Priorities

I was an undergraduate at UCSB’s College of Creative Studies, a student of Marvin Mudrick, when I realized that the study of literature was something you did for a lifetime and that the study of literature was reading, talking about it with other readers, and writing. Reading what? Everything. In grad school I began to understand that some of what you’d learn would only come over time: Anna Karenina is a very different book to me now from the book I read for the first time more than 40 years ago, and yet I haven’t forgotten what a transformative moment that was. I became an English professor, at a time when it was almost as hard as it is now to become an English professor. And then I walked away from that career without much understanding of where I was going.

Several years ago it finally came home to me that literature and life look exactly the same to me and each provides me a way into making sense of the other, and that’s been true all my life. That’s what I write about, basically.

Some people figure out early that what they are going to write is romance novels or “literary nonfiction” or some such thing and off they go, they learn the rules and execute; it’s all about “How.” But the question that has always bedeviled my education as a writer has been “Why?” I have boxes of manuscripts of things I’ve given up on because there wasn’t a good answer to “Why?” Whatever I began with, the reason they went astray is that I didn’t have a good “Why,” and without that a “How” is not much help to me. It is possible to write something well that wasn’t worth writing. Struggling with this, I seem to have spent a lot of time working on the “Why?” I’m only just starting to think it was worth it, and now I can start throwing away these old failures.

When I was an academic the “Why” was built in, but when I walked away from being an academic that didn’t mean I had walked away from having a life that was literature. The difference was that the “Why” would have to emerge from my life. I just did whatever job enabled me to keep up my habits, but even though I told myself that I wasn’t defined by the job I had, I kept letting that happen. The truth is that every job I have ever had, I’ve been good at it because of being a literature major for life, and I did not become a literature major for life so I could be a good English professor or a good editor. Those just came in the train of my interests. Well, now I have to explain what those are.

Once I was whining to Alan Stephens about some problem I was having with being blocked as a writer and he said, “What you need is a subject.” He meant something other than me. I took that advice. I mean, I don’t write for “therapy,” and although this is about “my experiences” at the work of reading writing, and making something of it, it’s important that they are experience, not that they are mine. There will be subjects here.