I was a little irked this morning because I don’t have time to work on my revision today. This is always a good thing for me though, that feeling that I’m chomping at the bit to get back to the page. It means I want to do it. My desire to write, to enter into the fictional world I’ve created and fix it up a little bit, is very much alive. And this makes me feel more alive. Well, this and having to do real life things like teach a couple of classes tonight. Teaching pulls me right back into the thick of things, the conflicts, the ideas, the energy of being in a room with a bunch of other people talking about stories.
Tonight, in the “writing about lit” class, we’re doing Charles Baxter. As it happens, I love his work and know it well and he’s from Michigan so this is not like really a chore to have to give a little background to class about him. First we’ll discuss one of my favorite stories Gryphon. On the surface, it’s about a substitute teacher who reads tarot cards, but underneath it’s really about imagination and flights of the mind.
One of the things I like to discuss after the story questions have dwindled down is the writer’s bio. I know some things about Charles Baxter, but I wanted to learn more, and that’s what I was doing this morning instead of working on my own book. His website is extensive, there’s a ton of stuff about “Gryphon” there, but what I really loved was this interview with Dave Weich of Powell’s. Weich asks interesting questions–I’m going to use some of them for my next GB interviews. Also, I got a list of four or five books Baxter mentions that I must read. Book shopping is always a happy thing for me.
Also, Baxter talks a lot about the writing experience, which I can never get enough of. Among his most interesting observations are these that reveal his trepidation upon beginning his latest novel, Saul and Patsy: “After The Feast of Love came out, my batteries were low…I didn’t want to write an entire book about a marriage. I didn’t think that it would be interesting and I didn’t think I had the imaginative energy to carry thorugh on a project like that.”
On finishing a book: “Every time I’ve finished a book, it feels to me as if the washrag has been rung out. Everything that I know, everything that I’ve observed or taken down, I’ve used. I feel that way now. I can’t see what the next book will be, I don’t have an endless supply of subjects. But I also think, I’m not a factory; I don’t have to go into mass production. Productivity in and of itself is not a good thing. If there isn’t another book, there’s not another book.”
On what turns him on about novels: “I love to break up the big arc with a lot of little arcs. I’m very comfortable doing that. The standard novel form doesn’t interest me very much, the one that goes from A in a smooth arc full of susupense to its ending. I just don’t care about books like that very much. I’m really interested in jazzing the form somehow, making readers think they actually don’t know where the story is going.”
On his changing artistic vision: “I don’t think too much about what it is that I’m doing…I don’t think that’s necessarily very good for writers…because you’re looking at different things, you’re bound to become a different writer. But it’s not as if it’s will ful for me. It’s not an act of will. I don’t say Now I will write about the fate of the entrepreneur in America because it needs to be studied. I don’t work that way. It’s much more a matter of thinking that I need to write abut this group of people whom I’ve been watching or whose behavior interests me.”
About the energy of short stories: “There’s more impulsive behavior in short story collections. There’s a lot of energy derived from observing people who aren’t thinking about what they’re doing…young people who are just acting out one thing after another. I think that’s where the energy comes from.”
On essays: “All of my essays come out of obsessions. They come out of nowhere, why I’m thinking these things…Burning Down the House [has] a number of wild claims…an occasional manic swing toward the large statement….I just gave myself permission to say what I wanted to say.”
On epiphanies: “…Not epiphanies in the traditional sense, but more like moments of ecstasy…my little joke on the epiphanic moment [is when his character] grasps the entire secret of the universe, the meaning of everything, and he promptly forgets it.”
On his work: “A lot of my work has to do with somebody watching somebody else who is happy. For me, stories begin with a kind of displacement; they’re not about people who are happy, but about the people who are watching others be happy and trying to figure out how to get there or what it was that those other people did to arrive in that state.”
And to think, I’d probably never have read this interview if I wasn’t teaching. Which has it’s good and bad sides. Good: I learned a lot about another writer’s process and that always fascinates me and gives me focus about my own stuff. Bad: I didn’t get to work on my own story today. But then again, there’s always tomorrow.
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