PEN Center USA

Last week I went to my son’s midyear parent-teacher conference. I was prepared to take notes and discuss his work. What I didn’t anticipate was a mini-writing workshop–– a refreshing twist to the usual discussion. To teach writing to the children, my son’s school utilizes a method Lucy Calkins developed. She is the Founding Director of the Reading and Writing Project at Columbia University’s Teachers College.

I’m nervous. Not about my writing––the collection’s coming along. What I’m nervous about is this blog. But I'll get to that in a moment.

Photo credit: Robinberg Photography

At this point in The Mark program, I thought it would be helpful to reach out to Lucy Corin, my teacher from my masters program at UC Davis. I often look to writers I admire for guidance, and I’m excited to share some of Lucy’s inspiring thoughts with you here, on The Mark blog.

Shortly after completing the Emerging Voices Fellowship, I applied to the masters in creative writing program at UC Davis. Lucy was the faculty member who notified me of my acceptance, and she also sat on my thesis committee. My graduate thesis was a draft of the novel I'm working on now in The Mark.

As a winner of the 2012 American Academy of Arts and Letters Rome Prize, Lucy is currently living and writing in Rome. She has a new collection of short stories forthcoming in August 2013 from McSweeney’s Books, called One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses. Her other books include Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls and a terrific collection, The Entire Predicament. She’s an associate professor at UC Davis and earned her MFA from Brown University.

The following interview was conducted over email.

As a former student of yours, I'm curious: What's it like for you to be away from campus and engaged full time as a writer, as opposed to splitting your time between writing and teaching?

I have loved teaching and learned so much from it and from individual students along the way. But I'd been struggling with some burnout, so it's an enormous relief to have some distance from it, to read without thinking about what my reading might mean to students or to my professional life. I hope the result will be that I return to teaching with a different relationship to it. I think the burnout came from my frustrations with the institutional changes we're all familiar with as well as being tired of my own shtick.

As soon as I have a shtick I become sick of it. But since all my non-teaching time is devoted to writing, when I go back to teaching, I just want to rely on my shtick, even though that feels really false and lonely to me. And abandoning my 'way of doing things' or my 'take on things' would leave me swirling with uncertainty in public, and that is not good for teaching—not in lecture format or in seminar format, either. But departure from habit is essential to writing and to the time spent writing.

All of this is just to say that writing full time is wonderful and I can't get enough of it.

You have a blog, referred to on your website as a "public writer's journal.” What's this experience like for you? Do you find that it affects your work or writing process, and why did you make the choice to start it?

I decided to do it because I wanted to embrace the idea of having a "web presence" instead of scoffing at it. I wanted to use the space without the ambition of being a trafficked site—without fighting for visibility on the web. I wanted to make it an honest space dedicated to what I think is important about what I do, rather than a space that felt controlled by the aspects of marketing that I think are disruptive to the making of art. I did not want to reproduce or create chatter.

What is your current project and can you tell us a little bit about it? What are you excited about and what's been a struggle?

I don't think I want to say much more about the project than what's on my blog. Mostly because I'm in the phase where my ambitions for it feel so grand that it's embarrassing to say what they are. It's a novel I've been trying to write for a long time—throwing away many months and reams of false starts—while also writing another collection of stories.

We're excited to share this treasure from John Steinbeck, whose thoughtful reflections on the art of writing constitute an invaluable resource for all writers. Below is Steinbeck's "letter" to beginning writers:

Dear Writer:

Although it must be a thousand years ago that I sat in a class in story writing at Stanford, I remember the experience very clearly. I was bright eyes and bushy-brained and prepared to absorb the secret formula for writing good short stories, even great short stories. This illusion was canceled very quickly. The only way to write a good short story, we were told, is to write a good short story. Only after it is written can it be taken apart to see how it was done. It is a most difficult form, as we were told, and the proof lies in how very few great short stories there are in the world.

The basic rule given us was simple and heartbreaking. A story, to be effective, had to convey something from the writer to the reader, and the power of its offering was the measure of its excellence. Outside of that, there were no rules. A story could be about anything and could use any means and any technique at all––so long as it was effective. As a subhead to this rule, it seemed to be necessary for the writer to know what he wanted to say, in short, what he was talking about. As an exercise we were to try reducing the meat of our story to one sentence, for only then could we know it well enough to enlarge it to three- or six- or ten-thousand words.

So there went the magic formula, the secret ingredient. With no more than that, we were set on the desolate, lonely path of the writer. And we must have turned in some abysmally bad stories. If I had expected to be discovered in a full bloom of excellence, the grades given my efforts quickly disillusioned me. And if I felt unjustly criticized, the judgments of editors for many years afterward upheld my teacher's side, not mine. The low grades on my college stories were echoed in the rejection slips, in the hundreds of rejection slips.

It seemed unfair. I could read a fine story and could even know how it was done. Why could I not then do it myself? Well, I couldn't, and maybe it's because no two stories dare be alike. Over the years I have written a great many stories and I still don't know how to go about it except to write it and take my chances. If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another. The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader. If the writer has that urge, he may sometimes, but by no means always, find the way to do it. You must perceive the excellence that makes a good story good or the errors that make a bad story. For a bad story is only an ineffective story.

It is not so very hard to judge a story after it is written, but, after many years, to start a story still scares me to death. I will go so far as to say that the writer who is not scared is happily unaware of the remote and tantalizing majesty of the medium.

I remember one last piece of advice given me. It was during the exuberance of the rich and frantic '20s, and I was going out into that world to try and to be a writer.

I was told, "It's going to take a long time, and you haven't got any money. Maybe it would be better if you could go to Europe."

"Why?" I asked.

"Because in Europe poverty is a misfortune, but in America it is shameful. I wonder whether or not you can stand the shame of being poor."

It wasn't too long afterward that the depression came. Then everyone was poor and it was no shame anymore. And so I will never know whether or not I could have stood it. But surely my teacher was right about one thing. It took a long time - a very long time. And it is still going on, and it has never got easier.

She told me it wouldn't.

(1963)