Novel Dickinsonia

Ashley Warlick ’94 has been practicing the craft of fiction since her student days.

A Reader’s Life
Ashley Warlick ’94 lives by the book … lots of books

Ashley Warlick is a novelist, award-winning and acclaimed, but if you ask her about writing, she’s more likely to talk about her life as a reader.

“I spend half my time reading,” Warlick says. “When you read something funny or beautiful, when you can see behind the curtain—that’s where a true affection for writing comes from.”

A few of her favorite authors are Lorrie Moore, Cormac McCarthy and William Styron. But she’s often excited about whatever she’s just finished. Tim Gautreaux’s The Clearing is her latest find.

She also reads—and studies—the books you might not expect. Once, for example, curiosity led her to Peter Benchley’s Jaws. She wanted to understand how, after so much time and exposure had diffused its surprises, it could still be so frightening.

“There’s a scary scene in the book where you see the fish, and you see the boy,” Warlick says, “but the boy doesn’t see the fish.”
She dissected that section, studied it, and then mirrored it in her second novel, The Summer After June, creating a similarly tension-filled scene about the approach of a hurricane.

“I like that I can learn from Peter Benchley as well as I can from Cormac McCarthy,” she says. “All books have so much to tell.”

Warlick, the reader, got her start early, probably when she was swept away by her mother’s romance novels. But Warlick, the writer, got her literary career underway while she was a student at Dickinson. She wrote her first novel, The Distance from the Heart of Things, almost the whole of it, in her room on campus.

“I didn’t do that well with my classes,” she says. “I remember that Prof. [Melinda] Schlitt couldn’t figure out why I was not quite there in class. It’s because I was writing the novel. After graduation, I couldn’t go home until the book was finished. I was afraid it wouldn’t get done. There was a librarian at the college who needed a house sitter. So I stayed at her house for a month, and I finished it.”

Dickinson’s then writer-in-residence, Robert Olmstead, put her in touch with an agent. Warlick’s talent—the luxury of her language and the wisdom she invests in her characters—quickly caught the attention of three or four publishing houses, and Houghton Mifflin snapped up the book.

These were heady times. It probably seemed to the new grad that she had landed in clover—this was as good as life could get for a writer—but it was about to get better. Warlick soon heard the news that would set her apart from most first-time novelists—she had won the prestigious Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship. The list of previous winners includes luminaries like Robert Penn Warren and Robert Stone. Warlick, then 23, was the youngest-ever winner.

Ten years later, she’s modest about the award, but the affection she feels for those days comes through in her voice. “That phone call, when I got the news, that was very nice,” she says.

Warlick thought the second novel would be easier to write. She no longer had to contend with a full load of college courses, and she already had one successful book under her belt. But writing the second novel was “less than pleasant,” she says. She doesn’t revisit her own work very often, but in her copy of The Summer After June there are pages that she’s “worn thin with erasing.”

That’s not the case with the novel she’s finishing right now. It will be released next fall.

“I feel like I have my feet under me,” she says. “It’s the most fun I’ve had writing.”

Warlick’s love of the written word has led her in other directions, too. She writes book reviews for The Journal News in Westchester, N.Y., and this fall she joined the faculty of the low-residency M.F.A. in creative-writing program at Queens University of Charlotte, N.C.

Given her passion for the craft, it’s a good bet that Warlick’s students will learn to write in the best possible way … by learning to read.

—Barbara Snyder Stambaugh

Dickinson College, PO Box 1773, Carlisle, PA 17013, 717-243-5121