April 2010
Steven Polansky grew up in New York City. He was educated at Wesleyan University (BA), Hollins College (MA in creative writing), and Princeton University (PhD in English literature). He has taught at the University of Minnesota, St. Olaf College, Macalaster College, University of Connecticut, and SUNY Buffalo. His short fiction has appeared in, among other places, The New Yorker, Harper’s, Best American Short Stories, Glimmer Train, New England Review, and Minnesota Monthly. His first book, the story collection Dating Miss Universe, won the Sandstone Prize for Fiction, and the Minnesota Book Award. His new novel, The Bradbury Report, _which Kirkus Reviews calls “sublimely witty and soulfully sympathetic,” will be published by Weinstein Books on May 4, 2010. Polansky lives in Wisconsin with his wife and daughter.

How do you start a new piece?
I no longer write short stories, so starting “a new piece” means for me starting a novel, the writing of which I know will take me two or three years. I start very slowly, and don’t actually begin to write the book until I can’t stand not to write it. This method derives from my sense that one can start a book too soon, but almost never too late. I think it is also true that if you wait until you know enough to start, you never will. What I do instead of writing is to live with the book for a couple of months, often longer than that. I might begin with a rudimentary conception of the book, something I can, if pressed, articulate in a couple of sentences. Then I write down everything I know, or think I know about the book, without worrying about contradicting myself or getting it wrong. Say that gives me twenty to thirty pages of notes. I print out these notes, then have a conversation with them in the margins. I incorporate, or accommodate, the marginalia, print the notes out again, and have another conversation with them. I might do this thirty times, trying each time to deepen and complicate my understanding of the book. It is satisfying, if a bit delusory, to watch the printed pages of non-book stack up. About this I tend to be methodical. I take walks. Run errands. Work out. I do whatever else I can think to do to delay writing the actual first sentence, which, oddly, I never revise, and which I let myself do only when I can complicate things no further, and when I begin to show signs of incipient psychosis, and when my wife points out that I am insufferable.

What is more frightening: a blank page or a manuscript in need of a complete rewrite?
I can’t compare the two. Because of the ex-sanguinary way I write, “perfecting” as I go, when I finish the first draft I am pretty much done. It’s as if I’ve condemned myself, by choice, to the “serial” way Dickens wrote most of his novels. The substantive revision, or overhaul of an entire manuscript is something I’ve not had to face. The blank page is frightening and irksome. Everyone knows why: Because no matter how often you’ve filled that page, sometimes even with good work, it’s hard to believe you can do it again. Hard for me, anyway, to believe.

In Richard Hugo’s essay “Writing Off the Subject,” he states, “When you start to write, you carry to the page one of two attitudes, though you may not be aware of it. One is that all music must conform to truth. The other, that all truth must conform to music.” In your writing practice, have you taken a position on this? In your teaching?
I have often begun the term by putting Hugo’s “paradox” on the board, and asking my students to consider it. Hugo, a fine poet, posits this antithesis so that he can go on to say that as a teacher he can teach “music,” but not “truth.” For a writer, this antithesis is pretty much nonsense. Why not believe both? That all truth must conform to music. That all music must conform to truth. How can you not believe both?

What’s your favorite in-class writing prompt?
I’ve never used an in-class writing prompt.

Are there any aspects of writing that you feel can’t be taught?
The phrase, “aspects of writing,” throws me, puts me off. If you gave me a list of these aspects, maybe I could check the ones I think cannot be taught. Without such a list, I can, on my own, think of a few things a writer might need that would be hard, if not impossible, to teach. Intelligence, for one. Taste. Imagination. Sympathy. Resilience. Wit. Touch. Agility. Indignation. I’m sure I could think of others. I wish these things could be taught. I’d be a better writer. Maybe others know a way to teach them.

When you are teaching, what pet peeves do you come across frequently?
I don’t know that I have any pet peeves. By nature, I am broadly peevish. When I teach writing, typically I am worried more than I am peeved. I worry about cruelty in workshops, though, I’m ashamed to say, when I was a graduate student there was no one crueler than I. I worry about the insidious drift in workshop stories towards a kind of ad hoc norm (for establishing which I might be, in part, responsible). I worry about manifestly bad, often self-serving advice given in workshops by one student to another. I worry about having the last word in workshops on student work, and about not having the last word. I worry about students who want to be writers but don’t much want to write. I worry about teaching with canned stories I have told a hundred times before. I worry about giving advice to students. When I was an undergraduate in my first fiction writing class, the teacher, F.D. Reeve (Christopher Reeve’s father, and equally handsome), said to me, “You have no talent for this sort of thing, Polansky.” I worry about judging students, about students being judged, prematurely, because I know it’s about who’s around at the finish. I worry about students devoted to genres about whose conventions and delights I know nothing. I worry about what TV and movies do to the language my students work with, and to their notions about what it means to be human. I worry about my students’ modesty, and about their immodesty. I worry when my students don’t like, can’t read, Henry James. I worry about what reading and thinking about their stories will do to my work. Here’s a peeve: I don’t like writers who teach their own work, assign their own books. And its corollary: I don’t like writers who cultivate a following among their students, though I was doubtless guilty of this when I started.