Clay Stafford talks with Joyce Carol Oates “On Being Her Own Person”
Joyce Carol Oates interviewed by Clay Stafford
I first met Joyce Carol Oates when she was the John Seigenthaler Legends Award winner at the Killer Nashville International Writer’s Conference. She is a prolific writer, a modern-day legend, and a professor at NYU and Princeton, where her fortunate students learn from one of the best living writers today. When her new collection of short stories came out, Flint Kill Creek, I reached out to her to see if we could chat about the new book, writing in general, and how to prepare oneself for a career as a writer. My goal, because she is both a prolific writer and a teacher, was to see if there was some Holy Grail that writers could discover to create a successful career. Fortunately, we may have stumbled upon it. “Joyce, someone such as you who's written over a hundred books, how do you consistently generate these fresh ideas and maintain this creative energy you've got going?”
“Well, it would not interest me to write the same book again, so I wouldn't be interested in that at all.”
“I wonder if some of it also has to do with all the reading you do. It's generating new ideas coming in all the time.”
“I suppose so. That's just the way our minds are different. I guess there are some writers who tend to write the same book. Some people have fixations about things. I don't know how to assess my own self, but I'm mostly interested in how to present the story in terms of structure. Like Flint Kill Creek, the story is really based very much on the physical reality of a creek: how, in a time of heavy rainfall, it rises and becomes this rushing stream. Other times, it's sort of peaceful and beautiful, and you walk along it, yet it's possible to underestimate the power of some natural phenomenon like a creek. It's an analog with human passion. You think that things are placid and in control, but something triggers it, and suddenly there is this violent upheaval of emotion. The story is really about a young man who is so frightened of falling in love or losing control, he has to have a kind of adversarial relationship with young women. He's really afraid to fall in love because it's like losing control. So, through a series of incidents, something happens so that he doesn't have to fall in love, that the person he might love disappears from the story. But to me, the story had to be written by that creek. I like to walk myself along the towpath here in the Princeton area, the Delaware and Raritan Canal. When I was a little girl, I played a lot in Tonawanda Creek, I mean literally played along with my friends. We would go down into the creek area and wade in the water, and then it was a little faster out in the middle, so it was kind of playful, but actually a little dangerous. Then, after rainfall, the creek would get very high and sometimes really high. So it's rushing along, and it's almost unrecognizable. I like to write about the real world, and describe it, and then put people into that world.”
“You've been writing for some time. How do you keep your writing so relevant and engaging to people at all times?”
“I don't know how I would answer that. I guess I'm just living in my own time. My most recent novel is called Butcher, and I wrote it a couple of years ago, and yet now it's so timely because women's reproductive rights have been really under attack and have been pushed back in many states, and it seems that women don't have the rights that we had only a decade ago, and things are kind of going backwards. So, my novel Butcher is set in the 19th century, and a lot of the ideas about women and women's bodies almost seem to be making like a nightmare comeback today. I was just in Milan. I was interviewed a lot about Butcher, and earlier in the year I was in Paris, and I was interviewed about Butcher, because the translations are coming out, and the interviewers were making that connection. They said, ‘Well, your novel is very timely. Was this deliberate?’ And I'm not sure if it was exactly deliberate, because I couldn't foretell the future, but it has this kind of painful timeliness now.”
“How do you balance your writing with all this marketing? Public appearances? Zoom meetings with me? How do you get all of it done? How does Joyce Carol Oates get all of it done?”
“Oh, I have a lot of quiet time. It's nice to talk to you, but as I said, I was reading like at 7 o'clock in the morning, I was completely immersed in a novel, then I was working on my own things, and then talking with you from three to four, that's a pleasure. It's like a little interlude. I don't travel that much. I just mentioned Milan and Paris because I was there. But most of the time I'm really home. I don't any longer have a husband. My husband passed away, so the house is very quiet. I have two kitties, and my life is kind of easy. Really, it's a lonely life, but in some ways it's easy.”
“Do you ever think at all—at the level you're at—about any kind of expanded readership or anything? Or do you just write and throw it out there?”
“I wouldn't really be thinking about that. That's a little late in my career. I mean, I try to write a bestseller.”
“And you have.”
“My next novel, which is coming out in June, is a whodunnit.”
“What's the title?”
“Fox, a person is named Fox. That's the first novel I've ever written that has that kind of plot. A body's found, there’s an investigation, we have back flash and backstory, people are interviewed. You follow about six or seven people, and one of them is actually the murderer, and you find out at the end who the murderer is. The last chapter reveals it. It's sort of like a classic structure of a whodunnit, and I've never done that before. I didn't do it for any particular reason. I think it was because I hadn't done it before, so I could experiment, and it was so much fun.”
“That's one of the things readers love about your work, is you experiment a lot.”
“That was a lot of fun, because I do read mysteries, and yet I never wrote an actual mystery before.”
“Authors sometimes get the advice—which you're totally the exception to—of pick one thing, stay with it, don’t veer from that because you can't build a brand if you don't stick with that one thing. Yet you write plays, nonfiction, poetry, short stories, novels, and you write in all sorts of genres. What advice or response do you give to that? Because I get that ‘stick with one thing’ all the time from media experts at Killer Nashville. You're the exception. You don't do that.”
“No, but I'm just my own person. I think if you want to have a serious career, like as a mystery detective writer, you probably should establish one character and develop that character. One detective, let's say, set in a certain region of America so that there's a good deal of local color. I think that's a good pattern to choose one person as a detective, investigator, or coroner and sort of stay with that person. I think most people, as it turns out, just don't have that much energy. They're not going to write in fifteen different modes. They're going to write in one. So that's sort of tried and true. I mean, you know Ellery Queen and Earl Stanley Gardner and Michael Connolly. Michael Connolly, with Hieronymus Bosch novels, is very successful, and they're excellent novels. He's a very good writer. He's made a wonderful career out of staying pretty close to home.”
“Is there any parting advice you would give to writers who are reading here?”
“I think the most practical advice, maybe, is to take a writing course with somebody whom you respect. That way you get some instant feedback on your writing, and I see it all the time. The students are so grateful for ideas. I have a young woman at Rutgers, she got criticism from the class, and she came back with a revision that was stunning to me. I just read it yesterday. Her revision is so good, I think my jaw dropped. She got ideas from five or six different people, including me. I gave her a lot of ideas. She just completely revised something and added pages and pages, and I was really amazed. I mean, what can I say? That wouldn't have happened without that workshop. She knows that. You have to be able to revise. You have to be able to sit there and listen to what people are saying, and take some notes, and then go home and actually work. She is a journalism major as well as something else. So I think she's got a real career sense. She’s gonna work. Other people may be waiting for inspiration or something special, but she's got the work ethic. And that's important.”
Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, and founder of Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference and the online streaming creative learning platform The Balanced Writer. Subscribe to his weekly writing tips at https://claystafford.com/
Joyce Carol Oates has published nearly 100 books, including 58 novels, many plays, novellas, volumes of short stories, poetry, and non-fiction. Her novels Black Water, What I Lived For, and Blonde were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize; she won the National Book Award for her novel them. https://celestialtimepiece.com/
