| Featured Book |
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| Just West of Famous |
| Charles Baxter doesn't pull any punches when he answers Lisa Coutant's questions in this month's author interview.
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| In this issue: |
An encore poem from Gol McAdam
Claire Litton's amazing Authenticity Leads
A collection of poetry from Craig Kirchner
New fiction from Maria Pollack and Josh Stewart
Plus great poetry from Corie Feiner, Gary Wilkins, and Sherry Pasquerello |
| Coming Next Month |
Anne Frasier has some fresh ideas about how to boost her book sales,
Ron Hogan is the ultimate literary insider - and next month he's going to take the Picolata Review into his world for an exclusive look around.
Plus:More great poetry, short fiction, and features. Enough great writing to satisfy any literary palate.
Want to submit to The Picolata Review? Send your submissions and queries to submissions@picolatareview.org
Complete guidelines can be found here. |
| The Picolata Review |
Managing Editor Mark Pettus is a full time journalist in St. Augustine, Florida, and author of the novel, Transit Gloria
Features Editor Lisa Coutant is a consultant, former writer for the Philadelphia Theatre Review, and a fiction writer. She is also Vice President of the professional writing group, Pennwriters.
Poetry Editor Andy H-H., is a poet who lives in the beautiful countryside of West Yorkshire
with his partner and a menagerie of pets (a sheep occasionally stares in through the kitchen window), in a home surrounded by literary history. Ted Hughes was born there, Sylvia Plath is buried nearby, and first Emily Bronte, then Kate
Bush, made a certain stretch of desolate land five minutes' walk away very famous indeed.
Fiction Editor Serenity Banks's day job is as an industry magazine editor. She also writes an online sex-advice column, and is trying to find an agent for her latest horror novel.
The Picolata Review is a monthly online publication, and a place to find emerging writers and poets. We welcome you, and hope we'll see you again. If you forget our address, look for us just a little west of famous. |
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| Volume 1, Number 2 August, 2006 |
| An interview with award winning author Charles Baxter |
Charles Baxter is the author of 4 novels, 4 collections of short stories, 3 collections of poems, a collection of essays on fiction and is the editor of other works. He is originally from Minneapolis and graduated from Macalester College, in Saint Paul. After doing his graduate work in English at the State University of New York at Buffalo, Baxter taught at Wayne State University in Detroit, then at the University of Michigan--Ann Arbor's MFA program. He now teaches at the University of Minnesota. Baxter's website is www.charlesbaxter.com
Lisa Coutant: When Mark Pettus first asked me to be Feature's Editor for the Picolata Review, I asked him about the type of feature articles he wanted to include. One thing Mark wanted in every issue was interviews ("Two interviews - one author, one non-author. You pick 'em, " he said).
The first author who came to my mind was Charles Baxter. When I read Feast of Love, I knew I wanted, needed, to interview the man who wrote it. I was amazed that he could weave a tale so effectively from so many perspectives, that he could make it simultaneously humorous, serious, moving, and timely. That book taught me a lot, and the Picolata Review gave me the opportunity to interview its author.
Charles Baxter has a reputation for being humble and generous, as well as one of being a writer's writer. I now know that reputation is well earned. I hope you gain from this interview as much as I did.
An Interview with Charles Baxter
Lisa - You've said once you've completed a novel you feel spent - "like a wrung out washrag." How do you become inspired again?
Baxter - You wait. You pay attention, and you listen. You keep the radar in full rotation. Sometimes a statement, a memory, a vision or a scene will move you somehow. I'm not a believer in production for the sake of production, of writing for the sake of writing, though I am a believer in showing up at the desk and doing what you can when you have something to say. To be inspired, all you have to do is breathe in. Inspiration is respiration.
Lisa - You have written poetry, short stories and novels. What form do you prefer and do you feel as though you draw upon each form no matter what you are writing?
Baxter - In a way, I prefer poetry, but my gifts, such as they are, are not those of a lyric poet, but more plodding: for observation, recording, noticing how people say certain things and do certain things and thereby contradict themselves, and create scenes. Sometimes I feel as if I'm writing fiction as a playwright would, if he had spent his youth as a poet. The genres should be hybridized.
Lisa - You once said you not only identified with the character of Saul in Saul and Patsy but that you were Saul. Do you indentify with all of your primary characters? If so then how do you discover them (or they discover you) and do you feel the writing process is a means of coming closer to the characters or more like an exorcism of sorts?
Baxter - Actors often become the characters they play. Dickens stood in front of mirrors and invented physical "bits" for each of his characters until he could write them down, what he had seen in his reflection. I don't identify equally with all the primary characters in my fiction (for example, I had quite a bit of distance on Wyatt Palmer, the protagonist of Shadow Play),but I try to get inside their skins in order to project them imaginatively onto the page. It strikes me that almost all fiction writers do so. It's not clear to me how I discover them. Sometimes they're just available, like Diana in The Feast of Love: a woman of a kind I had seen many times, but never observed in anyone else's fiction.
Lisa - One of your favorite books is The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. Bulgakov's influence is evidenced in Feast of Love. What other novels have influenced your writing?
Baxter - Katherine Anne Porter's Noon Wine, certainly. Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano and certainly Cheever's stories. Chekhov and the other Russians. Much of the work of William Maxwell. Nabokov, Welty, Malamud, Bellow. It all goes into the mix. But I'm almost sixty by now and not as susceptible to influence as I once was.
Lisa - Who are the contemporary authors you admire and why?
Baxter - I admire all the admirable ones.
Lisa - Do you believe that there is such a thing as the perfect story? If so, why, and what defines it?
Baxter - What a strange question. Perfection is for Puritans. But since you asked,I'd answer, "Yes, sure, there is such a thing as artistic perfection." What defines it? You wouldn't want to change a word, a comma, a character, or a single detail in its setting. Everything in a perfect story would have authority. Every element is both decorative and functional.
Lisa - What do you view as greatest problem facing mankind and how does that opinion color what you write, or does it?
Baxter - The environment and poverty, and, in relation to those, over-population. I'm not sure how those concerns color what I write, but I'm sure they get in everywhere. They're particularly evident in Shadow Play, I know that. But I don't want to be too conscious of what I do.
Lisa - Do you feel environment impacts a writer and if so how (such as where a writer lives or the emotional environment - supportive versus combative)?
Baxter - Of course, environment has an effect on a writer. Often we assume that it doesn't matter where you live, but that's false. Tell that to Cormac McCarthy, or Faulkner, or Edward P. Jones, or Lorrie Moore. An environment constitutes a writer's world, what surrounds him or her; it's the air we breathe, the water we drink, the poisoned well of our political life. Right now, I can't see how anyone can think straight, with the foolish and wicked man we have in the White House trying to control our destinies. Talk about an environment! He's created an environment of lies, concealment, double-dealing, and hypocrisy. That's the air we breathe now; that's all ours. We elected it, and we earned it.
Lisa - What impact do you hope your writing will have on the reader and do you feel you have been successful?
Baxter - The impact my writing has on a reader is a question related to the rhetoric of fiction, and I don't worry too much about that. I hope that my stories are memorable, that they stick in a reader's head, that they move him or her and provide a few meanings here and there. I don't worry about success. It's not for me to say.
Lisa - In your role at the University of Minnesota, you encounter many aspiring authors. How do you nurture their talents? And do you believe that talent comes naturally or that it is developed through hard work?
Baxter - One of the things I do is to provide as close a reading of their texts as I can for my students. I describe their work back to them; I try to tell them what's in it. I try to notice patterns, qualities in the voice, obsessions concerning subject-matter and themes. I pay attention to word-choices. It's about the sentences but, by God, it isn't only about the sentences, and people who say it's only about the sentences are academics in disguise.. If the writer has been careless about something, I'll try to point that out; after all, I may be the first close reader, but there will be others.
I try to foster pride and ambition in my students. I try to convey a love of literature to them, a love of the craft of writing. If they don't have that, they won't make it. Hell, there's so much I don't know--it'sembarrassing. But I can convey a few of the craft elements that I do know, and I can suggest that writing is not a sack race, that it demands a contradiction: both great quantities of ambition and great quantities of humility. It's crucial to have both.
Lisa - What recommendations do you have for aspiring authors?
Baxter - Don't quit. Be insanely ambitious, while holding on to your humility. |
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