How Valerie Sayers Became a Writer (& how she’s trying to get her new book The Powers into the hands of Stephen Colbert)

I finally understood I really did have to put in the hard work, that becoming a writer was in its own way it sort of like becoming a brain surgeon.

Valerie Sayers was born and raised in Beaufort, South Carolina, which became the thinly disguised Due East of her fiction, and educated in New York, where she lived for many years. She is the author of six novels: The Powers; Who Do You Love and Brain Fever, both named “Notable Books of the Year” by the New York Times Book Review; Due East, which also appeared in five foreign editions; How I Got Him Back; and The Distance Between Us. A film, Due East, was based on Due East and How I Got Him Back. Her literary awards include a Pushcart Prize for fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship. A professor of English at the University of Notre Dome, she publishes stories, essays, and reviews widely.

Web page: http://www3.nd.edu/~vsayers/

Read more by and about Valerie:

Novel: The Powers

Novel: Who Do You Love

Novel: Brain Fever

Novel: The Distance Between Us

Essay at Image: The Word Cure: Cancer, Language, Prayer

But first!
Check out Valerie’s video message to Stephen Colbert, appealing to their shared Irish Catholic South Carolinian backgrounds, in hopes that he will give the Colbert Bump to her new novel, The Powers.

How Valerie Sayers Became a Writer
This is the next installment in the How to Become a Writer interview series, which will post here at Ph.D. in Creative Writing every other Sunday (or so) until I run out of writers to interview, or until they stop saying yes. Each writer answers the same 5 questions. Thanks to Valerie for saying yes!

1.  Why did you want to become a writer?‬

I resisted becoming a writer as long as possible.  I was the designated writer in a large family and longed for something sexier like actress or brain surgeon. I sensed that writing involved long, self-involved, neurotic hours (and of course, I was absolutely right).  But even though I didn’t want to be a writer, I did want to write.  Mainly, when I was younger, I wanted to write in short bursts–moments when I was on fire–and so until college, I wrote a great deal of very short material because that fire kept dwindling down.  I finally understood I really did have to put in the hard work, that  becoming a writer was in its own way it sort of like becoming a brain surgeon.  And since I have minimal depth perception and no hand-eye coordination, brain surgeon was really not a good career choice.

‪2.  How did you go about becoming a writer?‬

I read voraciously and (when on fire) produced.  In college I signed up for a fiction-writing course and got poetry instead, by mistake–best training ever (and had me producing poetry more than fiction for five years or so.  I rarely write poetry anymore, but every now and again it pops out.)  The course was in the early ’70s, that giddy time of politicized experimentation, and the prof was full of wild enthusiasms.  When he liked something, he leaned his head back and laughed uproariously.  That suggested to me for the first time that in addition to moaning about hard work and neurosis, I could openly consider writing fun.

‪3.  Who helped you along the way, and how?‬

That first poetry professor, Bob Nettleton, who had begun his own career as an engineer and then moved over to literature.  Two editors at Doubleday, Lisa Wager and Casey Fuetsch, were great boosters, and my agent Esther Newberg has been steady and faithful despite the lack of income I bring.  My editor at Northwestern, Henry Carrigan, has delightful taste, if I do say so.  My family helps me, and all my colleagues in the Creative Writing Program at Notre Dame are great about supporting each other.  Bryan Giemza has been writing about my work in a smart way that has been totally affirming (he has a new book on Irish Catholic Southern writers, which is wild company).  This sort of feels like an Oscar speech, so I’ll stop there–but so many people I cannot count or name them all, and students and other writers have topped the long list.

‪4.  Can you tell me about a writer or artist whose biography inspires you?‬

It’s funny that this question is so hard to answer, because I have always been a compulsive reader of writers’ bios.  But of course, once you know the stories, you know the dark sides.  When I was a young mother, the painter Paula Modersohn-Becker’s story affected me deeply, because I didn’t know how I would keep writing and mothering going simultaneously.  Also, I got to cry at the catastrophic childbirth-deathbed scene.  When it turned out that mothering stoked instead of smothering writing, that realization made Modersohn-Becker’s story an even greater loss.  I was also quite obsessed with Faulkner’s life, particularly the deals he would make with himself about drinking and writing.  And I like very much what Coetzee has done with the whole concept of a telling a writer’s life, though he sure is hard on himself.

Paula Modersohn-Becker, Mother and Child

‪5.  What would you say in a short letter to an aspiring writer?‬

Have some fun.  What the hell.

Weekly Photo Challenge: From Above

This week’s photo challenge is From Above

This picture looks to me like the earth strung with lights, but it is actually a photo of a puddle at a Berlin biergarten. I love how the change in perspective makes you see things in a new way. Just like taking students to Prague and Berlin in 2011 helped them see the world differently. And spending time with students at a biergarten helped me see them differently! Here is part of the group:

(Note the lights and the trees in the background. They were captured in the puddle as we left.)

Top 5 Highlights from the 2013 SOKY Book Fest

1. Let’s get straight to it. The number one highlight of the Southern Kentucky Book Fest was this:

That’s right, I got to hang out with two of my favorite people and authors: Molly McCaffrey (left) and David Bell (right).

2. And I might have gotten to meet this guy:

(He’s standing next to the tall girl in red above. The tall girl makes everyone look shorter than they are. The tall girl apologizes to The Fonz.)

Seriously, Henry Winkler was super friendly and charming. He hugged my friend Molly and told her how much he loves her personality. We bonded over New York / New Jersey connections.

3. I met three overeducated country boys who brew some damn fine IPA over at Country Boy Brewing:

(Seriously, these guys make great beer, and they majored in things like English and History. They have Master’s Degrees! Yes.)

4. I was assigned an awesome boothmate: Sharon Short

Sharon’s new book is My One Square Inch of Alaska, and I’m excited to read my new copy! She also agreed to participate in my interview series, so more about Sharon to come…

5. Dinner and gossip with the amazing Eric Goodman and Lee Martin, authors of these awesome books that I just bought:

BONUS HIGHLIGHTS:

I sold some books! My attention has been on my forthcoming book, Liliane’s Balcony, due out in the fall, so it was great to talk to people about For Sale By Owner again.

As I drove home I passed a trucker who honked at me. This has not happened to me for years, so I looked in my rearview mirror and saw that he was holding up a sign in his front window that said, “M O M.” I thought, “Geez, how did you know? Is it that obvious?” But when I glanced back again, he had turned the sign over. It now said: “W O W.”
(Oh my!)

How Marcela Sulak Became a Writer

I immersed myself in new situations and surroundings all the time—I lived in South Bend, Indiana; Philadelphia; Ceske Budejovice, Czech Republic; Rottenberg am Neckar, Germany; Caracas, Venezuela; Austin, Washington, DC, and Tel Aviv. I had a baby. All of these things make the world absolutely new—or maybe they made me new, and forced me to reinvent language and my relationship to it.

Marcela Sulak was born and raised on a rice farm in South Texas.  She attended The University of Texas at Austin, where she received a BA in Psychology and Honors English.  She received an MFA and an MA at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, winning the William Mitchell Award for Best Graduate Creative Thesis. She holds an MA in Religious Studies from VillaNova University, and her Ph.D. in English is from The University of Texas at Austin with concentrations in Poetry and Poetics, American Literature, and a certificate in European Studies. She is a four-time recipient of the Academy of American Poetry Prize, and has won five FLAS prizes for the study of Czech and Yiddish. She is the author of two collections of poetry, Immigrant (Black Lawrence Press, 2010) and the chapbook Of All The Things That Don’t Exist, I Love You Best (Finishing Line Press). Other poems have appeared or are forthcoming in such journals as  Guernica, The Black Warrior Review, The Cimarron Review, The Notre Dame Review, Fence, The Indiana Review, The Cortland Review, Quarterly West, Third Coast and No Tell Motel, among others.

Website: http://www.marcelasulak.com/

Read more by and about Marcela:

Book of Poems: Immigrant

Chapbook: Of all the things that don’t exist, I love you best

Translation: A Bouquet of Czech Folktales

Poem at Guernica: Marriage

Poem at Cortland Review: Jerusalem, a ghazal

How Marcela Sulak Became a Writer
This is the next installment in the How to Become a Writer interview series, which will post here at Ph.D. in Creative Writing every other Sunday (or so) until I run out of writers to interview, or until they stop saying yes. Each writer answers the same 5 questions. Thanks to Marcela for saying yes!

1.  Why did you want to become a writer?

I am not sure I wanted to become a writer. I wanted to become a reader. I grew up on a rice farm five miles outside of a town of 250 or so (the town was not incorporated), so I read a lot.  All the time, in fact. And when my siblings and I were outside, our immediate world was mediated through the stories my father and my maternal grandparents told about it—we grew up a mile from where my father did, and ten miles from where my mother was raised. I grew up with the expectation that everything around me contained a story.  I suppose I began to write in order to have a dialogue, to add to the family conversation with the land and with one another, and with the books I read.

The world portrayed in books never matched the world of our rice farm, though; we did not have snow or really much of a change in seasons. We had no highrise buildings or elevators—I must have been in high school before I saw either an elevator or an escalator. And since this was the end of the twentieth century, not the end of the nineteenth century, I realized later, my experience was unusual.  At any rate, after I left the farm, I found the world a pretty exotic place. It gave me the sense of a foreigner everywhere I went. Somehow, this feeling seems to be conducive to writing.

2.  How did you go about becoming a writer?

I read a lot, everything in the public library and school library. I began to keep a journal when I was twelve and have kept it ever since. I try to free write in the journal for at least 30 minutes a day—everything from new words to recipes to names of birds to things that happened to me or things I saw. I also studied literature at university and creative writing in graduate school. But what really helped me become a writer was simply the practice of reading and writing.

Also, I immersed myself in new situations and surroundings all the time—I lived in South Bend, Indiana; Philadelphia; Ceske Budejovice, Czech Republic; Rottenberg am Neckar, Germany; Caracas, Venezuela; Austin, Washington, DC, and Tel Aviv. I had a baby. All of these things make the world absolutely new—or maybe they made me new, and forced me to reinvent language and my relationship to it. They certainly forced me to renegotiate my relationship to the world. This can be exhausting, but there is nothing like the perspective it gives you.

I did my MFA straight out of undergraduate, but that was really too early for me. I needed to expand my horizons first.  I worked as an English teacher, free lance writer and university adjunct instructor for ten years, then went back to graduate school, and that’s when I started publishing poems in journals. I also translated poetry, and my first book-length translation of poetry was published before my first book of poems.  As for my poems, I just kept writing them, editing them (by which I mean throwing most of them away and cutting the others quite a bit) until one day I had enough that weren’t completely awful to start thinking about a book.

3.  Who helped you along the way, and how?

In sixth grade my teacher introduced me to her friend, Mrs. Mickey Huffstutler, who was a “real poet.” I think she even drove me to meet her at her house in another town the first time. Mrs. Huffstutler introduced me to prosody and received forms, and told me I needed to frame my highly subjective impressions of the world, and to write more concretely—to use nouns and verbs instead of adjectives. Also, I needed to give the reader a frame or a place to enter the poem, thereby introducing me to the idea that my poem might have a reader apart from me. She also introduced me to the concept of a writing community, by introducing me to the Poetry Society of Texas.

At the University of Notre Dame, where I received my M.F.A., I was greatly aided by John Matthias, Sonia Gernes and Jacqueline Vaught Brogan, and later, at the University of Texas, where I received a Ph.D. I was aided by studying prosody with Tom Cable, and poetry with Tom Whitbread, David Wevil and Khaled Mattawa. They were all exceedingly generous and helpful. When I was an undergraduate, Joseph Malof and Kate Frost both at the University of Texas, taught me to close read modernist poetry and Shakespeare, and that has been life-changing.  Today I am helped a lot by the writers with whom I’ve studied, and with whom I remain close, and writers whose work I’ve admired.

4.  Can you tell me about a writer or artist whose biography inspires you?

I am inspired by Veronica Franco (1546-1591) a Venetian courtesan who was one of the most eloquent writers of her period; she also was a prolific writer in many genres. By her eloquence (and perhaps her connections) she defended herself against accusations of witchcraft before the Inquisition and was acquitted. She allied herself with the most distinguished families of Venice, and all who traveled there, yet she publicly defended her fellow courtesans and spoke out against their mistreatment by men. I love how she lived by her wits; indeed, she often wrote for her life.

Veronica Franco (Image from wikimedia)

I admire those who look beyond their own difficult lives and give voice to those whom no one else defends.  To do this well, you have to use new forms in fresh and energetic ways, so as to give the reader a stake in the story. Muriel Rukeyser, C.D. Wright and Lola Ridge write the kind of documentary poetry that puts the reader in a sort of jury box.  And perhaps most of all I an inspired by Nazim Hikmet and Taha Muhammad Ali, whose writing reaffirms their deepest humanity despite the fact they were placed in the most dehumanizing of circumstances—imprisoned and evicted from their home, respectively.

5.  What would you say in a short letter to an aspiring writer?

Read as widely as you can the best books, poems, stories and essays you can. Try to be as compassionate as possible. And write every day. I learned a lot by imitating the poets I admired in order to learn their tricks. Also, only send your work to journals you yourself enjoy reading.

How William O’Rourke Became a Writer

Most every writer I admire has been persistent; it’s best not let the bastards get you down and one should continue to plow ahead.

Photo credit: South Bend Tribune/GREG SWIERCZ

WILLIAM O’ROURKE is the author of The Harrisburg 7 and the New Catholic Left (1972), Signs of the Literary Times: Essays, Reviews, Profiles (1993), and On Having a Heart Attack: A Medical Memoir (2006), as well as the novels The Meekness of Isaac (1974), Idle Hands (1981), Criminal Tendencies (1987), and Notts (1996).  He is the editor of On the Job: Fiction About Work by Contemporary American Writers (1977) and co-editor of Notre Dame Review: The First Ten Years (2009). His book, Campaign America  ‘96: The View From the Couch, first published in 1997, was reissued in paperback with a new, updated epilogue in 2000. A sequel, Campaign America 2000: The View From the Couch, was published in 2001. He has been awarded two NEAs and a New York State Council on the Arts CAPS grant.  He was the first James Thurber Writer-in-Residence at the Thurber House in Columbus, Ohio and is a professor of English at the University of Notre Dame and was the founding director of its graduate creative writing program. He wrote a weekly political column for the Chicago Sun-Times from 2001 till 2005. Two books appeared in 2012.  From Indiana University Press, Confessions of a Guilty Freelancer; and from the Notre Dame Press, a 40th anniversary edition of The Harrisburg 7 and the New Catholic Left, with a new Afterword.

Web site: http://theviewfromthecouch.com

Read more by and about William:

Book of Essays: Confessions of a Guilty Freelancer

40th Anniversary Reissue: The Harrisburg 7 and the New Catholic Left

Memoir: On Having a Heart Attack: A Medical Memoir

Audio link: William O’Rourke discusses Confessions of a Guilty Freelancer

Articles at Huffington Post

How William O’Rourke Became a Writer
This is the next installment in the How to Become a Writer interview series, which will post here at Ph.D. in Creative Writing every other Sunday (or so) until I run out of writers to interview, or until they stop saying yes. Each writer answers the same 5 questions. Thanks to William for saying yes!

1. Why did you want to become a writer?

Because I didn’t do anything else as well.  I got it into my head in my early teens that I was a good writer.  In the grammar school I went to the nuns made a fuss over my writing.  I wrote an essay in the sixth grade and looked for it on a bulletin board and couldn’t find it.  The nun had arranged them in best to worst order and I finally found it in the first row at the front, not the place I had been looking.  And I’ve always been a strange sort of introvert; I figured my writing would speak for me and I wouldn’t have to put myself forward.

2.  How did you go about becoming a writer?

Another thing I liked about writing when I was young was that it didn’t require much equipment.  A pencil.  A pen.  Paper.  When I got to highschool the only female teacher I had (it was an all boys’ school) was the first class in the morning freshman year, typing.  She taught a room full of boys how to type.  I became a very fast typist.  And, then, I managed to badger my father to bring me an old typewriter from the company he worked for to use. It was an old Royal, long gone now.  I wrote for the highschool student newspaper, which taught me a number of things, especially not to plagiarize inferior, only superior, writers.  By college – I went to a local streetcar university in Kansas City, Mo., my home town – I had turned myself into a post-Beat generation arty kid, becoming involved in theater, painting, writing, a mix of all the arts, given there was so little to sample locally in just one.  And, by and by, I met two “real” writers during that time, Edward Dahlberg and Winfield Townley Scott, the former in Kansas City when he taught at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, and the latter, in Santa Fe, NM, when I worked at the Santa Fe Opera for two summers.  Then it was off to New York City when I got accepted to Columbia University’s new graduate creative writing program, where Dahlberg taught for a year before he was fired for a variety of reasons.  His recommendation for me, I’m sure, got me in.  It was short.  I was told it said that I was the only intelligent person he had met in the Midwest.

3. Who helped you along the way, and how?

Well, obviously, Dahlberg helped me.  And Scott, who led an entirely different sort of artistic life than Dahlberg did, rich in Santa Fe, whereas Dahlberg was poor, living in a tenement on Rivington Street in NYC’s lower east side.  Both of them helped by the example of their lives, opposite in kind as they were.  They are both writers now largely unknown by what passes for the literate readers of today. And a visiting professor at UMKC, one who took an interest in me, Lois Gordon, helped, too.  She and her husband returned to New York City the year I arrived there and, coincidently, moved into a large apartment around the corner from me on West End Avenue, when I was living on West 76th St., in one room.  The conjunction of New York City and Columbia University provided a great boost to my career, though I never thought of it then as a career.  My two years there led me to Provincetown where the Fine Arts Work Center was just coming into being.  Stanley Kunitz taught at Columbia and was one of the founders of the FAWC. The early 70s were, oddly, a good time for artists.  Reverence for the rich hadn’t settled in back then and there was a spirit of equality flowing across the land.  And it was while I was in Provincetown that I met Diane Schulder, one of the lawyers for the Harrisburg 7, who brought me into their world and prompted my first book, The Harrisburg 7 and the New Catholic Left, which came out in 1972 when I was 26.  I had never thought my first book would have been nonfiction and certainly wouldn’t have predicted it would have had the word Catholic in the title.

George Orwell

4. Can you tell me about an artist or writer whose biography inspires you?

In addition to those above, I was taken, as many are, by the example of George Orwell.  And by Normal Mailer, because both of them seemed to be the sort of writer I wanted to be, insofar as they wrote across the genres.  My latest book, Confessions of a Guilty Freelancer, has an epigraph from Orwell at its start and I didn’t realize till later he is probably mentioned, one way or another, in all my books.  He, certainly, figures prominently in a novel of mine about the last great strike, the NUM strike in Britain in 1984-85, during the Thatcher reign, called Notts, which came out in 1996.  Mailer, who I had the good fortune to meet a couple of times, made an impression, too.

5. What would you say in a short letter to an aspiring writer?

Strange you would ask.  A decade or two ago I was asked to write a short piece just about that subject.  For a book by many hands; I received a contract and all, but the volume never appeared.  I have the ms. somewhere, but it was written right before everyone switched over to computers, so I can’t put my hand on it.  And I don’t remember what I actually said, though I have thought for a long time that persistence pays off in this culture, so I would recommend persistence.  Most every writer I admire has been persistent; it’s best not let the bastards get you down and one should continue to plow ahead.  Believe in yourself. Of course, it always helps if you have something to say.

The Barbaric AWP: A Song of Myself & 12,000 Others

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains

          of my gab and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,

I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

-Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

Last week I went to the AWP Writers’ Conference, where I guess I at least tried to sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs – of Boston.

But I don’t know, it was kind of a fail for me. I’m not a big yawper. I didn’t have much to yawp about. And I got all lost in the shuffle of a DOZEN THOUSAND people. Nay, not just people. WRITERS. My favorite type of people, except when there are 12,000 of you. Them. Us. Maybe I just felt lost in the biodome/mall where it was held.

My highlights were:

1. seeing my long lost BFF who drove in for a visit of sushi and tapas
2. meeting my editors at Rose Metal Press for my next book and plotting the fall release
3. rooming with my partner in cosmos and crime and plotting all the ways we will transform the literary landscape.

Freedom to Write: A report from the Irrawaddy Literary Festival, Myanmar

As 11,000 U.S. writers (including me!) head to Boston for the annual AWP Conference,
here’s an excellent reminder of what’s going on in the rest of the world.
Many thanks to Cila Warncke for this guest post.

Guest post by Cila Warncke

Sometimes you have to go halfway around the world to appreciate what you have at home. Attending the Irrawaddy Literary Festival in Yangon, Myanmar (formerly Burma) reminded me that literature demands not just inspiration but also political, psychological and economic freedom.

Myanmar has endured almost 50 years of repressive dictatorship, complete with pre-publication censorship. Foreign journalists were barred and native writers faced prison if they angered the military regime. The country has opened up considerably since democratic elections in 2010 and in late 2012 the government ended censorship. It officially disbanded the censor board in January 2013, just a week before the festival began.

Among the many international and Myanmar writers gathered to enjoy this new political freedom was Jung Chang, author of Wild Swans, a memoir of three generations of women’s lives in China. It is hard to imagine the formidable, charming Chang an exiled teenager doing peasant labour, but that was her fate after her parents, ranking members of the Communist party, fell out of favour.

In crisp sentences she spoke of her father being forced to burn his beloved library and her mother suffering public denunciations. She told of flushing her first poem down the toilet during a police raid on their house, and joked about the hazards of working as a self-taught electrician.

Despite her tormented adolescence Chang’s story has a happy ending. She was intelligent, young, and strong enough to hope. When the revolutionary fervor cooled and universities reopened Chang was able to study English. Eventually she won a scholarship to Britain, earned a PhD, married, and made a life there.

None of that would have been possible without the easing of Mao’s terrible repression, but political freedom was only the beginning. For many years Chang told people she was from South Korea because her memories of China were too painful to discuss. It was more than a decade before she began the conversations with her mother that became the basis of Wild Swans.

The success of Wild Swans, which has sold over 13 million copies, gave her the means to spend 10 years on her next book, a biography of Mao co-authored with her husband Jon Halliday. Financial freedom is as critical today as when Virginia Woolf made her pithy argument about a room of one’s own in 1929. Money can be a major obstacle creative work and, as with political and psychological freedom, there is no simple solution. It would be lovely if we could all write international bestsellers but the reality is that writers often work two shifts or learn to live with less.

As writers we may never enjoy perfect freedom but, as the Irrawaddy Literary Festival showed, we can always learn from each other’s experiences and find inspiration in our struggles.

Cila Warncke is a freelance writer and editor. You can contact her on cilawarncke@gmail.com or via her website cilawarncke.com

View more about the Irrawaddy Literary Festival by Cila Warncke here: http://www.freewordonline.com/content/2013/02/free-thinking-from-the-irrawaddy-literature-festival/