Novel Dickinsonia
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| Perabo encourages students in her creative-writing workshop to be “wildly
imaginative.” |
weighting
the bar
Writer-in-Residence Susan Perabo encourages heavy lifting for student writers
Susan Perabo, Writer-in-Residence and associate professor of English, sat down
this summer to talk about writing with staff writer Jillian Cohan. Recipient in 2002 of the
Ganoe Award for Inspirational Teaching, Perabo has published a book of short stories, Who I
Was Supposed to Be, 1999, and a novel, The Broken Places, 2001.
Let’s talk about your dual roles—author and educator. In a 1999 interview with
your hometown newspaper, The St. Louis Post Dispatch, you said, “I’m exhausted
doing both jobs, but I’m crazy about it, too. I’m a better writer because I’m
a teacher.” Why?
Teaching writing reminds me of things that otherwise would be easy to forget. It constantly
brings me back to the basics of character, point of view, plot, conflict. After you’ve
been writing a long time you can get a little bit lazy. Teaching makes me less lazy. I learn
from mistakes my students make. I learn from successes my students have, also, because the
challenges that they face are the same challenges I face.
In your advanced creative-writing seminar you share a story about your
grad-school days. Frustrated with a story, you asked your professor “When does this get easier?” He said it
never does. So what’s the payoff?
The payoff is that even though it doesn’t get easier, you get better. I have these ridiculous
sports metaphors that the students always make fun of me about. Basically, I think of it like
weight lifting. Weight lifting never gets any easier, but you can see the results because there’s
more weight on the bar. It’s not as if nothing’s changing; you’re constantly
moving up to the next level and making it harder for yourself. Who would want to sit there
and do 4,000 reps bench pressing 10 pounds? You don’t want it to get easier.
An old salt in the writing business once told me you’ll never be a great writer when
you’re a young writer. You can be a very good 22-year-old writer; you’ll be an
even better 42-year-old writer and you’ll be a much better 62-year-old writer, because
you’ll have the perspective to reflect on your experiences. Do you think that’s
true?
I think in most cases it’s true. But T.S. Eliot wrote “The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock” when he was 21 years old. James Joyce wrote The Dead when he was 22. If you’re
a genius I think you can be a great writer when you’re 22, like Joyce. For the rest of
us, we have to write a whole lot of bad fiction before we write any really good fiction. I
don’t know anyone who has written a truly great story on the first go round. It just
doesn’t happen. [My students] aren’t ready to write masterpieces yet. But God,
they have moments of brilliance.
Whom do you recommend students read?
In [The Craft of the Short Story] course, and in the workshop, I do Chekhov, Joyce, Hemingway,
Salinger, O’Connor, Cheever and Carver. I think those are the best short-story writers
to teach. In the workshop I often do a contemporary anthology with people like Tim O’Brien,
Joyce Carol Oates, Andre Dubus, [Raymond] Carver. I’m a Carver junkie. He was the first
writer that I was really inspired by, for many of the reasons he inspired so many young writers
in the ’80s. He made it look so easy.
A lot of the characters in your short stories are really quirky—a widow who pawns her
car and her silver to buy $35,000 worth of lottery tickets, a man who fakes amnesia to win
his wife back—yet one of the first lessons for young writers is to “write what
you know.” When is it OK to move beyond that?
I think “write what you know” is some of the most misunderstood advice. Often the
danger is that students think it really means write about what you did last weekend. For me,
it means write from an emotional place that you understand, that you have been or that you
can project yourself into.
If “write what you know” is taken seriously, then I have to write about 34-year-old
creative-writing professors at little schools in Pennsylvania. And how dull would that be?
I want to write what I don’t know. So that I can know it. That’s what I encourage
my students to do. To be wildly ambitious and take risks. I’d much rather read a really
bad story about migrant farm workers than [about] some random hook up at Fast Eddie’s.
If you want to write about what you did last weekend, take the memoir class [from Sharon O’Brien].
If you want to use all that stuff, and channel it into your fiction, then stay here.
The first
group of Dickinson’s creative-writing minors just graduated, and you’ve
been teaching writing here for seven years. Are you seeing more talented young writers in your
classes now?
I don’t know if this is the right answer, but I’m going to tell you the truth.
No. What I am seeing is a better community of writers. It’s not as if there’s a
great crop of writers whereas five years ago there were none. We had all these creative-writing
students floating around, and they didn’t know each other. The minor allowed us to give
that community a name and make it official. Now we have students who read each other’s
work outside of class. They’re talking about it not just in the classroom but in the
Underground and out on the lawn. They’re taking it seriously in a way they weren’t
able to before because there wasn’t that mutual understanding and passion.
Over the last several years—and I think this will continue—a lot of the people
who end up being the best writers come to writing from unusual places. Some of them are computer-science
majors who, as juniors, take a creative-writing workshop on a whim and discover, “Oh
my God, this is so cool. I didn’t know I could do this. I didn’t know I wanted
to do this.” It’s tough to make a living writing fiction. How do you advise students if they’re
determined to live the writing life?
It would be a disservice for me to encourage students to go out and be a writer when I know,
realistically, they won’t make any money at it. I hate to be a dream crusher, and I say
it in the most loving terms I can. But it would be crueler in some ways to say, “Yes,
you can do it.” You can—you just have to do something else, too. I tell them to
think about a practical career and encourage them to find a place in their lives for writing,
too.
You’ve published a novel and a short-story collection to critical
acclaim. What are you working on now?
I’m just starting to work on stories again. In the last year or so I’ve been writing
some nonfiction, some essays. One’s for Self magazine, another is for Lifetime. You know,
the cable channel. They have a magazine. That one is about the Dickinson faculty softball team.
And there’s an anthology called Primetimes. It’s writers talking about television
shows that influenced them. Mine is on Days of Our Lives. There are a lot of really good people
in it—[like] Nora Ephron writing about The Mary Tyler Moore Show. How cool is that? I
lucked into it because my agent is also the agent for the book. And no one else wanted to write
about a soap opera.
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