Edited by
Michael Steinberg and David Cooper
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Interview With Scott Russell Sanders Robert Root Over the past dozen years Scott Russell Sanders has created an impressive body of nonfiction. The Paradise of Bombs (1987), his first essay collection, won the Associated Writing Programs' Award for Creative Nonfiction, and was followed by Secrets of the Universe: Scenes from the Journey Home (1991), Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World (1993), Writing from the Center (1995), and Hunting for Hope: A Father's Journey (1998). He is also the author of short stories, historical fiction, and children's books. Sanders is most comfortable describing himself as an essayist. In 'The Singular First Person" he writes, "In the essay, you had better speak from a region pretty close to the heart or the reader will detect the wind of phoniness whistling through your hollow phrases." His own essays draw from his personal life, his sense of location in the American Midwest, and his concerns with reconciling himself to the past and improving the nick of time in the present. "I choose to write about my experience not because it is mine, but because it seems to me a door through which others might pass." With the assumption that the essayist's concerns reflect the concerns of other citizens of his time and place, he maintains a belief that the essay is "a haven for the private, idiosyncratic voice" and "the closest thing we have, on paper, to a record of the individual mind at work and play." Generous, compassionate, thoughtful, and candid, his persona is reinforced by a prose style of remarkable precision and durability.Root: Annie Dillard has written of the essay: "The essay can do everything a poem can do, and everything that a short story can do." Do you agree with that? Sanders: The essayist certainly can use most of the strategies open to the writer of poetry or fiction - narrative, dialogue, exposition, and so on - but not all of them. Nothing in the essay corresponds to the force of the line in poetry, for example. Nothing in the essay, as I conceive of it, corresponds to the unreliable narrator in fiction. I don't think any one genre is a substitute for the others. We need poems and stories and novels and plays, as well as essays. Each genre offers us paths through the dark woods of this life, and we need all the paths we can find. Root: You've written in different genres. Do you turn to one genre or the other because of either what it can do or what you need to get done? Sanders: I don't write poetry, although I read it with great pleasure. I made my start as a writer of fiction, and I had finished half a dozen novels or collections of stories before trying my hand at the essay. Once I got the feel of the essay, it began to draw me away from fiction. As I say in my introduction to The Paradise of Bombs, I turned to nonfiction at a time when minimalism and irony and postmodernist game-playing ruled the world of fiction. I was tired of reading stories whose characters and narrators were inarticulate, obtuse, or numb, and I had no desire to write such condescending and stripped-down stuff. Against the vacancy, shallowness, and silliness of so much that was fashionable in stories, the essay appealed to me for its directness and urgency and grace. It seemed to me a form in which one could pursue any question, no matter how difficult, and to which one could bring the full range of intelligence. I keep imagining that I'll return to the writing of stories and novels, but for the present I'm still absorbed, still challenged, by the essay. Root: I've noticed that a number of writers seem to think of creative nonfiction as essays that use the devices and strategies of fiction. Other essayists resist this viewpoint, particularly those who see their work more aligned with poetry than with fiction. They think of the essay as principally a lyrical form rather than a narrative form. Sanders: The essay is a capacious genre, with room enough for lyrical as well as narrative forms. Because of my own training in fiction, I often use narrative strategies in organizing my essays' scenes, character sketches, dramatic gestures, plot, and so on. But I also frequently organize essays by a logic more common in poetry - using a sequence of governing metaphors, for example, or fashioning a collage of images, or playing up the role of the speaker' s voice, or relying on patterns of sound to bind together seemingly disparate materials. Root: Occasionally I notice uncertainty or even controversy over the definition of the term "creative nonfiction" and the boundaries of the form, whatever we call it. What would be your term for the kind of nonfiction writer you are? Sanders: I suppose we do have to use labels, but I don't find "creative nonfiction" to be an especially useful one, even though I've won prizes and taught workshops bearing that title. "Nonfiction" itself is an exceedingly vague term, taking in everything from telephone books to Walden, and it's negative, implying that fiction is the norm against which everything else must be measured. It's as though, instead of calling an apple a fruit, we called it a non-meat. Sticking "creative" in front of "nonfiction" doesn't clarify matters much, and it's pretentious to boot, since it implies that other forms of nonfiction - Plato's Republic, Ellman's Joyce, Hawking's A Brief History of Time - are not creative works of intellect and imagination. So I prefer to think of myself as an essayist, and to speak of what I write as essays. It's a term with a venerable tradition, and it preserves Montaigne's emphasis on essayering - on making a trial, an experiment, an effort of understanding. Root: No doubt you've been aware of the recent reaction against the memoir, which has recently been a popular form of nonfiction. Your essays often draw on the past but always in service of your current concerns. Even your pieces most dependent on memory I would tend to label as "personal essay" rather than as "memoir," which you don't seem inclined to write. Sanders: I feel that a lot of what goes by the name of memoir these days is merely autobiographical reverie; it's too loose and self-indulgent for my taste. I generally feel impatience or boredom in the face of purely confessional writing. As a reader, I'm not interested in the events of other people's lives, no matter how colorful or traumatic they may be, unless those events are illuminated in the telling by insight and beauty and meaning. Without that transforming vision, the events themselves are merely gossip. Nothing in my experience deserves the attention of readers merely because it's my experience. I don't write in order to win sympathy or praise; I write to share understanding about the human struggle, and to share delight in the power of language. Root: Given where you've gotten in your nonfiction, what direction do you expect your writing to go in the future? Sanders: I want to continue pushing at the edges of the genre called nature writing, so as to make space within it for exploring social life and family relations. I want to write about race, about the Vietnam War, about the impact of technology on our lives and minds. Because I've written so intently about my place, and about the impulse to stay put, I may write more commissioned pieces - as I've begun doing for Audubon, for example - as a way of getting out and about in the world. I want to continue on from Hunting for Hope by reporting what people are doing across our country to heal the wounds in landscapes and communities and individuals. I've been teaching now for more than a quarter of a century, over half my life, and yet I've rarely brought this work directly into my writing; now I'm feeling that I should write a book about teaching, if I can find a fresh way of doing so. I'm still grappling with religious questions, especially as they come into conflict with the view of the universe revealed so magnificently by science, and I feel moved to ponder those questions further. Writing is my way of thinking about whatever's difficult, facing what scares me, celebrating what gives me joy. I'll run out of energy or clarity or time before I run out of motives for writing. | |
