Novel Dickinsonia

Brock Clarke inspires students at the University of Cincinnati as he was once inspired by professors at Dickinson.

Writing the Wrongs
Brock Clarke ’90 writes about the failures that make fiction ring true

Brock Clarke’s characters make mistakes. Big ones. They flail and flounder, but they never give up. Such characters are hard to forget and hard not to like, even if you don’t always like what they do.

“I want my characters to believe they deserve better,” Clarke says. “They do destructive things in attempts to get what they don’t have, what they can’t have. I’m empathetic to that. They make messes. But they’re trying, even if their quests aren’t so noble. I don’t care for characters that get what they want. I’m not sure I care for real people who get what they want.”

It’s these not-so-noble quests that Clarke has explored in both of the books he’s published—the novel The Ordinary White Boy and the short-story collection What We Won’t Do, which won the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction in 2000.

Clarke writes almost lovingly about the screw-ups and failures that make us all painfully, comically human. In the foreword to What We Won’t Do, Mark Richard refers to Clarke’s characters as “the poor bastards” who go through all sorts of trouble to answer the questions that matter.

“I make ‘hope’ as difficult as possible for my characters,” Clarke says. “Then that last bit of hope that remains means something important.”

Yet there’s nothing depressing in his work. Clarke’s writing often is laugh-out-loud funny.

“Misery and a sense of humor go hand in hand,” he says. “I like the combination of whimsical and serious. It’s that relationship that powers a story for me.”

When he’s looking for inspiration, Clarke seeks out the writers of “reality skewed,” authors like Flannery O’Connor, Padgett Powell, John Cheever and Saul Bellow. “I like writing that has a sense of the bizarre—but is rooted in recognizable reality. I read for liveliness of voice. If my own writing gets dull, I look at the voice.”

Clarke is assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Cincinnati and says he’s a bit of a grouch in the classroom. “I care deeply about my students’ stories. If the students aren’t working as hard as their stories deserve, it makes me grouchy. I try to be a fan of their work.”

Just like his characters, Clarke expects aspiring writers to win or go down trying. “Even if their stories fail, I want them to be interesting failures, noble failures.”

Clarke says he had good role models for teaching at Dickinson. “Professors like Wendy Moffat, Ashton Nichols, Tom Reed and Liza Wieland, who is no longer there. I still think about those people,” he says. “I wasn’t particularly good at my courses, but I loved taking them. Being a writer seemed possible after being there.”

The college is referenced in one of his stories. In “She Loved to Cook but Not Like This,” a character named Brady decides—in a way that only a Brock Clarke character can—to burn down the Emily Dickinson House in Amherst, Mass. While Brady is scouting the scene of his impending crime, he runs into students from Dickinson College, who are visiting the house, too.

“That was based on an actual trip,” Clarke says. “It was a senior seminar on Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. We went to the house. The story isn’t really about the trip, but that’s where it came from.”

From that story, published in What We Won’t Do, is emerging Clarke’s next novel, An Arsonist’s Guide to Writer’s Homes in New England.

“It’s the same character as the Emily Dickinson story,” he says. “After Brady burns down that house, he finds there is a market for it.”

Clarke calls himself a slow writer, but the correct term might be deliberate, as he spends a lot of time fine-tuning his characters.

“They’re not villains,” he says. “They’re not great people, either.”

In other words, they’re wrong … but not all wrong, and that means they’re just right.

—Barbara Snyder Stambaugh

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