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A couple of months back, I had the pleasure of talking writing over a Guinness with Andre Dubus III, author of House of Sand and Fog, Townie, and other books.

Our profile of Dubus in WD magazine is on its way to subscribers right now, and will hit newsstands June 5. In the meantime, here are some of my favorite unpublished excerpts from the interview—those inspirational writing bits that wouldn’t fit neatly into the piece, and deserve better than to be lost in the jumble of notebooks on my desk.

I’ve also got a new copy of Dubus’ memoir Townie on hand—I’ll give it to one randomly drawn commenter on this post below.

Happy Friday. Here’s Dubus on how to stay true to yourself and your work, and some other tips.

* * *

“If you don’t put 99 percent of yourself into the writing, there will be no publishing career. There’s the writer and there’s the author. The author—you don’t ever think about the author. Just think about the writer. So my advice would be, find a way to not care—easier said than done. Accept that the world may never notice this thing you worked so hard at. And instead, do it for it, find a job, find a way of living that gives you an hour or two or three a day to do it, and then work your ass off sending out, trying to get out there, but do not put the pressure on the work to do something for you. Because then you’re going to be writing dishonestly and for the market instead of for the characters and your story.”

“There are some beautiful books out there. But the ones that leave me cold are the ones where I feel—it’s that postmodern thing—it’s more experimentation with language than it is a deep compassionate falling into another human being’s experience.”

“I really think that if there’s any one enemy to human creativity, especially creative writing, its self-consciousness. And if you have one eye on the mirror to see how you’re doing, you’re not doing it as well as you can. Don’t think about publishing, don’t think about editors, don’t think about marketplace.”

“I think the deeper you go into questions, the deeper or more interesting the questions get. And I think that’s the job of art.”

“One of the things I learned about writing a memoir is you can’t drag the reader through everything. Every human life is worth 20 memoirs.”

“I still have my truck, and I still have my carpentry tools, and if this writing thing dries up on a publishing level—it’s never gonna dry up for me on an artistic level because I’m never going to quit—but if all the sudden I were out in the cold in the publishing world, them I’m gonna build you a kitchen. I’m gonna do your roof. I would rather do that than sell my soul to the publishing devil. I just won’t do it.”

“I think it’s important not to talk about what you’re working on. … It releases that creative tension that can be fuel for your writing. Don’t show anyone what you’re working on. Don’t talk about it. And don’t think about it. Don’t be taking all these furious notes because I think that when we take all these notes when we’re not writing, they’re actually sexy ideas that may be just ideas. If it’s a real direction for the story, it’s gonna show up in the next day anyway. So just push it back.”

“Even a day writing badly for me is 10 times better than a day where I don’t write at all.”

 

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Years ago, after I finished writing my third book, Still Love in Strange Places, Andre Dubus III wrote words for that jacket that still stun me.  Quiet and elegant words, beautifully crafted, followed by a note of equal elegance.  You don't forget people (perfect strangers) who do those things for you.  You tuck them into a special place on your shelf of fortunes.

I have read all Dubus books since, watched his House of Sand and Fog on the big screen, wondered where his craft came from (though of course there were the genes, the blood legacy of his namesake author father), and while I knew the bare outlines of Dubus's personal story, I never guessed at what he reveals in his new memoir, Townie.  Dubus was one of four kids left to hardscrabble living after the separation of the mother and dad.  Having left the family to pursue a life as a published, teaching author, Dubus the elder appeared once or twice a week for years—took the kids to dinner, interceded on behalf of bullies, taught his teenager son to toss a ball, but stayed, otherwise, where he was, in his zone of writing and teaching and young and hip friends and outside the circle of his family.  It was Dubus's mom who was left to the overwhelm of single parenthood, and it did, Dubus's reveals, overwhelm her.  Boyfriends came and went, houses were abandoned, much was filth and poverty, alcohol and drugs, and nearly everything was violence. 

I'm going to write more about this book in a few days to come.  But just now I want to share this passage, early in the book—a passage that is, I think, a high example of classic, gorgeous writing.  There's the hard truth here, in other words.  There is also tenderness.  Story and situation, I tell my students (using Gornick's terms).  Here are both, the perfect web.

The house was almost always dirty.  Whatever chores Mom would give us, we just did not do.  But some days, cooped up in that small hot house, one or two of us would finally leave the TV, grab the broom, and start sweeping the floorboards, the narrow wooden stairs and hallway.  We might wash the backed-up dishes in the kitchen, find the mop and scrub the floor.  We'd go up to our rooms and make our beds, pick dirty clothes out of the corners, and stuff them into a garbage bag for when we went to the laundromat.  Sometimes I'd go out to our tiny enclosed yard and sweep the concrete stoop.  In the corner of the fence was a rusty rake and I'd use it on our dirt yard.  I made straight even lines parallel to the fence.  It was still a dirt yard, but standing on the concrete stoop after, looking down at it, our home seemed somehow more orderly, our lives within it more comprehensible.

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