How to use this Page

In a few hours, I'll be at Arcadia University for the Creative Writing Summer Weekend. I'll be teaching a private master class. At 3:00, my reading will be free and open to the public. I invite you to join us on this rainy day.

I've decided to focus on the idea of the osmotic for both the class and the reading. How we move from truth to fiction and back. How we empathize with both the real people in our lives and the characters that emerge from our dreams. How we maneuver imagination and compassion.

Today, choosing against the gym after a physically exhausting week, I had an extra hour to read and have spent that time in the company of James Salter. There, in the midst of a Paris Review Art of Fiction interview (with Edward Hirsch), I found Salter reflecting on this very topic:

INTERVIEWER

You once said that the word fiction is a crude word. Why?

SALTER

The notion that anything can be invented wholly and that these invented things are classified as fiction and that other writing, presumably not made up, is called nonfiction strikes me as a very arbitrary separation of things. We know that most great novels and stories come not from things that are entirely invented, but from perfect knowledge and close observation. To say they are made up is an injustice in describing them. I sometimes say that I don’t make up anything—obviously, that’s not true. But I am usually uninterested in writers who say that everything comes out of the imagination. I would rather be in a room with someone who is telling me the story of his life, which may be exaggerated and even have lies in it, but I want to hear the true story, essentially.

INTERVIEWER

You’re saying it’s always drawn from life?

SALTER

Almost always. Writing is not a science, and of course there are exceptions, but every writer I know and admire has essentially drawn either from his own life or his knowledge of things in life. Great dialogue, for instance, is very difficult to invent. Almost all great books have actual people in them.

Words I will share at Arcadia later today. Words that will help keep me balanced as I continue to reflect on what sort of osmotic project I might wrestle next.

Finally, today, I leave you with this—more words to be shared today at Arcadia. This time the writer is Andrew Solomon in The New Yorker and this time the osmotics concern youth and age:

This is what I will say to you most urgently: there are many obvious differences between middle age and youth, between having lived more and done more and being newly energized and fresh to the race. But the greatest difference is patience. Youth is notoriously impatient, even though there is no need for impatience early on, when people have the time to be patient. In middle age, the wisdom of patience seems more straightforward, but there aren’t so many days left. But Rilke is correct that we must all write as though eternity lay before us. Enjoy the flexibility that span of eternity offers. The discourse between the young and the nostalgic retains some of its inherent poetry in the form of a longing intimacy. The freshness of younger people awakens memories in older ones—because though you, young writers, are yourselves at the brink of your own future, you evoke the past for those who came before you.

Add a Comment

Larry Watson, the author of Montana 1948 and many other fine novels, has just published Let Him Go, his latest foray into literary fiction. Let Him Go, like many of his previous novels, was published by legendary independent Milkweed Editions, his publisher of choice. It tells the story of the Blackledges, Margaret and George, as [...]

Add a Comment

By Kirsty McHugh, OUP UK

It has become a holiday tradition on the OUPblog to ask our favorite people about their favourite books. This year we asked authors to participate (OUP authors and non-OUP authors). For the next two weeks we will be posting their responses which reflect a wide variety of tastes and interests, in fiction, non-fiction and children’s books. Check back daily for new books to add to your 2010 reading lists. If that isn’t enough to keep you busy next year check out all the great books we have discovered during past holiday seasons: 2006, 2007, 2008 (US), and 2008 (UK).

Rupert Thomson is a British novelist born in 1955. He is the author of eight novels including Death of a Murderer, which was shortlisted for the 2007 Costa Awards and by World Book Day for The Book to Talk About 2008. His next book is a memoir, due out in 2010. You can read the first chapter here.

There are some books that cast a spell over you. They stay with you long after you have turned the last page, making your life feel richer and more magical. Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson is one of those books. I have known about it for some time – it was first published almost thirty years ago – but only got around to reading it this year, perhaps because Faber have just published a new paperback edition. For once, you can judge a book by its cover. The image of a single-track railway viaduct disappearing into the mist in a heavily wooded landscape does perfect justice to the poetic, haunting quality of Robinson’s prose. The novel is the tale of two sisters growing up in the care – if ‘care’ is the right word – of their disturbed aunt Sylvie, the sister of their dead mother, in the tiny, isolated town of Fingerbone in the far north-west of the United States. The narrator is the younger of the two sisters, Ruth, and she inhabits that eerie and yet utterly convincing space between the everyday and the extraordinary, demonstrating a child’s ability to adapt to anything, no matter how strange. And this novel is definitely strange: Sylvie makes her nieces eat their supper in the dark, and she sleeps on top of the covers with her shoes under her pillow. Though Housekeeping is, at one level, an investigation of madness, and the mystery of madness, and although its themes are loneliness, abandonment, and that infinitely human attempt, especially where children are involved, to make sense of the world in which they have found themselves, the writing is so beautiful, so subtle, and so wise that the book manages to be both heartbreaking and life-affirming.

Another book that has definitely cast a spell over me is 0 Comments on Holiday Book Bonanza ‘09: Rupert Thomson as of 1/1/1900