like and it’ll be too late by then.

O’GRADY: How has your degree in Asian Studies helped your writing? Do you think it’s important for a writer to have knowledge of an outside discipline?

CHANG: I have mixed feelings about how to answer this question. I teach undergraduates, many of them very serious writers, and they want to know if they should major in English. I always tell them they don’t have to. At the same time, if I could go back and do it all over again, I would take a lot more English courses than I did in college. Of course, when I was in college, I had no idea I was going to become a writer, and I was taking English classes as electives that I worked in secretly and enjoyed. It’s not that I didn’t take them seriously, but I didn’t take seriously the idea that I should study English. And when I went to my MFA program, I realized there were all these books I hadn’t read. I feel like I’ve been catching up ever since. So that’s one side of the story. On the other hand, I don’t think I could’ve written Inheritance if I hadn’t majored in East Asian Studies. I learned so much about China in college. And I learned the language, which was very important to me in writing the book. I encourage my students to do as many different things as they can, because once they get writing, it’s hard to get out to do too many different things.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ: Many writers have mixed feelings about MFA programs, but coming from an MFA program yourself, what do you think are the benefits and disadvantages to attending one?

CHANG: I don’t have mixed feelings about MFA programs. I think going to get my MFA at Iowa was the best thing I ever did. I had not studied writing in college. Reading John Gardner’s book, The Art of Fiction, a number of times, cover to cover, was the extent of my writing education, aside from a few community courses. So, when I went to Iowa, I felt supported and sustained by the mere fact that I was surrounded by people solely interested in writing. They had given up whatever they were doing, and in many cases traveled thousands of miles, to go to this inland, small-town setting in which writing was taken extremely seriously and there was a long heritage of writing. I think MFA programs can provide shelter and sustenance for people at the right point in their lives. I think sometimes people go to MFA programs too early, before they have time off. And in those cases, an MFA program is like an ex- tension of their college educations. I don’t think an MFA program can be appreciated by everybody until they’ve had a chance to leave school and try to write on their own, which is always a real struggle. So it was wonderful—I learned an enormous amount about craft. I met people who are still my readers. I had two really, really good years.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ: I saw that your books have several Iowa professors in the acknowledgements.

CHANG: They matter to me. They still matter to me. When I was at Iowa, each person I studied with taught me something. But I think many people who go through MFA programs are disappointed for one reason or another, often because of expectations. They go to the program expecting to meet a mentor who will then help them. That was not my experience. What I found instead was that I met a peer group that became very sustaining to my life as a writer. A poet who I deeply admire told me that it’s more important for a young writer to see and watch an established writer than for an established writer to see and watch a young writer. In other words, people want established writers to notice them because they think it might be some kind of touch from a world they can then enter. It’s actually more important that they watch that person and see how they conduct themselves, the things that they do and don’t do, what they do that you wouldn’t do. I think that’s one thing the MFA program provides. It provides an opportunity for writers in training or aspiring writers to watch and learn from established writers. The learning is not always direct, it’s not always someone taking you by the hand; it’s often things that you glean. And it’s not necessarily what the established writer wants you to glean. I remember going with a professor to a reading at a place the name of which I won’t mention, to watch a visiting person of high eminence give a reading, and having the professor explain to me that “this is how not to give a reading.”

O’GRADY: A couple stories in Hunger have bits of different styles. “San,” for example, has a sort of detective story in it, where she’s picking up clues about her dad’s life. In “Pipa’s Story,” she’s getting stories from the outside world, and there are fairy tale elements to the story. Do you try to try to mix forms?

CHANG: I do try to mix forms. I’m very interested in the tale. The early drafts of Inheritance had huge tales in them. I had a whole generation of characters that aren’t in it anymore. There was this whole big scene in a gambling house, where this big tale’s being told about the evolution of the kiss in lovemaking. This got cut, because, as many readers pointed out to me, it was totally irrelevant to the novel. But it’s always been a form that interests me. In terms of the detective story, I picked up as a child that we are born into time after our parents, and the only way we can find out about them, if they don’t tell us, is by spying on them. And I think that will constantly appear in my work. I don’t see that going away because it’s one of the things that most troubles me, the fact that we’re born forward in time and we can’t go back and revisit. That really bothers me. I think “Pipa’s Story” has some elements of the gothic, which I didn’t understand when I wrote it, with the big house and the conflict at its heart and the magical qualities. There are also elements of the tale in that story. I was experimenting, somewhat consciously—just stretching my wings and trying to incorporate different elements of stories I’d heard. In a way, Inheritance takes a lot of its narrative thrust and flow from a “low” genre—the made-for-video or made-for-TV movies that a lot of Asian people watch these days. They’re often historical, filled with drama, and full of scenes where someone is begging or pleading to somebody for something and they don’t get it. You know, the ones with enormous turns of plot, huge, dramatic incidents. I took some of that and consciously put it into Inheritance; the way the action is handled is a kind of tribute to popular culture.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ: There is a strong point of view shift in the middle of Inheritance, when you go from a third-person omniscient to a first-person narrator in Xiao Hong. How do you think zooming in on Hong’s first person narrative intensifies the effect of her character? Or more broadly, why did you do that?

CHANG: Finding the point of view was one of the hardest things I had to do while writing Inheritance. I knew my material before I knew my narrator, I knew what story I wanted to tell before I knew the narrator, and it took me a long time to understand who would be the best narrator for the story. I never understood, when I was reading the Janet Burroway textbook Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft, why she had two whole chapters on point of view, because it seemed pretty straightforward. People are always able to say, “Oh—here’s a mistake in point of view,” but I realized as I tackled the novel that point of view is more complex and slippery than I understood it to be when I was starting out as a writer. In the novel form—as in the short story, but especially in the novel—point of view is a crucial choice. The difference between writing a novel and a short story is that in a novel, you have to live with your choice for 300 pages. I look at a novel like The Great Gatsby and I understand why Fitzgerald chose the first person and why he chose Nick Carraway as his narrator. But I can also see how that choice, to some extent, dictated so much about the book’s form in many of its complicated places, like where Nick tries to relate stories of things he could not possibly have seen. And I find it interesting that even a brilliant book like The Great Gatsby can have places where it is hamstrung by its point of view. I knew I had to choose a narrator, and that the narrator didn’t have to be a person in the story. But I also knew I had to somehow knit many years together. It was difficult to rely on repetition as a means of knitting the story together, because the story moved from place to place. There were no physical, geographical locations I could use to anchor the story. Look at a third-person epic, such as 100 Years of Solitude: you’ll notice that it takes place in the house, and indeed, García Marquez’s working title for the book was The House, so that every time he returns to the house, you get a sense of continuity and control of the narrative. You can’t do that if you’re constantly moving from one place to another. I decided to rely on a person to be the unifying force in the book. Then I had to decide who it would be, and I had the choice of using the main character, Junan, or someone of her generation. Or someone of her daughter’s generation. Or someone of the youngest generation, which is what I tried to do first because I had been given an admonition by an editor—not my editor—that I should make someone from America the main character or the book wouldn’t sell. Of course, I didn’t go with that editor, but it stuck with me; I wanted to create an American voice, but I didn’t in the end, because I realized the story encompasses two countries, and that the person who could best tell the story was somebody who had lived in both countries and understood the bridge. Hong was that bridge. But I had to start the book before she was born. So I used the idea of the family story to make it possible to create an opening to the book that didn’t include her.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ: It didn’t feel like an enormous shift in voice, and that’s probably because it was the family story, and she could easily have been recounting it.

CHANG: That’s right. And I wanted to create that sense of a tale. I think the tone of the book was dictated by the need to fit the third-person and the first-person parts together. And as a result, I learned while I was writing the book how much choices of material and narrator—all that stuff we learn in beginning fiction classes—have such a huge impact on what kind of object the book turns out to be, what tone it has. I don’t know if this is the kind of book I would’ve written by choice, but it turned out to be like this because of what I chose to write about. That’s how I feel about it.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ: What do you mean, “by choice”?

CHANG: Well, I mean, it comes across as an epic. Although really I don’t know because I can’t read it. But I know that I’m perfectly capable of writing a completely different kind of book. But not with this type of material. If that makes any sense. I feel like the material in this book is very different from that in Hunger; Inheritance has a different tone than Hunger, it is an entirely different kind of object than Hunger was. I don’t have a problem with it, but I’m aware that part of it has to do with what I was trying to write about, the choices I made.

O’GRADY: Are you working on anything new?

CHANG: Last spring I wrote a 100-page manuscript about some poets, but I realized I haven’t written poetry as an adult, and I felt I should include some poetry and I couldn’t, so I stopped. I’m still thinking about it; I was actually writing about an MFA program, but I thought, “That’s crazy, too; who would want to read about one of those?” But I felt it would be best to put that aside for a while and try going back to it later, since I’m still interested. Since then, I’ve been dealing with changes in my non-writing life: I got married, we bought a place, and we moved into it. That took up a few months. Now I’m working on a lot of the projects I took on after the novel, the ones I took on because I felt my life would be empty without it. I feel that one of them is particularly interesting. It’s a landscape dictionary, edited by Barry Lopez, that will be published in a year or so. In the landscape dictionary, forty writers describe 800 American landscape terms.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ: What words do you describe?

CHANG: Some of them are quite technical, such as “debris cone.” I’m also doing basic words, such as “harbor” and “Back Bay.” New England ocean terms, it seems to me; they must’ve given them to me because I live in New England. And I got a couple of desert terms, such as “slick rock,” local to Moab and that area of Utah. And some fun terms like “lover’s leap.” There are 52 places in the United States named “lover’s leap,” according to the U.S. Geological Survey, and they all have things in common. One of the interesting things about writing for the dictionary is that I had a struggle—I had to break through my resistance to it—but the struggle was trying to adopt an authoritarian third-person point of view about a subject outside of myself. I had never done that before.

O’GRADY: How long are the entries?

CHANG” They’re about 150 words. And they want us to do them in a “writerly” way. It’s a lot of fun, and I think I’m learning something, but I’m not sure what. That’s the way it is always, though.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ: How would you like to see your career go? How might you like to be remembered as a writer?

[A long pause.]

CHANG: I think what writers really want is to be read. If people continue to read my work, that would be my greatest wish fulfilled. [Another pause.] I’m thinking about this. It’s a really interesting question. [An- other pause.] But don’t people all say the same thing? Don’t they say “I want to be remembered as an important writer of the 21st century” or something like that?

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ: Something like that. But I think it’s especially interesting to ask because you’re young; you’ve got a lot of books left in you.

CHANG: We’ll see. I’d like my books to continue to develop in depth and substance. Obviously. I’d also like to write more short stories and novellas. I love different lengths and forms. But I think what I want most is for people to continue to read my work.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ: So it’s a communication itch with you?

CHANG: I don’t know if I’d put it that way exactly, but I think most writers want to be read.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ: You say “read,” not “liked” or “respected.” Is there a distinction for you?

CHANG: No. No distinction. I just want to be read. I don’t have very big ambitions at the moment. Well, I’d like to be able to keep going. It’s very hard for people to keep going. People say it gets harder and harder as they continue on. But I’d love to keep going. I always had the idea of improving as a writer over a long period. That was always my goal. I never wanted to be a “flash in the pan” or a “one hit wonder” or a prodigy because it can set up disappointment. I always want to continue learning.

Found in Willow Springs 54

February 13, 2004

Lisa Frand and John Baker

A CONVERSATION WITH MELANIE RAE THON

Photo Credit: University of Utah English

Melanie Rae Thon is the author of two collections of short stories and three novels, including her most recent work, Sweet Hearts, which is set in the forest and plains of Montana. She has had other work published in Best American Short Stories, The Paris Review and Story. She won the Whiting Award in 1997 and an NEA grant in 1992. Originally from Kalispell Montana, she received her BA from University of Michigan and her MA from Boston University. She has taught at Harvard University, Emerson College, Ohio State University and at a women’s prison. Ms. Thon currently lives in Salt Lake City, where she teaches at the University of Utah. In February, 2004, she spoke with us at the Ridpath Hotel in Spokane, Washington. Our discussion seemed to weave in and out of the common threads that bind writing and the struggle of humanity, including exploration, risk-taking and redemption. Throughout our conversation, a fire burned in the large fireplace before us in the hotel lobby, complimenting Ms. Thon’s quiet and soothing voice.

Lisa Frank: Your characters are all very well crafted and complex, and are all very different from one another, with various backgrounds. How do you go about creating characters for your stories?

Melanie Rae Thon: I usually have some questions that guide me. Like with the story “First, Body,” I had been to a lecture on autopsy and there was a man there who looked Vietnam-vet age. He was an extremely large man and he had an obviously very serious knee injury and it came out in conversation that he actually injured his knee in the hospital. So, I thought, Wow, there’s a story there! He never said he was a Vietnam vet, he just kind of had that ragged, torn up look and he was about the right age, so I made chose connections and thought, Okay, Vietnam vet comes back from Vietnam intact, works at the hospital and messes up his knee. How would that happen? And so it was the explosion of the question in my mind that set me on the course of trying to discover Sid Elliott and his story. But when I work on a short story, I often do two hundred pages of exploration; in fact, in the story, “Little White Sister,” I did fifty pages of exploration in the voice of the woman who dies and who only speaks seventeen lines in the story. So, I did fifty pages of trying to figure out who she was. But I couldn’t have found the seventeen right lines that she speaks if I didn’t know her well, if I didn’t know her background. It [the exploration] brings me close to the people-the characters-and it helps me see them physically and spiritually, and it helps me understand their experiences. So, I have this massive list of questions in terms of exploration. I think now, because I’m getting older, I actually write less. But I think more.

John Baker: It sounds like a lot of work, but you also talk about the joy that comes in the act of writing. Is that also a big part of it?

Thon: It’s a huge part of it. I’m a victim—as much as any other writer—of wanting to have a product, of wanting to have a beautiful story to send out to the world and have people read it. I get into that, but then underneath it all, there is still the thrill of knowing your characters, of discovering their worlds, of becoming more familiar and less afraid. A good example of that is in Sweet Hearts, with the character of Flint, who is an outlaw. I have been interested in juvenile problems for a long time and I have visited juvenile detention centers, but I had never been to an adult prison, so I had to go to the scare prison and do research for that. The one, huge obstacle in my teaching career at that point was that I had always wanted to teach in a prison, but I was too afraid. I thought they’ll look at me and think privileged professor, Miss Do-A­-Good-Deed or something. Then, while doing a tour of tribal colleges a couple of years ago after working on that novel for years, I visited the women’s correctional facility, where I taught a class. Throughout that experience, I was so completely comfortable. I walked into the room, and unlike a traditional classroom, all the women walked straight up to me as they came in and shook my hand and introduced themselves. We sat at these little tables and it was just like a group of women getting together and talking or playing cards. It was very intimate and I felt safe and comfortable, because I thought, You know, I’m not completely ignorant. I don’t know what it’s like to really have to live in prison, but I’m not completely naïve and small minded, and so I thought that it’s okay for me to be there. And that’s what’s real, this deep, internal satisfaction of saying, I’m not so limited, I’m not so naïve. I can go into any place and have that peace of mind.

Baker: A lot of times we think too much about how our work is going to be perceived, which can be a roadblock for a writer. How important is it for a writer to write unpretentiously, or rather truthfully?

Thon: Writers are both incredibly arrogant and incredibly insecure, si­multaneously, and those two things are so close, really. They’re set up as opposites, but really they slide in and out of each other completely. But as for the pretension—I think chat the way I get around that emo­tionally and spiritually is to do those hundreds of pages of exploration, to spend years doing my research so that I’m not just taking a pose, I’m not just doing something artistic, I’m not doing something in terms of craft, but I’m really trying to understand. And that’s not a bad thing-to try to understand-and I think that when we think, Oh, I’m doing this because I want praise, I’m doing this because I want money, I’m doing this because I want to be famous, all of that, you know, is ridiculous. But if you’re doing it because you want to understand something that you don’t understand, that’s a good thing to pursue and the writing that comes out of it-whether you get there or not, I mean you try to get there, but you don’t know that you will get there—but I think if you do it honestly and you do the explorations and you do the research, you’re going to be changed by that. And you’re going to come back to your life in a new place, and that’s a good thing.

Frank: In Sweet Hearts, the narrator is a deaf-mute and the protagonists’ aunt, which is an extremely interesting choice in many ways. What makes a character a good narrator?

Thon: I didn’t have Marie as the narrator until after I had been working on the novel for about three and a half years. I was lost, actually, in terms of who was telling the story. I had all these pieces from different kinds of perspectives and I hadn’t pulled it all together. It was terrible. I could’ve presented it that way, I suppose. It’s post-modern, everybody. It’s cool you figure it out! [Laughter breaks out.] But I really feel passionately, you know, about helping my reader understand my world. It’s really very old-fashioned, I know [ laughter]. And then I went to Montana to live alone and do research right in the area [where the story is set]. I wanted to live on the lake in the area where the motel was and it was during that time—you know, I was alone all the time, I was silent all the time, and the sounds that I heard were really minimal, they were limited to natural sounds mostly, which was glorious, except for by choice when I would go out into the intrusive world—that I started to hear the voice of someone who couldn’t hear, and that was fascinating to me. She’d been a character in the novel, but she wasn’t the speaker. And then there was a day when I was walking along the river and she started speaking to me fiercely about her father and she had a very passionate voice. And I thought, There it is. There’s where the heart in the story is.

Baker: How important is it for a writer to be or to become uncluttered and uninhibited and unshaped by the mainstream culture? Do you think it’s important to have a view or an understanding of the culture and still try to become as uncluttered and uninhibited as we can as writers?

Thon: I like moving between the two. I have many stories that have urban settings and I am painfully aware of the culture and our current dilemmas and I just really finally have to withdraw to really do the real writing. But it’s almost impossible to live that way and I’m not sure that it would be good ultimately. I mean, I really like moving between the polarities and being exposed and then having my space.

Frank: One thing I’ve really appreciated in your writing—in First, Bodies, as well as in Sweet Hearts—is your willingness to experiment and take risks. But with that also comes the willingness to fail, which I feel is underrated and can also be a good thing, because you ultimately learn from your mistakes. Can you talk about your willingness to take risks?

Thon: I think every story is a failure, that our vision is like way up there [holding her hand high above her head] and that through our revisions, we kind of go like that [starting with her hand down at her head, she slowly moves it up, but stops when she gets only half-way extended] until we only get to here and then we go, I’m not going to get any further with this piece. There’s no way I can get to the vision of it, which is always far beyond what you can render. But you’ve learned something on the way and you go back into new material from a different perspec­tive, and so from my viewpoint, everything’s a failure. So, why not take the risk? [laughter] But it’s the same idea as the exploration, that if you’re going to learn something, if you’re going to hope to become more compassionate through your work, through your exploration, then you have to take risks. And I also really believe—and you know, scientists say this—that we only tap into, at most, about a tenth of our imagina­tions and that’s what I see with my students all the time. When they’re trying to make things fit and make things work and to tell a story and do it the straight way, their minds just clamp down. And as soon as they have an exploration to do, as soon as you say, “Don’t worry about the product, just go,” suddenly their minds are on fire, you know, and they’re going in twenty-five different directions at once and then you’ve got two hundred pages and somehow you have to make sense of it. That’s kind of a drag, you know [laughter] and it’s hard to figure that out, but I think better to have the two hundred pages and never make the story than to do twenty pages that are precise and perfect and well crafted and didn’t get you anywhere.

Frank: If you have a piece that isn’t working, how do you know whether to keep working on it or to pitch it?

Thon: There were a few stories along the way that I pitched, and certainly very early in my writing, everything got pitched eventually. But now what I discovered is that if I stay with it long enough, it morphs until it becomes a story that is okay, one of those okay-failures. If it’s not working—first of all, that language…I always tell my students, “There is no ‘This is working, this is not working,”‘ which I just find annihilat­ing—but if l reach a point where I think, I can’t make this story make sense for myself, then I think, there’s something in here that’s the heart of it that I can take out and I can use that as the core to transform it into something else. So, eventually, if I stay with it long enough, it becomes a story I want to tell.

Frank: That’s something I need to learn a little bit, so I appreciate that [laughter].

Thon: But I think what I said about pitching stories early on…what I always tell people is that nothing that I wrote in graduate school be­ came part of my published work, with the exception of a story that I actually started as an undergrad that was in completely different forms as an undergrad, in grad school, and then finally in the published ver­sion, which ended up as a totally different story. But nothing that I generated in graduate school became part of my published work. All of that was learning.

Baker: I’m glad to hear that, actually [laughter].

Thon: Many people do publish a book right out of graduate school, their thesis becomes their first book. I know a few people like that and I think, Well, bless your hearts, lucky you [laughter].

Baker: You must’ve encountered some self-doubts, like What am I doing writing? But when did you know that writing was your calling, your vocation?

Thon: In my first semester in college, when people asked me what I was going to do, I said, “I am a writer, which was incredibly silly and naïve on my part [laughter]. I had no idea what that meant. I had written very, very little, just bad adolescent poetry and it was just totally silly. But was true for me—and what has always been true—is that I could not live, I literally could not live, if I didn’t do it. I couldn’t survive in the world. The world was too tumultuous, too confusing. My sorrow was too deep for me—and that’s the adolescent poetry still seeping out [laughter] to survive. So, I didn’t ever think of it as a choice and I think that a blessing, really. One of my friends said he had a choice, he could either be a thief or a writer [laughter]. And for me it was like, I could either be a waitress or a writer and I was a waitress for thirteen years. It’s made my mom crazy as you might imagine, but I just never thought I’d do something else, you know, and I didn’t publish for a long, long time. I just never thought that was an obstacle. I think I was really lucky that I grew up in a different time period. People now—your age—are under a lot more pressure to make money, to be successful, to get your careers on the road. I was a waitress for five years straight after graduate school and never during that time did I think I was making a mistake. I thought, I’m becoming a better writer, you know, I’m not publishing, but I’m becoming a better writer. I just kept doing my work.

Frank: The daily experiences also seem to help with writing. All the bor­ing, mundane stuff and interactions with different people.

Thon: Yeah, everything goes in there.

Frank: Yeah, even all those lost years, as I like to call them [laughter].

Thon: You can learn to love anywhere, you know, and ultimately it’s about who do we love and who are we trying to love and you don’t have to be in some prestigious job to figure that out.

Baker: I’ve heard writers say that our work as writers and artists really should be not to glorify the human spirit, but to uplift it, and from reading your work, I would guess you would say the same thing, but I’d like to hear what you have to say about that.

Thon: I would be hesitant to say that artists and writers should do anything. People have different views on making art. But I think for myself, what I’m always trying to do in my work—for myself—is to learn to love more intensely, to learn to be more compassionate toward people of whom I’m afraid and people with whom I’m intimate. And for me, that happens in my writing, that’s how I get there. The product, the writing itself, is the byproduct. The quest for me is to make my life bigger, so I hope that when readers read my work, they feel that it opens them to feel more compassion and less fear, and the possibility of loving more people or loving the people whom they love with greater depth, greater openness. Many people say my work is “dark” and every time they say it, I can feel the dagger. And I think, Oh, don’t you see the joy? Don’t you see that these people-no matter what their circumstances-they’re trying to love, they’re trying to stay alive through their love however difficult their lives are, however much they’ve suffered. All of my people are trying to love, and people who say my work is “dark” never buy that argument. But that’s what I hope that my work does. Once again, with thinking of the work as a byproduct, I think that for me, the work that I do helps me go into the classroom, helps me be with my family, helps me go into the prison. So, the work is at least doing the work on me-slowly, slowly, slowly, with many falls backward [laughter].

Frank: This is in connection with what you just said. Before I actually ask the question, I’m going to first apologize for using the word “dark,” [laughter] although I think you’ll forgive me when you hear the rest of the question. Sweet Hearts is a really dark story, but all the charac­ters—no matter how bad their sins—seem to have a strong desire for redemption, a desire which leads to hope, which in turn lends itself to a more hopeful reading of the ending, which I ultimately find to be more interesting. Can you talk about redemption and its place in humanity and in your characters?

Thon: I think that if we’re seeking redemption truthfully, not some sort of I’m going to make amends and then everything’s going to be alright, but if we’re seeking redemption in the sense of repentance, and repentance meaning literally turning, and that turning isn’t one turn of conversion, like Okay, now I’m going to be a good person, but the constant turning into new situations, and facing new situations with love and openness and trust and to behave decently toward other human beings and other living creatures, as soon as we honestly begin to seek redemption, we are redeemed. It’s just like as soon as we seek God, we have already found God, whether or not we understand that, whether or not we recognize that. As soon as we begin to turn into that place, the process has already begun and hope is eternal in that motion as long as we keep remind­ing ourselves that it’s not okay to feel like, Okay, I’m safe, I made it. I experience this like a hundred times a day, that feeling of relief, when understanding washes over me, and that feeling of despair, when I feel my heart close toward someone, where I start to judge someone or I start to need something from a friend and then am disappointed by them. That kind of closure keeps me from seeing. So, it’s constant and a constant reminder to keep turning and turning and turning.

Found in Willow Springs 53

October 24, 2003

Brian O’Grady and Rob Sumner

A CONVERSATION WITH RICK BASS

Photo Credit: The Elliot Bay Book Company

RICK BASS IS THE AUTHOR OF EIGHTEEN BOOKS of fiction and nonfiction, including the novel Where The Sea Used To Be, and editor of the anthology The Roadless Yaak. Bass lives with his family in northwest Montana’s million-acre Yaak Valley, where there is still not a single acre of designated wilderness. In October 2003, Rick Bass talked with Brian O’Grady and Rob Sumner at the home of the writer John Keeble, a ranch located southwest of Spokane, Washington. During the conversation they sat on the rear porch, still under construction, and enjoyed a meal of freshly slaughtered pork as the sun settled into the horizon beyond the hills of pine. We are eating bowls of chili.

BRIAN O’GRADY

Before you started writing, what effect did a compelling story have on you?

BASS

Before I started writing, I read a lot, as a child, but certainly not as much as my children read, it’s just what I thought of as a lot. And I’ve met other people along the way who really do read a lot, what I’ve thought was a lot was more just a hobby. I’m in awe and some envy of truly serious readers. That’s a long answer to say I probably didn’t read as much as I thought I did. I loved it and I read everything I could but there’s people who don’t go to sleep because they love reading, I mean they read twenty-four hours a day. In retrospect I realize I’m not one of those kind of people and certainly now that I’ve become a writer I don’t have the luxury or indulgence of becoming that kind of person when paradoxically I most need to be.

A single story can have a huge influence on a writer, or a reader, or any person, and for me that story was Legends of the Fall, the novella by Jim Harrison that really made me want to write fiction. I loved to read fiction, I loved to read nonfiction before that point, but reading that story made me want to try and write it. I don’t why. I mean I know why I like that story, why I love that story, but I just remember having that impression of how big—the cliché about that story is epic, which is an overused word, but I just remember how big the emotions and content, scale, voice, everything about that story was larger and fuller than what I had read previously. And not to take away anything from Legends of the Fall, I’m not saying it’s the only book that way. It could have been other stories in the world but I had not to that point read them. I believe there’s a story like that for every reader. I think eventually, sooner or later, you encounter them. If they make you want to be a writer or not, who knows? There are too many variables there, but for me it did make me want to be a fiction writer.

O’GRADY

Do you aim for that range of emotion?

BASS

No. I wish it were that simple, that I could have a guidepost, or model, or scale against which to measure each work, if that’s what you’re asking, but I don’t aim for anything other than just to do the best I can. And that almost sounds defensive, but it’s liberating is what it is. And conversely or paradoxically it’s not so liberating, because that’s pretty tough to ask of yourself to do the best you can every time. I mean you can only do the best you can one time, and then that’s your best. The only thing I aim for is to do the best I can given any emotion, any range of emotions, any character, any range of characters, any setting. Whatever story or essay I find myself in I just try to do my best, which is usually task enough. That can be taken the wrong way when I say that’s task enough. I don’t mean that, “Oh I’m so wonderful that it’s hard to match my best,” I mean it’s so easy to be lazy, I think it’s hard enough for everybody to do their best every time they go out(,) or even try to have the courage to attempt their best.

Jonathan Johnson comes out with a plate of ham, baked beans, and salad for each of us. His three-year-old daughter, Anya, and John Keeble’s dog, Ricky, come out with him.
Jonathan: I don’t think we’re going to have room for all of them here.
Rick: This is incredible. This is so good.
Jonathan: I’m sorry the silverware has to be inside the toilet paper.
Anya stays outside with us for several minutes while her dad brings out the rest of the food. Rick gives Ricky some pets.
Brian: You were right about getting out here.
Rick: Good.

O’GRADY

Do you still get the same impact that you did before your writing, when you read fiction today?

BASS

More so. Much more so.

Rick smiles.
Rick: That dog.
Jonathan: I’ll bring Ricky inside. Come on, Ricky. Come on!
Ricky falls to the deck. He wiggles about on his back and wags his tail.
Rick begins to talk but starts laughing at Ricky.
Rick: I have not fed that dog. Laughter.
Rick: Oh my gosh, you are a trickster. That’s great. No, I said, come on, not lie down and roll over. You misheard me. Roll over so I can scratch your belly and feed you. Give you pork.
Laughter.

BASS

A great story affects me more now than it ever has. I rely upon reading as tonic more than I ever have. I think that’s probably just a function of age as much as profession. You’ve seen, approaching or in the shadows of middle age, and you still haven’t seen everything but I’ve seen a lot more than I had seen when I started out being a writer, which is to say when I started out making notes about what the world looks like. That’s a bad place to come to as a person. So I really rely on fiction and nonfiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry to pull me out of that, the natural tendency we have as individuals to go into that telescopic place of diminished perception, observation, newness, wonder, all those significant artistic notions. A good story means more to me now than it ever did as a young person. Also, having wrestled with writing for almost twenty years I have a greater appreciation now for when it’s done well than I did. And that’s not to say I took it for granted when

I was younger, I still loved reading great things but my palate was not as developed then.

Rick eats between questions.
Rob: I’ll let you chew.

ROB SUMNER

You’ve noted the importance of not overly controlling your writing. When you’re developing a story how do you refrain from interfering too much?

BASS

I would say something like that and it’s true, but you grow and prob- ably contract too, but you grow as a writer, hopefully, and go through phases and spells, play to your strengths and then work on your weaknesses. For me, personally, that has probably at one time been a strength, to not control a story or just go with the intuitive and subconscious and trust those instincts and focus on feeling them as powerfully as possible. It’s hard to argue against that approach, that can be kind of a tiring way to go through stories, one after another, but it can also be deeply and strongly felt. As I get older, for lack of a more precise term, the intellectual side of writing does interest me more, if only that I’m slowly learning my way into it. It becomes like a game to try and control a story now and tinker with it, make it go this way and go that way. That’s still a dangerous impulse, and the best stories for me as a reader or a writer, and the truest stories, are the ones in which I don’t control them, but am tapped into the emotion more than the intellect. That said, I’m becoming comfortable enough with, I guess, theory, for lack of a better word, to be aware of it as I work. Structure, or any of those conscious things, as opposed to the infinitely more powerful subconscious.

SUMNER

You’ve stated that emotional truth informs the structures of your stories. Is emotion always central for you?

BASS

Yeah. To answer your second question, or to answer the question, yes, I mean if you—yes, there’s just no other answer but yes. But I’m not sure I understood the first thing you asked.

SUMNER

Well you’ve talked—

BASS

Or mentioned.

SUMNER

—about how emotional truth, that the emotion of the story that you’re writing develops the structure, kind of tells you where to go with it.

BASS

It can and usually does, and in the past it has for me, but what I’m interested in now, and maybe it’s almost out of boredom or something, but I don’t think that necessarily has to be true. You can have an emotional truth underlying a structural instability or a structural falsity, and a story could in theory be all the more powerful for that. It could enhance that emotional truth, but on the other hand to have a structurally sound and logical creation that has a false emotion, artificial emotion beneath a structure that might fit an emotion you’re trying to get, that wouldn’t work. So the answer to your question, yes yes yes, but again the obverse is not necessarily true. As long as the emotional truth is being felt by the narrator or the author you can have a good structure or a bad structure and you’re still going to have a story.

O’GRADY

Just before we sat down we were talking about your essay in Why I Write, “Why the Daily Writing of Fiction Matters.” In it you stress the importance of engagement with the world as well as with the world of the imagination in fiction. Is that balance between engagement and imagination an evolving process for you?

BASS

I want to say no, I want to say that it’s pretty much a fixed variable, a fixed rate, a constant, that I need a certain amount of x to yield a certain amount of y, and that’s what I believe. I don’t ever write about that. You would think—I would feel like that can’t be possibly true, because people change, everything changes in the course of its existence, but it seems constant to me. When I get enough physical activity, that yields intellectual and emotional growth for me or even an expansion of feeling. And when I’m not in the physical world the other aspects of me tend to shut down too. It’s just that simple. That’s all.

O’GRADY

Along those lines, something else that you mentioned in that same essay, have you been able to follow the advice you give, to be able to write every day and also to be in constant contact with the physical world in light of the other activities that you do?

BASS

That’s a trick question. Let me figure out how to get there. For the benefit of our reader, can you clarify that device of which you speak, of which we speak?

O’GRADY

In the essay you say specifically that you spend your mornings writing and then your afternoons walking.

BASS

Oh, yeah, yeah. No, because sometimes I tell stu—I thought you were talking about another advice, a device, so, good, you’re not, because I don’t follow that one, that other one. But I don’t follow this one either anymore. [With] the activism and family desires and obligations, I just make a choice every day. I’ve got to do what I want to do after writing and some days I don’t even write because of the other obligations of activism and so on. So no, I don’t, and that’s a real handicap. But everybody has handicaps. Some people have to work for a living. [laughter]

SUMNER

You’ve warned of our culture’s increasing corporatization and homogenization and how writing is a way to rage against the resulting constriction and entrapment. How does writing challenge sameness?

BASS

How does writing challenge what?

SUMNER

Sameness.

BASS

Well within writing, back to that notion I talked about [earlier], about literature being about loss or the recognition of loss, you’re also remaking the world. Either you’re celebrating the world the way it is, knowing that it’s not going to last that way, or you’re already actively re-creating an alternative world, an alternative logic, an alternative justice, alternative boundaries in the world. You’re putting on paper and presenting to the ‘true world’ or the ‘real world,’ the existing world or the present world. And that very act challenges sameness. You know, you’re putting your money where your mouth is, you’re investing the time of your life to put down this model, this blueprint, this plan of another world with other values, and giving craft time and attention to that work, just as surely—

Rick is interrupted by Jonathan Johnson, who comes outside with three beers.
Rick: Oh, I can’t, I wish I could!
Jonathan: You’ve been bested, eh? [laughter]

BASS

Writing doesn’t necessarily have to challenge sameness, I mean you could be a press flack for the Bush administration and just be fighting furiously to hold on to the status quo and pull the wool over voters’ eyes and say all is well in Bethlehem. So writing doesn’t necessarily have to challenge sameness, but, on the converse, it certainly can.

SUMNER

You’ve quoted before William Kittredge: “As we destroy what is natural we eat ourselves alive.” That’s quite different than what Bush’s press agents are writing. Your own writing seems to tend to something quite different than a Bush press agent.

BASS

I mean fiction, good fiction, has that quality of naturalness to it, in that it’s being its own thing, and you don’t even know what that thing is, you just know you have an emotion, you don’t know what story is going to come out of an emotion, you’re not trying to advance an agenda, you’re just trying to get an emotion out of the vessel of your body into the world, and that’s the only agenda at play in good fiction. That’s a pretty natural process, it’s an expulsion, and a procreation or a creation or perhaps a re-creation of an emotion in you, but it’s creative. So that is natural, it’s not a destructive or even really manipulative impulse, or exploitive. It’s pretty natural.

Nonfiction, on the other hand, can be a real challenge. You can have other less primary, less elemental goals or desires in the writing of nonfiction. You can have direct values that, by the nature of the medium, come into play. It doesn’t mean it’s less natural, and for that matter to say that to manipulate or exploit is unnatural is like a dog chasing its tail. That’s natural too but I don’t think of it as being as primary or elemental—that’s the raw emotion with the human filter. What I like to think of as really good fiction I think of as being more primal than that, not even having the human filter but just being the thing itself: the physical essence of joy or sorrow rather than the narrator or writer filtering that emotion into creative nonfiction.

SUMNER

In a book like Oil Notes you paint a picture without trying to change anyone’s mind. In other nonfiction books, like The Nine Mile Wolves, you’re trying to affect change. And then there’s your fiction, where you don’t know what’s going to happen.

BASS

That’s a fair gradation. For me there’s pure fiction, and then creative nonfiction which just has kind of an edge of me or the human condition. And then there’s the you-know-what-you-want-and-you’re-going-after- it kind of nonfiction which is more of the latter group, The Nine Mile Wolves or The Book of Yaak kind of book.

SUMNER

So are these different types of writing definitely separate for you?

BASS

It’s almost a question of level, how far into the subconscious I am. With fiction it’s not even a temptation to bring in an agenda or even me. You’re supposed to be in the characters and in the setting and that means you’re not in you, that means you’re certainly not in your politics. And in environmental advocacy work you’re so into the issue your art doesn’t get into it at all. I guess the creative nonfiction part of that triumvirate is where it can get interesting, where you can bring in some pure fiction for a while and then also attempt to bring in some hard core advocacy. That can be interesting. But that’s why it’s the middle ground for me. With fiction I’m not ever even tempted to get on a soapbox.

O’GRADY

You said before that writing and reading fiction can help writers and readers overcome natural and cultural boundaries.

BASS

I suppose it can. I don’t remember saying that.

O’GRADY

I’m paraphrasing of course. Do you think that as a country we look at fiction in that way, as a weapon against those tendencies?

BASS

I’ve never thought about it. Are you asking me how I think in this country we tend to look at fiction? This is going to be off the kettle, calling the stove black or however that saying goes, but I think in this country. There’s a tendency among too many to look at fiction as making a statement of politics or even personal values. I understand what a joke for [it is] me to say something like that, because my environmental advocacy is so fiercely partisan. It depends on the reader but I see a lot of people read fiction and try to filter it through a lens other than what I think the writer was intending, which was the human condition. A lot of readers will try to extrapolate from a piece of fiction into judgments and assumptions that don’t hold up. But it’s always been that way, and that’s a weakness but it can also be a strength of fiction, the fact that it can be mutable, that it’s a universal currency, that it can be a universal dialect in language. It should be, and yet the readings of so many books are slanted toward the times, the culture, this day and age. It’s a good question but I can’t answer it. Most readers are different.

SUMNER

If we could talk about your new collection The Hermit’s Story. Longing has played an important role in your fiction. Earlier work has often focused upon the rage of people as they try to get along in an uncooperative world. In the new collection we find characters such as Dave in “The Prisoners” and Kirby in “The Fireman,” divorced men who can see their daughters only rarely. Both Dave and Kirby have moved from rage towards a more deadened feeling. What interests you in their saddened, hardened emotional state?

BASS

I don’t know, I don’t know. What you said previously, about them moving toward detachment, may be what touches me about characters in those situations, that they’re moved toward survival and their acceptance of pain. Under one reading you could look at characters in those stories and say, “Well, they’re copping out, they’re detaching rather than embracing their pain,” but I don’t read those, or I don’t read “The Fireman” that way. [In] “The Prisoners” the characters have more of a subconscious detachment, they haven’t yet realized that they’re detaching to stay alive, but if you’re trying to stay alive then you’re trying to avoid foreclosing on the possibility of not being able to be sensate. So that is, if not heroic, it is still nonetheless, well it’s maybe not even dying but it’s not a full disengagement. You can detach in order to retain the ability to engage, and I mean that’s what, it’s just a diminution of ambitions, perhaps. Bittersweet would be the emotion there. And that’s an interesting conflict or interesting tension, interesting duality of emotions…[trails off]

Jonathan Johnson is approaching the table with three pies balanced on his arms.
Rick: Good god almighty!
Jonathan: One per each. Pumpkin cheesecake, turtle cheesecake, and pumpkin pie.
Brian: Umm, I’ll have some of the pumpkin pie. Rob: I’ll try that pumpkin cheesecake.
Rick: Ah…My God, that’s the hardest question. Johnson: He’s been rendered inarticulate by dessert. Rick: Yes, yes, all of it.
Johnson: All of the above, eh? Rick: Just the tiniest sliver.
Johnson: Of which? Rick: Of yes, of each. Johnson: Okay. I gotcha.
Rick: I mean, but you can imagine…pie.
Johnson: Pumpkin pie, pumpkin cheesecake, tiny sliver of each. Can somebody open the door?
Rick: Yes.

Rob: No more sun.
Rick: Yeah, never was much. Frosty. [eating] What are these little red things?
Brian: Those are pomegranate seeds.
Rick: Oh yeah?
Rob: Yeah, they were good.

SUMNER

Kind of tied into the longing, what we’ve just been talking about, memory in your work seems to work as a type of longing. Ann in “The Hermit’s Story” holds a memory of her trip to Canada “as tightly, and securely, as one might clench some bright small gem,” and Russell and Sissy in “The Cave” are hit by the realization that though their memory of the cave was bright and strong in that moment, “even an afternoon such as that one could become dust.” These are characters trying to hold on to what has already passed. In a way they reflect your stressing of fiction as a way of reconnecting what has been isolated.

BASS

Not to sound like a smart ass, but yes. I mean, I would agree. Certainly. I’m not conscious of those kinds of thoughts but that doesn’t make them any less true or even surprising to me that I wouldn’t have been able to explain them. A lot of people talk about memory as a kind of landscape, and that really interests me, that makes sense that, you know, you’re looking back, but . . .

Jennifer Davis comes outside with plates of pie. Jennifer: . . . cheesecake. [laughing] Sir.
Rob: Thank you. Brian: Thank you.
Jennifer: Here you go. [To Bass:] Yours is coming. Rob: Yours takes more time.
Rick: Bring the wheelbarrow!

BASS

But, in memory, you are obviously looking back at country that you traveled through, you are making a map, a map of that territory, but the way you say it was smarter. […] I mean, fiction is a device to preserve memory? Is that what you meant? Enrich memory?

SUMNER

To try to hold on to our own memories, or things that we’ve lost.

BASS

Hm. I suppose so. I mean again, literature is about loss or the recognition of loss, in celebrating or bringing the attention of art and craft to a story you are both celebrating and preserving something, for sure. You don’t think about presenting it to a future, but I think about presenting a story to the present, because it’s already in the past as you imagined it. There’s some movement across time and it’s almost kind of a resurrection, sure. Take something from the past and bring it all the way back up to the present, take it back to the contemporary moment, and that is an act of preservation.

My own memory is really bad, so I suspect that there’s something larger to that than what I’m grasping.

Rick: You guys are missing out. Rob: The turtle?
Rick: Yeah.
Rob: Yeah, I was eyeing that one. Pumpkin cheesecake. Maybe there will be some left for us when we’re done.

SUMNER

Now here’s another. Let’s talk about work. Artie in “The Prisoners” works in real estate and Kirby in “The Fireman” is a computer programmer. Both men find their jobs either numbing or irrelevant. They make money for their companies but find very little value in their work. So Artie goes fishing and Kirby volunteers as a firefighter, activities that working-class people do for a living. In the fishing and the firefighting there is an immediacy to the activities, a direct physical engagement with the world around them. What’s the relationship of work and passion in these stories and in your writing?

BASS

I don’t know. I don’t even know how to explain it, but work is what you do, that’s how you are—one of the ways—that you are in the world, to state the obvious, and almost everybody has to work. If you’re going to write a story about engagement with the world . . . Let me back up. I guess what it speaks to in part is what kind of story do you like as a reader and a writer, and the stories of the sad, dead weight, heart-dead, bittersweet, life-wasted stories of detachment and desensitization that are not infrequent in contemporary literature, while technically masterful and even emotionally masterful, after a while I get to feel, as a reader, cheated by the repetition of these subdued responses when the point of the story is your response to it. A little goes a long way, I get it! And that’s life, I get it! And so I like to personally look around for almost more elemental stories, where there’s a little less ambiguity. I don’t think that gives up anything in terms of sophistry, I don’t concede that at all in stories that really speak to me. If you’re interested in reading or writing a story about which a partly successful attempt at greater engagement with the world is achieved, it’s hard, a real trick to pull that off with a story about somebody who didn’t do something, as opposed to a story in which it was in somebody’s character to do something, and work is something to do, so it seemed hard to leave work out of some stories. But the wind is in your face if you’re going to write a story about somebody who’s going to feel the world deeply, but that person doesn’t feel deeply enough about the world to engage with it except when he or she is on the pages of your story. It seems artsy—it can run the risk of becoming artsy and artificial. There are, I’m sure, people who do not work who are fully engaged with their senses and the world, but the wind is in your face, in the writer’s face.

Rick coughs.
Rob: You doing all right?
Rick: I’m shoving pumpkin pie in my face. I’m doing all right. [pause] It’s my favorite.

O’GRADY

In “The Distance,” you have a Montana family visiting Monticello with the result that Thomas Jefferson, westward expansion, and the dynamics of one 21st-century family coalesce into a single story. Central to the story is the boundary between wilderness, or wildness, and control and our attempts to balance these elements. What motivated you to dig into the mistakes of America’s past?

BASS

Um, almost sounds like a smart-aleck answer, but—

O’GRADY

If you take issue with the question—

BASS

Well, not even so much as issue but again a lot of the questions you’re asking are so thoughtful, intelligent, that there’s a danger of them presuming an awareness on my part that that’s what I was aiming at, which was not the case. It doesn’t make it not true, I just didn’t know of some of the things that were going on there. The arc of this country at this point in time I find severely disappointing, and there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t fret about or rage about it. So that’s embedded in my subconscious, it’s embedded in my subconscious that it even comes up into my consciousness, but I don’t set out to write fiction to say those things. I just think, “What am I feeling?”, and then I start painting pictures and say, “This is what I’m feeling. This is what I see.”

So I would not argue with any of that, but it was not a conscious goal, because that would be a political assertion. It’s there, you’re right, but my first impulse was just trying to get the pictures accurate, that landscape, that point in time, that disparity between them. The Louisiana Purchase inhabitant in new-time versus the Louisiana Purchaser in old-time and the crisscrossing, it’s just a good structure, a good zone, good opportunity for conflict and richness.

Something about that story . . . Well, you asked, “What, what was the genesis for that dynamic?” I think what authorized me to tell a story like that, or enabled me to, is that living in the Yaak in the 21st century, we’re faced with the same choices on such a heartbreakingly smaller scale. The scale to Jefferson’s perception, then, was infinite. It wasn’t infinite, but he perceived it to be infinite, his culture perceived it to be infinite. And now, goddamn it, nobody perceives it to be infinite, we all understand how damned finite it is, we can measure down to the last foot how finite it is. There is 188,000 acres of roadless lands left in a million-acre landmass in the Yaak that’s still even eligible for wilderness designation, which is to say let these last 18.8 percent of the landmass go about its own natural processes, to burn or rot, grow old or die, grow young again at its own pace outside of our own manipulations. Not to cast value judgments even on our manipulations, just to say these last 18.8 percent of places in this incredibly wild valley we’re going to save, for no other reason than as a test case, scientific base of data, against which to measure our own future successes and failures. So living there is where that story came from about slavery and control, land and control and science and knowing everything or thinking you know everything. But I don’t think those things when I’m writing a story, I’m just realizing it now.

SUMNER

How’s the Yaak doing, Rick?

BASS

It’s in a tough way. It’s got a Republican White House, Republican Senate, Republican House of Representatives and they’ve had three years to stuff agencies and cabinets and committees with industry lobbyists and right-wing philosophers, and they’re not big fans of wilderness or wildness. They’re not big fans of much of anything of what I care for, so it’s about the worst I’ve ever seen it. We’re in the middle of a forest- planning initiative, so if I can make a request for people who read the interview to write letters I’ll send information on that.

SUMNER

That was our last question. Do you have a final thought?

BASS

Too many final thoughts.

SUMNER

They’re never final?

BASS

They’re all final.

Found in Willow Springs 52

April 25, 2003

Sarah Coomber, Bridget Hildreth, and Travis Manning

A CONVERSATION WITH PHILLIP LOPATE

Photo Credit: Harpers Magazine

Widely regarded as one of America’s foremost living essayists, Phillip Lopate’s publications include three books of personal essays (Bachelorhood, Against Joie de Vivre, and Portrait of My Body), two poetry collections, and other works on teaching and on film criticism. He is a frequent contributor to such periodicals as Harper’s, The Paris Review, The Threepenny Review, and The New York Times Book Review, and has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and other honors. Phillip Lopate is also known as a first-rate teacher of nonfiction writing; currently he holds the Adams Chair at Hofstra University, and also teaches for the MFA program at Bennington College. He visits with interviewers Sarah Coomber, Bridgit Hildreth, and Travis Manning on a recent visit to Spokane.

HILDRETH: We are interested in your view of the state of creative nonfiction. What styles of literature are on their way out? What styles are on their way in? I know John Keeble, Eastern Washington University creative writing professor, hates the title “creative nonfiction,” so if you want to address personal narrative instead. . .

LOPATE: I think I prefer the term “literary nonfiction.” Creativity is such a strange thing, as though people would intentionally write uncreatively. It’s a little bit like Robert Frost’s line about the poet: “You don’t call yourself a poet; others call you a poet.” You don’t call yourself a “creative nonfiction writer.”

Certainly I think that the personal narrative has grown a lot in the last ten years. Part of what happened is that with composition, which is the service workhorse of English departments in the university, and the course that everybody has to take, freshman composition, you get to turn more toward personal narrative in the last fifteen years. It just started in places like Stanford with the Voice Project (a program that brought professional writers to campus to teach freshman). There were people in the field who were saying the best way to turn students on to writing is to get them to tell their own stories and work from their experience. Before that it had mostly been taught as a kind of legal-brief way of summoning arguments, rhetoric and persuasion. I still think that is one of the dominant models, and deserves to be, but there began to be more of them for the personal narrative.

Then of course the vogue of the new memoir had a lot to do with it. And the textbooks that were adopted, not just mine (The Art of the Personal Essay, Anchor Books, 1994), which is really not a textbook dealing with the personal essay but which has had a long, popular run. But the real mammoth-selling textbooks began to use a lot of personal narratives, and they also covered the spectrum in terms of multicultural authors. So you started getting these kind of contemporary classics, like Richard Rodriguez for instance, which I think is excellent writing, but basically you have one of every thing: Leslie Marmon Silko, a Native American writer, Sonja Sanchez , Sandra Cisneros and so on and so forth. This became a way to placate political correctness.

HILDRETH: In the education field, textbooks were, especially following Birkets book, The Gutenberg Elegies, being forced into broadening their spectrum to become more inclusive.

LOPATE: One of the curious things that happened was that there was this market-driven emphasis on the contemporary. I think the reason why my Art of the Personal Essay has continued to have a niche is that I insisted on starting with the ancients and moving to the present. A lot of teachers wanted to be able to teach not just the contemporary. I think it is really strange to teach only the contemporary, to ignore the whole tradition. This is an old tradition. This is not something that is a recent vogue. As long as there have been writers, writers have been telling their personal stories. A writer has only his or her own experience to work with, however they may transform it. They could make it science fiction but they are still working with the motions that they observed themselves. Many times it’s not science fiction, it’s much closer than that. There have always been autobiographical novels like Martin Eden by Jack London or The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler or Red Burn by Herman Melville, because people want to turn their experience into stories.

Of course, you go back to Cicero and St. Augustine, the personal witness, the attempt to develop a voice that’s flexible and intelligent and sympathetic on the page. This is one of the grand traditions. I am particularly insistent on linking up with that, with that past. My only view is that personal essays, if not all personal narratives constitute a kind of conversation and that we are talking to our predecessors and ancestors as much as we are talking to the contemporary audience. Many writers will tell you that.

COOMBER: You mentioned the new memoir, is that supplanting something else? Is there anything that is getting thrown to the wayside?

LOPATE: I do think that the new memoir has undergone a kind of mutation from the old autobiography, or what they call “memoirs,” plural. It used to be that you sat down to write your life, usually when you had lived a large part of it. There were the memoirs of old generals and actresses whose stardom derived from their popularity as public figures or as politicians, rather than because they were writers. The writer’s memoirs, which is a kind of separate form, also tended to look at the rhythms and the rises and falls of a life, so the subject matter became development. In the new memoir there tended to be a shrinkage of chronology, so that thirty-year-olds were writing about their experience up to age 18 or something, and it became much more a form about the crucible of adolescence. And of course even if they wrote into their forties there was a tendency to pitch the memoir toward a single afternoon talk-show theme, like physical disability, sexual abuse, incest, alcoholism, addiction–and this was a reductive approach which also tended to emphasize the autobiographical protagonist as a victim who got over this problem. You see, if you are writing a long autobiography there is no one problem you get over. It’s life. You have to keep living it. You may start off with some difficulty, but you have to keep going even after you succeed.

It’s a curiosity of many autobiographies that often the first third is better than the rest. For instance, if you look at a book like History of My Life by Charlie Chaplin, his period of being knocked from pillar to post as a kid and trying to develop a sense of self and professional self and making forays into early film-making, all that is quite exciting. All that is the construction of a self. Once he became a big star it tended to be, “Then I had lunch with the Duke of Windsor and then I saw Lady So and So afterwards,” and it becomes much more boring, it becomes now a period of being with other wildly successful people. The major issue has been solved.

The new memoir has tended to focus on one issue and also the new memoir has tended to bring in a lot of techniques from fiction and poetry. This probably has to do with the genesis of nonfiction in MFA programs. In the beginning God created fiction and poetry [laughter].

MANNING: And drama somewhere back there.

LOPATE: Somewhere drama. In fact, now there is a magazine called The Fourth Genre, dedicated to essays. Which is a nice magazine and the title is wittingly saying: “We’re the last ones.” Nonfiction was the Hagar and Ishmael of the literary biblical family.

A lot of writers who began in poetry or fiction began by writing memoirs. They found that they could actually get a book of memoirs signed up more easily. Mary Carr, or Lucy Greely both began in poetry, for instance, and took their MFA degrees in poetry. What I have found is that the prose of the new memoir is affected by the techniques of fiction and poetry. There tends to be a greater emphasis on lyrical language, and some of the invidious notions of “show, don’t tell” have even percolated into the nonfiction sense of the craft of nonfiction. “Show, don’t tell,” it seems to me, is far too broad a rule even in fiction since a lot of great eighteenth, or nineteenth-century fiction certainly does show and tell. It’s a crude formulation, which has a greater truth in it. Of course if the teller has a wonderfully modulated voice and mind, I can see it in any method of telling. When Stendhal is on a roll, who cares if he’s showing or telling? I don’t want to fight that battle. What I want to say is that this interdiction against telling began to percolate into the craft of contemporary nonfiction, so that in workshops that I teach I’ll often hear students say, “Well I think you should do this as scenes,” and I’ll think, well, maybe yes, maybe no. The issue is not to do it as scenes or not as scenes. The issue is to bring a lively understanding or intelligence to voice in the material.

My idea, and it’s not just my idea—it’s the cornerstone of Vivian Gornecks’ book The Situation and the Story: It’s not so important what the experience was you want to tell, it’s what you make of the experience. People think they are entitled to tell the story because they have suffered. Emily Dickinson who would sit in her room and hardly go out and have a universe at her disposal. I remember saying to this class in Minneapolis: “It’s not enough to have cancer and have been sexually abused as a child. You’ve got to make it interesting on the page.” There is nothing intrinsically interesting about any material. If your mother was a prostitute, and your father was a drug pusher, that might just play as tawdry. It’s really what you do with the material.

So that puts a premium on mind and style. I do think that the personal narrative taps more directly into powers of thinking and reasoning than, let’s say, fiction and poetry. Or to put it another way, the unconscious plays less of a role. For instance, in fiction it may be important to develop a narrative where unconscious symbols resonate inside the narrative. That may not be important at all in a personal essay. I think that part of the resistance the fledgling autobiographical writers have to working in the form, is they use it kind of as a resistance to the mind. Because in our culture, the heart is privileged over the mind.

For instance, I was teaching a workshop and there was a presentation by one student who had earlier in the term written a very good narrative about her early years. In fact, her mother was a prostitute and drug addict, but she had done a brilliant job in making it interesting and showing how she thinks about it now as well as how she experienced it then. The second presentation she made was filled with a kind of confusion and myopia, because she wanted to get into the immediate sensation of what it felt like to be so confused. I said: “This will not do,” and several students defended her and said it recaptured her vulnerability.

I thought this was a misunderstanding of form. That you don’t just replicate the vulnerability and confusion, that you have an obligation to access as much understanding and wisdom that you can. That used to be the attraction of the personal essay and autobiographical narrative: that you were in the presence of somebody who was not dumbing down, who was trying to share as much worldly understanding as he or she could.

HILDRETH: Can we look at how that’s been received. I think about Loren Eiseley, who was definitely influenced by Montaigne’s rambling Sallies of the mind. He was also influenced by the affects of Edgar Allen Poe’s application of story and myth, and applied this to his personal essay.

LOPATE: But do you know the wonderful memoir by Eiseley, All the Strange Hours? Eiseley led a kind of gothic life.

HILDRETH: Well, he was not received well and so he did kind of turn inward. He wrote to no audience, is what he said.

LOPATE: He wrote to no audience. His mother was deaf and he was a hobo for a while, riding the rails, very poor. He witnessed his father’s tragic death. He had a lot of those sensational deficits going for him. But he had one of the most intelligent profiles of the twentieth century. Every sentence of his is modulated and he is drawing on whole centuries of formal writing. He’s not only trying to situate you in the moment of confusion and make you feel that confusion; he’s trying to give the emotion of it, but also his understanding of it. I’ll go farther and say that in Eisley’s case, his use of metaphor and myth has real resonance because you don’t feel that it is coming out of Creative Writing 101. You feel that he is somebody that has extreme difficulty in making relationships with other human beings. He has to look to fossils, to creatures, to the stars in order to feel out his relationships.

COOMBER: Turning the questions back to your work in particular I’m wondering if you can tell us about the vulnerability that there is in being a well-read personal essayist. People know your family dynamics, parts of your body, your relationships. When you walk into a room of readers, do you feel overexposed? And do you care?

LOPATE: I don’t care. What’s surprising is that people read and forget. I’m sure the most attentive readers don’t, but in a way they read for the pleasure of the moment, and they’ll remember some things but not others. So you know, I’ll meet a reader and it will come up that I’m Jewish and they are surprised, and I’ll say: “Well, didn’t you read the book.” But they are not reading to compile a dossier on me; they are reading for something else.

Also, I don’t entirely identify who I think I am with this person. It’s not that I’m lying —essentially I’ve told the truth— it’s that it’s one experience to know the page and another to be in a social situation. Montaigne said something like, “Friends of mine who I wouldn’t dream of telling things to can go to any local bookstore and find out any of that stuff.” I am to some degree a reserved person, a little shy, certainly not somebody who rattles on about my self socially. Most of the time I would rather get somebody else to talk about themselves. I don’t need to hear my story; in fact, before I remarried, it was a problem in dating because I would get bored having to tell this stuff over again. I really felt like saying: “Why don’t you go to the bookstore and you can find all this stuff out.” When I’ve written an experience satisfactorily to my mind, then I don’t think about it much more. It’s a strange using up of one’s experience. The written account comes to replace the memory.

COOMBER: Do you think you are losing your memories, almost, by putting them down?

LOPATE: No, because so much happens to a person in a lifetime that you can never write about everything. There is always going to be much more that you haven’t written about than you have written about.

HILDRETH: And always things that are unresolved.

LOPATE: And always things that are unresolved. So I get pleasure in confiding on the page, or pushing myself to a point where I feel like I’ve gone deeper or I’ve gone further. That’s a reward. I’m looking to get to those passages. So it doesn’t bother me, because it doesn’t affect my interactions at the moment. I still have to feel my way through my defenses and another person’s defenses when I meet a stranger. The same awkward catch-as-catch-can experience.

COOMBER: How about another part of this issue. You write very personal things about people you’ve known: family, lovers or whoever. Do you run these things by them before they go to print, or is everything that happens to you fair game and it just goes without saying?

LOPATE: Well, I don’t run it by them; I don’t want them to have censorship rights on my material. I don’t think everything is fair game and I don’t feel entirely justified. That is, I don’t have a single ethical formula I can apply. It’s true that by yourself you can portray other people, and it’s true that writing personal narrative, you are going to write about other people because nobody is an isolate. So you define your own personality by projecting through other people to a certain extent. I think that there are ethical questions that need to be decided on a case-by-case basis. What I try to do is not to use my writing as a vendetta, to get back at someone or to prove that I was right and they were wrong. But obviously I am more vivid to myself than other people are to me, so to some level what I am doing is conveying what it feels like for life to come at this particular individual.

COOMBER: What you said a few minutes ago is that you don’t feel completely justified in what you do. Its sounds a bit like your credo: You won’t use it as a vendetta, but you are trying to show how your consciousness perceives the world.

LOPATE: If people are looking for a nonfiction license issued by me, in the same way that a poetic license works, I am not the one to give it to them. I continue to have ambivalent feelings. I continue to hold back material that I don’t write about. I don’t write about everything. I do protect some people. It all depends. I have hurt people by the things I’ve written, so I can’t offer myself as a model on the safe way to do this. All I can say is that if you are going to be a writer, you are probably going to have to accept the guilt of articulating your visions which may not suit other people.

HILDRETH: And would you say that that is also a distinctive character in your personal narrative, the Montaigne’s concept of apologist? That you formulate an apology on the page for what’s about to be said?

LOPATE: I think you have to reflect on your practice. I think that you can’t start out with the assumption that you are a good man, or the last good man. If you are observing yourself, you have a need to be prepared to find dislikable evidence. So it’s a form both of self-justification and self-condemnation, perhaps.

MANNING: What thoughts do you give to audience as you are writing the personal essay? Are you writing to a specific person? A demographic? An aspect of your own personality? How does that imagined audience affect how you write various personal pieces?

LOPATE: I would say that I take audience into consideration in a few ways. On one level I don’t take audience into consideration; I just try to write as close to the thoughts that are being dictated to me through my brain as I can. The first draft, I’m trying to get my thoughts down. I try to write for the illustrious dead who will be forgiving and understand that I am trying to walk in their footsteps. So I write to the shades of Lamb. “How’s that, Montaigne, Stevenson saying, “Here’s my little missive, I’m trying to do what you guys have done.” I know they will understand some of the gadgets I’m using because I do see myself in the literary tradition. So some people might say they are writing for God. Since I’m never sure if I believe in God, or doubt I do, I would say I am writing for someone who’s smarter than I am, who will at least be tolerant of my flaws. If you write down, you’re going to get in trouble, so try to write up. That’s my understanding of my practice.

The other thing that I do is I try to keep my audience in mind to the degree that I anticipate the audience’s boredom or irritation. So it isn’t so much placating the audience as just trying to keep the audience engrossed. Cynthia Ozick once paid me a compliment in that she found my writing to be engrossing. I thought that’s as much as I want. Engrossing is good. If I can just keep it engrossing, a person can disagree, but at least they don’t go into a zone, the flat-line boredom. When I read another personal essayist and I feel that basically I know what is going to come from the next five pages because I’m just going to tromp through the expected positions, I just want to skip. So you want to keep it engrossing.

COOMBER: When you say you’re trying to keep it engrossing, are you talking about for an audience, like Montaigne? Ivy Leagues? Readers in the working class?

LOPATE: Not Montaigne. I mean what Virginia Woolf called the common reader, which I think of as somebody who is educated. They don’t have to be Ivy League—my father had a high school education and tried to go to night college, and it didn’t work out, but he read a lot. There used to be much more of this understanding of the working-class autodidact. It really doesn’t matter the level of formal education. What matters is how much someone is willing to open himself or herself to a book.

I can’t write to the bottom level of the typical magazine editor. That’s like a grasshopper. I fortunately had the experience of being a book writer before being a journalist or magazine writer. So now when I write for magazines, they know to expect a certain thing from me and I’ll never be entirely able to be processed into their extraordinarily quick attention spans. If they’re going to publish me, it’s because they like the idea of having some other kind of voice coming in. They like to think they can tolerate a certain amount of literary, “old-timey” voice. But I can’t write for that short attention span. It’s so inhibiting. I have to feel like I can at least develop some points.

MANNING: Do you think that the audience for a personal essay or memoir is still growing? In the 1996 Writer’s Chronicle article with John Bennion, you said that your attempt with The Art of the Personal Essay was to reestablish the genre of the personal essay. Do you think the book has done that, looking back seven years now, and is the personal essay genre or sub-genre continuing to grow up?

LOPATE: I don’t think that my book did that, but I do think that my book contributed in however a slightest way. There was a hunger in the culture at large for personal narrative. Not very different from the hunger people have when they watch the Oprah Winfrey show when somebody says, “My mother was shot to death by a killer and then he put a bullet in me and then I almost died.” I mean, there’s a curiosity about authentic experience, and with that a kind of impatience with the artifacted, fictive plot. I think that fiction has lost a certain claim of intensity. There’s always pulp fiction and genre fiction, but I think that the whole culture has wanted to hear people stand up and testify. I think that speaks to a certain religious inclination in American culture.

MANNING: Like the sermon.

LOPATE: The sermon has a connection to the personal essay and not just the sermon but the revival meeting, where someone stands up and says: “I was a drunk, I was a gambler.” Also the media magazines, newspapers, have a constant need for copy that is readable and that they don’t have to edit much. There are tons of hybrid, semi-essay articles. Someone begins by talking about himself or herself to establish and determine authenticity. Let’s say the author knows someone who was bulimic, for instance. And then, the author interviews the experts in bulimia, and then goes to a different party. This is a kind of hybrid, semi-personal essay, semi-article: The person goes out and gets some facts. This isn’t the practice of the art at its highest. We have to look at the fact that magazines, newspapers have an endless appetite for topical articles and that one of the ways of approaching topical articles is the personal experience. And they also have these niches like the back-of-the-book, the six hundred-word article; there are even newspapers where somebody not on staff can send in something, as long as its six hundred to a thousand words for the op-ed pages.

MANNING: How about the other forms of media—Internet, TV, radio—how is the personal essay creeping into those media?

LOPATE: On NPR, you see essayists on TV, Andy Rooney. Certainly the Internet has encouraged many more people. There’s a big market and appetite for the watered-down product, but there may be no greater market for the most literary examples. I think it’s just as hard to get a collection of personal essays published now as it was ten years ago. I don’t think there’s any further market. I think what you have is a kind of disguised collection of personal essays: Somebody writes a self-help book, somebody writes of his experiences, like Lee Iococca, basically in a series of essays. Nobody thinks of it as a series of personal essays; basically it is.

But for someone who is enamored of Didion or Baldwin or Lamb or Hazlitt, Montaigne or Stevenson, to be writing a collection and then trying to get it published, I counsel patience and forbearance because it may be just as difficult. I happen to be one of few lucky writers who can publish collections of my essays. Most writers who publish collections of their essays are famous already as novelists, let’s say, an Updike or Ozick or Saul Bellow can get a collection of essays published. But to not have established distinction in another area and try to achieve it directly as a personal essayist is difficult. There are collections that continue to be published, sometimes by small presses and sometimes by very small presses [laughter]. I’m trying to make a distinction between the very large, broad area of demand, which made some people say, “This is the age of the essay”, and on the other hand a very small demand for the art of the personal essay at its most refined.

MANNING: How many copies of The Art of the Personal Essay have been sold?

LOPATE: The Art of the Personal Essay has done very well. I can’t count the number of copies, but I can tell you that I continue to get royalty checks and was able to buy a car, make other purchases, basically it’s been a good story for me. I’m now attempting to do another thing like that, which is I’m editing an anthology of American movie criticism from the silent era to the present, which will attempt to assert a canon of the best American criticism, which I hope will be adopted by film programs and English programs. Occasionally I experience a twinge of chagrin that my most popular book is an anthology and not one of my own one hundred percent Phillip Lopate books. We take what we can get.

COOMBER: I’m interested in your view of truth in the personal essay. It stems from an earlier discussion we had about “The Moody Traveler” (in a collection of essays, A Portrait of My Body) It was about a situation you encountered in the past and when you described your writing process, you mentioned that after writing it, you went back to notes taken at the time of the actual event and found that they differed, somewhat substantially, from the essay that you wrote. You opted not to change it then, and went forward. How do you justify that as practitioner of the personal essay?

LOPATE: I guess that because I consider the personal essay a story, and consider myself a story-teller, I do feel sometimes that I can take liberties. For the most part, I don’t take liberties. I’m a great believer in purity. It doesn’t bother me so much to break the rule in that way. It’s not as though I was describing the negotiations for the end of the Vietnam War, where it would really be important not to distort the truth. This is something that I don’t lose a lot of sleep over. I try to work from factual materials as much as possible because I enjoy the idea of shaping what actually happened into a narrative. But I’m aware that I’m slicing and shaping, and I’m leaving out so much, so I’m already distorting. This is another acceptance of guilt on my part You almost have to be a little shameless to be a personal essayist.

COOMBER: Do you feel that in a case such as this—where it doesn’t matter that much because it’s your story—does that impinge on your credibility for other nonfiction pieces?

LOPATE: Is someone going to say, “This person admitted that he changed one detail in one of his pieces, therefore we can’t believe him in another piece?” No, I don’t think so. I don’t think this issue has ever really come up, where someone has challenged the veracity of something I’ve written. Maybe because I’m writing about such insignificant people, including myself, that it’s not really an issue. But also it is because whenever possible, I do tell the truth. This is an interesting issue. There is honesty, candor, the truth, facts . . . I try to be as honest as I can. I like the sound of honesty. Sometimes when you’re having a conversation you exchange small talk for a while and then your friend says something or you say something that comes from a different place, a more honest place, and it is as though in the soundtrack of your life, the music changes keys at that moment. I like that changing of keys. I like that moment of honesty.

HILDRETH: In your forthcoming book, The Waterfront, you are dealing with a lot more factual information and research-oriented topics, and it seems like a slight departure from what you have been doing in the past. How do you go about putting that into a story format and how do your keep the story from “flat-lining”?

LOPATE: What I had to do in The Waterfront was find stories all along the New York City waterfront, and go with them and try to convey my enthusiasm for the story. For instance, I have a long chapter on public housing in my book because in New York the projects were built on the waterfront due to the fact that a lot of that land had been abandoned. The land in parts was quite decrepit, sometimes toxic, and so the projects were easy to assemble, particularly above 96th Street where you get into Harlem. So there are all sorts of issues of race and class, but what interested me is that it all began so idealistically. There was this tremendous movement of reform to build public housing. I know that I still believe in public housing, and that the federal government should go back to funding public housing.

So what I tried to do was to disentangle the past and try to figure out how it began so idealistically, how that dream was deferred and became rather grim so that a writer like James Baldwin could write about the projects and Harlem as a kind of nightmare. And then, to give it another twist, these projects were not destroyed the way they were in other parts of the country, but they continued to work. To find what was still reclaimable about them is to understand the current optimism of the New York Housing Authority to improve them, to complicate a story because most middle-class people regard the projects as unredeemably awful. And I was coming from a different place. I was coming from having grown up poor and asking myself, “Don’t they continue to perform a good function by giving decent, affordable housing?”

The fact is that nobody picking up my new book, The Waterfront, would think they would find a chapter on public housing. It’s just not what you would think. I like the idea of finding a story that was unexpected and carrying it out so its vicissitudes about idealism, cynicism, despair, more idealism, come to a kind of stand-off, you might say.

MANNING: What sorts of research did you do for that chapter?

LOPATE: I did a lot of library research, read the controversies and arguments of the time. There was no one book that had a history, so I had to go to articles. For instance, the initial idea of building towers was seen as progressive because you have more green space around it. The [project] towers were originally coming from that “towers-in-the-park-notion,” which has since to a large degree been discredited. There was this impulse to tear down the slums and build these clean spanking towers. Of course, you’ve got people arguing, “Well, maybe those tenements have more vitality and are more comfortable than these towers in the park.” You go through a lot of ironies and ambiguities. Everyone is proceeding to some degree from a good heart, but it plays out in very different ways.

HILDRETH: I don’t know the terrain myself, but I have spoken with friends who grew up near the waterfront and grew in the Sea Scout program, which was free for every child. Children who have grown up in the projects have access to a geography that many adults have no idea about.

LOPATE: Would they have access to that geography? Because highways were built around the waterfront in Manhattan, they would have had to cross these major highways to get to that waterfront. That’s one of the great tragedies of New York is that the highways cut people off from the water. A lot of what I’m doing, in effect, is to question the knee-jerk politics of my peer-group and to say, “What do I really think?” and not “What am I supposed to think?” Actually, there’s a lot of politics in this book. It’s the equivalent of asking yourself about the Afghanistan War and the Iraq War: “What do I think about this?” and not “What am I supposed to say?”

HILDRETH: So you’ve embedded the politics with story?

LOPATE: Yes. For instance, there’s this very important figure in New York history, Robert Moses, who was kind of a master builder of New York. Moses has become an archvillain in the mass narrative of New York and I went back and looked at some revisionist takes saying actually he did an incredible number of great things. He did some bad things, and we think of [him] because it’s paralyzed us from doing anything new and bold.

We’re so afraid of planning in general. I’m trying to assert my own view of the city and the city in the making. That interests me. At one point in America, it seemed easy to make cities. People seemed to know how to do it. Now whatever they do, they feel like they’re acting in bad faith: They feel clumsy. And that happens in Spokane (Washington) as well as in New York.

MANNING: So which narrator is going to walk the pages of this book? Which Phillip Lopate persona have you chosen?

LOPATE: A middle-aged Phillip Lopate. Because I say at one point, when I was younger, all I needed to do was walk around and I would be filled with poetic lyricism. And I can no longer pretend to have that sense of the younger man walking around and turning everything into writing. So it is, in effect, a more disenchanted observer, but there are positives to disenchantment as well as negatives. It’s somebody who has a lot of affection for my native city and has seen so many ambiguous developments: good plans that didn’t get built, bad plans that did get built. Things that have had different results.

I’m trying to explore a place because a lot of me is that place. I consider myself, my identity, as a New Yorker almost more central than my identity as what, as a Jew? Probably I’m more New Yorker. It’s a central part of who I am.

Found in Willow Springs 81

COMING

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Photo: Ulf Andersen danchaon.com

COMING SOON to Willow Springs