Dear Glimmer Train Readers and Writers,

From the summer issue of Writers Ask:

ELIZABETH McCRACKEN, interviewed by Jennifer Levasseur and Kevin Rabalais:

Your parents were academics and editors. Did that help you move toward writing?

I'm sure it did in some way. When I went to Iowa, one of the things that floored me was that there were people whose parents did not think what they were doing was a good thing. People had to fight against their parents, who said, "Why are you going to graduate school in this? For that matter, why did you get an undergraduate degree in English? My parents never asked those questions. I'm not sure if it was because they were academics or just because they were terribly impractical people. They both came from families with lots of amateur and professional artists. My cousin Elizabeth was a dance teacher. My mother's sister is a sculptor. So writing didn't seem like an unusual thing to do.

McCRACKEN, Elizabeth. Novels: The Giant’s House, Niagara Falls All Over Again. Short-story collection: Here’s Your Hat, What’s Your Hurry.

CHANG-RAE LEE, interviewed by Sarah Anne Johnson:

Aloft is a departure from your earlier books in several ways. First, the main character is not Asian-American, but an Italian-American retired landscape business owner and laborer. How did you arrive at the character of Jerry Battle? What drove you into his particular narrative?

Jerry’s story is different. I’d been thinking about someone his age, living in this classic suburban landscape. I wanted to write a suburban novel. These days the suburbs are at the center of what it means to be an American. I was thinking about a guy around sixty years old who is caught between certain points of life, not being a young man and not being too old, and having a lot of pressure from the surrounding generations and being at a point in life in which the questions should be fewer and the solutions obvious. Part of the inspiration was what I’d seen around me in my parents and my in-laws’ lives. There seemed to be lots of questions about retirement, what to do now that the heavy lifting was done, but feeling as young as ever. This was a time of life that I hadn’t heard much about. There are plenty of stories about middle-aged angst and midlife crisis with marital problems and what not. But this book isn’t about aging. It’s about someone who’s been too comfortable in his life and is now trying to figure out what that all means. It’s also in a way an immigrant story, but a couple of generations past. I was very interested in that. But I decided early on that the hero wouldn’t be an Asian-American character, because an Asian-American character at that age in that setting would have required a very different story. It couldn’t be a story about someone who felt like he completely fit and belonged in his context, or felt too comfortable. It just couldn’t be. That’s why it had to be someone who was white, but not so landed and established. I wanted someone who didn’t question his belonging, and yet someone who still had ties to the old world. The book, I think, also looks at class. There are three very distinct classes in the book. Jerry Battle is squarely middle class, and his father has working class roots, and his children tend to be upper middle class aspirants, his daughter intellectually and financially his son. I liked that Jerry was sandwiched between those generations and could think about the legacies of his working class father that he didn’t fill, and the problems of Jack, his son, and where all those years of family work was heading. He’s more like me, too. I have a young family and a life in the suburbs. It’s one of the first times I was writing autobiographically, and because it’s through Jerry, it surprises people.

LEE, Chang-rae. Novels: Native Speaker, RA Gesture Life, Aloft. Princeton University.

EDWIDGE DANTICAT, interviewed by Sarah Anne Johnson:

I have had two sets of family my whole life. When I was two, my father left Haiti to move to the United States, and my mother when I was four, and I didn’t join them until I was twelve. I had an uncle and aunt who raised me, and I had to go through the what-do-you-want-to-do-when-you-grow-up with my aunt and uncle first when I lived in Haiti. When I told them that I wanted to be a writer, we were still living under a dictatorship and a lot of our writers were exiled or killed under that dictatorship. That’s what it meant to them to be a writer, to put your life in danger. When I told my parents later in the United States when they asked me the same questions, they didn’t see how I could be a writer because there were no examples of other people who’d come to the United States from Haiti and become writers. They thought it was the strangest idea, and they were very concerned about how I would make a living.

That concern is valid. Most writers I know do something in addition to their writing, whether it’s teaching, or something else. It’s not an unreasonable concern, but also with my family there was this idea that by becoming a writer I would be this rebel outcast that no one would understand or know what to do with. When people have sacrificed so much and left their country, they want their children to conform and lead what they think of as a good, stable life. If you’re not doing that, there’s fear that not only will you fail, but the whole family, the whole enterprise will fail. I don’t think any group of immigrants is alone in that. Especially for the newer immigrants who are coming from poorer and poorer situations or fleeing extreme circumstances, stability is a strong goal.

DANTICAT, Edwidge. Novels: Breath, Eyes, Memory; The Farming of Bones; The Dew Breaker. Story collection: Krik? Krak! Travel: After the Dance. Two novels for young people.

ASKOLD MELNYCZUK, interviewed by William Pierce:

You’ve talked about the émigré community’s distance from literature. How did your parents handle your decision to write?

My father had very little use for the fine arts and was initially freaked and frustrated that both his children pursued them—my sister painting and me writing. He simply did not get fiction and poetry, and was very frank about it. But he has, at first grudgingly, and now in his serious and enlightened old age enthusiastically, embraced the practices, and takes an avid interest in them, and reads reviews and reads a lot of fiction.

My mother aspired to be a poet. She published poems in some magazines when she was fifteen or sixteen, and was later invited to submit a book for publication by a press in western Ukraine. She’d sent the book off for publication in Kiev, but had it rejected because it seemed too bourgeois for the communist editors there. Western Ukraine was itself still bourgeois and was willing to go with it, but then the war broke out and the publishing house collapsed. I have the book on my desk, and I’m translating a couple of the poems. My mother has a profound respect for fiction and poetry, and called my father a barbarian for not appreciating it. I had great support and backing from her. It bound us together in opposition to my father’s tyranny of reality, of a kind of two-dimensional or three-dimensional reality that was not enough for either of us.

I remember talking about this once with Derek Walcott when I was in my early twenties and had published very little. I said that my father was advising a career shift, and Derek said, “Say to him, ‘Did you really have the nerve to do what you wanted?’ Maybe he wanted to be a ballet dancer and just didn’t have the balls."

MELNYCZUK, Askold. Novels: What Is Told, Ambassador of the Dead. Stories in Gettysburg Review, Missouri Review, Antioch Review, Grand Street. Founding editor of AGNI. University of Massachusetts-Boston.

To view more complete survey results from our last Bulletin, look for Bulletin 3 at the top of the page and click the links to text and graph responses. With 88% of you having participated in a writing group, 64% in a workshop, 30% in a writing program, and 87% having taken writing classes, it is no surprise the volume of experience you have to share. Here’s a sampling of your advice for charting your own course of education. Click here for a much more inclusive document.

Take a favorite book or story and type out the first chapter as if you were the author intending to submit it to a magazine or publishing house. It helps me get a feel for fine finished work, how it’s put together and how many manuscript pages make up the printed pages. It brings writing and publishing out of the realm of mystery and into my little world of “this is possible.”

Have someone you can check in with about how the work is going, how the creative process is going. You don’t have to share your work, but I find it helps to be able to share my thoughts and feelings about the work.

Read. But read consciously with yourself as both teacher and student: notice how various authors handle dialogue, how they introduce the past, what person they use and what they gain from using, say first person instead of omniscient narrator, how exposition does or doesn’t replace dialogue, how they build a character. If they’re stumbling over some aspect of something they’re trying to write, pick up an Austen, a Hemmingway, a Fitzgerald, a DeLillo, a Morrison, and analyze how they have dealt with that aspect.

Writing technique is so varied and fluid; I used to tell the students I taught as a TA that the hardest part of any endeavor is discovering how you yourself do it best. I firmly believe that. There are tons of books out there by which to bone up on the basics of technique. Beyond that, I think it’s mostly a matter of developing style, then vision and conviction, as well as the endurance to keep gutting it out when there’s no one reading your work but you. On that point, don’t expect even initially enthusiastic volunteers to read your stuff, and if they do, don’t expect them to be honest in their assessment of it. If you happen to find someone who defies that category, marry him or her.

You told us about your experience with writing programs. More.

I got an M.A. in Writing and Publishing at Emerson College in Boston and found the program to be integral to my evolution as a writer. It's embarrassing to think of the state of my writing prior to these classes. I learned to crave criticism and to want to revise my work. Workshops averaged 12 students, and typically 3 people submitted a piece of writing to be workshopped the next week. Everyone was expected to weigh in on the piece and provide written feedback to the author. If I have any criticism, it's that my courses really lacked study of the fundamentals like reading an author who's particularly good at dialogue and applying that in a writing exercise, or reading exclusively to study scene mechanics. Overall though, I found the classes to be stellar and the network of writers to be a huge support. It's so rewarding to be surrounded by people who have the same commitment to writing.

I am studying at Wesleyan University. It is not an MFA program, rather a self-designed major within the Humanities concentration in the Graduate Liberal Studies Program. I have found the workshop portion the most useful, but it is also good to study with working writers, who are both students and teachers in the program, to work at assignments and to come up with ideas, and to have my work edited by others. The program has been (for the most part) gentle, in that the expectation in the workshops has been for a positive approach, even though the teachers and students also give constructive criticism when necessary. I have been exposed to writers I might not have read on my own. I have learned about the process of sending work out, and some professors even require that as part of the program, which I have found integral to my self-confidence and growth as a writer. I like being with other creative people who want to write a lot.

I actually taught for a writing program--and I learned more about writing by teaching it than I did as a student. Seeing poor examples and trying to figure out how to improve them taught me a great deal.

My MA is in English with an emphasis in fiction writing. It was useful in countless ways, but best of all it made me part of a community of writers who had the same interests and ambitions that I did. Even conversing with 'English folk' who are interested in literature or composition or linguistics, etc. isn't the same as connecting with other writers. Not that creative writers are better or smarter or lonelier than people in other areas of English – but they do have experiences and concerns that are unique to producing creative text and trying to find an audience for it.

Here are some of the comments you had on conferences and workshops. More.

I was in an MFA workshop program and it was very helpful for the first few years to have deadlines, peer reviews, readings. Toward the end though, I grew tired of it, and I haven't felt drawn to them anymore, preferring to share work with just one or two other people.

I've attended lots but the Key West Conference on Immigration in American Literature was absolutely excellent. Great writers made great presentations. Introduced me to writers like Alexander Hemon and Junot Diaz. I met Bharati Mukherjee (keynote speaker) waiting in line to use the bathroom and she told me she teaches my best story in her class, which was the most gratifying thing that has ever happened to me as a writer.

It was very focused on generating new work, writing each night to have new work read to the group the next day. Lots of new ideas were created, it was useful.

Have been to two. The first was a weekend conference which was great for meeting people, but turned out to have little content that interested me. The second was 10 days long and included a critique group. Again, the best part was meeting people and talking about writing outside of class. I also loved and learned a lot from listening to people read their works every evening – no critique, just reading.

The vast majority of you have been in or are in writing groups (graphs here), and most of you found those groups to be quite or very valuable. Here are a few excerpts about what you find useful in a writing group. More.

My group is only a couple of friends that meet twice a month for two hours away from kids and other obligations. We spend the majority of that time just writing, having peace and quiet. It helps to have a new setting, to get away from the normal writing area. I've also found it really helpful to be on a regular schedule, so that if I become lazy for two weeks or my current project has ended, I'm forced to come up with something new for that evening. It keeps me writing regularly rather than doing tons for six months and taking six months off.

One of the groups I belong to does NOT critique stories. We get together for 2 hours once a month to write together from a prompt. We find a great well of creativity in this. Several of us have used these exercises to write about our characters outside the context of our novel or story and thereby gain insight in their motives and personalities.

It's so helpful to me, as a novice, to get feedback from others, to validate what I know to be good and to point out the glaring flaws that I skim right over. I meet with honest, talented women who aren't afraid to tell each other their truth.

Here’s what you had to say about the writing classes you’ve taken. More.

I was a creative writing concentration (of an English major) during my undergrad studies. The classes were varyingly helpful based on content, but very helpful in getting me to sit down and write. I also appreciated the group feedback. Actually, although I write mostly fiction, I found the poetry classes most useful regarding content. We did a lot of exercises playing with forms and language, and I think that has contributed to my writing skill.

I took two years of screenwriting classes at the Watkins School of Art and Film in Nashville, Tenn. This was perhaps the most valuable training I have ever received as a writer since it introduced the structural, thematic and narrative underpinnings I had always been missing, despite having studied creative writing at Northwestern University. I also have taken screenwriting and fiction writing classes at The Writer's Center in Bethesda, Md., and private screenwriting classes.

I've taught writing workshops in a university for 20 years after earning a MA in creative writing, so I'm very familiar with the question: Can Writing Be Taught? It's a complex question but I stress technique in my classes and students find them valuable and keep coming back for more. In any workshop, my experience is that people hate to see it end and make plans to continue gathering on their own. That seldom is possible due to busy lives, but it's proof that writers, like birds, flock together.

And these are questions you would like to ask other writers. More. (We’ll be pulling from this list in future bulletins.)

I am writing a first-person point-of-view story that starts out in the past tense and switches to the present. Has anyone done that successfully (meaning you were satisfied with the outcome)?

Is it helpful to retreat for longer blocks of time? (Say, escaping distractions and responsibilities for a couple of weeks somewhere other than 'home.') Or is it more productive to stay home in familiar surroundings, and hammer out a paragraph or two between kids and aging parents and part-time job?

How do you know when a piece is good enough to send out? And did your judgment improve as you became more experienced?

I'm waiting to hear from Bennington to see if I've been accepted into their low-residency MFA program. Any advice on how to structure the independent study is most welcome. Alethea Black alethea_black@businessweek.com

Thank you all for your valuable contributions: Your stories, your ideas, and your subscriptions all help keep Glimmer Train vital.