by Ianthe Brautigan
Ianthe Brautigan is the author of You Can't Catch Death: A Daughter's Memoir
(St. Martin's, 2001), a remembrance of growing up with her father, the late
poet and novelist Richard Brautigan. She's also a teacher, editor, mother and
wife, and Joan Frank's first reader and best friend.
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How did you grow up?
Until age 11, in Phoenix, Arizona. My parents were New York natives whoÕd moved west to start a family. Phoenix back then was magical for my little sister and me—clean, dry, fragrant, colors brilliant; we had favorite cactus blossoms and scrambled in the desert hills looking for caves. My father was a college teacher of English Lit and Philosophy; my mother shy but very cultured. Our house was filled with books and record albums—those were the days of record albums—and prints of paintings that remain branded on my brain. But then, every detail brands itself when youÕre a child.
When did you become a writer?
IÕd been steeped in language from the beginning because of who my parents were, the early background of teachers, books, thoughtful conversation. IÕve always felt powerful love for reading and writing, a nearly mystical affinity with it. Our mother took Andrea and me on regular raids to the Phoenix libraries; we came home piled with books. English classes were ambrosia. I felt electrified by the mysterious message that seemed to pulse from books—more, there is more—and took joy in excelling at it.
After my mother died—it appears to have been suicide, an event that later bled into much of my writing—we moved to Sacramento, just as I was entering puberty. I spent my formative years there, during high school and commencing college. Things got difficult for me as a teenager and young adult, because I did not yet own a firm enough identity to write with real authority. I found myself able to parrot back expertly in classes what I sensed was expected. But I felt no gut grasp of the realities I wrote about so fluently, and was uncertain where to take my so-called gift. I felt confused, fearful and ashamed, and knew only that I needed to run away. I traveled to Africa with the Peace Corps, and later made a home in the Hawaiian Islands for about a dozen years, returning to San Francisco to take a technical editing job in my 30s. During the Hawaii and San Francisco years I began writing for weekly newspapers and magazines—reviews, articles, essays. Thus, it was journalism that first made sense for me. When I returned to the Bay Area I revved up the campaign and began in earnest to write personal essays for a number of major metropolitan dailies and national slicks.
What triggered the changeover from journalism to fiction?
At midlife some instinctive urge told me a dimension of writing was missing, something deeper and truer than the chatty, hyper-clever voice IÕd cultivated almost too well in personal essays. The missing dimension was something I didnÕt understand but felt compelled to seek. The same instinct led me, as if by hypnotic command, to a short story workshop taught by novelist Anne Lamott. That was when the door creaked open. It was traumatic, but formative.
Why traumatic?
Because Lamott quickly informed all of us quivering, terrified students that we would have to face the fact that she probably was NOT going to take any of us aside and insist that our work—Òif you just take out the scene with Cammie and the ducksÓ—was the best thing sheÕd ever seen since Tolstoy. She was hugely pregnant with her son Sam at that time—somewhat wrought and distracted. But she was a good teacher, giving the right first principles really, and certain wonderful titles to read, like Joan ChaseÕs During the Reign of the Queen of Persia or William KotzwinkleÕs Swimmer in a Secret Sea.
Who else influenced you as teachers?
I was lucky to meet up with a passionate teacher during high school (Jack Pelletier, still a beloved friend) who was probably directly responsible for waking me to the idea that something miraculous was going on in novels, stories, essays, and poetry. Many years later, Thaisa Frank (no relation), of Berkeley, Calif., a brilliant writer of fabulistic short stories (A Brief History of Camouflage, Sleeping in Velvet), was perhaps the best teacher a developing writer could find. She offered a true, coherent language for talking about writing (Finding Your WriterÕs Voice). I took several classes from her, and she remains someone I deeply respect. At a writing conference I studied with Jane Smiley, and finally at the Warren Wilson College MFA Program with Antonya Nelson, Margot Livesey, Stephen Dobyns, and others who gave superb help.
Whom do you read now? Why?
I read greedily but also very, very idiosyncratically. You must bear in mind I lost twenty years of ÒnormalÓ fiction study when I struck off into the world early, determined to avoid the conventional path of fiction writers (graduate school and teaching). Instead I worked many strange jobs and read only nonfiction during those years, believing it more useful. Now I have an impossible amount of catch-up to perform.
What helped me learn to read very closely—and to analyze craft—was the MFA degree in creative fiction from Warren Wilson College in Asheville, NC. Its teachers are working writers, generous, dedicated, gifted. Before I went I had distrusted the idea that you could teach craft, but the program helped me begin to see far more deeply into the how of a writerÕs product. I believe there is a kind of osmosis between learning about craft and doing it—if, for me, the former event is conscious, the latter unconscious. Yet there is an exchange there. In the next breath I will tell you, as will dreary billions of others, that I doubt that any program can teach talent. But it can install habits of craft, and reading, that will enrich any writer.
I love William Maxwell, whose voice embodies a warm, pained humanity I find comforting. The Russians are bedrock, to return to again and again: Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Turgenev. The usual suspects are beloved: Flaubert, Austen. I admire so many contemporary writers I have compiled a random list of them to hand to people. I love Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, Mary Gaitskill, James Salter, Lorrie Moore, Carson McCullers, Grace Paley, W. G. Sebald; more recently Per Pettersen, Siri Hustvedt, Andre Aciman, Colm To’bin, Hugo Hamilton. IÕll supply the list to anyone who asks! Write to me at www.joanfrank.org.
How do you write while working for money, and being part
of an active family?
It is more difficult than I can convey, and impossible to solve. Mostly I've felt like one of those loony acts on an old fashioned amateur-hour program, keeping plates spinning on hands and feet and nose and the top of my head.
Then why do you persist at it?
At writing because I have to, because it is essential as food and air. At family, because it is somehow at the marrow of things. The dailiness consoles. Family can often save a writer from her own miserable exile (my husband calls it "the march to Moscow"). And then writing, conversely, saves you from family. ItÕs a way of organizing perception, a place to cherish interiority. Not to mention that you cannibalize everything for work.
On that subject: how do you answer the favorite challenge
to writers, ÒHow much of that story is true?Ó
There was a wonderful essay by the writer David Huddle many years ago entitled exactly that. The short answer—ÒHow much time have you got?Ó—is a fair response, given the Mr. Potato Head element. Meaning: we use different portions of different people to create conglomerate characters who then go on to Òbecome themselves.Ó But let me ask you back very quickly: why do you think we always want to know that?
I guess itÕs somewhat titillating to suppose a story is true—more scandalous, more ÒjuicyÓ to us that way.
Someone once suggested that stories, no matter how exalted, are basically gossip—the village news. But if stories have art, they transcend soap opera and teach us about ourselves. If weÕre lucky weÕre changed inside by stories we remember, made larger, even if we donÕt quite understand how. Harold Bloom says, in his wonderful book How to Read and Why, we read to become more ourselves—some might say, our best selves.
To me the wonder of fiction is that it transfigures messy life to render it both more personal and more universal. Think of D. H. Lawrence, Edith Wharton, Henry James, James Agee, Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Mary McCarthy, Katherine Mansfield, Edna OÕBrien, Katherine Anne Porter, Jean Rhys, Eugene OÕNeill, Somerset Maugham. All these (and countless others) often wrote directly from their lives.
I believe that in any good work, whomever the story was modeled on soon ceases to matter—especially after some time has gone by. At first it may be mildly titillating to wonder who was who. But soon the story takes over, like a plane achieving liftoff. Ultimately it becomes something much larger than whatever bitsy human beings modeled for it—and comes to live inside us, forever. There are books you close shut in your lap, thanking heaven you lived long enough toÕve known them.
What is going on now, and what will you undertake next?
My second story collection, IN ENVY COUNTRY, won the 2010 Richard Sullivan Prize, and will appear in that year through the University of Notre Dame Press. I am presently striving to find publishing homes for two novels and an essay collection.
What about the future of literature?
I fear for it, and beg readers of all ages and tastes to help keep it alive: Educate the children in your life to love and need books. (My small granddaughters are so proud of having their own library cards; they already know the names and bodies of work of their favorite authors—this, thank God, despite all the electronic beckoners, at which of course they're also adept.) Go to readings. Use the library. Subscribe to a literary journal. Follow reviews. Talk to friends about books you like. Write to the authors you enjoy—most love hearing from readers! Buy their books—or if too expensive, ask your library to order them. The life of the word on the page needs all the help it can get.