Clay Stafford talks with Joyce Carol Oates “On Being Her Own Person”

Joyce Carol Oates interviewed by Clay Stafford

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I first met Joyce Carol Oates when she was the John Seigenthaler Legends Award winner at the Killer Nashville International Writer’s Conference. She is a prolific writer, a modern-day legend, and a professor at NYU and Princeton, where her fortunate students learn from one of the best living writers today. When her new collection of short stories came out, Flint Kill Creek, I reached out to her to see if we could chat about the new book, writing in general, and how to prepare oneself for a career as a writer. My goal, because she is both a prolific writer and a teacher, was to see if there was some Holy Grail that writers could discover to create a successful career. Fortunately, we may have stumbled upon it. “Joyce, someone such as you who's written over a hundred books, how do you consistently generate these fresh ideas and maintain this creative energy you've got going?”

“Well, it would not interest me to write the same book again, so I wouldn't be interested in that at all.”

“I wonder if some of it also has to do with all the reading you do. It's generating new ideas coming in all the time.”

“I suppose so. That's just the way our minds are different. I guess there are some writers who tend to write the same book. Some people have fixations about things. I don't know how to assess my own self, but I'm mostly interested in how to present the story in terms of structure. Like Flint Kill Creek, the story is really based very much on the physical reality of a creek: how, in a time of heavy rainfall, it rises and becomes this rushing stream. Other times, it's sort of peaceful and beautiful, and you walk along it, yet it's possible to underestimate the power of some natural phenomenon like a creek. It's an analog with human passion. You think that things are placid and in control, but something triggers it, and suddenly there is this violent upheaval of emotion. The story is really about a young man who is so frightened of falling in love or losing control, he has to have a kind of adversarial relationship with young women. He's really afraid to fall in love because it's like losing control. So, through a series of incidents, something happens so that he doesn't have to fall in love, that the person he might love disappears from the story. But to me, the story had to be written by that creek. I like to walk myself along the towpath here in the Princeton area, the Delaware and Raritan Canal. When I was a little girl, I played a lot in Tonawanda Creek, I mean literally played along with my friends. We would go down into the creek area and wade in the water, and then it was a little faster out in the middle, so it was kind of playful, but actually a little dangerous. Then, after rainfall, the creek would get very high and sometimes really high. So it's rushing along, and it's almost unrecognizable. I like to write about the real world, and describe it, and then put people into that world.”

“You've been writing for some time. How do you keep your writing so relevant and engaging to people at all times?”

“I don't know how I would answer that. I guess I'm just living in my own time. My most recent novel is called Butcher, and I wrote it a couple of years ago, and yet now it's so timely because women's reproductive rights have been really under attack and have been pushed back in many states, and it seems that women don't have the rights that we had only a decade ago, and things are kind of going backwards. So, my novel Butcher is set in the 19th century, and a lot of the ideas about women and women's bodies almost seem to be making like a nightmare comeback today. I was just in Milan. I was interviewed a lot about Butcher, and earlier in the year I was in Paris, and I was interviewed about Butcher, because the translations are coming out, and the interviewers were making that connection. They said, ‘Well, your novel is very timely. Was this deliberate?’ And I'm not sure if it was exactly deliberate, because I couldn't foretell the future, but it has this kind of painful timeliness now.”

“How do you balance your writing with all this marketing? Public appearances? Zoom meetings with me? How do you get all of it done? How does Joyce Carol Oates get all of it done?”

“Oh, I have a lot of quiet time. It's nice to talk to you, but as I said, I was reading like at 7 o'clock in the morning, I was completely immersed in a novel, then I was working on my own things, and then talking with you from three to four, that's a pleasure. It's like a little interlude. I don't travel that much. I just mentioned Milan and Paris because I was there. But most of the time I'm really home. I don't any longer have a husband. My husband passed away, so the house is very quiet. I have two kitties, and my life is kind of easy. Really, it's a lonely life, but in some ways it's easy.”

“Do you ever think at all—at the level you're at—about any kind of expanded readership or anything? Or do you just write and throw it out there?”

“I wouldn't really be thinking about that. That's a little late in my career. I mean, I try to write a bestseller.”

“And you have.”

“My next novel, which is coming out in June, is a whodunnit.”

“What's the title?”

“Fox, a person is named Fox. That's the first novel I've ever written that has that kind of plot. A body's found, there’s an investigation, we have back flash and backstory, people are interviewed. You follow about six or seven people, and one of them is actually the murderer, and you find out at the end who the murderer is. The last chapter reveals it. It's sort of like a classic structure of a whodunnit, and I've never done that before. I didn't do it for any particular reason. I think it was because I hadn't done it before, so I could experiment, and it was so much fun.”

“That's one of the things readers love about your work, is you experiment a lot.”

“That was a lot of fun, because I do read mysteries, and yet I never wrote an actual mystery before.”

“Authors sometimes get the advice—which you're totally the exception to—of pick one thing, stay with it, don’t veer from that because you can't build a brand if you don't stick with that one thing. Yet you write plays, nonfiction, poetry, short stories, novels, and you write in all sorts of genres. What advice or response do you give to that? Because I get that ‘stick with one thing’ all the time from media experts at Killer Nashville. You're the exception. You don't do that.”

“No, but I'm just my own person. I think if you want to have a serious career, like as a mystery detective writer, you probably should establish one character and develop that character. One detective, let's say, set in a certain region of America so that there's a good deal of local color. I think that's a good pattern to choose one person as a detective, investigator, or coroner and sort of stay with that person. I think most people, as it turns out, just don't have that much energy. They're not going to write in fifteen different modes. They're going to write in one. So that's sort of tried and true. I mean, you know Ellery Queen and Earl Stanley Gardner and Michael Connolly. Michael Connolly, with Hieronymus Bosch novels, is very successful, and they're excellent novels. He's a very good writer. He's made a wonderful career out of staying pretty close to home.”

“Is there any parting advice you would give to writers who are reading here?”

“I think the most practical advice, maybe, is to take a writing course with somebody whom you respect. That way you get some instant feedback on your writing, and I see it all the time. The students are so grateful for ideas. I have a young woman at Rutgers, she got criticism from the class, and she came back with a revision that was stunning to me. I just read it yesterday. Her revision is so good, I think my jaw dropped. She got ideas from five or six different people, including me. I gave her a lot of ideas. She just completely revised something and added pages and pages, and I was really amazed. I mean, what can I say? That wouldn't have happened without that workshop. She knows that. You have to be able to revise. You have to be able to sit there and listen to what people are saying, and take some notes, and then go home and actually work. She is a journalism major as well as something else. So I think she's got a real career sense. She’s gonna work. Other people may be waiting for inspiration or something special, but she's got the work ethic. And that's important.”

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Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, and founder of Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference and the online streaming creative learning platform The Balanced Writer. Subscribe to his weekly writing tips at https://claystafford.com/

Joyce Carol Oates has published nearly 100 books, including 58 novels, many plays, novellas, volumes of short stories, poetry, and non-fiction. Her novels Black Water, What I Lived For, and Blonde were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize; she won the National Book Award for her novel them. https://celestialtimepiece.com/

Clay Stafford Interviews… Sara Paretsky: “Making A Difference”

Sara Paretsky interviewed by Clay Stafford

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Don Henley sang about wanting to get “to the heart of the matter.” In this interview, I did. Sara Paretsky is a legend in detective fiction but also a champion for the rights of those who don’t have a voice. I spoke with her and found her as compassionate and passionate as my impressions of her were before we met. What struck me the most before the interview was her concern for others. How people incorporate that concern to make the world truly a better place without the preachiness that sometimes comes from pedantic writing is what I sought to investigate with her.

“Sara, it's not difficult to read your work and see where you might stand on things. Do you think it is necessary or even an obligation for writers to include social issues in their work?”

“I think writers should write what is in them to write. I don't sit down wanting to tackle social issues.”

“They’re there, though, so they just come out?”

“It's just they inform my experience and how I think. And it's not even what I most want to read. I most want to read someone who writes a perfect English sentence with an exciting story. That's what I care about. You read things you're in the mood to read, which changes at different points in your life. When I was about ten, my parents gave me Mark Twain's recollections of Joan of Arc to read. My parents felt that I had too intense a personality and that I was always going to suffer in life unless I dialed it back. They wanted me to see the fate that awaited too fierce girls. They get burned at the stake. So, I read this book, and it did not make me wish to dial back my intensity. It made me wish I could have a vision worth being burned at the stake for. That is just my personality, and that's why these issues keep cropping up in my books.”

“I don't know if it's even true, but one of my favorite Joan of Arc stories is that she went to those in charge and wanted the army to go, and they said, ‘They won't follow you. You're a woman,’ and she said, ‘Well, I won't know because I won't be looking back.’”

“Oh, God! I love it!”

“I think that's incredible. And, of course, they still burned her at the stake. That was a fantastic way of looking at that vision, which sounds like what you were talking about.”

“I’ve got hearing aids, and I keep hoping to get messages. I hope St. Catherine and St. Michael will start telling me what to do.”

“Some people are putting tin foil over their heads to stop the messages from coming in. You're hoping they will arrive.”

“You heard it here first when you want to come see me in the locked ward.”

“You said you wanted to write your first book, if I've got this right, to change the way women are portrayed in detective literature, and the gamut of portrayal at the time ran from sex objects to victims of formidable forces, women who must be judged because of their moral bankruptcy, or those who needed to be rescued by Harrison Ford. Do you feel you achieved that regarding how women are portrayed today?”

“Oh, I think not. What I think changed is that the roles for women became much more diverse, reflecting how society was changing. When Sue Grafton and I started, we were on the crest of a wave of the world looking at women differently. Lillian O'Donnell was in a previous generation of women writers, and she had a woman who was a New York City transit police officer solving crimes. But she was writing at a time when people weren't ready to see women taking on these more public roles. I published my first book the year Chicago let women be regular police officers instead of just matrons at the Women's Lockup and the Juvie Lockup. People don't remember this, but there were not exactly riots, but wives of patrol officers were storming the precincts, demanding that women not be allowed in patrol cars with their husbands because they knew that either they would seduce their husbands, or they weren't strong enough to provide backup for their husbands. We don't remember that struggle because we take it for granted now. But I was publishing my first book when all those items were in the stew. Can women do this? Should women do this? And now, there's still a lot of pushback, but nobody questions whether a woman should be in the operating room, or on the Supreme Court, or doing these kinds of things. So, in that way, I was part of a change, for what I think is a change for good. At the same time, I can't speak to why, but I feel like there's a lot of contemporary crime fiction where people are almost in a one-downmanship struggle to use the most graphic, grotesque violence. I know it's unfair to pick on the dead rather than on the living: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I'm, of course, honored that Stieg Larsson considered me an influence on him. Still, every detail of the sexual assault and abuse committed on Lisbeth Salander is described in exquisite detail. Then, when she seeks revenge, all of that is described in exquisite detail. The use of violence has become almost pornographic. But also, you know, V.I. and Kinsey Millhone became detectives out of a sense of possibility, joy, and problem-solving. But there's a tremendous amount of victimization of women, and it's acceptable for them to take an active role in fighting back against being victims. But we're not seeing a lot of women going into this work just because they want to. There is always a reason, and it must be a victim reason, in way too much fiction as I'm reading it, and I find that depressing and disturbing.”

“But when you started writing, and tell me if I'm misquoting you, you said you wanted to change the narrative about women in fiction.”

“Right.”

“I noted you didn't say detective fiction, but you said, ‘I want to change the narrative about women in fiction,’ and some would say you did achieve that.”

“I think that does me more honor than I deserve. I was one of the voices that helped make that happen, and I think we did.”

“This is a difficult question and something I always tell my children. I was like, ‘Okay, to argue a point, you must be able to argue both sides equally well. And then you know the issues.’”

“Great advice. I wonder if I could do that?”

“It's worked well for the kids. But this is a difficult question for those with strong opinions. At this moment, we humans seem to be a bit divided. How do you feel about authors taking social stands on issues with the opposite allegiance to where you or I might stand?”

“I think they should be boiled and oiled and have their carcass– No.”

“I don't think that's true. I don't think you believe that at all.”

“I don’t believe it. I'm wading into controversial waters here, but I'm a Jew. Since October seventh, I feel like my brain has been split, not just in half, but maybe in six or seven pieces because I'm totally against the violence against Palestinians in Gaza. I'm totally against the relief and joy that some Americans expressed watching live streaming of Israeli women being raped and mutilated. I'm totally for some things and totally against some things, and there are like maybe eight different ways you could segment yourself on Israel, Hamas, Palestine, Gaza, West Bank Settlers, and U.S. policy. That's an issue where everyone has a strong opinion, except for someone like me, who is fragmented in the middle. And so, I'm listening to all of these, and I think writers who want to hold forth on this are bolder and braver than I am, but it also is an opportunity for me to get exposed to many different viewpoints. And in that sense, yeah. Great, everyone who feels they know enough to speak about it, or even if they don't know enough, is speaking about it. I know that I would not be a person who could write an empathic, believable story about someone who was opposed to women's access to reproductive health. But if that's where your head is, you should write it, and maybe you can create a sympathetic character that would help me understand why you have those views that are so repugnant to me.”

“Regardless of the perspective of one, literature is a powerful sword, as we know, and people read things and, maybe like your parents were talking about with your Joan of Arc, it's going to subdue you a bit. But no, it made you blossom. And so, you never know which way literature will lead you to look at something and then go, ‘Wait, let me think about this a little more.’ I think differing opinions do tend to do that.”

“Yes, and if you have one monolithic opinion, you are doomed. You need to hear many voices of a story. It's only tangentially connected to this, but Enrico Fermi, the giant physicist of the 20th century, was the person who brought my husband to the University of Chicago. My husband was quite a bit older than me, and he died five years ago, and I still miss him every day. But that's beside the point. When Fermi was dying, he died of esophageal cancer around 1955. A young intern came into his hospital room and tried to talk to him cheerfully about his prospects and the future. And Fermi said, ‘I'm dying, and what you need to learn as a young doctor is how to talk to people about the fact that they're dying.’ This is all in this doctor's memoir. This doctor published this six or seven years ago, at the end of his career, and he had asked Fermi how he could have such a stoical outlook. Fermi was reading Tolstoy's short stories, “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” and other stories, and Fermi said, ‘You go home and read “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” and you will learn how to talk to your patients about death and dying.’ The doctor said, ‘Yes, I went and did that, and it was the most important part of my medical education.’”

“Literature is powerful. So why did you lead the charge – and I think I know this, but I'm asking – why did you lead the charge to create Sisters in Crime. How did that come about?”

“In March of 1986, Hunter College convened what I think was the first-ever conference on women in the mystery field: writers, readers, publishers, editors. I had published two books, and they asked me to speak, which was exciting. I was on panels with people I'd been reading for a long time, including Dorothy Salisbury Davis, who became a close friend. Because I lacked impulse control, I made some strong statements. These generated a lot of discussion, and I started hearing from other women around the country. Sue Grafton and I were fat, dumb, and happy. We published our books. We got a lot of great reviews. We didn't understand the industry, or I didn't. Maybe Sue did. She was smarter than me in many ways. But women who were being asked questions like, ‘What do you do when your kitty cat gets on your keyboard,’ or ‘Isn't it nice that you have a hobby so that you're not bothering your husband when he comes home from a hard day's work?’ You know, just lots of ugly stuff. The great civil rights lawyer, Flo Kennedy, said, ‘Don't agonize, organize.’ So, at the Bouchercon in Baltimore in October of 1986, I sent letters to everyone I had heard from and the women I knew, twenty-six people, to see if women wanted to get together to form an advocacy organization. I said, ‘If you do, we’ll work; if you don't, we'll shut up and stop crying about it.’ Everybody was on board with it, and our first project was our book review monitoring project because Sue and I were getting all these reviews. Most women were not getting reviewed at all. Sue and I were getting reviewed because we were doing something that was being perceived as male. We had privatized. We were doing something in that Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, John MacDonald tradition. And so, we connected with male readers and reviewers. But women who are doing things outside that: cops, so-called cozies, domestic crime. They were not getting reviewed. Our first project was to get numbers on that. Because if you're not getting reviewed, libraries will not buy you. And they were, in those days, the biggest buyer of midlist books. And bookstores don't know you exist. So, with the help of Jim Wang at the Jude Review, we got a list of 1,100 crime thriller mystery books published in 1986 and then worked hard. We looked at two hundred newspapers and magazines and looked at the reviews, and we found that a book by a man was seven times more likely to be reviewed than a book by a woman. We figured, ‘God. Maybe men write twice as well as we do, but not seven times as well.’ So, we started just going to bookstores and libraries. Sharon McCrumb, Carolyn Hart, and Linda Grant, I think it was, put together books in print by women writers. We didn't want to go headlong against the industry because we needed the industry. We wanted to educate people. Sisters grew out of that and has been essential as a place of support. Of course, some men belong, and it's been a template. Writers of Color—I don't have the exact name right—are advocating, so you're starting to see many more mysteries by writers of color than you would have seen ten years ago. This advocacy makes a difference, and it makes a difference not by being confrontational but by being educational and showing publishers, booksellers, and so on that there's a market for these characters. People want to read about them. We were going back to your previous question about regional characters. Now, we're down at the grassroots of where stories come from. And we see that a story speaks to people regardless of race, creed, or place of national origin. Some days, I feel so much despair I can hardly get out of bed, but when I think of the possibility that readers and writers have of exploring so many different voices and places, it's like, yeah, this is a brave new world.”

“What advice do you have for writers of today?”

“If you're writing for the market, you may hit it lucky, but the market is such a fickle place that by the time you finish your book, it will be interested in something else. You write what's in you to say and do it the best way you can. One thing I don't have that I wish I had in my own life is that I don't have a reading group, and I don't have a first reader now that my husband is gone. I have not found the right person, or maybe I haven't even looked. But you need a sounding board, even if it's just one person. Your head is an echo chamber, so get feedback but also stay true to your voice and vision. Balance the two. It's like you were saying, can you have a sympathetic voice opposite your position? You may love your prose so much that you don't want to alter one word. There's one important writer you're not allowed to edit today, and I'm like, ‘Oh, sweetheart, I'd read you more often if you'd let someone cut about 30% of that deathless prose.’”

“You've been called ‘the definition of perfection’ by the Washington Post.”

“Yeah, right.”

“And ‘a legend’ by people such as Harlan Coben, and for your work ‘the best on the beat’ by the Chicago Tribune and others, and the list goes on and on and on. How does that make you feel? How does it feel to be labeled as ‘perfection’?”

“That's an impossible bar to reach and go over.”

“But you have that reputation.”

“Yeah, well, you know…”

“And you've bumbled well into it, right? Let me ask you this. Other people think of you as a legend for numerous reasons. Whether it's Sisters in Crime, your advocacy in your personal life, your writing, or the influence your writing has had, what would Sarah Paretsky like to be remembered for?”

“I'd like to be remembered for telling stories that cheered people up.”

“That's a wonderful thing.”

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Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, and founder of Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference. https://claystafford.com/

Sara Paretsky revolutionized the mystery world with her gritty detective V.I. Warshawski in Indemnity Only, followed by twenty V.I. novels, her memoir, two stand-alone novels, and short stories. She created Sisters in Crime, earning Ms. Magazine’s Woman of the Year. She received the British Crime Writers’ Cartier Diamond Dagger and Gold Dagger. https://saraparetsky.com/