Voices on Writing: Robin Hemley
Robin Hemley is the author of ten books of nonfiction and
fiction and the winner of many awards including a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship,
The Nelson Algren Award for Fiction from The
Chicago Tribune, The Story Magazine Humor Prize, an Independent Press Book
Award, two Pushcart Prizes and many others.
His fiction, nonfiction, and poetry has been published in the U.S.,
Great Britain, Germany, Japan, the Philippines, and Hong Kong, and he teaches
creative writing workshops around the world.
He has been widely anthologized and has published his work in such
places as The New York Times, The
Believer, The Huffington Post, Orion, The Wall Street Journal, The Chicago
Tribune, New York Magazine, and literary magazines. The BBC is currently developing a feature
film based on his book Invented Eden
that tells the story of a purported anthropological hoax in the Philippines.
His third collection of short stories, Reply
All, is forthcoming in 2012 from Indiana University Press (Break Away
Books) and The University of Georgia Press recently published his book A Field Guide For Immersion Writing: Memoir,
Journalism, And Travel (reviewed by Steve Weinberg in this month’s What’s
in Store column). He is a senior editor of The
Iowa Review as well as the editor of a popular online journal, Defunct
(Defunctmag.com) that features short essays on everything that’s had its
day. He currently directs the Nonfiction
Writing Program at The University of Iowa and is the founder and organizer of
NonfictioNow, a biennal conference that will convene in November 2012 in
Melbourne, Australia.
Your CV is
intimidating. Have you always been a writer?
I’ve always written, but I haven’t always identified myself as a
writer. I come from a literary family: My
mother was a short story writer, translator, and novelist, and my father was a
publisher, novelist, poet, and translator. So, from an early age, part of my
life included writing and reading.
Your focus, for the most part,
has been short stories, essays, and memoir. What is it about these
genres that grabs you?
It’s true I like the short form—essays and stories—though I’ve gone
long several times, as well. My novel, The Last Studebaker, was well-received
and reviewed, and I’m only now working on a second novel. I love the novel form, too, but I tend to
write in whatever form interests me at the time.
Workshops tend to focus
on the short story. When I went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop as a young
writer, I wrote a lot of stories, some of which made it into my first book of
stories. I loved short stories well before that. I used to love to peruse my family library
and pull short story collections from the shelves. That’s how I discovered Kafka, Borges, and
Isaac Babel, among others.
After graduate
school, for a couple of years I taught part-time at The School of the Art
Institute of Chicago, and there I taught “Essay Writing.” This was a basic composition course, but
here, I fell in love with the essay, too, largely through an anthology that the
poet Donald Hall edited. At the time, hardly
anyone in the academy thought of the essay as an art form that held its own
against the short story and the poem.
That’s all changed now, and I’m glad of it. I think the short form interests me so much
because these forms tend to focus on what’s not written as much as what is written. The gaps, what’s left out, what’s left to the
reader’s imagination—this is what makes these forms so vibrant to me.
What's the
crossover?
Can you repeat the
question? I didn't catch that.
Um,
crossover—
Ha, sorry, my silly
sense of humor displays itself. Okay,
crossover. With my family background,
you can see that crossover is inevitable.
I’ve never been one to declare genre loyalty. Sure, writers tend to excel at one form, but
there are many writers who don’t want to limit their creativity to just one
form, and that’s certainly how I feel about my own writing.
Tell me
about your new book, A Field Guide for
Immersion Writing.
This book arose
directly from my book, Do-Over, in
which I revisited past embarrassments and failures from my childhood. When I was asked what I’d call this type of
writing, I said it was an immersion memoir.
The term “immersion” has long been applied to journalism but never
before to memoir—when I was speaking to an editor at The University of Georgia
Press about this type of writing, she suggested I write a book on it. Over time, I expanded the idea to consider
immersion writing in all its forms: memoir, journalism, and finally, travel
writing—which of course involves immersion as well.
This book
crosses over a little bit with another book of yours, Turning Life
into Fiction,
which has sold more than 50,000 copies.
I love life-based fiction. What
prompted you to write it?
Turning Life
into Fiction, likewise, came out of my engagement with the subject and a
discussion with an editor, Lois Rosenthal, who founded Story Press and briefly
revived Story Magazine. I had been teaching about the transformation
process in fiction, the ways in which we turn experience into fiction, and Lois
asked me if I’d write a book about this for her. I believe it was the first book that Story
Press published. Later, when Lois and
her husband Richard sold their publishing enterprise, the book somewhat
inexplicably went out of print, though it was selling well. And so, Graywolf Press picked it up and it’s
now in its second or third printing with them.
Both A Field Guide and Turning Life into Fiction talk about use what
you're
living through and write about it. Is this the main way you find
your
subject
matter?
I find my subject matter in a lot of different ways. As a writer, I’m fairly eclectic. I’ve written from dreams and I’ve written
about people who have nothing to do with what I’m living. One story in my
forthcoming collection of short stories is from the point of view of a
Portuguese spy on the ship of the explorer Magellan and another takes place
outside of Chino, France, in the time of Joan of Arc. Ideas present themselves in many forms, and
if they intrigue me enough, I take them on.
Do you
believe immersion journalism is a more...valid brand of journalism?
I wouldn’t use the term “valid,” but I do believe that traditional
journalists can be blind to their own agendas.
I’ve experienced this personally—how a self-righteous journalist can
completely muck up a story and still remain self-righteous.
My experience with
this comes from my book, Invented Eden: The
Elusive, Disputed History of the Tasaday.
This told the story of a group of 26 people who were “discovered” living
in the rainforest in supposed complete isolation in the Southern Philippines in
1971.
For a while they were
hailed as the ethnographic find of the century and a 45,000 acre reserve was
given to them by the Marcos Administration.
For a while they were a world-wide sensation, supposedly living an existence
that closely resembled the cave-dwelling lifestyles of our Pleistocene-era
ancestors.
Then in 1986, a freelance reporter from
Switzerland hiked into the rainforest unannounced and was told through
interpreters that the Tasaday were a hoax, that they were simply local farmers
who had been coerced into playing Caveman.
Good story, but it
wasn’t true. The guy hiked in and out of
the rainforest in a couple of days and believed his translator, a local anti-Marcos
activist who had an agenda of his own.
Now, the world declared that they weren’t the find of the century, but
the hoax of the century, and credulous reporters followed, all filing
supposedly objective stories that agreed the Tasaday were a hoax, without
knowing anything about the complex political and cultural situation of the
Philippines at the time.
It’s called “confirmation
bias,” the idea that you pay attention to arguments and “facts” that support
your theories, and ignore or throw out anything that disagrees with your
theories. Everyone is susceptible to it,
even supposedly objective journalists.
In this case, they created a mess.
I spent five years
researching the story, traveling around the world and meeting everyone alive
who was a part of the story: journalists, academics, even the Tasaday
themselves, and I found out that the story was a lot more complex and that the
real hoax was perpetrated by the people who said the Tasaday were a hoax. Yet the conventional wisdom today is still
that the Tasaday were a hoax, mostly because of bad reporting that was
broadcast on ABC’s 20/20 and taken as
gospel.
I simply think it’s
good to own up to your biases, to allow the reader to see that a human being,
and not a supposedly infallible news organization, has written the story and
gathered the information.
When doing
immersion journalism or travel writing, I assume it's best to
come across
as much like a non-writer as possible?
I wouldn't say that’s always the case; it’s only true of writers who write
what I call an “infiltration.” Ted
Conover, for instance in New Jack,
when he was writing about being a guard at Sing Sing. Or Kevin Roose when he, a liberal student
from Brown, infiltrated the conservative Christian Liberty University in
Lynchburg, Virginia. Short of that kind
of infiltration, I think it’s good to be honest about being a writer—and I
think that there are ethical considerations involved in the infiltration as
well. There’s no rulebook, but I have a
chapter of ethical and legal considerations in which I delve into the writer’s
responsibility to the subject.
Talk about
the marketplace, especially for travel writers.
I think there’s always a market for a well-written travel book. I can’t say for certain because I’m not a
marketer, but it seems to be a pretty strong niche.
Quite a few publishers
now print disclaimers on an opening page of a memoir that names have been
changed. Which makes me wonder: Should a memoir writer allow his or
her subjects to vet the manuscript at any point along the way?
That’s a good question. It
really depends on what you’re writing about.
When I was writing Do-Over,
one of the people I wanted to write about said that she didn’t want to be “an
incidental character in your adventure.”
I liked that. It made me think about my relationship to the people I
wrote about. In her case, I showed her
what I had written and changed her name, but others didn’t ask that of me. I
changed the names of anyone under 18 except for my daughters, but I also gave
them the chance to read the manuscript before I sent it to the publisher.
When I wrote Invented Eden, I didn’t have the luxury
of changing names, and I needed to make sure that nothing I wrote was
actionable.
Traditionally,
journalists have resisted showing what they write to their subjects, but in
some instances, that’s something worth reconsidering.
Some have
said the memoir genre is a crowded one. What do you think?
Every genre is crowded. Thousands
of novels are published every year.
Thousands of books of poetry.
There are plenty of good books and plenty of bad books of every kind.
What's your
opinion of the mountains of self-published books, and do you
think they
help or hinder the publication and marketing of traditionally
published
books?
I know of a couple of people who’ve self-published books
successfully, but they are definitely the exception. While I don’t think it carries the stigma it
used to, there are so many exciting independent presses out there now. Not only is it easier to self-publish, but
it’s also easier to publish other people, to start your own press. One start-up, Engine Books in Indianapolis,
has published a short story collection and a novel by two friends of mine, both
fabulous writers who might be relegated to the mid-list with traditional
houses. But they’ve been doing well—this
publisher publishes two to three titles a year, and my friend’s short story
collection was just reviewed in O: the
Oprah Magazine. So why self-publish
when there are so many good independent publishers out there?
Many of your
books have been published by smaller presses. In other words, not by the Big
Six. Talk about the value of smaller presses.
I wouldn’t necessarily call them smaller presses. Three of my books
have been published by Graywolf, which isn’t exactly a small press anymore, but
a giant of independent presses.
In any case, I’d
prefer to call these presses “Independent” rather than “small.” My father was the founder and publisher of
just such an Independent Press, the somewhat legendary Noonday, which in the
fifties was what Graywolf is today.
One of the biggest
strengths of independent presses is that they don’t necessarily have to be as
slavish to the bottom line as some of the larger presses are. They can take chances, especially those that
are nonprofit, such as Graywolf.
A case in point is
Noonday. When my father was first
starting it up in the 1950s he and my mother attended a cocktail party given by
the owner of The New Yorker Theater, Dan Talbot. In the middle of the party, Talbot shushed
everyone and said he wanted to read this great new story that had just appeared
in the latest issue of The Partisan
Review, an important literary magazine of its day. Can you imagine anyone at a party doing such
a thing now? The story in question was a
translation by Saul Bellow of a then-unknown Yiddish writer, Isaac Bashevis
Singer.
Talbot read the
story and my father asked if Talbot knew Singer. He did and a meeting was arranged. It turned out that Signer was upset by the
way that Alfred Knopf had edited his first novel, The Family Moskat. According
to Singer, Knopf had butchered the book, and so Singer was amenable to working
with my father. Singer and my father
were a great match, and my father became Singer’s translator, editor, and
trusted friend.
Independent
publishers love literature. That can’t
always be said for the big corporate houses.
Matthew Arnold said that “journalism is literature in a hurry,” but now
literature is literature in a hurry.
What I mean is that that nurturing spirit is largely absent from large
houses: If you don’t succeed right away, you’re out. But independent publishers still nurture
their writers for the most part.
Let’s talk
about teaching. How do you teach nonfiction writing?
That’s a difficult question to answer—but briefly I do it through a
combination of manuscript critique, peer critique, and individual
conferencing. But it really depends on
the venue: a traditional university, a weekend workshop, or a low-residency
distance-learning model. They all demand
different approaches. In general, I give
students models in the genre in which they’re working, I sometimes use writing
exercises (again, depending on the level), and I try to see what the writer is
attempting to do and help him or her achieve that goal. I’m working with so many different kinds of
nonfiction writers that I have to tailor my approach somewhat to each writer.
How does
teaching help or hinder your own work?
Sometimes it helps, sometimes it hinders. It depends on the time of year and the
students with whom I’m dealing. I work
with some mightily talented students and while I don’t usually find myself
directly inspired by their work, I do get a vicarious pleasure in helping them
turn their ideas into essays and books.
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