printable version'3 Books': Distinguished authors talk about what the writing process can reveal
One of the best things about novels is how they can illuminate "ways of being" other than our own, said psychology Professor Hazel Markus last Wednesday evening, as she introduced writers Jamaica Kincaid, Tobias Wolff and David Henry Hwang at the New Student Orientation event "3 Books." Books by the authors were a summer reading assignment for the freshman class.
The books are set in vastly different geographic places and cultures—Kincaid's Annie John is set in Antigua, West Indies; Wolff's Old School takes place in a New England boarding school for boys; and Hwang's play, M Butterfly, is set in 1960s China. The works represent the kind of writing that can help us understand that our differences "exist not because people are different in some unalterable or essential way, but because the lived contexts of our lives are different," Markus said. "Novels and plays give us practice at imagining the 'other.'"
They also can work from the inside out—uncovering aspects of their creators to themselves as they write, the authors told students gathered in Memorial Auditorium Sept. 21.
Hwang, the son of Chinese immigrants, wrote his first play, FOB (for "fresh off the boat"), in his Stanford dorm room. He entered the university as a freshman in the mid-1970s not knowing that he would become a writer, having not seen very many plays and having not given much thought to the fact that he was Asian American.
"I knew that I was Chinese," he said, to the laughter and cheers in the auditorium, "but I considered it a relatively minor detail, like having red hair."
In classes that Hwang took in Los Angeles with playwright Sam Shepard, he was encouraged write in an uncensored, stream-of-consciousness style. "I saw issues appearing on the page that I hadn't known I was interested in—things like what it meant to be a first-generation Asian American, cultural issues, East-West issues."
All were things that his conscious mind had told him weren't very important, but "evidently my unconscious mind felt [they were] very important," Hwang said. His work became a kind of mirror that allowed him to look more deeply into himself, he said. "I really feel like I discovered myself as an Asian American through writing. I learned by looking at the page about the person that I eventually started to become."
In the West Indies, where Kincaid grew up, "black people are 'normal' and white people are not," she told students. Issues of ethnicity for her were not about the color of her skin but about her gender. Elaborate plans were made for her three brothers' lives—plans that "all fell apart. No plans were made for me, and I succeeded through," she said.
Kincaid's mother, who loved to read, took her young daughter along everywhere, including the library. When, at age 3-1/2, she could read as well as a 5-year-old, Kincaid was put into school. Her mother told her to lie and say that she was 5.
"If you ask, 'How did you get to be you?' I have to go back to this person and reading and writing and lying … or dissembling. Every significant thing of my life is related to me making things up and because I was a girl," she said.
In writing Old School, his first novel, Wolff, a professor of English at Stanford, also "dropped my bucket into the well of my own memory," he said. Like the protagonist of the novel, Wolff attended boarding school as a scholarship student. In writing the book, "I was trying to rediscover the shock of leaving one world and going into another," he said.
Early on, he discussed the book project at a party where he was asked about the class issues he himself had faced as a boarding school student. His response was, "Oh, no, my school was really class blind," he recalled. Driving home that night, he thought, "What an idiotic thing to say."
While it was true that his school never publicly identified scholarship students or made overt distinctions between students, in a way that only made class issues more powerful, he said. "There was nothing to distinguish [scholarship students] from other students—except of course, for the way they looked and talked and behaved.
"The funny thing to me was that I believed [the school was class blind] all those years, because that was the way the school talked about itself to itself," he said.
Moments of self-discovery and surprise are essential to the act of writing, he said. The work itself is so wearying and so difficult that writers must find meaning beyond the tangible rewards of money or fame, he said. "Writing is the way I find out what I know. I don't know otherwise. I only really think deeply when I write."
Once written, "I always surrender a work, I never pronounce its meaning," Wolff added. "If I am called to adjudicate a dispute about meaning, I decline. Because, honestly, I believe in the play of minds upon poems and stories and novels and the way in which interpretations have continued lives of their own, hovering over these stories like angels.
"I love that," he said. "And I would never in a million years move to shut that down."