“The writer doesn’t always know what he or she is doing; they find out afterwards,” said author Colum McCann during his visit to Connecticut College this past Thursday, Nov. 20.
His visit began in a Seminar in Fiction class. The class sat in nervous anticipation of his arrival, glancing at the clock every so often as they workshopped one of their classmate’s stories. He was due to come at any minute, an event that they had been preparing for throughout the semester as they read his novels and prepared questions to. The prospect of sitting in silence with the author was almost as terrifying as opening their mouths to say anything.
However, when he entered the room, it was immediately clear that they had nothing be worried about. He greeted the class with a hearty, Irish-tinged “Hello!” and dropped his bag to the ground. He proceeded to sit at the head of the table and ask for everyone’s names and what writing they were working on. He was genuinely interested in the world that each of them were set on creating. What eventually became even more evident was that he was dedicated to the task of answering whatever strange, nagging, embarrassing and occasionally insightful or intelligent questions they had for him about the life and times of being a writer.
It started with the basic facts of his life. McCann grew up in middle class Dublin. “Happy childhoods are never good material for writing,” he commented jokingly. The room began to loosen. He started writing professionally at the age of 17 as a journalist for several Irish newspapers. In the summer of his 21st year, he moved to Hyannis, MA with 25other Irishmen and a typewriter, intending to experiment with fiction writing in the four bedroom cottage they shared. Before even attending his first formal writer’s workshop at University of Texas, he took a cross-continental bike trip that went as far south as Mexico and as far north as Canada.
“I was gathering stories and experience. I wrote two godawful novels which have not been published, thank god. I was growing the muscles,” he said of his travels. After receiving enough pink rejection sheets to wallpaper a bathroom, his talent was recognized. He went on to write six novels and three collections of short stories.
McCann then fielded a wide range of questions from the students. The advice he offered ranged from issues of craft and story writing, grappling with making characters and situations feel real to the reader (“Use research to find the most extreme details to fill in the blanks. Then the reader will trust you,”) and contending with the feelings of self-criticism and disparagement in the writing process (“The quest for perfection is what makes it good.”) He described the space where he writes: On the ground of a cupboard padded with pillows, balancing his computer on the arm of a desk. He listens to Van Morrisson and Rachel Yamagata when he writes, and he hopes to write lyrics with Sting one day.
However, his visit to this particular class was not the main event of the day. McCann was invited to the College to speak at the 17th Daniel Klagsbrun Symposium on Creative Arts and Moral Vision along with, visiting Professor Jessica Soffer ‘07. The symposium was begun by the Klagsbrun family as a way to honor the memory of their son, Daniel Klagsbrun ‘86. Since 1989, writers such as Jhumpa Lahiri, Sandra Cisneros, Elie Wiesel and David Sedaris have come to give author talks and engage in conversation with the campus community.
The Symposium began with an informal conversation between Soffer, McCann and the Weller Professor of English and Writer in Residence Blanche Boyd.
“By the time you read most of the books assigned here, the people that wrote them are dead,” Boyd stated at the beginning of the panel. “This symposium has helped to show what real, living writers do.”
While studying at Conn, Soffer completed a creative writing thesis for Boyd and went on to earn her MFA from Hunter College, where McCann taught and mentored her. It was fitting, then, that the afternoon’s discussion focused on the mentor-mentee relationship and the creative process. Both spoke to the significance of each other’s work in their own lives. “When you get a student’s book, it’s the best and most uncomplicated feeling because you love it unconditionally,” said McCann in reference to Soffer’s debut novel, Tomorrow There Will be Apricots, which was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in April, 2013.
The second half of the Symposium took place later that evening, where McCann and Soffer read works they had written. Both were introduced by Boyd, who herself read a short story by Soffer that was published in Granta Magazine in 2009.
From there, McCann took the stage and read from his 2003 novel Dancer, a book about real life dancer Rudolf Nureyev, after describing the process of writing fictional accounts of real figures from history.
After reading McCann gave the stage to Soffer, who discussed her novel Tomorrow There Will be Apricots and then read an excerpt from it. The two writers continued swapping the microphone to read various pieces and excerpts throughout the rest of the event–McCann also shared parts of his 2009 National Book Award-winning novel Let the Great World Spin and his most recent novel Transatlantic, and Soffer also read a short piece written for Esquire Magazine’s project How to be a Man, which asked various authors to write about how to be a man in 800 words.
Hearing the two writers read their work out loud offered a rare glimpse at hearing work the way its writers intended it to be heard. McCann’s reading was theatrical and exuberant, giving life to his words and characters in a way that enhanced his already vivid descriptions on the page. In contrast, Soffer’s reading style was terse and contained, complimenting the tightly crafted sentences of her “How to Be a Man” short story perfectly.
“Something that [Soffer and McCann] both seem to share in their writing is that they use really direct language,” said reading attendee James O’Connor ‘15 upon hearing the authors read their work. “I think it makes their writing more effective when they’re tackling more difficult subjects.” O’Connor went on to cite McCann’s Let the Great World Spin as an example, which confronts historical events such as September 11th and the Vietnam War.
“It was quite an inspiring talk,” said O’Connor as he reflected on the evening’s events. “I think it’s great that the College has events like this to offer.”
As we look through the scribbled notes of wisdom we took through the course of the evening, it is difficult to choose any one quote that defines the course of the discussion. It is all good and honest and true. The experience of speaking with both McCann and Soffer was equal parts humbling and inspiring. All the advice both authors gave to their audience was not only applicable to the experience of sitting down and writing a story. They spoke to a much more universal experience; the experience of being alive. •
