January 2009 Archives

Pamela Smith Hill is the award-winning author of Ghost Horses, The Last Grail Keeper, and Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Writer's Life. She lives in Portland, Oregon, although she grew up in the Missouri Ozarks 'on a steady diet of Bible stories and old TV westerns.' Last Fall, I was fortunate enough to have her come and speak with my class of creative writing students at the university.

If you're interested in Pamela's writing, you can find out about her latest projects, workshops, and more at http://www.pamelasmithhill.com/.

Q: Who is your favorite author and why?

A: I don't have a favorite author, but there are several that I reread periodically:  Mark Twain, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Barbara Pym, Charles Dickens, Laura Ingalls Wilder, T.H. White, and E.B. White. I find inspiration, artistry, and the pure joy of reading in their books.

Q: You mentioned you started your career in newspaper journalism. What do you see as the future of print news? How is the newspaper industry connected (if at all) to reading, fiction, and entertainment? 

A: Unfortunately, traditional newspaper journalism seems to be a dying profession.  Younger readers prefer to get their news online-- it's faster, more timely, and delivers fast-breaking stories better than television.  I'm not sure, however, that online news is as reliable or thorough.  And will it support the dying art of investigative reporting?  Ultimately, I worry that the American public will be satisfied with superficial reporting, that major stories will go under- or unreported, something we've already seen during the last eight years.   
 
As a writer, my background in print journalism strengthened my career as a writer of fiction and biography.  The skills and techniques I used to research newspaper assignments and conduct interviews prepared me for the exhaustive research needed for historical fiction and biography.  I also believe that interviewing strengthened my ability, years later, to write good dialogue.  So for me personally, my training as a newspaper staff writer related directly to my later career as a novelist and biographer.
 
 
Q: John Gardner once wrote that the question he was most asked was, "Do you write with a pen, a pencil... or what?" He said he thought this question delved into the mystical aspect of writing, and questions, at its deepest level, whether there is in fact any hope for the young writer. So I have to ask, do you write with a pen, a pencil... or what? Is there any hope, and, if there is, what is your best advice to students and aspiring authors?

A: I write in Word Perfect (I despise Microsoft Word) at my computer.  Other than to jot down notes to myself or random insights about a work-in-progress, I rarely write with a pen or pencil, perhaps because of my reporting background, where I wrote all my stories on an IBM Selectric typewriter.  Reporters didn't have time to write their stories in longhand.  That said, I always carry a pen and/or pencil and paper with me; I keep yet another set of writing supplies by my bed.  You never know when you'll need them.
 
And I think that, in itself, is hopeful.  Be prepared for the unexpected because the best ideas usually arrive unannounced.
 
My advice to student writers is to continue to write, to perfect your craft, and to read as if your life depended on it.  Because as a writer, it does.

Q: You recently published a biography titled Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Writer's Life. What drew you to the author of the Little House on the Prairie books? Is there a specific reason you chose to tell Wilder's story? 

A: I was commissioned to write the Wilder biography.  Frankly, if I hadn't been asked, I probably wouldn't have had the courage to take on a subject like Wilder.  What could I possibly say that hadn't been said before?  But once I began to research Wilder's writing life, I discovered that I had plenty to say.
 
Wilder's career as a professional writer and then later as a successful novelist was far more complicated and extensive than most of her readers recognize.  She struggled to find her voice, her subject, her genre, and even her publisher.  This intrigued me-- along with the sheer beauty and simplicity of her prose.  Furthermore, the tension between the facts of her life and the fiction of her "Little House" books reveals Wilder to be a far more interesting and masterful novelist than the literary legend she's become.

Q: If you could tell an aspiring writer one thing, one piece of advice, what would it be and why? 

A: Have faith in your own work and your belief in yourself as a writer.  As novelist Eloise Jarvis McGraw once said, "Nobody but you really cares whether you write or not.  Never mind that, keep at it."

Brian Kiteley is the author of The 3 A.M. Epiphany and The 4 A.M. Breakthrough, books on writing fiction, and the novel I Know Many Songs, But I Cannot Sing. His newest book, The River Gods, is forthcoming in September 2009. He is also a professor of English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Denver, in Colorado. You can find his books in the Amazon Store by clicking the links above; in addition, you can visit Brian Kiteley's homepage for more interviews, essays, and writing by clicking here.


Q: You write in The 3 A.M. Epiphany that "the American workshop is a lazy construction."  You go on to explain your reasoning, which I agree with.  Could you briefly tell me a few things you do differently in your classes at the University of Denver?  How do you teach enthusiasm for stories, and why is it that so many people believe writing can't be taught?

A: I promote useful accident-production in my fiction workshops.  I convince students to generate a lot of fragments about a coherent set of problems and characters, so that they may find, in this mess of fragments, a couple of possible stories or even an idea for a novel.  In my intermediate workshops for undergraduates, students write any four exercises from my book The 3 A.M. Epiphany (or its follow-up, The 4 A.M. Breakthrough), and then they write another four exercises.  I never tell them which exercises to write until they've finished a draft of a story, when I might suggest a couple of exercises to open up or helpfully derange the story.  We look among these eight exercises and make suggestions to the students about stories that lurk in the bits and pieces.  Before my students write their exercises, I tell them not to write a story--that they try not to finish anything but only produce questions and possibilities.

Here's one example of an exercise, from The 4 A.M. Breakthrough: Take a bunch of tag lines from cartoons, say, from the New Yorker, such as: "It has great refracted light."  "Beverly, brief me on my 11:15 duel."  "Are you even listening to me?"  "And then he turned the tranquilizer gun on himself."  "Look, making you happy is out of the question, but I can give you a compelling narrative for your misery."  "That was one strange and confusing competition."  Put them together.  Type up 10 or 15 tag lines and study them for a long while until they no longer seem connected to the comic strips they originally came from.  Rearrange their order a few times until you can see a possible story between the tag lines.  Write some kind of narrative to link together these fragments of talk or description.  500 words.  The word-limits on these exercises, by the way, are crucial.  I prefer to have small pieces of prose to wrap our minds around as we discuss the larger problems of potential stories or novels.

The last question you ask--why so many people believe writing can't be taught--has frustrated me over the years.  I had great teachers--Donald Barthelme, Grace Paley, Wayne Carver, Fred Tuten, and Mark Mirsky, and they all taught me and my fellow students how to write.  Their approach to the workshop was to ask us to bring full drafts of stories to class without any guidelines or suggestions for how to write those full drafts.  A few of them offered exercises.  Mark Mirsky asked me questions about myself and my family, outside of class, and he guided me toward a different subject matter for my fiction than I was exploring at the time, and this was a very good thing.

Genius can't be taught, but what can be taught is ambition, craft, subject matter, an understanding of the vocabulary of an art form, and a readiness to experiment with your own skills and limitations.  Enthusiasm can be provoked.  In my workshops, I've found a system that spurs undergraduates to poke around in their conscious and unconscious minds and create very different voices and methods than they would have created if they'd simply been told, "Write a story and bring it to class."  I am fond of asking questions like "What do you write about?"  "Why do you write about what you write about?"  Or simply, "Who are you and how should that affect the fiction you write?"

Q: Following up on the previous question, how do your lives as professor and writer coexist?  Is it sometimes difficult to find time to write?

A: I find being a writer and being a teacher of writing fairly similar activities.  It has taken me a while to learn how to integrate the two professions, but I began to realize a long time ago that teaching was also effectively a process of writing, and I could use that process to propel my fiction writing and essay writing.  I tell my graduate students to save everything they write for teaching, to rewrite syllabi, course notes, and handouts, and to take these pieces of writing out of the context of the classroom and turn them into other forms of writing.  I've also assigned so many of these exercises over the years that I was bound to do some of them myself, often in the classroom with the students, and occasionally outside of class to provide samples of my own flailing away at the same edicts and commands.

I have learned to be patient about writing long projects.  The difference between me as a writer now and when I was 28, say, is that I can see beyond the frustration of composition to the possibility of success.  I know that what looks bad several days after the moments of inspiration may look a lot better in six months.  I put things away, and I work on many different layers of a book, without the restlessness I used to feel when I was young.  Then I wanted to be finished with a chapter or a novel much sooner than it was ready to be finished.  I've always been a slow writer.  Before I began teaching full-time, my first novel took five years to finish.  My third novel, The River Gods, seems to have taken 11 years, but I also wrote two other books in the mean time (The 3 A.M. Epiphany and The 4 A.M. Breakthrough) and part of a book of travel memories, as well as a memoir about my brother that I never finished.  Patience is crucial for any writer, but particularly for a teacher.  I have learned how to wait for the writing to make sense to me, which I didn't always do in my 20s.  I have also learned how to write when I have only 15 minutes here or there.  Writing all the time (intermittently), as if it were a normal part of your waking life, is very important for staying in the mind of any writing project.

Q: Your new novel The River Gods is written as a series of short, first-person narratives (for example, one bit is told from the point of view of William Carlos Williams).  Each story deals with a particular time and place around Northampton, Massachusetts.  Can you tell me a little about the book?  Is there any reason you chose to form the book this particular way?

A: Traditionally, historical fiction writers use research to flesh out the story, to add colorful detail, and to achieve verisimilitude.  Research is what's done early in the process of writing most historical fiction.  My approach in The River Gods was to use the research to trigger the narratives at any time in the process--I continued to do research until the last few months I was working on the book.  I was interested in accuracy, but the historical fiction I wrote was more concerned with the mood and experience of the past.  When writing about the distant past, one is essentially translating from another language, losing great chunks of idiosyncratic detail and idioms of the moment.  But something can also be gained in this translation of the past: prose styles erupting out of close readings of primary and secondary texts, and a healthy rethinking of the relationship between the past and the present.  When a writer rewrites history, by taking over other texts and elaborating on them, the result is history reread and revised.  Much contemporary innovative historical fiction takes a simple idea--of reading the past--and complicates the process in surprising and imaginative ways.

The form of the book grew out of the research.  It also grew out of a sense of the function of the storytelling I wanted to employ.  I did not want to write a sweeping historical drama of the town.  Nor did I want to use a frame device--a contemporary or historical figure--to anchor the book in a narrative structure.  I wanted the history of the town to spill out and over the usual boundaries of a "novel."  I believe history is writing--what is written, not just by one author on paper, but by many voices and other forms of "writing," like architecture, town planning, or civil engineering.  This is a book of fragments of history.  The only narrative frame I've constructed is the one the reader brings to organizing the vignettes and storylets in his or her memory.  I tried several different orders of the 75 or so short pieces that make up the book.  First I put them in chronological order, beginning with the earliest human (or European) encounters with the place, Vikings, around 1000 A.C.E.  That didn't work.  It seemed arbitrary, and it privileged my own family stories, which came at what would have been the end of the book.  Then I tried a reverse chronological order, going backward in time.  This version of the book began with my brother's death in 1993.  It was fun to work backwards this way, but it also felt, finally, constructed.  The last version I came up with was to tell my family story more or less in chronological order and intersperse the family tales with other historical tales, echoing something in the family story.  But I do not begin the book with a story about "Brian Kiteley" or anyone else in my family.

Q:  I found a lot of wisdom in John Berger's Ways of Seeing, a book of art criticism that deals with oil painting in particular.  Although I often thought of it, I had not heard anyone mention the book in connection with writing (until I read The 3 A.M. Epiphany).  You even title one of your chapters "Characters and Ways of Seeing."  What is it about Berger's essays that you find important or relevant?  How does that relate to your own writing?

A: John Berger is a novelist and a very good commentator on art and art history.  This in itself is unusual.  I do not know another fiction writer who writes books about painting, off hand.  Berger's essay on Cubism in The Sense of Sight is a wonderful history of that moment in time, and I've found it a useful model for thinking of twentieth century fiction as well.  Perhaps because I am married to a painter, Cynthia Coburn, and many of my good friends in my late twenties were visual artists, I have sought out parallels between the arts.  I can see more clearly what I want to do with fiction through theories and descriptions of the act of making visual art.  I lived among painters and sculptors in 1984 and 1985, when I was at the Fine Arts Work Center, in Provincetown, Massachusetts (an artist colony for twenty young writers and visual artists).  The art that impressed me was new to me at the time--the paintings I watched come together on canvases.  I was unable to witness the other writers' work and revision as satisfyingly as I was able to witness (and learn from) painters' revisions and, heartbreakingly, erasures.

Q: Who is your favorite author (and what is your favorite story he or she wrote)? What resonates with you in that particular story?

A: Bruno Schulz and "August" is a very important story in the history of my influences.  "August" is about that month, the heat associated with that time of year, the emptiness of time in the summer at eight years old.  In Schulz's stories, his family members, named only "Father," "Mother," "elder brother," etc., are legendary figures rather than fictional characters.  This story does not play by the rules of fiction--with characters created for the reader in a careful manner, even if we're not aware they're being created or proposed.  The family in these stories, Street of the Crocodile and Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass, seem to exist before the narrative, as our own parents pre-exist us.  The stories are feverish evocations of late childhood and adolescence.  "August" is a very simple story that explores the way a child sees the world, not logically or rationally, but by means of association and mythology.  There are traces of Kafka in Schulz, who translated Kafka into Polish.  He writes as if he were inviting us into his life and world, not as if he has to explain or abstract his life and worldview.  He wrote many of these stories to one person, in a series of letters.  The philosopher in Warsaw who was his correspondent had taken a liking to his work.  She pushed Schulz to publish the stories he was sending her.  I prefer to read and write fiction that feels overheard, private, always on the verge of being embarrassing or inadvertently illuminating.  I don't enjoy fiction as much that behaves as if it were fiction.

Q:  I end all of my interviews with this question: John Gardner once wrote that the question he was most asked was, "Do you write with a pen, a pencil... or what?"  He said he thought this question delved into the mystical aspect of writing, brought up the "kinds of things compulsive gamblers are said to worry about," and questions, at its deepest level, whether there is in fact any hope for a writer.  So I have to ask, do you write with a pen, a pencil... or what?  Is there any hope, and, if there is, what is your best advice to students and aspiring authors?

A: There is hope.  Writing is an act of faith in the future (and faith that there is a past that can be examined, if not understood).

I used to write by hand with Koh-I-Noor Rapidograph pens.  These pens are used by draftsmen and sometimes by artists doing very fine drawings.  According to Koh-I-Noor's own ad copy, the pens "lay down dense, even-flowing ink lines of controlled and predetermined widths."  I used these pens because I'm left-handed, and when I wrote with a ball-point pen or even a fountain pen the fleshy part of my outer palm would smudge the writing I was doing.  Rapidograph pen lines did not smudge like this--their ink dries very quickly.  I wrote both on paper and in journals.  I can't recall the last time I wrote anything with one of these pens--perhaps six or eight years ago.  I also can't recall when I switched to composing my fiction (and every other kind of writing except postcard stories) on the computer.  I did notice the transition from type-written letters to letters composed on the computer (and later email).  Each medium changed the process completely.  When I first began writing letters to friends on computers, I realized I had begun to write in circles, rather than in a straight line.  I'd write a couple of paragraphs, and then I would go back and rewrite those paragraphs or delete one of two of them.  Sometimes I'd see a sentence that needed to be a paragraph.  These letters felt more constructed and less seat-of-the-pants recordings of my consciousness.  This is also true of composing fiction and nonfiction on the computer.  Because it is so easy to edit and revise work on the computer, I've discovered I am not nearly so concerned about the invention phase.  I write away without any editor on the shoulder.  I let loose whatever wants to come out.  That's a good thing.  The constant revision is not necessarily a good thing.  I feel I am maybe too patient now.  I have only just begun another novel, which I am writing in a beautiful Italian-bound blank book.  My rule for writing this book is to write by hand, never look back (well, not too much), and never revise.  I allow myself only to comment on what I'm doing, outside of the story, and those comments may end up in the book I finally do type up on my computer (at which point I'll probably revise and reorganize drastically).  But I do plan to write this novel in one draft, filling the 300-page book.  I've never done this before.