Report from Santa Fe; Joyce Carol Oates

. . Report from Santa Fe is made possible in part by grants from the members of the National Education Association of New Mexico, an organization of professionals who believe that investing in public education is an investment in our state's economic future. And by a grant from the Healey Foundation, Tau's New Mexico. Hello, I'm Lorraine Mills and welcome to report from Santa Fe. Today our guest is one of my favorite writers on the planet, Joyce Carol Oates. Thank you for joining us. Thank you. It's always a pleasure to have you in Santa Fe. I feel it's brighter when you're here. John Lackdike, John, your friend John Lackdike said about you. If we had the title for Woman of Letters, you, more than anyone, would be entitled to it. I know he's your friend, but you are such a prolific and honored writer.

Are you a woman of letters? Well, I think of myself in those terms. I've always been an immense, the voracious reader. And I've always written about my writing and my reading. I think of myself as somebody who's involved in the culture of literature rather than just writing my own work. I'm interested in reading and promulgating all the people's work. Well, tell us a little about your background because you went to the same one-room schoolhouse that your mom went to. Yes. Well, I think my background was just a perfect background for me. I'm not sure that it would be ideal for anyone else. I don't come from a bookish background at all. And I was the first person to even graduate from high school in my family, let alone college. So I come from a background of people who were, I think, intelligent, but not intellectual. I kind of world of silences rather than being articulate. And a world in which people worked very hard.

A farmland background, but my father also worked in a factory. And he worked very hard. I think of myself as being a working class background, but in a kind of mythical way it sort of blends in with being from the farm and from the country. And I did go to a one-room schoolhouse. And I come from an era before there were school buses. So you walk through the snow. I'm not sure that snow means a lot in New Mexico. But where I come from an upstate New York, snow can be like 12 feet high. So walking to school made school a challenge and a place of some destination. Like reading books was a privilege. We didn't have those things. So I didn't come from a culture of plentitude. I came from a culture of relative deprivation. You have gone from that culture of relative deprivation to being one of the most prolific writers in America.

Is there a final count? Maybe about 100 titles. Well, I don't think about those things too much. I focus on what I'm doing at the moment. And so I can talk with some degree of accuracy about things I've written out in the past couple of years. But basically I'm just so focused on the work that I'm doing, which I think is probably typical of any writer or composer or artist. It's such a mesmerizing experience to try to bring something into life and give a coherence and structure and organization. I think of it as keeping a flame going, like we're working on a novel or a memoir. This flame of the work is there. And if you leave it too long, it might flicker and go out. So you're sort of always tending to it. So when people ask me, well, how many books have you written or how many short stories?

It almost seems to be about another person rather than the person who's doing this, you know, tending of this flame. Well, there's no need to quantify the number of books in. Nor is there need to quantify the amount of awards that you have won. Because you have won pages and pages of awards. And some of them, when you got the Oprah's Book Club Award for We Were the Movinies, that was just... That was amazing. Yes, I'm sure. We'll tell me about it. Well, being chosen for the Oprah Book Club was like nothing else in my life. Because every other award of distinction than I had, every other experience basically was literary. But Oprah's Book Club was somehow, was populous culture, a wide readership, of people who are not not literary at all, though they are intelligent and interested in books. But they don't come from an academic world and they're not literary. And they weren't drawn to my novel because of its formal characteristics or any kind of literary context.

They were drawn to it because of the characters and the plot and the story and the tone and what happens. And I would think of it myself as a tragic domestic story of American life. But it does have a redemptive ending. And I think those are the reasons that readers might have been drawn to it. And so for me, it was a special situation rather than a literary one. I'd like to show our readers. This is the current edition. There have been many editions of We Were the Movinies. And I really recommended it as a fabulous read. Other awards, that was kind of the cultural war, but the Oh Henry Award, the Pushcart Prize, National Humanities, Metal National Book Award for Fiction, so many Lifetime Achievement Awards like the Norman Mailer Lifetime Achievement Awards. And three times you've been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. I think it's going to happen. And you're also a professor of creative writing at Princeton.

Yes, yes. Now are you looking at retiring? I will be retiring in 2015 in July. But I'm going to be teaching at other universities apart from Princeton. For instance NYU and Stanford. And last semester I had a great time teaching at UC Berkeley. Oh well. I taught a writing workshop for undergraduates. Advanced and very gifted undergraduates. It was a sort of large workshop with a lot of diverse talent. And it was lots of fun. Berkeley would bring forth very diverse talent. Let's just quickly look at some of your older books. There's so many of them, but I brought some of my favorites, The Falls. Yes. Because you grew up near. Niagara Falls, I do. Yes. That is an extraordinary book. I love the cover of this. Thank you. My sister, my love. Yes, it's a wonderful cover by Martin Mall, MULL. No one is a comedian actually, but he's also an artist. Yeah, he's certainly a surreal and strange artist. Now one of my favorites that I hope we talk about later is Wild Knights.

Yes. Because you created of imaginary days in the last days in the lives of some of your favorite writers. Absolutely, like Emily Dickinson. Yes. And you wrote it in the style of their work. And with their same preoccupations and obsessions. What fun. It was really a great deal of fun. This is what is so extraordinary about you. That you are, it's kind of like you've heard of gender blending, where you're a genre blending person. Yes. Yes, I do. You do. No more fiction, nonfiction plays, poetry, book reviews, essays. Yes. Well, I'm interested in language in different forms, that language, can express one's vision. You know, the intensity and tightness of a poem is very challenging. And then the expansiveness of a novel with all these people, like a family that you get to know. And these different forms exert different predilections and compulsions and obsessions, you know. But the poetry, of course, is the most finite and the most challenging, I think, formally to make it as short as possible.

And then the novel has other challenges and other problems. Well, you have mastered the new media and social media. I'm so astonished to see that you tweet and you do lots. You say you spend lots of time on email and you listen to audiobooks. So I sent my first tweet in this life to you. Yes. And you had said that Emily Dickinson was almost the most subtle precursor of tweets. How can you go from 660 pages like your new novel, The Accursed, that we'll talk about in a minute, to 140 characters? Oh, well, sending tweets is somewhat like writing aphorisms or writing lines of poetry. I thought a bit initially as being like poetry, the last line of a stanza and the rest of the stanza is not there, it's implied. But some of the tweets that I do are promoting books or plays or films that I like.

I just tweeted about the wonderful cowboys reel and imagine here at the New Mexico History Museum and recommended that. And that's the sort of thing that Twitter is so good for to recommend things that are right now, you know, exhibits that are right now and trying to get people to come to them. Book store readings and things that are immediately right now. Well, you teach writing, creative writing, and I recently saw a list you'd publish, your top 10 hints, tips for writing. And the first one was write your heart out. That's right. And the last one was write your heart out. That's right. That's really true. That's really true. You have to write about what you care about and what really thrills you and excites you. I think that can communicate itself to the reader. I want to go back to the brevity of tweeting and the length of some of the larger books because for years you've written in longhand.

How long does it take to write 700 pages in longhand? That's before. That's after all the editing. Well, the writing is sort of complicated. I take notes in longhand, like in long strips of paper, and they're like outlines and sketches. And then I take that and I go to the computer and I might start writing the first draft. You know, so it's not that I'm writing in longhand and say a thousand pages per say. But I like to write in longhand because it's the person, you know, it's the personal expression. It's like our fingerprints are the pelt's feet or the voice. So the handwriting is special. And if I write a poem, I definitely write it in longhand. And I like to write it like an escrap of paper and, you know, I have notes on the back of the page, you know, and have arrows going here and there. Something about the very incoherence of it is if it's incoherent and it's sort of coming into crystallization, but it's not already there.

Whereas when you're typing, there is the memory of formal print and it's a little too... Linear. ...finished looking and linear. Whereas the other is much more like the imagination and it's not yet formed, sort of things coming up and coming together. So it's somehow, maybe psychologically, it's a seductive sort of way of writing. Well, I love that. You also say that the best time to write at least you used to say it was first thing in the morning. Oh, absolutely. You said to me at one point, one of our earlier interviews, you said, don't even open your eyes. Don't get out of bed. No, that's right. Don't open your eyes. That's a precious time. You wake up, but you're not yet looking at the world. You're not engaged with the world. As long as you keep your eyes closed, you're still in that twilight zone and that's very rich and very mysterious. You can sort of go back into the dream world and you should immediately start thinking about your work then.

But don't start thinking about the day. As soon as you open your eyes, then all this comes flooding in. And who knows what will happen. It may be hours and hours before you get back to that stillness. You also think about your work when you run because you've been a runner. Yes, when I run and when I walk. And once you told me that sometimes if you get stuck or need to work out a problem, you will vacuum or wash away. Oh, yes, I love that. Yes. Yes, I do love that. Now I do a lot of gardening. Ah, good. Since my first husband died, he was a wonderful gardener. He loved the garden, but I didn't do much gardening. But I loved his garden. But then after he died, I took over some of the things that he had been doing and planted some of the things that he would plant. And when I moved to another house, I transferred the plants to the new house. So it's like a community with that first husband and with the garden. So now I'm doing it. And when I'm in the garden, I'm really happy. And I do think about my work in a very positive way.

I want to speak about one of your most recent books. We're speaking today with Joyce Carol Oates. And one of her memoirs is called A Widow's Story. And this is so poignant and rich and honest. I really recommend it from the bottom of my heart. I've experienced a lot of this, but you are able to articulate it so beautifully. Can you tell us a little about Raymond and about what happened? Well, Raymond Smith and my husband of 47 years died unexpectedly. And I've sort of never gotten over that, I think. Not that it would be easier to have a long illness. I'm not sure all these ways are very traumatic. But I think because it was so abrupt, I could not grasp it for a long time. And I'm not sure that I have. I mean, I'm not sure since you're a widow, you probably can feel that you haven't really gotten to the bottom or the fullness of it yet. And I thought, when I ended the book, that I'd reach some sort of point.

And then I realized that it's like you were standing here and you have this perspective and you say, oh, now I see this. A ruin or devastation. But then you realize, no, that's not right. Because you walk over here and there's a new view of the same devastation that you didn't know about. So there's the first faulty piphany that you've mastered some grief. You think, well, now I'm okay. I think I can do this. But that may be false. And then you get to a point where you're at a new perspective and you see, well, you forgot all about this other. Oh, I didn't see that. And oh, I didn't know that was over there. And it's like a second epiphany that you're not coming to the end of it so easily. So I could actually write another memoir. And another memoir would say, yes, I say, yes, I say yes, or something like that, mimicking the end of James Joyce as you're listening. Yes.

Because the way to get through or to prevail in an episode of mourning and grief is to say yes. You can't say no. You want to say no, but you have to say yes. And you say yes to the grieving and yes to the new things that come to you. And something new and wonderful did come to you. Many lots of new things come that are very positive. But new things come that are not so great. There are new things come that are painful. New things come that are maybe mistakes, but they're new. You know, you make a mistake in six months, but it's a new mistake. And it was an honest mistake. Yeah. You know, and it was a naive mistake. And then later on something happens that's very good. But if you just say no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You may not make any mistakes, but you won't have any of this other. So I would, I would emphasize saying yes. When friends invite you somewhere and a friend wants to take you somewhere or go traveling, or a new project somebody wants you to write about or a new exhibit,

you have to travel a little to see this exhibit. Say yes. And I say yes. That everyone should read this book. It's really, really profoundly beautiful. And I thank you. It was a gift to me to read it. Thank you. Now, let's talk about the accursed. What did Stephen King review it for the New York Times? Yes. Called it the first postmodern Gothic novel. Gothic novel. Yeah, Gothic novel, the first. Yeah. That was amazing review. It was stunning. And it was so enthusiastic. And Stephen King was just so unpretentious. He's like somebody who grabs you and talks to you. You know, there's nothing formal or circumnavigating about his prose. He just sort of comes right out there. So that was a wonderful surprise. Well, in this book you weave in, it takes place in Princeton. And Princeton, where you live, is almost a character in the book. Absolutely.

And it's at the turn of the century, I think, 1905, 1906. You weave in very well-known historical characters at the time. I've been seen Claire and Grover Cleveland and Woodward Wilson. And yet, there is this family. And there are these Gothic tales of the bog kingdom, the kingdom of the accursed, that are magical, that are riveting. Congratulations. Well, thank you. But how do you weave those two worlds? Well, the idea of the novel came to me when I was in Princeton. I actually wrote the first draft in 1984. So this is a novel I've been working on for decades. I mean, I'm almost embarrassed how long I've been working on it. But the idea was to write about a very affluent, special elite community academically and intellectually and financially, because Princeton, New Jersey is very wealthy community at the turn of the century. And how they, as Christians and white Christians, how they were completely failing their responsibility as Christians

and completely ignoring the horror of the violence and harassment of black people whom they called Negroes in a kind of condescending way. Throughout the novel, there are so condescending to these black people who are all around them, the servants in their houses, and others like Booker T. Washington. And at one point, Woodrow Wilson is pretending, I guess, to be a very generous person. And he talks about colored people that Princeton, it's not quite ready. Like a colored boy, no matter how talented, perhaps, Paul Roveson, is not quite ready for Princeton. And this whole era of condescension, and just I found it maddening in the biographies of how nobody calls anyone to task. They all focus on the reforms and the good things that they did,

which they did good things. But they completely ignore, if you're a black person in America and you're sort of standing over here and saying, what about the lynchings? The decades, hundreds and hundreds of lynchings, including in the state of New Jersey, and the white leaders and ministers and others, they just didn't see it. They had these blinkers on. So the idea of my novel is that the white race at that time is really a curse, and first it was the curse of slavery, which finally, after a lot of English, that was abolished, you know, as outlawed in this country. But then the consequences of slavery remain that the black people are still being considered subordinate and less than human. And anyone could basically go out and lynch a black man or even a black woman. And juries would not convict them. You know, they basically had a free pass to do this. So that was kind of the moral outrage or the flame. Let's say the flame of the novel.

Then I wanted to cast it into Gothic mode, and it has a historical novel. So we have a large canvas with well-known people like Woodrow Wilson, and E. Teddy Roosevelt comes along and Jack London and often Sinclair, and Grover Cleveland, and all real people who were living at that time. And even, or Mark Twain, even has a cameo role. Mark Twain was very, very much anti-lynching and very much extremely liberal, very reform-minded person. Mark Twain is like the only white person of reputation in the novel who is what we would call today a liberal. All these others are sort of conservative. So I needed that form of the Gothic. And I wanted the idea that there's a curse on the land, and the consequences are these emanations and say, emergencies of demons. And literally, the bog. And the bog.

Tank fetted. Yeah. You know, it's just so atmospheric. Well, if you lived in New Jersey, you would know that the bog is not so far from New Jersey. I mean, it's a myth in the novel. But if you've been in New Jersey humidity with our mosquitoes and ticks and all the things that we have, that you don't have here with your clear thin air, then you would know that the bog is not completely fictitious. You're the master of short stories, in addition to everything else. This new and black dolly and white rose has wonderful stories in it. And you revisit one of your characters in the title story. You wrote an award-winning book called Blonde about Norma Jean Baker. And she reappears in this. Tell me how she's been. What is she emblematic of for you? Well, what I wrote in my novel called Blonde, which is about Norma Jean Baker, who becomes Marilyn Monroe. It was 1400 pages long in manuscript. And I cut that back.

And there are many, many adventures and episodes and things that happen about Marilyn Monroe that I took out. And some came back as short stories. And then here she makes another appearance. To me, Norma Jean Baker is not dead and not gone. She's somehow still alive. I have only the shut my eyes and I can see Norma Jean. And I can see her. Well, maybe I didn't write about when she was 14 years old and she did this. And I didn't write about her first years as a starlet when she did that. And then she took these courses and acting. I could just tune in on any part of Norma Jean's life and just sort of get right back there and see what she's been doing since I wrote about her last. So in this case, it's 1946. And she's possibly rooming with this woman, Elizabeth Short, who became known as the Black Dalian. And now I'm not sure that they did ever room together, but they could have. Yeah. Because they were contemporaries. And they were almost the same age.

And one came to a terrible fate and the other went on to become an actress. And yet the fates could have been reversed. Norma Jean could have been killed by the person who kills the Black Dalian. And Elizabeth Short could have gotten on to be a movie actress. She's quite beautiful. I love how you always play with those possible outcomes and reverse things. Yes. Yes. So you're looking at retiring from Princeton. You're happily married and off on new adventures. But in terms of your writing, what calls to you? You've explored so many forms. You've mastered the social media and the new media. What? Is there anything left? Well, I'm not sure that I'm mastered anything, but I like to experiment. Well, the next novel of mine, after the one that's coming out, which is called Carthage, the one after that is quite experimental. I try to get into a number of voices, probably five, six or seven voices, and of all but one of them, of voices of Black people.

And it's said in 1987 in a city in New Jersey, in which there has been a lot of racial unrest, and riots, and terrible police brutality. And as I said, it's about 1986, 1987. That was a time in another city, but not far away, of the notorious Natuana Brawley case. And I wanted to revisit that from all these points of view, this point of view of the mother, this point of view of the girl, this point of view of the stepfather, this point of view of the detective, who is a Hispanic woman, this point of view of somebody else, and this point of view of the lawyer, and then going back to some of the other people and having the points of view kind of alternating. So it's almost like a chorus of voices. And all but one of them are Black, so I've been listening to Black speech and reading Black writers, and trying to get this, the poetry of Black speech, which is very much distillation. Black speech can be very rich and poetic, like rap music.

You know, that's very, it's very percussive, and it's a certain kind of harsh poetry. It's not the long poetry with long lines and rhymes, I think this is just a very different kind of poetry. So I would say for me to try this was very experimental, and I'm afraid it's so far away, it won't come out until 2015. I'm sure that it will make people, some people unhappy and angry, that a white woman will write about this subject, and it may be controversial. But frankly, it's so far away now that I'm not even worried about it. Well, you said once some of the reasons for writing, as you tell your students, is of course to memorialize your own experience, but also you have been known for giving voice to the voiceless for children and women and girls and victims of violence and the aftermath of violence. You have, you've given them expressed their knowledge and experience so deeply that I'm really looking forward to what you're going to do with this. Yeah, well, I did think of Twana Bradley in some way definitely a victim of violence,

whether or not the historical Twana had the experience that she claims you had, that's kind of irrelevant for purposes just of looking at emblematically that she does stand for young, black girls being victimized. Well, we've been victimized by time. We have run out of time. I'm so grateful. I want our viewers to look at a widow's story. This is one of your memoirs. May there be another. And this wonderful Gothic novel of the accursed short stories for those for the short attention span, Black Dahlia and White Rose. And I'm just so happy that we were able to join us. Joyce Carol Oates, thank you for your time. Thank you. It was just wonderful. It's always a pleasure. And I'm Lorraine Mills. I'd like to thank your audience for being with us today on Report from Santa Fe. We'll see you next week. Report from Santa Fe is made possible in part by grants from the members of the National Education Association of New Mexico, an organization of professionals who believe that investing in public education is an investment in our state's economic future.

And by a grant from the Healey Foundation, Taos, New Mexico. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you.