Screenwriter John August adds some more legitimacy to this love-hate relationship in an interview on Cecil Vortex. August is a top-tier screenwriter. Even if you haven’t heard his name, you’ve probably seen “Big Fish,” “Corpse Bride,” “Charlie’s Angels,” or “Go.” Which makes ideas like this all the more comforting to know:

I really don’t like writing. That’s a terrible thing to say of course, because one is supposed to love one’s art. But I’d rather do just about anything than sit down and start writing.

The thing is, I love having written. I love going back and looking at the scene I wrote. So “writing” is a necessary, painful process I go through in order to get to “having written.”

When people say, “Oh, I just loving writing!” I know they’re full of crap. They’re probably lousy writers who are regurgitating their daily thoughts in a journal. Actual writing is hard work. Even when you have the flow and it’s going well, it’s still incredibly taxing. My deepest nights of sleep are after days of having to write ten pages.

Ah. I feel much better now. Go read the interview on Cecil Vortex. And check out the rest of the site, there’s a stack of interviews with creative types. Recommended.

(Found via Yahoo! Picks)

Welcome to After the MFA’s leg of TypePad’s Virtual Book Tour with Brendan Halpin. Brendan, the author of five books, is promoting his new novel “Dear Catastrophe Waitress.” If you’ve come from Rarely Likable, TypePad’s network, or Brendan’s existing readers — welcome to all.

Before we launch into this interview, I want to throw a couple thoughts into a small stew pot that seems to have heated up since this virtual book tour began over on Syntax of Things.

Some folks in the “lit blog” world think TypePad’s promo tour may be exploiting the blogs on its networks. I can’t comment on what detractors are saying, what they may have at stake, or even about any conflicts of interest there may be in TypePad asking its network blogs to promote books. I’m not on the TypePad network. And I don’t particularly consider this site a lit blog — I don’t typically review books, talk about readings, or follow all the juicy tidbits in literary criticism, publishing, etc. I like to stick to the learning and doing of writing: the nuts and bolts.

Nevertheless, the debate got me thinking about this whole project.

I haven’t read Brendan’s new book — nor any of his previous books. And, I admit, I don’t often pick up novels of the kind that “Dear Catastrophe Waitress” appears to be. Brendan says he owes a lot to the work of Nick Hornby, and I haven’t been compelled to read Hornby since “High Fidelity” came out. I guess I prefer a different cup of tea. So, why agree to interview Brendan?

In the course of our email correspondence, Brendan said something that really stood out to me: “‘High Fidelity’ is the book that made me think writers weren’t necessarily some different kind of creature from me.” This is why I am taking part in this interview.

Fundamentally, Brendan’s words have everything to do with why I spend time on my web site. Writers aren’t necessarily a different kind of creature from me — or any of us. We can learn this art. We can carve out our own little slice of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, screenwriting, and whatever else is made with words. And once you begin to learn how, you have to start producing, start putting your words, ideas, and feelings on center-stage. Brendan Halpin is doing that and I’m glad we had an opportunity to sit down and talk about writing.

Whether or not this is exploitative or shilling for books… I can’t say. From my frame of reference, we’re talking about writing, like I’ve done here, here, and here. All different writers, different subjects, different styles. But in all of the cases, I’ve come out thinking a little bit more about my writing and my goals, which makes me feel like I’ve gotten the better deal out of it.

Enough of me. Let’s do that interview…

In your podcast interview with Harold Check, you mentioned that you have made the leap into full-time writing. When did that happen and how did you know it was the right time?

It was a bizarre confluence of events. I sold my first novel, “Donorboy, within a week of finding out that my wife Kirsten had about six weeks to live. I figured that the advance was enough for me to live on for a year, and once Kirsten died, it would have been very difficult to return to teaching because I would have had to put my daughter into before- and after-school programs, but, more importantly, teaching well takes a big emotional investment, and I had nothing in the tank to give to my students. All other considerations aside, I didn’t think it would have been fair to my students to just mail it in. So I started staying home and making up stories to make myself feel better.

You also mentioned that the discipline of writing is nothing like the discipline of teaching. Still, how do you stay on track?

I have a pretty rigid routine that helps me. I take the kids to school, I walk the dog, I exercise, and I sit down to write. And on the days when I don’t feel like writing, I do it anyway. I have the luxury to be able to do this as a job and not have to work my writing into time stolen from other responsibilities. So that makes it relatively easy. My personality is such that I’d feel guilty if I just sat on the couch and watched movies all day. And, of course, I have bills to pay. So I just sit down every day and do it.

How do you think teaching writing would compare with teaching high school?

Well, I always taught writing in my high school classes–I taught writing electives, but even in the “regular” English classes, I always made kids write personal essays, poetry and fiction in addition to the dreaded “English Paper.” For me, teaching writing was always the most fun because there’s a clear end product, and I guess I felt like I was good at helping my students to write better. So, for me, that was always the fun part. When I taught writing electives, it was really fun for me. Having said that, I don’t know how it works in college. I took one fiction workshop class in college and it was prickly and uncomfortable as all these kids with big egos, low self esteem and pretty undeveloped talent sat around and ripped each other’s stories to shreds. So I guess it’s really important for the instructor to set a supportive tone. I don’t know if that’s easier to do in high school, or if my instructor just wasn’t very good at that. She did introduce me to Raymond Carver, though, so that was good.

Where has your writing education or training or learning come from the most?

This is going to sound hopelessly corny, but I think I learned the most about writing from being a teacher. I learned a great deal just from teaching kids how to be better writers. And as far as the literature goes, I had to reread a lot of great literature, and I’m normally not a rereader. So on my fourth or fifth reading of something, I was able to stop just reading for the entertainment value and really pay attention to how those writers were making their books work. I guess it was like the difference between being a driver and being a mechanic. After a while I really got under the hood and saw how things were working.

You’ve talked about how important music is to you. Can you finish this sentence: Writing about music is like …?

…writing about food, or sex, or anything else that fundamentally hits you in a non-verbal part of your brain. I think that verbalizing experiences that come to us non-verbally is one of the biggest challenges of writing. And it’s also easy to do badly.

What other writers do you read, appreciate, feel a kinship toward?

I’m such a sponge that I have to read stuff that bears no resemblance to what I’m writing, or else I find myself unconsciously copying it. So, I mean, I obviously owe a tremendous debt to Nick Hornby, but I don’t read him anymore because I don’t want to steal from him. But I think “High Fidelity” is the book that made me think writers weren’t necessarily some different kind of creature from me.

I am in total awe of China Mieville. His imaginary worlds are more keenly observed than my real ones. And he’s a very good writer. So much science fiction/fantasy/horror/whatever you want to call it is strong on the ideas and cringe-worthy on the writing and dialogue, and Mieville is just so good at everything I can’t even be jealous of him.

I really like Christopher Moore‘s work, and a lot of Stephen King’s. I grew up reading Stephen King, and I really admire him. I think he’s just a really gifted observer of how people’s minds work. I think he’s able to sell all the supernatural stuff so convincingly because the workings of his characters’ minds feel so real. Charlie Huston is great. I’m a huge Philip K. Dick fan. I like Jonathan Lethem and Bradley Denton. Max Brooks’ “World War Z” is probably the best book I’ve read in 2007, and Frank Portman’s “King Dork” is the best book I read in 2006.

You have five books out now and another coming soon — what’s the secret of your prolific-ness?

Well, the longest one is 308 pages. So I don’t know that I’m writing more pages than anybody else — I just happen to write short books. But I think a lot about the advice I used to give my students, which is just that you have to be fearless about writing crap. I sit down every work day and make myself write at least a thousand words. Later on I worry about if they suck, but I think it’s just so important to turn the internal editor off when you’re writing a first draft. I find it much easier to tinker with a whole lot of stuff I’ve already written than to agonize over each word before I type it.

If you were invited to become a screenwriter, what would be your first project?

I’m dying for somebody to ask me to write a sequel to the Breakfast Club. John! Molly! Emilio! Somebody, call me!

***

With that, I send you off to the next stage of the virtual book tour, over at Drive Like Hell. I hope you got something out of your time here and may I see you back again.

In the 21st-century mashup of promotion and serendipitous discovery that seems to go so well with blogging, author Brendan Halpin is talking about his new book “Dear Catastrophe Waitress” in a virtual book tour of lit and writing blogs, mine included.

I’m honored to be a part of the experiment, since I don’t host my blog on TypePad, something the rest of the participating blogs share. But, I’m also honored to be included among an illustrious crew of good blogs, including:

Syntax of Things
Rarely Likable
Drive Like Hell

We’re all going to post a Q&A with Halpin. My turn is on Thursday, so please come pay a visit.

TypePad Featured Interviews: Brendan Halpin

I actually do believe this is a healthy way to try manage people in the workplace. People will stay interested, less disgruntled, and maybe as close to happy as possible in a job.

But, then, why didn’t I want that out of workshops? Why should creative endeavors have to enforce finding weaknesses in your work? I took this workshop style for granted until I recently read about storyteller Jay O’Callahan. He’s featured on Behance, an interesting new site about creative productivity (which also has some pretty cool notebooks, pads, and index cards to manage to-do lists).

The jist is, O’Callahan teaches workshops that stress finding “appreciations” in a story. Away with the usual feedback like, “I didn’t like this,” or, “I don’t get that…” And a lot more, “I really appreciated the way you described the sunlight glistening off the peanut butter.”

Does it work? I couldn’t say since I haven’t tried it, but when and if I ever get back into a writing group and/or partnership situation, I might suggest we give it a try.

Kate’s enthusiasm for and seriousness about the teaching of writing made an irreversible impression on me. In her own words from later in this interview, while taking Kate’s course I found “I was relieved to learn that I could still learn.”

Kate’s work outside the classroom includes a Flannery O’Connor Award, appearances in editions of “Best American Short Stories,” and publication in Zyzzyva, The Kenyon Review, and Other Voices. So, luckily for me this was a case of a teacher and a doer.

As with all subjects of my interviews, I’m thankful she took the time to converse with me. I always learn something in the process of asking the questions, reading or listening to the responses, and even the final formatting for the web site. My conversation with Kate was no different. Hope you all enjoy…

You once said “rejection is the rule of the day” for writers. Do you think rejection is a good thing for the art or the business of writing? Or is it just something that you have to accept?

It’s probably a good idea that there is some selectivity—that not everyone who writes can readily publish the work—but rejection also takes a real toll on writers.

The reasons for rejection are increasingly difficult to decipher when publishing has shifted to a mass-market mentality. In the “good old days,� editors were proud to have “mid-list� books on their list, books that didn’t necessarily sell very well but that made the publisher proud because of their perceived literary value.

What has been harder, as the market for books has shrunk and as editors have had to consider more intently the marketing potential of the book, is that good writers are receiving rejections more often, and the reason may be that the work fails in some significant way but the reason may also be that the editor can’t sell the marketing department on the idea or the manuscript didn’t suit the taste of a young editorial assistant who happened to be its first reader, and so on. So it’s harder to learn from rejection, and you face rejection more often, both of which make it difficult for a writer to persist.

When did writing become an important thing for you?

Let me see… this is a bit like answering the question, “When did breathing first become important to you?â€? I know that once I learned to read, I began to write.

I recall my father giving me a binder from his workplace so that I could write stories in it, and I must have been about seven at the time. I started to think of myself as a writer, sort of, in high school, and in college, I thought of myself as someone who wanted to write. Thanks to some great teachers, I began to see that I could actually be a writer.

Elliot Anderson, then the editor of Triquarterly, was a teacher of mine at Northwestern University, and in my senior year he drew me aside and asked me what I would do next. Um… be a secretary? I just didn’t feel I had the personal authority to declare myself a writer, and I grew up in an immigrant Irish Catholic family, where the only respectable work for a woman was to be a secretary or a school teacher, of course just temporarily until she got married and had babies. Which made me very ready to be told by someone else what to do. Elliot Anderson told me to apply to several specific writing programs, and I got in to one of them.

I first went to graduate school at Hollins College, which is a wonderfully weird place to earn a degree in writing, and then I spent three years getting an MFA at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. I think I really became a serious writer at UMass. My first semester there, I was living on almost no income, and I had to choose between buying a winter coat or buying a typewriter. I bought the typewriter.

There is some mysterious point at which you transition from being someone who writes because you need to unburden yourself or indulge yourself or earn praise and become someone who (while maybe still needing all those things) writes for a reader, is conscious of the work as artifact that will be in someone else’s hands and must be crafted carefully, carefully, into something beautiful and sound. Or as close as you’re capable of coming to that.

I was especially inspired by two very different teachers: George Cuomo helped me to see writing as a job, a set of tasks you worked to become competent at, and the late Tamas Aczel taught by example and his own gentleness what it meant to have art as one’s vocation.From George I learned that a fiction writer has to take care of the business of narrative: Where’s the plot? What’s the arc of change? George was bluntly literal minded about this and had little patience for airy experimentalism, and at the time, about all I knew how to do was write sentences I thought were pretty. This will date me, but at the time, there was a commercial for a fast-food burger chain, in which a tiny little old lady inspects a huge hamburger bun that hides a burger the size of a quarter and complains, “Where’s the beef?� George was always complaining in this way about student manuscripts: Where’s the beef? And I remember that as I was completing my thesis, Tamas pointed to a page on which I’d broken out an important sentence as a paragraph on its own, and he said, Now you are writing. He helped me to pay acute attention to all the ways in which language supports plot and characterization.

When and how did you get into teaching?

As a graduate student at UMass, I was a TA, teaching freshman composition courses. I’d always been interested in teaching, aside from any Irish assumptions about the job. Much later, I began to work again as a teacher; like many MFA grads today, I couldn’t find full time work after I first graduated, at least not in the urban areas where I wanted to live. I started out as a volunteer, teaching creative writing to school kids and to pregnant teens and teens in group foster care. Then I taught adults who’d gone back to college to earn a bachelor’s degree, which led to my being offered more traditional undergraduate courses, in composition and in creative writing. I also ran a writing center and tutored students. I began teaching in the MFA program at the University of San Francisco about thirteen years ago. For many years, I worked part-time at two or more different universities.

The variety of my teaching experiences taught me a great deal. Whether I was working with a student in the writing center or advising a graduate student on a thesis, the problems of composition existed along a continuum, and they are very much grounded in psychology—what motivates people, what enables them to judge their own work more objectively, what helps them to become revisers? A good teacher has to be receptive, not prescriptive: rather than impose a certain process on a student, you have to “listen� to what her process actually is and value it before you can help her to build on that in ways that will bring her closer to a successful piece of writing. And then, of course, how do you teach people to think? That’s a fascinating mystery. But not much intellectual transmission will take place unless teaching accounts for the psychological and social dimensions of learning.

One of the dilemmas of being able to teach writing seems to be that you need to be able to conquer two battles: getting published and the age-old dichotomy of needing to have experience as a teacher and not being able to get experience because you can’t get a job. Do you have advice or wisdom in working through this dilemma?

It’s just a very hard academic job market for people graduating with an MFA degree. Roughly several thousand people graduate from these programs every year, and about three hundred full-time jobs are advertised every year. It’s very important to publish your work in order to get a full-time job, or even a part-time job teaching creative writing, at least in an urban area.

I think that my advice is borne out by my own job trajectory. Be willing to volunteer to gain experience—and there are so many places, such as schools and prisons, where your presence will be greatly valued. People often overlook the many nonacademic settings in which you can teach writing, such as the Writing Salon in the Bay Area, and gain valuable experience. If you really want to teach, you’ll hunt out opportunities like these. You should also be willing to work at any part-time teaching job even ultimately related to your goal of teaching creative writing. If you really like teaching and you really like people, you’ll find a lot of satisfaction in teaching writing in any setting. Of course, all this presumes you will be able to live on next to nothing as you acquire the experience you need in order to qualify for a full-time job.

The question is, why do this at all? It’s a privilege to teach creative writing. Teaching forces me to keep being a student, to keep reading carefully and thoughtfully, and it imposes the task of imparting love for this task to my students. Teaching is like writing in that you have to do it for love, not money. And I get excited about going to class, excited about what the students are going to say about this story or that, about how beautiful the form of the short story is, about what I might try out on the students and whether it will fly.

I tend to organize and organize, but I also try to counter that. On the day of class, I spend a few hours coming up with a new idea, something spontaneous but also something that I hope will be inventive, not just the standard, “Can you identify the significant images in this work?� Teaching is an art form, and any art form is fundamentally about serious play, so I try to think about that when I’m planning for class. I also feel that teaching grants me a chance to share in a community that is at heart idealistic: whatever hardships there are in publishing one’s work, the experience of reading literature and writing honestly and as well as one can is idealistic, and it’s a very fortunate thing to have a job where this is so.

There’s a crotchety truism floating around that says you can’t teach people to write. What’s your response to that?

This criticism is often leveled at MFA programs, with the further criticism that whatever it is they DO teach their students, the outcome is a conformist, homogeneous product. I think that’s a lot of hooey. No one expects artists in any form to be able to become competent practitioners without many years of training and persistent effort, so why should writers be any different? Does anyone really believe that so many individuals can be formed so forcefully by graduate school that they convert to writing that fits a preshaped mold? I think the issue is simply that more people are pursuing a degree and then attempting to publish their work—so there may be more manuscripts on the market, but probably the same small proportion of them are truly exceptional.

I’d also have to say that my direct personal experience of how much people can learn in a writing program not only counters this notion but does so in a moving, even an awe-inspiring way. Having watched many classes of students spend about three years in the MFA program at the University of San Francisco, I can attest to how much they’ve grown as writers in their time as students. Partly, one grows as a writer simply from the chance to participate in a community that values the endeavor–planting a seed in fertile soil rather than on barren rock. And partly, one grows as a writer because serious close reading of literature and consistent, committed feedback on one’s own evolving manuscripts does lead to improvement.

You can’t teach a person to have a singular vision of any depth–you can’t make an artist from a do-it-yourself kit. But you can teach the tools of the craft to someone with artistic potential, who will devour whatever you have to offer. You can also help students to understand how technique is intimately bound up with vision. The visual artist Sue Coe once said, “Technique is the test of sincerity.â€?

You’ve mentioned in a prior interview that you’ve unsuccessfully attempted to quit writing a few times in the past. What keeps you coming back to writing?

Necessity. I think Robert Hass once spoke of the image as a means to capture experience and hold it still, when otherwise time just flows without stopping, washing away memories and sensations. Fundamentally for me, writing is about the image, and writing is about that effort to hold on to experience—to make it mean something, to defy time and forgetfulness. I don’t quite know how else to feel that I’m actually alive, in the world, trying to make meaning. Though I’m sure there are alternatives, I just never took to them. Writing is also such a satisfyingly demanding intellectual task–it requires all you understand theoretically about your art form, a cultivated receptiveness to your own subconscious, the capacity to feel as well as to imagine. Even compared to other kinds of writing, creative writing uses far more of your whole self and your whole mind.

I’ve wanted to quit a number of times, mostly because for years I kept meeting with failure when I tried to publish my work, and I was tired of not being successful at something. Here are your peers from college, getting jobs and getting promotions and gaining credibility in their field, and here you are, holing up in your room and hunching over your desk when you could be making some kind of gain in the world instead. There’s the feeling too that it’s just not useful to be doing this.

When my kids were little, I took a course or two in a graduate program in psychology, thinking I might become a therapist. Then I got an idea for a novel and remembered how wonderfully, fully consuming writing was for me. Another time I tried to quit just because I couldn’t take more rejection and it had really become painful to write. I didn’t know what to do with myself, so I wrote a book for my daughter, thinking that didn’t count. But it kept me writing, and I eventually started back up with my own work.

I still think about quitting. One of the hardest things about writing, for me, is that you’re always haunted by disappointment. I’ve never written anything as well as I’ve intended to write it, and ironically, the impulse to quit stems from the same place as the impulse to persist—the feeling of having failed at a piece, and being tormented by that, so that you either have to throw in the towel or try again, in case you can get any closer to that beautiful thing you’ve envisioned.

For those of us who would love to teach but don’t—or can’t—do you recommend any ways to keep our minds strong and prepared for the main event when we do get up behind the podium?

Finding classes to take, or forming writing groups or book groups, is one way to sustain the discipline of seriously thinking about your craft. It really matters to continue in some way to have a world in which reading and writing continue to feel central.

Though I wrote nearly every day for my job, I didn’t write a word of fiction for about eight months after completing the program at USF. Is there a typical after-the-MFA experience that you’ve encountered?

I think the let-down after you earn the degree is very common. You’ve achieved something when you complete a thesis, yet it’s probably not yet a publishable work, and it’s almost certainly not yet published. And now you are alone in the cold, hard world, absent the support you get from a community of people who think it matters that you write. It’s really helpful to sustain a writing group with your cohorts from your graduate experience, if you can, but it’s also important to be patient about fallow periods. Probably all writers have them. And the writers who sit down at their desk anyway, gnashing their teeth, insane with boredom and frustration, are the writers who’ll write something again.

You usually work in short fiction, but you’re currently writing a biography. How has working in nonfiction changed the way you write?

The biography is about molecular biologist Elizabeth Blackburn, and it’s also an attempt to describe the intellectual life of a research scientist and the social environment of a research lab. I brought a lot of ignorance to the project, and I was relieved to learn that I could still learn, trying to understand rudimentary concepts of molecular biology in order not just to describe experiments but to write them in a way that would convey the flavor of scientific opportunism and adventure.

A biography is a novel-like narrative: it requires a dramatic arc. One of the intriguing aspects of writing nonfiction was learning how to discern from a welter of facts what that dramatic arc might be and then how to write the book so it possessed this shapeliness. Fictional impulses take over, and you’re constantly being tugged back by the immovability of the actual facts. Often, I’d think I saw a particular narrative arc or conflict and have to revise my notion in the face of the facts (and the living subject of the biography, who could contradict me). But the facts would, if given their due, lead me to a different or more complex notion of conflict and change than the one I had started out with. It’s just like writing fiction in that way—you learn from the writing itself and revising is analogous to digging down through layer after layer of subtext and nuance. With revision, you become more able to suggest that richness beneath the surface. I think writing the biography taught me something about how to approach novel writing. It also left me ravenous for the freedom of fiction writing, and I began a novel soon after I finished the biography with a stronger sense of the through-line of plot than I think I’ve had before.

Read more at NPR: Novel Ideas

(Thanks to Tavi, Program Assistant in the University of San Francisco MFA office for the link.)

In the first part of our conversation we learned about Jones’s life following his MFA and talked about his two short story collections, “Lost in the City” and “All Aunt Hagar’s Children,” as well as his phenomenal novel, “The Known World.” In this section, we get into the challenges of storytelling, books, a couple of interesting tidbits about movies and graphic novels, and whether or not there’s magic in writing…

When did books and writing become important to you?
The writing thing came late in college. Like I said, I’ve never been one to sit down and write every day. But books became important in my early teens, but I had been reading comic books before that. I would say reading has been important since I started learning how to read, really. But the writing thing came later.

I mean, I didn’t grow up thinking that I would be a writer — that’s not the kind of environment I came from. You grew up to get a solid job, so that you won’t have to pray about your rent and worry about food. And I didn’t know any people who were writers. But the reading was always important, and I suppose that there’s no better foundation in the universe, if you want to write, than loving to read.

You come across people in writing courses with poor reading — they haven’t read enough… One of the first things I noticed, before I even thought about being a writer, I think I was in junior high school, and for some reason I was in some office killing time, and there was a typewriter there. That was the first time I ever typed. I typed my name and I was fascinated by the way the black words looked on the white paper. And I discovered books when I was in my early teens, and one of the things I noted, for example, was quotations. There’s open quotations, and then there’s the comma, or the period, and then end quotation. I had this student, an intelligent woman, and one of the things she was doing was that she had no idea how the dialogue technically was supposed to be written. As if she had never read a book that had dialogue. I always liked to have conferences, whether in my office or over the phone, and I was telling her about that problem. I said, “Go to your bookshelf and take down a book.” And it was if she had never investigated how dialogue — a simple thing — how dialogue is supposed to be written… The reading thing is the best foundation.

So you’ve done two story collections now and one novel. Have you thought about or been approached about doing other types of writing, like nonfiction, or has Hollywood come knocking?
Actually, someone is writing a screenplay for “The Known World,” but I don’t know how far along they are. And I got an email from DC Comics about some ideas for graphic novels, but I have no ideas, so I don’t know where that will ever go.

That would be great —
They heard that comic books were a part of my childhood. I have never read a graphic novel…

There’s some good stuff out there.
That’s what I understand. You know, I saw “Sin City” on DVD and I liked that a whole lot. I’ve seen maybe one or two other things too. I think at first, when I thought about that, this coupling of comic book and novel, I wasn’t quite sure. But now I know that there’s some good things out there, and I’m looking forward to catching up.

As a fan, I would encourage you to go with that. A Jones graphic novel would be a great thing to see… One last question I had for, about the writing process — What’s the toughest part of writing for you?
Well, I think it’s all sort of tough… Because I’m not the kind of person to take anything from my own life. In both collections of stories, the second story in each collection deals with a little girl going off to school for the first time, and I would say that maybe 10% of each of those stories is from my own life. The rest of the stories — the second story in each volume — is all made up. And 100% of each of the other 26 stories are all made up as well. This whole thing of trying to create something out of nothing is difficult.

And also, once something comes to you, what’s a good and proper resolution? I remember when I knew there was going to be something substantial with “The Known World,” I took my mind as far ahead in the story as I could to create a resolution, create a climactic moment.

And I said before that you read some people’s novels — not necessarily the stories, because you can deal with that in a shorter period of time — but in novels, I think people sometimes they wake up with these wonderful ideas and they go ahead with them. They never think about how everything is going to resolve. So, then two-thirds tend to be wonderful because they had all this inspiration. And the latter third is rather flat because they ran out of inspiration, and because they didn’t know where it was going to end up. The resolution should always be in your mind. There are times when you just won’t have the energy, and the resolution should be like a star in the sky to guide you. You might run out of food and water but you can still keep crawling towards that star.

You just described basically what I struggle with in my own writing. That’s definitely something I am going to remember.
Yeah, I don’t have much patience — you know, people will say, “Oh, you know I just let the characters take over…” I think that’s so much junk. It comes out of your mind, it’s in your brain, whether or not you’re going to acknowledge it. And sometimes people will say, “Well, do your characters live on after you finish?” No! They don’t do or say anything I don’t tell them to do or say. You know what I mean?

People want to make it seem like there’s some sort of magic. There is no magic. It’s “once upon a time, Jack and Jill went up the hill…” And you don’t need any fancy language, you know?

——

And that’s it for the interview, sadly. I would like to thank the folks at HarperCollins, including my good friend Jeff, for helping make this happen. I was nervous about this, but it ended up being a conversation that gave me much to think about and many ideas to act upon. Can’t ask for anything more than that.

Thanks, also, to all the people who sent feedback and linked to the first part of the interview, including Maud Newton, who pointed out this great review/essay from Harper’s on Jones’s work. It’s recommended reading.

Purely an individual, he works how he works and does what he does. It may have taken him a few years to get where he is, but that should be a healthful and happy reminder to everyone out there toiling and sweating and worrying about writing, about making it, about carving out a place in this world.

Jones is antimatter to all the youthful ingenues, the photogenic, the dazzling New Yorker interns, the firebrand ex-junkies, the cross-dressing voodoo doctors who know how to twist the arm of headlines and book review sections and blogs. Edward Jones is none of these. He’s a writer and a storyteller. He’s won an NEA grant, a Pulitzer, and a MacArthur Fellowship. He held down a boring job while working on his first two books. He doesn’t own a car. He doesn’t even want one. Edward Jones is my hero.

Jones has a new collection of short stories out called “All Aunt Hagar’s Children.” The stories are fantastic.

I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to interview Mr. Jones over the phone about his new book and his writing. Much of it pertains to life after the MFA. Some of it is just personal wisdom. Some of it I may not even agree with — Jack and Jill in second person could actually be kind of exciting. I’m proud to feature our conversation. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

My new mantra, by the way, is “the colonel, his father, and the ice.”

Lastly, if anyone is in New York on Thursday, Sept. 14, you can see Edward Jones reading at the 6th Avenue Barnes & Noble in Chelsea. I’ll be there.

Can you go into a chronology of how things went for you after your graduate program?
Well, I didn’t apply to teach any place, because I didn’t think I was going to get a job anywhere. I’d only published maybe a story in Essence and maybe one in a literary journal and that was it. So, you know, I didn’t spend two years getting a degree and then think, “Right, everything will be wonderful. Once I get a degree I’ll get a teaching position.” So I just got a job with a tax magazine summarizing newspaper articles and magazine articles on taxes — I’m sorry, I began proofreading — for a weekly magazine that had 120 pages on just about anything you’d ever know about taxes. And then, a few months after that, I started summarizing articles on taxes… And I didn’t get up every morning before going off to work and start writing. I didn’t came back home and start writing.

I was fairly satisfied with the life I had and I suppose I had only gone on to get a degree was because the job that I had before I left for graduate school, which was sitting and calling people all day at Science magazine, that wasn’t all that fulfilling. And graduate school seemed okay. And about, I started doing that job around ’83, and around ’89 or ’90 I started in earnest finishing up the 11 or 12 stories that became “Lost in the City.” A couple of them had already been published and so I went just finished the rest of them that were still in my head.

So you had a few years in between working and completing “Lost in the City” where you were doing some writing? Not much writing?
I really can’t remember — I mean I think I’d probably get up and if there was a mood… I got an NEA grant in ’86 which allowed me to stop going into the office every single day. I stopped the proofreading and just did the summarizing. And so I never went back to going into the office every day, all the way up until when I left Tax Notes in 2002.

I mean, I’ve never been someone to get up every single day and write physically. I work a lot of things out in my head and that works for me. It might not work for anyone else. But, like I said, I started working on the stories that had been written. Eleven or twelve of them had not been written. I started in ’89, ’90, and then I was finished around 1991 and I sent them off to this editor that I knew and they were published in 1992. And I got the idea in 1992 about writing this novel and I spent 10 years thinking of it in my head.

That’s amazing. While you were writing your short stories, did you have a similar experience as a lot of other folks in getting rejections from when you were submitting? Most writers talk about how they stacked up hundreds of rejections before things finally started moving for them…
I don’t think I ever sent anything out after I came out from school. The only thing I did do was apply for the NEA grant. That was all I did. I didn’t send anything to any magazines. I think I had gotten enough rejection letters before graduate school, so that carried me through.

I just didn’t have any confidence in anyone, you know — no offense to the people at the ground level of a lot of these literary magazines, but some guy in college or grad school, comes in grumpy and no matter how good your story might be, he might go “well, I don’t want this story,” and just say “no.” And even when I had finished all the stories — you know one or two of these stories had already been published, but everything else was brand new — my agent had sent them out and no one gave a damn. The only magazine that cared to publish, out of all of those stories that had not been published, was the Paris Review.

It was nice because I knew once I did have the agent and he was going to get stuff out there, I knew I would never again, ever send anything out. And I haven’t. And I won’t.

And after graduate school how long did it take before you got into teaching?
I got offers — it wasn’t anything long term and it wasn’t anything permanent — but I started getting offers after the book came out, American University, and all of that. And I never applied for those positions. They called me, I think, probably because they were only a semester here, a semester there.

I’ve read that you’ve taught at Princeton as well… What were some other places. Was there a particular place that was your favorite so far?
Unversity of Maryland, George Mason University, and University of Virginia, when I was getting the degree and for about a year after the degree. And I think there were about five or six places. They all had something to recommend themselves. At Princeton they only had 10 students in each class, and I suppose if Princeton had been around the corner, I would have taken Paul Muldoon up on his offer to come back in the fall. But I would leave my home — I don’t have a car, don’t want a car — I would leave at 7:30 in the morning, and I would not arrive at my office in Princeton until about 12:30. So, like I said, if it had been around the corner… But, at each of them, you met some students that you liked a lot.

Recently, I mentioned one of your stories here from your collection… I got a feeling from it, along with others from “Aunt Hagar,” that when it comes to writing your stories — and definitely please correct me if I’m wrong — I get the sense that you like to go with where you want to go. You’re not trying to play by rules. I get a sense that you like to experiment…
No. No, I don’t experiment. I go by the stories that I read in my life, which are stories that everybody’s read. I don’t know very much about new stuff. I don’t care to go out there and discover new stuff. That’s just me. So I’m going by the people who publish things before, say, 1980 or so, and that’s going back since whenever the story began. But, no, I don’t like to experiment.

Right now, I’m the guest editor for the anthology, “Best New Stories From the South,” and I’ve come across some good people. And the ones that turned me off almost right away — there’s a guy who wrote two stories in second person. One of them is okay, it holds up. But the other is just so darn phony. It reminds me of standing in the bathroom with the door closed and talking to yourself in the mirror. My sense of this is always — always — that if the story itself, the people and the plot and everything is good enough, you don’t need to go around experimenting… “Once upon a time Jack and JIll went up a hill to fetch a pail of water…” And, you know, you can’t make it exciting by saying “you and Jill went up the hill to do such-and-such.” If what happens when they go up that hill isn’t enough for a story, then you’re doomed, you’re lost. But, I’ve been very happy with some of these — these are very new people, of course, people I’ve never read before. Of the 32 I’ve read so far, I’d say 10 of them are very good and the others are sort of in the middle category.

But, I never experiment. You know, I try to have a beginning, middle, and and end, even if people can’t see that. One of the things I do like to try to do — and that might be experimenting — is I want to create stories that have the feel of a novel, even though they’re within the confines of the pages of a short story.

Okay, and that points to — when I was talking about experimenting, I wasn’t thinking about the post-modern techniques of second person or metafiction or things like that. I noticed things that, at least in my graduate school experience, people tended to discourage, like talking forward and saying this character, years from now, will remember this. I saw a lot of this particular technique in your stories, where you flash forward…
Yeah, I don’t mind that so much, and I guess I don’t really see that as experimenting… And, I wasn’t following him, but we are influenced without even knowing sometimes by what we have read — so like in “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” it begins with the guy who is shot and remembers the day his father introduced him to ice… I’ve come to see that maybe my belief is that a character’s life is one long string from the beginning, from being born, till the end. And telling the story of this person’s life, you can just choose along that line, whatever will enhance the story, whatever will make it real and vivid for the reader.

So, in choosing the story to tell about these characters, are you picking a moment in time that helps show something about their whole life?
Well, in a story, of course, you’re kind of limited. I’m thinking whatever’s pertinent… It’s a been a long time since I read “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” but I would think that the colonel, his father, and the ice, that day he was introduced to the ice was a very important day. The day before, when he had something sweet to eat was not as important. The next day, when he slept, until 7 rather than 6 o’clock in the morning was not an important day. So, like I said you have this long line and there are hundreds and hundreds of events that you can create and introduce, but not everything is important…

Stay tuned for the second installment of the interview. And feel free to leave comments — let me know what you think…

Sept. 25: And here’s a link to part two.

How did “The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop� come to being? What were its formative moments?
As you know, I worked in bookstores, with a passion, for 10 years, and for 7 years after that I was a publisher’s sales rep who called on bookstores. It’s just been in my blood, for whatever reason. Happenstance, most likely, a fortunate happenstance. And as a writer, one always considers one’s experiences for material. But in 1992, or thereabouts, I was asked to write some general essays about bookselling for American Bookseller magazine. Those were a lot of fun, and I knew then that I had to write this book. I knew what it would be called, and how it would look even, and am happy to say that’s all turned out to be true. But other than that, I really didn’t know where to start. I quit the book business in 1994 and started teaching, and it wasn’t until 2000 that I really had a clear vision of the book. I think it took that distance to get the picture I wanted. I knew that a memoir of my own bookselling career would be fairly tedious, and I felt that a larger view–an historical view, a wide cultural view–would benefit the book. I wanted to write a book about the bookstore in general, to write about all bookstores. I wanted to write a memoir on behalf of the bookstore. I needed the time away to find that larger focus.

In the book, you talk about how you came to books and literature through “The Grapes of Wrath.� You also talk about almost immediately picking up and trying to write a story after reading that particular book. Do people who love to read always want to write? And vice-versa?
Well, I can’t say for sure, but it would certainly seem that way. When I was teaching continuing education courses, I frequently heard new students–anywhere from 20 to 70 years-old–say that they’d always wanted to write, that they’d always been readers, and at some point, they knew they had a story to tell. Sadly, I also heard as many of them tell me that they’d started out writing only to have this notion squashed by any number of people–parents, teachers, friends, failed writers who’d given up. Everyone? Probably not. But a lot, that’s my guess. If you were a huge baseball fan, say, and watched and went to game after game, wouldn’t you at some point but a glove and yearn to play catch? Maybe start a team? It’s inevitable. But with this addition. Everyone who knows how to read already has the tools, that is, they have written something before–poems in school, essays, business reports, letters. It’s part of being human, telling stories, and when you’ve got the tools, well, why not?

Does every avid reader have a writer inside crying to get out? Should they all get out?
Don Delillo says that the novel is a truly democratic art form and claims that every person has a novel in them, at least one novel. Sure, I’m willing to buy that. Every person certainly has a unique path through reality, and each of those paths suggests some important testimony, some witness to a life on the planet.

Should each of us write a novel? There are some who would say no, that that’s best left up to, well, to whom? Professionals? No, every writer is an amateur, and the best writers retain–you can feel it in the urgency of the writing–something of their amateur status. Because that is, in the long run, what we want, urgent messages from others. A lot of teachers I’ve worked with bemoan the burgeoning of writing classes and programs, claiming that somehow it crowds the market. But I would disagree. I’ve had something close to 1,000 students in my twelve years teaching, all wanting to write–all writing, by the way–and while not all of them, in fact hardly any of them, are going to become “successfulâ€? or even published, I can’t see the harm. Each of these students has written something of interest, something of their lives, a piece of testimony that wasn’t there before. They’ve investigated the world and their place in it. How can that be bad? And all of them will be better readers, more engaged readers. Why shouldn’t everyone write, tell their story? It’s better than building bombs.

While in graduate school, I always struggled with this sense that I wasn’t as well-read as my fellow students. I definitely feel better read now that I’ve finished… How do you come to a sense of being well-read or not?
One never feels well read. It’s a constant struggle to feel that you’re making inroads. Because every time I read one book, it only uncovers five more books I want to read. There’s only one thing for it, the time and persistence it takes to read. It’s an odd concept, though, feeling as if one’s well read. For who defines that? You read and read and read, and always fall behind. It’s actually a great thing, this falling behind, to feel that you will never run out of great books to read. How sad to feel all-read out.

There seemed to be a consensus amongst the staff at USF that writing went hand-in-hand with reading. Is this consistent among all MFA programs? Is there any room for exceptions to those rules? Do you absolutely have to be a voracious reader to fulfill a dream of being a writer?
I know one good writer who doesn’t like to read. Claims that he hates it and only reads what he has to. He’s a failed concert pianist who took up writing as a means of self-expression. And he’s the exception. Do you have to be a voracious reader to be a writer? I don’t see why you’d have to. But I just can’t figure out why you’d want to be. Most writers are compelled to write because of their reading, the sense that words have immense and beautiful powers. And from this reading, their own stories start to emerge. I just can’t understand why someone would want to be a writer if they weren’t also an habitual reader. I mean, why would you want to? So, as a rule, yes. As a piece of common sense, though, reading is naturally tied to writing. I certainly wouldn’t want a brain surgeon who was some kind of maverick and didn’t keep up with what other brain surgeons had done and were doing. All trades learn from apprenticeship on one level. Reading is the key element in a writer’s apprenticeship.

***

And, with that, I thank Lewis Buzbee for sharing his time with me. He recently informed me that “The Yellow-Lighted Bookshopâ€? has gone into its third printing. No surprise to me. I’ll be honest, when I picked up a copy, I was a little anxious. What if I didn’t like it? That would have been a serious blow to teacher-student relations (not that it’s a requirement for students to enjoy their teachers’ work). But I didn’t need to worry at all. TYLB is one of the best books I’ve read all year. Buy, steal, or borrow a copy and check it out.

But, Lewis did get an MFA and that makes him prime fodder for an interview here, and I’m glad he agreed to do so.

Full disclosure: I consider Lewis a friend and somewhat of a mentor of mine, and I want to do whatever I can to help get the word out about his new books: “After the Gold Rush” and “The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop.”

If you love books–if you can’t stop yourself from browsing shelves, buying $1 books, stacking up books by the side of your bed–then “The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop” should be sitting on top of that stack. Trust me. And if you’re drawn to short fiction in the California lit vein, “Gold Rush” should be in your Amazon shopping cart as well.

In the first of three parts, we talk with Lewis about the MFA experience…

How did you arrive at getting your MFA? What were the factors that made you decide to go to school for a graduate degree in creative writing?
A total whim. I was just about to graduate from college and was being offered jobs I just couldn’t see myself in–most notably writing technical manuals for weapons’ systems–and so I thought, hey, this MFA thing sounds pretty cool. This was 27 years ago, and there weren’t nearly as many MFA programs as now, so it was still a bit of a mystery. I chose the program I went to (ed. note: Warren Wilson College) because Raymond Carver was listed as faculty, and that seemed reason enough. It was Ray’s last semester, alas, but the program was no disappointment. It changed my life. Why? Because it made me write and revise with great diligence for two years, it forced me to become a critical reader, and it offered me a community of writers, which I’d not had before. So, what’s not to like. At its most basic level, because of those two years of focus and drive, an MFA program asks every student the big question: is this really what you want to do? And that’s an important question to have asked.

What was your life like after getting your MFA? Any moments when you asked yourself whether it was worth it?
Life after the MFA was hard. I didn’t write much of anything for three years–although not for lack of trying. I was used to having all of those teachers on my shoulder, and they were still there, and every time I wrote a word, I would stop and listen for their response. It is a problem. As if you’ve taken the jello out of the mold before it’s quite set. But I kept at it, never stopped. And that’s the big test right there. Some people–a lot of people, actually–will stop after the MFA. Others slog on. That’s the bonus question to the big MFA question–now keep writing. Eventually I wrote a novel that I hoped my teachers would hate. And at least one of them did hate it. And that felt like a victory of some kind.

What were the two or three things that really stuck with you from your MFA experience? Lessons in the classroom, or even outside of it…
The two biggest lessons, both from teachers, just as I was about to graduate. Stephen Dobyns said to me one morning after a workshop, “no more donuts.” I knew exactly what he meant, too. He meant no more big starchy lardy fluffy things, no more screwing around, no more staring into space. He meant that if I really wanted to do it, I should just do it. Writing was, he told me later, and more explicitly, a matter of will. It took me years to incorporate that lesson, but I got it eventually. And from David Huddle, who told me, “Lew, you’ve got to give the reader a physical sense of your characters.” I argued for a moment, claming there were only a few physically memorable characters in great literature. No, he told me, not memorable, not a portrait. A sense, he meant, of the characters as physical beings moving through the universe. And we talked at great length. David taught me–as did Stephen–many many things, but this last little chat we had has always stayed with me. That’s one of the great things about an MFA program, when you find great teachers, the lessons are many, and they’re varied, from the cosmic to the page. It’s been twenty-four years since I graduated from my MFA program, but the lessons from my MFA teachers, all of those lessons, still float around in my head. I suppose that’s what I’m offering my students–lessons from my teachers who got them from their teachers who…Etc.

How about teaching? How does a post-MFA get into teaching? How did you get involved in teaching?
I got into teaching haphazardly. I’d published my first novel and was just about to quit the book business to immerse myself in my writing, when I got a call from a friend of a friend of a friend who needed an instructor. I took that class, and I stayed. So, very lucky. Because I love teaching, and I find, at least for me, it’s made me, I hope, a smarter writer, and certainly a more engaged reader. But listen, not everyone is going to love to teach. And the money’s not that good, and you don’t really get summer’s off. One should teach because one loves to teach. It’s still a job. Get another job if you don’t like teaching. Being a teacher is no gateway to publishing either, so perish that thought.

Richard Hugo says that MFA grads, or any writer, for that matter, shouldn’t teach until they’ve been writing, really writing, for ten years. Can’t think of a better piece of advice. Getting an MFA degree is no conference of authority; in fact, receiving one’s MFA is just the beginning of the real writing journey. Why should one leave an MFA program and immediately begin teaching. I’d like my teachers to have some more experience in writing before they begin tossing around exercises and maxims. To get back to the brain surgeon again–though the analogy isn’t explicit. I think I’ll go with the brain surgeon with 10 years of experience, overall, as opposed to the newly minted resident.

Do you think anyone who wants to teach writing should have an MFA?
Lord, no. You don’t need an MFA to do anything, not to write and not to teach. We did just fine without MFA degrees for thousands of years. The MFA is a very recent development, around WWII, actually. So, no, not necessary. And let’s be reasonable, logical, almost. Not every MFA holder is going to be a teacher. If that were the case, we’d be overrun with MFA students and teachers in a couple of generations. An MFA is just a piece of paper; it’s the writing experience and the aptitude for teaching that makes a good teacher. But there’s something to it. Someone with an MFA, who wants to teach, will probably have studied with some good teachers, and so done their apprenticeship in teaching that way. Teacher to student to student to student. Etc. But if you’ve got the chops for teaching and writing without a degree, then do it. I know several great teachers who don’t hold a degree. But they all love to teach.

Stay tuned for more… And feel free to post comments or questions of your own.