I’m a school teacher. What can you offer to help me prepare 4th graders to appreciate writing, now and for the rest of their lives?
Writing and reading are the two best ways humans have invented to participate with the larger world. Everybody in school wants to be popular: it’s so utterly human, to long for self-expression and connection with others. I would point out that writing and reading offer those things, and more. Writing is a kind of social networking […]
Why did you establish the Bellwether Prize? What are you most proud of in its ten years, and do you think it’s as necessary now as it was in 2000?
I always thought if I had more money than I needed to support my family, I would use it to improve the world somehow. So when I received my first really large book advance in 1998, I considered the power of words. I decided to use that money to encourage writers, publishers, and readers to […]
Who are your favorite authors?
It’s impossible to choose. Margaret Atwood, Jane Austen, Russell Banks, Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Louise Erdrich, William Faulkner, Milan Kundera, Doris Lessing, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Bobbie Ann Mason, Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, Francine Prose, John Steinbeck, Kurt Vonnegut, Eudora Welty, Virginia Woolf. That’s only a partial list, chosen on the basis […]
Do you consider writing to be a form of activism? Do you think novelists have a duty to address political issues?
I think of “activism” as a simple action meant to secure a specific result: for this purpose I go to school board meetings, I vote, I donate money, and occasionally fire off an op-ed piece. But that’s not what I do for a living. Writing literature is so much more nuanced than these things, it’s […]
Do you actually go to all the places you write about? What balance do you strike (if any) between primary and secondary sources?
Hooray for you, for knowing the difference between primary and secondary sources, in a world where many seem to think watching a nature show is the same thing as being in nature. It isn’t. The nature show leaves out the smells, for one thing, and the seventeen hundred hours the camera crew sat waiting for […]
A lot of your settings are places I can’t find on a map, even though they seem real. Do they exist?
The writing of fiction is a dance between truth and invention. Pittman, Kentucky, the starting point of The Bean Trees, resembles any number of small towns in east-central Kentucky where I grew up. I didn’t invent its weathered look, its party-line phones, its inclination to rally around good gossip or a neighbor in need. Those things […]
To what extent is your fiction autobiographical?
Not at all. The plots are not my life, those characters are not people I know, and none of them is me. My job, as I understand it, is to invent lives that are far more enlightening than my own, invested with special meaning. That’s the whole advantage of fiction over life: you get to […]
Do you go through a lot of drafts?
Gazillions. I adore revision. Whether it’s a two-page article or a 500-page book, I rewrite endlessly. I may rewrite the first paragraph of a novel fifty times before I’m satisfied. I comb through a manuscript again and again, altering every sentence a little or a lot. I don’t print out every draft on paper, or […]
How do you begin a novel?
I begin by imagining something surprising and important, a question whose answer is not clear to me, but seems vital. Questions like: How do we balance the needs of the individual with the needs of the community, when they’re in conflict? (That became Pigs in Heaven.) How does one make peace with the terrible things one […]
Do you write every day?
Writing is my dream life. But many writers will tell you, in the modern era our job seems to demand everything but writing. In a typical week I spend hours or days on non-writing chores: fielding interviews, reviewing reprint requests and copy, updating websites, responding to particularly crucial requests, administering the Bellwether Prize, answering queries from translators, […]