Larry Woiwode: Persistent Exuberance

Editor’s Note: Award winning fiction writer John Salter sat down with nationally acclaimed novelist, short story writer, and memoirist Larry Woiwode at Nicole’s Fine Pastries, April 26, 2008, and talked with Woiwode about the writing life and his latest work, A Step from Death.
HPR: A Step from Death opens with you getting tangled up and seriously injured in farm machinery. It took you a long time to free yourself. So I have to ask, when you were twisted up in the PTO of your tractor, were you already starting to write about it? Jim Harrison once said that he and his wife saw a man jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, and Harrison immediately started making sentences out of the event. How about you?

LW: Probably since what I do is write, I’m sure that at least on a certain level sentences were starting to form. But actually I was much more focused on the physical reality of being there, and then figuring out how I could get out, when it became obvious that nobody was going to come to help me. But sure, I would say there were sentences. Sometimes they’d get cut off by the pain. I wasn’t observing somebody else in freefall.

HPR: Just as you were far from help when you suffered your accident, you live far from New York City and the big engine of literary America. Do you think this distance, this isolation, is dangerous for you?

LW: Not at all. I think if you’re close to the big engine, you start wanting to feed it coal. So people in New York City get entangled in the mill there; I got entangled in a PTO. It’s a little bit different. I was able to get myself out.
But if you get into the literary politics of NYC, it’s pretty thick. For instance, this writer who was writing for the New Yorker-I won’t bring up her name-decided to move to Maine, and her editor at the New Yorker-not mine, it was somebody else-said, “If you move there, you’ll have nothing to write about.” And she continued to write the same kind of stories she’s been publishing regularly, but since she’d moved there, he wouldn’t publish them.

So that’s sort of the necessity of being in touch with the city, of being in touch with your editor, of being in touch with your agent. And it’s helpful at first. But then I wanted to get out of there so I could do my own work on my own. In this isolated area of North Dakota that we finally came across, there were so many benefits to writing--the quiet, the calm atmosphere, no horns honking, no sirens going off--that I could concentrate on what I needed to do. And in the midst of that concentration, I found that my work was going to be moving in a different direction. So that was helpful.

HPR: But then you run the risk of being labeled a “regional writer.”

LW: Why is it more regional to write about varieties of locations in North Dakota and Wisconsin and Michigan or wherever I happen to be writing about, why is that more limiting than writing about an eight-block area in Manhattan, as, say, Malamud did in The Assistant? I mean, eventually you get to the graveyard but basically the whole story happens within about an eight-block area.

HPR: Which is a small region.

LW: There’s the idea that’s persisted in literature for centuries that to be a great French writer you had to live in Paris, that to be a great Russian writer you had to live in Petersburg, or possibly Moscow. Tolstoy chose to live mostly in the country, at Yasnaya Polyana. To be a great literary writer now you’re supposed to live in New York City.

HPR: When you look at the work of younger writers now, do you feel optimistic or pessimistic about the future of American fiction?

LW: Both. Right now I just happened to run across a young man who’s maybe the second or third young person I’ve met who is a natural-born storyteller. His stories about a rural part of Idaho sound like Mark Twain. He tried to do an essay and I said, “Why don’t you write a story instead?” And he wrote it overnight and handed it in the next day.

HPR: Over in Jamestown?

LW: Yes. What makes me pessimistic at times is that among young people, the language seems so fractured. They have trouble with homophones, they don’t know how to punctuate, they don’t know what the difference is between a fragment and a run-on. Their whole concept of language is totally fractured. And I suspect that is partly due to media influence, email, text messaging--being able to rap off your immediate thought as if it’s meaningful.

HPR: Do you think you can be taught to be a writer?

LW: Okay, no one can teach you originality. That you can only find in the deepest search of yourself. For instance, when I came to North Dakota from New York City, I had about 400 pages drafted on a new novel. And as I listened to people talk in the area--it was set in North Dakota; that novel was Born Brothers when it finally came out--as I listened to people talk and spent time in the area, I realized I had to start all over, because it was too fanciful and literary, and had nothing to do with the way people were living here. So it was probably my dream of North Dakota, but it wasn’t accurate.

HPR: What would you tell the young writer seeking advice?

LW: Never throw anything away. William Maxwell used to say that to me. Never throw anything away. Because the state of mind you’re in when you’re writing something will never return.
Even if it’s crappy. I remember one period when I wrote through a page or so and got so depressed I thought, “This is going to be incoherent.” But as I came to revise the book, these portions were the areas that needed no revision. So you never know. That’s why you don’t throw things away.

HPR: You were answering questions once and talked about some of your accomplishments, like all your stories in the New Yorker, your Guggenheim Fellowship, being on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, the many translations of your work, and so on. This is all stuff most writers would trade their souls for. Yet I noticed more than a few glassy eyes in the audience, as if none of this registered. Do you feel you’re under-appreciated in the area?

LW: I feel I could be used more. The state could use me more. In other states, the poet laureate--and I happen to be the poet laureate here--is asked to write a poem for the inauguration and read it, and also reads a poem at the beginning of the legislative session. I even suggested to one governor that maybe I could read at his inauguration and instead he had a bunch of amateur singers and dancers.

HPR: Were they wearing cowboy hats and twirling lassos?

LW: Yes! The Poet Lariats!

HPR: What three books would you recommend that new writers read?

LW: Everybody should read They Came Like Sparrows, by William Maxwell. That’s sort of the quintessential novel about death in the family. And I think many Americans aren’t able to handle that, or handle it poorly. The next book everybody should read is War and Peace. If one hasn’t read War and Peace, one is suffering a lack greater than I can communicate in less than its fifteen-hundred pages. The third would be difficult, but I guess I would have to say Sido and My Mother’s House, by Colette--semi-fictional memoirs.

HPR: What do you read? What contemporary writers do you like?

LW: The writer I’ve kept up with the most--I probably have forty of his sixty-some books--is John Updike. I think he’s been underestimated, especially in recent years. In fact, I think he’s the only American whose oeuvre is worthy of a Nobel.
I like Erdrich. I think everybody from the area should read her. I like her poetry and her novels. And I think anybody who comes from the area should read Tom McGrath. Some of his great, sweeping poems are like novels in themselves.

HPR: Between the teaching and the farming and the writing, you’ve been pretty busy. Do you have any passions aside from work? Golf? Bullfighting?

LW: I like horses. I used to ride a lot, but lately I’ve either been bunged up or too busy.

HPR: Hasn’t theology been a great interest of yours? Wouldn’t you say you’ve been deeply involved in the spiritual quest?

LW: I think that permeates everything I do. And yes, I’ve read a lot of theology. But I’m becoming less interested in theology and more interested in the way people are able to live out Christianity, if they call themselves Christians--or even if they don’t--in the world now.

HPR: That’s a big territory.

LW: I’d read theology so much I thought that, well, this is wrong, that person is wrong, this person is closer to right. I think that means nothing anymore. I think it’s how you’re able to live your life in the world. What your theology is or your total lack of it is not so interesting to me as what you get in the Old Testament: “What’s your story?” When Christ himself wanted to explain something, like when the Pharisees would ask him a question, he’d say, “Love your neighbor.” And they’d ask, “Who’s my neighbor?” So rather than go into the theological possibilities of that and all the hairsplitting, he said, “A certain man was traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho.”

HPR: He told a story.

LW: Because stories include people, and theologies exclude people. And I think that all teaching and all writing should be permeated with the kind of wisdom you find in Christ and his teaching and in the Bible, which have been pretty valid for two thousand years. Most of Western literature, from Chaucer up to and through T.S. Eliot and Flannery O’Connor and others, built on that foundation that’s been there for two thousand years.

HPR: When you finish something, are you happy with it?

LW: A certain amount of joy comes at completion. But then when I look at it in a new light, I think, “Oh my goodness.” There isn’t a book of mine that I can pick up without feeling irritation, shame, anxiety. When I pick one up I have to have a pencil so I can start fixing it. I started reading the memoir and I don’t know how many pages in I saw a typo. And I just closed the book. I didn’t even want to look at it and find another typo!

HPR: One of my favorite scenes in A Step from Death is when you’re staying by Lake Michigan, and Thomas McGuane and Jim Harrison show up with their dogs and shotguns to go hunting. You’re all kind of at the beginning of what would come to be stellar careers. I was struck by the presence of a great, intoxicating, youthful exuberance as the three of you talked. So I wonder, when you look back on something like that, does it make you melancholy?

LW: It makes me feel as exuberant as I did the day we talked