Joyce Carol Oates isn’t a person bitten by the writing bug early in life. She wanted to be a teacher. And, it’s as a teacher that Princeton University celebrated her last Friday, with 10 of her former students—all multiply published writers today—returning to talk about their experiences in her classes and workshops and with her personally. She began teaching at Princeton in 1978 and, in 2015, will retire from full-time teaching but continue to teach a course each fall in the Creative Writing program.
While the former students lauded her accessibility and careful attention to their work, Oates also has found time to create more than 100 books, including fiction, essays, plays, poetry, and a memoir. In this list is her “unlikely bestseller,” On Boxing. One of her former students, Jonathan Ames, commented that in his day, the only photograph in Oates’s office was one of her with Mike Tyson. This got a laugh from the 100 or so people in the audience observing Oates’s birdlike frame.
Boxing might seem an activity far removed the daily life of a literary academic, but all writers are boxers, one might say, whose opponents are the words they are trying to batter into place in meaningful sentences that express ideas, display characters, and tell unforgettable stories. While this or that writer is applauded as “brave” for spilling raw emotions messily onto the page, Oates’s former students called her truly “courageous” —and here the boxing metaphor emerged explicitly— for never “pulling her punches.” And she taught them not to, either.
Numerous comments about her guidance related to how she prepares her students to be writers, including, as Jonathan Safran Foer said, maintaining the energy to produce a completed work. Many students—equally talented and ambitious as the published writers present—at some point just stop writing, he said. Oates makes her students excited about the process, in the hope that they won’t stop, because from draft to draft, although incremental improvements may—probably are—achieved, they become smaller and smaller. As Whitney Terrell said, “Half the game is just hanging in.” And the work is hard. Moderator Edmund White called his conversations with Oates “one Sisyphus talking to another.”
Another gift she gave students, they said, was permission to identify themselves as “writers.” Being a writer is not necessarily an identity people are comfortable claiming for themselves. In France, White said, no one ever says “I am a poet.” “I write poems” might be OK, but external validation is needed for writers to assert their status in the creative world. Christopher Beha said that Oates made him feel like a character himself —a persona—apart from his ordinary sense of self.
The students further praised her for finding something in every piece of student writing that she loved. She would point out the particular strengths of a piece of writing, then focus the seminar participants—much as editors of a magazine might, which was a frequent class discussion device—on how to make it better. “You let me hand in all those dirty stories,” Ames said, “and you never just x’d that stuff out.” To which Oates replied, “There wouldn’t have been much left. Your name, maybe.”
Over her years of teaching, she’s observed changes in her students. Most prominently, at Princeton today, the student body is so diverse, coming from many different countries and backgrounds. Students have traveled more, visiting countries that decades ago most wouldn’t even have heard of and encountering different cultures that inevitably affect their work. They also read different books, and Oates emphasized the importance of the earliest books one reads—before college, even before high school. Today’s childhoods typically include Harry Potter and more films. Her favorite reads were Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, which she first devoured at age eight or ten. Fantastical. Penetrating. Funny. Inciting curiosity. Qualities we were told she brought to her decades of teaching.
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