{"id":3227,"date":"2014-11-09T07:09:14","date_gmt":"2014-11-09T12:09:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=3227"},"modified":"2014-11-09T07:09:14","modified_gmt":"2014-11-09T12:09:14","slug":"joyce-carol-oates-being-a-writer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=3227","title":{"rendered":"Joyce Carol Oates: Being a Writer"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Joyce<\/a>Joyce Carol Oates isn’t a person bitten by the writing bug early in life. She wanted to be a teacher. And, it\u2019s as a teacher that Princeton University celebrated her last Friday, with 10 of her former students\u2014all multiply published writers today\u2014returning 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cunlikely bestseller,\u201d On Boxing<\/a><\/em>. One of her former students, Jonathan Ames<\/a>, commented that in his day, the only photograph in Oates\u2019s office was one of her with Mike Tyson. This got a laugh from the 100 or so people in the audience observing Oates\u2019s birdlike frame.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cbrave\u201d for spilling raw emotions messily onto the page, Oates\u2019s former students called her truly \u201ccourageous\u201d \u2014and here the boxing metaphor emerged explicitly\u2014 for never \u201cpulling her punches.\u201d And she taught them not to, either.<\/p>\n

Numerous comments about her guidance related to how she prepares her students to be<\/em> writers, including, as Jonathan Safran Foer<\/a> said, maintaining the energy to produce a completed work. Many students\u2014equally talented and ambitious as the published writers present\u2014at some point just stop writing, he said. Oates makes her students excited about the process, in the hope that they won\u2019t stop, because from draft to draft, although incremental improvements may\u2014probably are\u2014achieved, they become smaller and smaller. As Whitney Terrell<\/a> said, \u201cHalf the game is just hanging in.\u201d And the work is hard. Moderator Edmund White called his conversations with Oates \u201cone Sisyphus talking to another.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another gift she gave students, they said, was permission to identify themselves as \u201cwriters.\u201d Being a writer is not necessarily an identity people are comfortable claiming for themselves. In France, White said, no one ever says \u201cI am a poet.\u201d \u201cI write poems\u201d might be OK, but external validation is needed for writers to assert their status in the creative world. Christopher Beha<\/a> said that Oates made him feel like a character himself \u2014a persona\u2014apart from his ordinary sense of self.<\/p>\n

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\u2014much as editors of a magazine might, which was a frequent class discussion device\u2014on how to make it better. \u201cYou let me hand in all those dirty stories,\u201d Ames said, \u201cand you never just x\u2019d that stuff out.\u201d To which Oates replied, \u201cThere wouldn\u2019t have been much left. Your name, maybe.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019t 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\u2014before college, even before high school. Today\u2019s childhoods typically include Harry Potter and more films. Her favorite reads were Lewis Carroll\u2019s Alice<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

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