The Questions That Matter Most: Reading, Writing, and the Exercise of Freedom - Hardcover

Smiley, Jane

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1597146056 ISBN 13: 9781597146050

Verlag: Heyday Books, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

Heyday

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jane Smiley is a novelist and essayist. Her novel A Thousand Acres won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992, and her novel The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton won the 1999 Spur Award for Best Novel of the West. She has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1987. Her novel Horse Heaven was short-listed for the Orange Prize in 2002, and her novel Some Luck was long-listed for the 2014 National Book Award. She is the recipient of the 2024 Robert Kirsch Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Los Angeles Times. She has written for numerous magazines and newspapers, including the New Yorker, the New York Times, Harper’s, and The Nation. Her most recent novel, Lucky, was published in 2024. She lives in Carmel Valley, California.

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INTRODUCTION

When I moved to California in 1996, I was following a horse. The horse’s name was Terson (I called him Mr. T). I bought him from a stable in Wisconsin in 1993, and kept him in a barn outside Ames, Iowa, where I taught at Iowa State. But I was tired of nearly freezing to death when I rode him in the winter, and, by the way, my husband, Steve, who had grown up in Iowa, had spent some time in Santa Barbara and wanted to move back. Eventually, Steve and Mr. T. agreed on Carmel Valley, California. I could have said I was the native Californian, because I was born in LA, and my parents lived near Hollywood Park until I was about a year old, then moved back to the Midwest. Steve was born in Iowa, Mr. T in Germany. But no matter—like all migrants to California, we looked around and fell in love instantly with the new landscape and the ever-changing but (almost) always pleasant weather.

At the time, I was known for A Thousand Acres and Moo, one of them openly set in Iowa and the other one sort of set in Iowa, at a land grant university. The first thing I did (inspired by Mr. T) was decide that of course I could breed racehorses, and I did, though none of them were successful. But Mr. T and the horses I bred gave birth to Horse Heaven, and in order to understand racing

and breeding, I took a wonderful tour of California—Del Mar, Santa Anita, Hollywood Park, Golden Gate Fields, Temecula, Coalinga, and Davis, with many stops in between (San Francisco, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, San Diego). The first thing I learned about California was how beautiful it is; the second thing I learned was that the climate and the scenery change every time you turn a corner or go over a mountain. I experienced this just the other day when I was walking in Monterey, and I left the Del Monte Shopping Center for Don Dahvee Park. I saw a path that I had never taken before, and it took me straight into the woods along a creek, natural, chaotic, and messy, not half a mile from the designer handbags at Macy’s.

Before I came to California, the only California writer I knew much about was John Steinbeck, from Salinas, who, judging by his works, was interested not only in the social world and the history of his native land but also in the landscape. In my favorite of his novels, East of Eden, he begins by describing the diversity of the Salinas Valley—the lupines and the poppies, the trees and the Spanish moss, the changing nature of the soil, and the danger and beauty of the Salinas River. All of his works take on economic and political themes too (obviously in The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men), but one of the things you can’t help doing if you are a writer based in California is attempting to convey what it feels like to be here, moment by moment.

My family had one small connection to California— one of my grandfather’s many older sisters ended up in Vallejo, married to an astronomer who was a true crackpot, and who was also from central Missouri. His name was Thomas Jefferson Jackson See, and he earned his stripes as a crackpot by ruthlessly opposing Einstein’s theory of relativity until the day he died, convinced that the universe was made of ether. He worked for the US Navy, and was sent to Mare Island to use astronomy to tell the exact time of day and to let the captains of the ships know so that they could embark on their missions in the proper way. And so I went to Vallejo and Mare Island to look around, gathering the information I need- ed to write Private Life (published in 2010). I also discovered a blot on US, and California, history that I hadn’t known about: the internment of the Japanese during World War II. (If you grew up in St. Louis, or elsewhere in Missouri, slavery and abolition and segregation were frequent topics of conversation.) What I learned about my great-aunt taught me more about the complicated history of California and more about the complicated history of my family.

When I began teaching creative writing at UC Riverside in 2015, I was pleased that my students were much more diverse than they had been in Iowa, and they all had stories to tell that were enlightening and dramatic. A term was ten weeks long, so every student had to produce a draft a week—three drafts each for the first three stories—and then to choose the story that most interested them and write a fourth draft of that one. Discussions of each draft lasted about twelve to fifteen minutes, and the students discussing each draft could not use words of judgment or praise—if they didn’t like something, they had to ask a question, such as “Why does Mary disappear after the first three pages?” The result was that the students got more intrigued by the stories they were writing, and as they fixed things, the stories grew more complex and unique. Often, what the students who were reading the stories did not understand had to do with the connection between where the story was set and how this affected the main character and his or her friends and family. This meant that over time my students became more aware of the ecosystems and communities that they grew up in, and also more eager to depict them. Reading these stories worked for me, too, since there are so many enclaves in California that most of them are under the radar. Two examples of stories that my students were working on were one written by a female grad student about an insane asylum from the early twentieth century that was run by her ancestors, which explores the cruelty of the system, in part from the point of view of one of the women who works at the asylum; the other was by a male undergrad student, about a family escaping from Mexico after the father is killed by gang members— some members of the family have transportation, but some of them have to walk the whole way.

The books I assigned were meant to be an exploration for my students, but turned out to be an exploration for me, too. I was quite familiar with Sue Grafton and had been enjoying her mysteries since the late 1980s—in some sense she replaced my youthful obsession with Agatha Christie, and both my students and I enjoyed the way Grafton created suspense, but also how she portrayed the idiosyncratic locations in and around Santa Barbara. I was also familiar with The Woman Warrior, and I wanted my students to learn from the complexity of how the narrative mixes personal experience with traditional stories. We did not exactly read it as nonfiction, because the elements seemed imaginative to us and therefore worth learning from, for both fiction writers and nonfiction writers. In some sense, these books served my students as historical novels, about events and places that existed before they were born and that have now changed—I had felt the same pleasure in books I had read in school, such as David Copperfield and Giants in the Earth.

One book that my students and I found astonishingly compelling and informative was Kindred, by Octavia Butler, a novel that immerses modern readers in the experience of being enslaved in the mid-nineteenth century, and how that contrasts with the life the protagonist is leading in the present day. We understood that Butler was using science fiction to explore important issues that many of my students were familiar with but hadn’t been asked to imagine in such detail before. Little Scarlet, by Walter Mosley, offered similar insights and feelings. Some of my students were from the LA area, and Mosley’s dramatic depiction of the Watts riots and the racial issues surrounding them, plus the way he incorporated them into a thriller, was very alluring.

The more recent novels that we discussed showed them what they could aim for. I had spent a lot of time on an...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Heyday Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1597146056
• ISBN 13: 9781597146050
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 243
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland