Tony Earley is known primarily for his fiction, having established his reputation with a collection of short stories, Here We Are in Paradise, that earned him a place on Granta's list of America's best young fiction writers. Of Earley's first novel, Jim the Boy, Walter Kirn of the New York Times wrote, "it's not a big book, just a good one - and in this instance 'good' is higher praise than 'great.' Earley is also the author of a nonfiction collection, Somehow Form a Family: Stories that are Mostly True, in which he explores the roots of his family and attempts to make sense of the space he occupies in the world. The stories span his life, from childhood through his marriage, and end outside of Pittsburgh. Currently, Tony Earley lives with his wife, Sarah, in Nashville, Tennessee, and teaches writing at Vanderbilt University.

Hattie Fletcher is a student in the University of Pittsburgh's MFA program and the Creative Nonfiction Editor at nidus.


I want to start with the dilemma you describe at the beginning of Somehow Form a Family: you remember seeing a full moon on the night of the astronauts' landing, but later find out that in fact the moon was a waxing crescent that night. You write that at that moment you came to understand, if not embrace, the term creative nonfiction. And I was wondering, why don't you embrace it?

Well, because it still seems kind of false to me. Writing a personal piece based on memory -- it's making up a story, and it feels exactly to me like writing a short story, except that I would be the protagonist. And when I realized that I had made such a huge mistake in my memory, that my memory was so distorted and nowhere near correct, I realized that I was making up the entire narrative. With that fiction, nonfiction stuff . . . we need to call it one thing or the other to keep from blowing people's minds and completely confusing the readership, but you know, it's making up a story. It's making up dialogue. And since I'm not the eight-year-old kid I was then, I'm making up that character.

Do you approach writing fiction and nonfiction the same way? What makes you write one and not the other?

Well, ultimately, commercial consideration. But once the actual typing starts, I don't find that I approach them any differently at all. It seems to me that they're both the boiling down to a narrative truth--not that I necessarily know what that truth is when I start writing or typing or erasing and retyping until I figure out what it is I'm trying to say. Then, at the end, I go, oh, that's it, and I write the conclusion. But the process feels exactly the same to me. It's the search for the same kind of intangibles.

I've read that when you write fiction you wait until you have a first sentence, and then it never changes. Is that true?

That happens as much in nonfiction as in fiction--I don't write either until I can kind of hear the voice in my head. And even when it's a personal essay and it's my voice, it's still sort of an artificial version, a constructed narrative voice, and I can't really get started until it gets loud enough in my head.

How much do you weed out what you put in? It seems that when something is a personal essay, there's more of a decision in that regard, since you are revealing personal things. How do you choose what to write about?

Well, I worry more about it than when I'm writing fiction, but ultimately, if I decide it's important, I go ahead and put it in. In the title essay, "Somehow Form a Family," I did change the names of my next door neighbors, and that's because I wrote about their divorce. I just felt it would be wrong to light them up by taking this moment of personal disaster that they had, and so I did change their names. And in "Tour de Fax," I changed the names of a couple people. In the magazine version I used their real names, but I thought, maybe they didn't come off that great and I've already lit them up once. Why light them up twice? And so sort of for humanitarian reasons, I changed their names. I do think more about it in nonfiction, but when it gets down to it, if I think it's important that I write about something and my parents think it's important that I not write about it, I just get kind of steely-eyed and cold and write about it anyway.

Have they been upset about anything?

My mother was really upset about "Somehow Form a Family," the title essay. She wasn't real thrilled about "Hallway," because I said some things about her father -- my grandfather -- that she thought were disparaging. I tried to be as truthful as I knew how . . . Telling the truth's not always an easy thing. Telling fictional truths is hard as well, but at least you can disguise people. If some of fiction is at least inspired by autobiographical events, and you want to tell a hard truth and the person who did it is skinny, in the story you can make them fat, and then when the skinny person comes to you you can say, look, it's not you, they're fat! But you can't do that in nonfiction. They're still skinny or they're still fat.

You seem concerned about the whole notion of telling a story, and you seem to address that more deliberately in your nonfiction, especially the first five or six stories in the collection. The introduction talks about telling stories, and several sections of "Hallway" start, "The story goes like this," and then, also in Hallway, you talk about endings, that stories don't end the way we want them to end, they just sort of end. It seems like in fiction you can control that more. Or is that not the case?

Well, I actually haven't thought about that dichotomy since I wrote "Hallway," but I think that's exactly true, because in fiction you can manipulate inconvenient events and make them literarily convenient. Real life's supposed to be messier. You can't always find that perfect narrative arc, and that's what happened when I got to the end of "Hallway": I created a narrative arc, and I got to the conclusion, and it really wasn't an arc, just a line. And so in the ending I had to say that. Sometimes you can find a nice convenient narrative arc in nonfiction, but in fiction you can manipulate it a little more. Although, in fiction the convenient narrative arc is often the bad one. I think the best fiction is often a little messy and ambiguous.

The end of "Yard Art," one of your Nashville stories, is a little messy. It seemed to end abruptly, too.

In the first ending of that story, they found a real hundred-thousand dollar statue nobody had ever discovered. And it just seemed completely bogus -- that was the expected arc. And then I had the idea, what if they didn't discover an Edmunson? Then I had the idea for the Cracker Jack sailor, which seems a much better ending, because it subverts the expectation. So maybe in nonfiction the expectations are just naturally subverted, and in good fiction you try to subvert the expected ending -- to do what nonfiction does naturally all the time. I believe in fiction and in nonfiction that a writer should never light up a character. Like, imagine walking through your life and you have God's big finger pointing from the sky at you, and everybody could see that. It's the same kind of thing if you light up a character, because they can't defend themselves. They can't speak, so it's patently unfair, because you're their creator. I always try to take good care of people. Characters in fiction won't always do the right thing, but you have to treat them as if they're going to, and let it seem like their bad actions are their choice and not your manipulation. I'm even more careful about that in nonfiction. If I'm writing about something -- say my father made some terrible mistakes when he was young, and he wasn't the best guy -- writing about that, I feel that to be fair, I really need to try to understand why he might choose to do that and write about it with all the empathy and sympathy that I possibly can, and just to tell the truth as plainly as possible without any sort of manipulative language that herds people into thinking or feeling a certain way. Because that kind of narrative manipulation doesn't work in fiction, and it really stinks in nonfiction.

Though characters can sometimes hang themselves in nonfiction, especially in more journalistic pieces. Some of the people in "Tour de Fax" aren't exactly likable.

Of the pieces in that book, I feel a little bad about "Tour de Fax," because nobody asked me to come on that airplane and write about them. The guy who put the trip together, I guess he assumed I was going to write about him, but he has no idea about the space he occupies in the real world. The space he occupies in his mind and the space that he actually occupies are two entirely different things. He's kind of a big pompous buffoon. But he has no idea. And so I feel a little unkind pointing that out, because he was minding his own business and I showed up on the airplane. So it's kind of tricky. "Tour de Fax," that's not the usual kind of piece for me. David Foster Wallace's book, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never do Again . . . I think there's some really great stuff in that book, but the title piece, making fun of those poor people who were on the cruise -- they were just poor people on a cruise. It's just their misfortune that David Foster Wallace showed up with a notebook. They had no idea that they really weren't having fun. They thought they were having fun, and they weren't harming anybody. I do wonder about the ethics of that sort of participatory journalism, because who am I to judge like that?

Both of those pieces were for Harper's.

Well, Harper's prides itself on being a little snotty. If you've got something that's a little snotty, Harper's is a good place to send it.

In some ways they're similar pieces.

Oh, they are similar pieces. And I just feel a little bad about mine. Although it's got some really funny stuff in it. But a lot of that humor is at the expense of other people. . . .There's this one poor girl who sat at [David Foster Wallace's] dinner table every night that he just couldn't stand. She was on a cruise, for god's sake, and her family was saving for years, maybe, so they could go on this cruise, and this brilliant writer happens to be sitting at her table. I wonder about it. I'm not completely comfortable with the ethics of the whole thing, because I feel like, as I say, you've got to write what you see, you have to tell the truth. And this other part of me says, as I said earlier, who am I to judge. Because that sort of stance, you're taking a kind of stance that says, "Know what? I'm smarter than they are. And because I am, I'm going to tell you what they're really like." That's a real tricky stance to take, and I'm not completely comfortable with it. Most of the humor, I think, in Somehow Form a Family is at my expense. And in the pieces I write about my marriage, Sarah gets all the good lines. I play the straight man, the one that the bucket of water falls on.

That seems safer in some ways. That forges a good relationship with readers, too--not that you do it deliberately for that reason.

I don't do it deliberately for that, but it's certainly nicer. I do think about that, because I don't want to be a negative voice. When I was younger, in college, and to a lesser extent graduate school, I thought that I was the generator of my talent, that I could do this, I could write like this, just because I was remarkable, I was doing this. And there's a lot of self-glorification in it, and I think that sort of pyrotechnic quality in my earlier stories is sort of a result of that; it's a sort of "look at me" thing. After I got out of graduate school and went through this really severe depression where I couldn't even write a postcard and there was no guarantee that I was ever going to write anything ever again, or even that I would make it through the next month, I came out from the other side of that and I realized, I'm not generating this at all, and it could go away just like that. Once I started to think of it as a gift, then suddenly I thought, well, there's a responsibility, and what do I do with this? What I've come up with is I think it's sort of my job as a writer to advocate a moral universe -- I hope that doesn't sound too sanctimonious, but that's sort of not necessarily a Judeo-Christian universe, but a moral universe -- and to write things that make people ask the big questions. And by making people ask the questions, I don't presume I have the answers. And writing a comic piece that lights up a lot of innocent bystanders really doesn't fit into that moral view.

I think that's one of the things that stands out about your work -- not that it's completely devoid of cynicism, but on the surface, it's not "edgy." I think a lot of writing can have a caustic tone, maybe, that's trying to be hip.

Yeah, and I think I'm probably a lot snottier in my day-to-day life than I am as a writer, and I tend to be more cynical and more gossipy and prone to unkindness as a human being. But when I sit down to write, I take pretty seriously not being like that when I write, and trying to find the good and the truth in the person that I happen to write about, in fiction or nonfiction. It's easy to be cynical, and I just think that there's way too much cheap hipness in contemporary fiction and nonfiction at the expense of other people. I don't know what writers are thinking about when they write like that, because it's the easiest kind of writing in the world to do. There's nothing hard about that, and I don't see what people get out of it. I think it's . . . sure, there are rewards to be had, but this writing is kind of cheap, you know.

So I'll be cynical and say that it seems like there's a really fine line that you walk -- and I think you always stay on the clear side of it -- but I wonder if people aren't kind of afraid of not being cynical because it seems so easy to lapse into Reader's Digest land or something like that. People are afraid not to be guarded.

Well, it is expected and is safe, you know. If you want to be part of the intelligentsia (for lack of a better word) you have to show your bona fides, and cynicism and world weariness and textual awareness do that. You have to show that you're smart. And I probably do just enough of it to show the other smart people that I could do it if I wanted to. And I'm certainly not saying that I'm a pure, morally called creature, because the unpleasant, cynical part of my nature is as prominent as the side of my nature that wants to be kind and tell the truth, and I think that my writing -- I hope -- shows the struggle between those two sides. If I ever get to the point where I come off as completely sanctimonious and act as if I do in fact know all the answers and that my way is the only way, I hope someone will just shoot me with a tranquilizer gun and drag me off to the zoo. When I think about it, how can one be an artist at the highest level of literary merit -- and I'll be honest and say I aspire to do that -- and advocate things that aren't hip? It's not an easy path, and I think that there are real pitfalls on both sides. And I'm a Christian, but one of my big horrors is my work winding up in Christian bookstores. I think that sort of sums it up: as soon as I see one of my books and the cover is the sun setting over the ocean, I'm just screwed. I think it's over then; I don't want that at all.

Who do you think of as doing what you aspire to do? Who would you count as influences?

Well, I think the best writers, or the writers that I'm most attracted to, are writers of heart. And I think that can spread across any kind of genre or style, and the writers whose work I don't aspire to are the writers who can be really smart and stylistically flashy, but they're maybe just kind of mean. I think writers with good hearts can be found anywhere. I even think early Hemingway was a writer with heart. I certainly don't think he was as he got older and drunker, but I think there's a real humanity in those early stories that people tend to overlook because of the masculine veneer of it.

Anyone else?

Willa Cather is kind of my heroine -- idol -- in some ways. Because I just think she was a writer who was just a huge heart.

I hadn't really thought about Jim the Boy and My Ántonia. That's a Jim too, isn't it?

Well, I first named Jim Glass in honor of Jim Burton, so that's my little nod. But My Ántonia and Death Comes for the Archbishop . . . it's not fashionable to write those kinds of books anymore, but those are the kinds of books that I want to write.

Stylistically, you write a lot of very straightforward, crisp, subject-verb-object sentences that reflect in some ways, that attempt to be quiet, or at least not so flashy. Is that something deliberate?

Ultimately, I think it's easier to tell the truth in a declarative sentence because there are a lot fewer colors that can be misinterpreted or that can blend inadvertently with other colors and suggest something that you didn't mean. Just from an artistic point of view, I like the challenge of doing artistically or thematically complicated things using really simple sentences. I actually think it's a lot harder to do that than write overly complicated constructions with a lot of polysyllabic, Latinate words, and so for me the artistic payoff is greater in minimalism, for lack of a better word. And I'm attracted to minimalism in all kinds of art. I listen to Hank Williams and think, how did he do what he just did? How did he make me feel that way with a song that's seemingly that simple? Or look at a Matisse painting or one of those paper cutouts he did when he was a very old man, and the lines are so incredibly simple, but the result is so complicated. I like that purity of line in all art forms.

You say in the introduction to Somehow Form a Family that you feel like "The Quare Gene" is the only real essay in the book in terms of what you thought of as an essay. And stylistically, that's one that seems kind of different. Just on the sentence level, it seems like the writing is really different.

That piece, I wrote that originally as a talk. I had been asked to give a lecture, and so I wrote it originally as a lecture. I had just started as a professor at Vanderbilt, and I was kind of uncomfortable in academia, and largely because a lot of academics view creative writers as kind of not fully educated and sort of suspect, and I think a lot of academics sort of discount what we do, I just wanted to prove at least to myself that I could write a pointy-headed essay if I wanted to. But then, it's partially pointy-headed essay and partially heart-felt narrative -- how I always wind up writing.

I know most of the pieces -- or all, almost -- were published separately. Did you rework them at all? Because it seems like they're so closely connected; themes start in one story and pick up in another.

I wrote all those pieces with the idea of collecting them eventually, and so I think they're thematically connected for that reason. I find that I try never to write anything I can only sell once. Also, at the time, this was the time of my great depression of the early '90s, and I was just trying to figure out what the heck I was doing on this planet, and the only way it seemed to me that I could do that was to go back to the beginning and figure out how it was that I had come to be. I think they're thematically connected in that way, because I was looking for an answer in a certain way, and that involved going back to understanding the family.

You talk in the collection about turning things into metaphors, and it seems like you flirt a lot with that line, of letting certain things stand as metaphors, and not letting other things be metaphors. I wondered how you do that when you're writing.

I can't write any piece, fiction or nonfiction, until I come up with a metaphor. I hate the idea of writing on only one level. Often just walking around through the world, I'll see something and think, damn, that is a great metaphor -- for what? And so I have a metaphor, but I have no thing to hook it to. And so, a piece usually results when I find I have both sides of the equation. I love metaphor. I like metaphor better than I like narrative. I'm a whole lot more interested in writing in between the lines than I am in what's accomplished in the lines themselves. Exposition, you know, moving characters through space, getting a character to the airport on time so he can catch the plane -- I hate that stuff. I would much rather do a metaphorical construction than character development.

So when you sit down to write, you have the metaphor for that story figured out?

I think that I'll have something figured out. I'll have enough of a voice to get started, and often I discover the metaphors while I'm working. I think my subconscious is rapidly trying to connect things, and once I actively start writing then I discover the metaphors in the piece. Usually it's where I say, this looks like that. And once I've had that realization, I can go back through and put in the textual stuff to link them. But often I won't understand until I'm well into a piece that I have in fact constructed a metaphor, and then I'll go, there it is!

That's got to be a good moment.

I love that moment. When I teach to my students, I call it the "thing" and the "other thing." The "thing" is what the story is about, and the "other thing" is a parallel narrative, something that looks like the "thing" but isn't. Like, in my story "Here We Are in Paradise," there's a pond that has snapping turtles in it, and the snapping turtles eat these painted ducks, and the people who own the pond, the wife is dying of cancer. So the turtles eating the ducks looks like cancer, but it isn't. It's "thing" and "other thing." And I try to do that in fiction and in nonfiction both. Actually, I think that's the classic American short fiction template.

Well, since you bring up teaching: you're a product of an MFA program. How valuable do you think classes about writing are? Can you teach writing? Or what can you teach about writing?

Well, maybe as bad as it is for a professor to say this, only God can make a writer. I think that for the students who aren't going to be writers, writing classes will make them better readers, and give them a better understanding of how literature works and how narrative works and how art works that will sort of enrich whatever they do the rest of their days. For the kids who are going to be writers -- no writing program is ever going to make a writer out of someone who wasn't going to be a writer, and no writing program is ever going to stop somebody from being a writer who's going to be a writer. What they can do is vastly accelerate the learning curve. You can learn something in a semester in a good writing workshop that might have taken you ten years to figure out on your own. So I think that a writing program can take the students who are going to be writers, who have that ability, and plug them into that current faster than they could find it on their own. But it's two sides: it's mechanics, which can be taught, and the intangible, which can't be.

It seems that every year there are more and more MFA programs.

I've got mixed feelings about that. I live a very comfortable life teaching writing. At the same time there's something a little fraudulent about it. Are we producing more writers of a higher level than we were without MFA programs? I'm not sure that we are, and so it's this kind of self-generating industry, where we're training people to go out and publish stories in literary magazines and get that short story collection published so they can get a job in an MFA program and teach people to go out and publish in literary magazines and publish that short story collection. I wonder how much of a closed ecosystem it is. I don't think it's as bad in that regard as regular academia, which really doesn't make any pretensions about reaching out to the greater world, but I'm pretty idealistic, and I think art should. But I'm not sure that the MFA system is always doing that.

But you had a good experience getting an MFA.

I did. And I learned a lot in my workshops, but the best thing about an MFA program is that for two or three or four years, your job is to write stories. And that's absolutely the best thing about it. That, and hanging out with other people who are trying to write stories. And I think that probably the academic part of it was a distant third to the physical amount of writing I did and the socialization with other writers. Writers need that, and an MFA program is a great place to get that, because there are twenty, thirty, forty people there who are trying to do exactly what it is that you're doing. It can be competitive and unpleasant, but at the same time it can be very encouraging and uplifting and make you feel validated, this sort of secret little fantasy that you had about whatever it is that you're doing. If everybody else is trying to do it, then it must be OK.

Because at least you're with people who will talk about writing, and you can't necessarily do that with other people.

You meet your other friends at the bar and they say, Did you get any work done today? And you say, Nah, just a page, but I threw it away. Nobody cares out in the world. Being around good writers never made me feel bad. Some people will read a great book and it will depress them because they say, I can never do that. I read a great book or a great story, and it gets me excited, because it shows what's possible. And it was a big help for me in that way. And when I got to Alabama, I wasn't one of the top writers there, but I really really wanted to be, so it was very exciting and inspiring. I wasn't competitive with the other writers, though they probably will tell you that. I was just excited to be around them.

What are you reading these days?

Mostly student manuscripts. I just read Alice Randall's new book; it's not out yet, but I did a quote for it, so that was the last book I read. She's the woman who wrote The Wind Done Gone, the Gone With the Wind parody that got banned for a little while. So I just read her second book, and I recently read Jeff Eugenides's Middlesex, which I thought was a terrific book.

Do you tend towards fiction when you have time to read for pleasure?

I tend to like narrative nonfiction better than fiction. I'll read anything that's got the word "storm" in the title.

The Perfect Storm?

Isaac's Storm . . . Anything that's about a storm or a killer disease, I'm all for it. Gina Kolata's book on the 1918 flu epidemic, I thought, was just a rousing, action-packed adventure tale. And I just finished reading Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War, which is a revisionist biography of Jesse James that I thought was really good.

It's funny, because all those things are so different from your writing. In terms of the storm, action-packed adventure . . . not that Jim the Boy isn't an adventure story, but it's not a loud, cymbals crashing, lightning flashing kind of story.

Maybe I like reading that because I'm such a sort of tightly screwed down minimalist that in my fantasy life I like reading about hurricanes and little boats tossed about on great waves.

I want to go back to the beginning of Somehow Form a Family, because you start with a quotation from Green Hills of Africa: "The writer has attempted to write an absolutely true book to see whether the shape of a country and the pattern of a month's action can, if truly presented, compete with a work of the imagination." And I was wondering, first why it's there, and second, what's the verdict? And I know you undercut it on the very next page with the rebuttal from T. S. Matthews, and I'm wondering what's going on there and how much of that is autobiographical, or directed at yourself.

Well, the biggest charge leveled against writers of creative nonfiction -- and I think justly so -- is that of navel-gazing. And there's a lot of really bad, self-absorbed nonfiction out there. And there are a lot of professional victims out there overcoming this or that in the pages of their self-absorbed books. And I wasn't sure if I was doing that or not. I tried very hard not to, but I was sending it out into the world, and I sort of wanted to head that criticism off at the pass and undercut it if necessary. Because I do think it is a real danger for the personal essayist, to get so absorbed in the self with no connection to anything greater than the self. It just leads to a lot of really unfortunate stuff.

Did you get that kind of criticism?

No. But I was really worried about it the entire time I was writing, and I think it's important that one never make oneself appear to be a victim, and that one accept responsibility for one's shortcomings in the narrative account of the life.

Ultimately, then, the verdict might be that nonfiction can compete with fiction.

I think in the current marketplace nonfiction is actually winning. If you could offer any publisher, say, Middlesex and Seabiscuit, they're going to take Seabiscuit. Publishers really want good literary memoir, so I think it's probably winning.

Do you have any thoughts on why that is, though? Why are we so drawn to people's stories? I mean, I think we are drawn even to people's self-absorbed memoirs. Enough of them can do well. There was recently an essay on the back page of the New York Times Book Review about the continued proliferation of memoir. And I know in our MFA program, a lot of people come in planning to write McPhee-style nonfiction and end up writing memoir instead.

Then you catch yourself typing that personal pronoun. I think we write them because it's only human nature to be interested in yourself, and I think we read them because we're Americans and we're a prurient society. And we're prurient and puritanical at the same time. We want to condemn people for the dirt, but we want to make sure we know the dirt. And there's less suspension of disbelief. I think it's easier to find yourself in a person you know to be real than in a fictional creation. There's maybe not a huge difference, but maybe we're getting a little lazy, and we don't have to work quite as hard to lose ourselves in a memoir. But I really don't have any idea about the vagaries of the marketplace. I wish America loved collections of short stories. That's what I like to write.

You're at work on a novel now. Do you see yourself doing more nonfiction? Somehow Form a Family ends in Pittsburgh, which is a while ago now.

I've really lost interest in writing the narrative of trying to find myself. Once I finished Somehow Form a Family, I really don't have any interest in writing any more pieces like that. I'm really bored with thinking about me right now.

Though that doesn't have to rule out nonfiction. Or does it?

I signed a contract to write two more novels, so I have to do that. But one of the things I'd like to write in the future is . . . I do see myself writing that wandering around America, talking to interesting people, John McPhee-style book. I would like to do some journalism like that. But I want it to be about other people and not my personal search through America for personal meaning. I really like John McPhee. And he's a presence in those pieces, but it's not about him. A lot of writers, particularly young writers, I think, just feel compelled to interject bits about themselves to show how smart and hip they are, and it becomes less about the subject and more about them.

So what kind of advice do you give your students who want to be writers?

I tell them to learn how to do it. I mean, you go to see a great musician perform, and you know that musician has spent thousands of hours, literally, playing scales. Writers have to do the same kind of thing, but for some reason it's been culturally misrepresented. It's the only artistic endeavor where you can say, "I'm a writer," and you are. Well, you're not. Writers have to play scales like any other kind of artist, and I tell [my students] you have to write a finite amount of bad stuff before you can write your good stuff, and that amount is different for every individual. I tell them that writers write and posers pose, and if you're more interested in being seen in Starbucks with your notebook than actually learning how to do it, then just get out now because you're embarrassing the rest of us. But I also tell them that on the other side of that -- once they've paid their dues and played the scales and achieved the necessary technical competence, there are great rewards on the other side, artistic rewards and other kinds of rewards, but that there's no easy way to do it. You know, it's like Treasure Island: to get the treasure, you have to fight the pirates. You don't just get the treasure. But culturally, we've been taught you can get the treasure just by saying, Oh, I've got the treasure.
         I get kids in beginning fiction workshop, and they'll put a story up, and it's a beginning story. They've never written a story before, and we'll criticize it. And I believe in gentle criticism in workshop, but you can just tell that they're crushed that the fruit of their creative inspiration is being blasphemed in this way. I mean, where did that bullshit come from? It's so wrong, and it does such a disservice to people starting out. "Oh, I could never change that, I was inspired." So I try to demystify it and preach about the Promised Land, like, Come with me, children, we've got to spend forty years in the desert, but on the other side . . .

On the other side there's a book contract.

On the other side there's a book contract that's made of milk and honey. And I believe that. I mean, I know the myth that really aggravates me -- there are a number -- is the myth of the misunderstood genius slaving away in his or her garret, and just completely and wrongly misunderstood by the publishing industry in New York. That person does not exist. The entire publishing industry is based on finding good writers to publish, and the entire industry is out there actively looking. If they don't find those writers, there's no industry. Good writers are rewarded. I really believe that. And I think there's enough gravy out there for all of us. But there's very little gravy out there for the people who don't do the work.