Interview with Robert Morgan, 2003 Writer-In-Residence

Conducted June 2003, via Email

By David Hoffman

What do you enjoy most about writing? After numerous volumes of poetry, five novels, and many other accomplishments, what keeps you motivated to continue the process every day? I think it is the challenge of writing I enjoy most. No matter how many books you have written, the act of writing never gets easier. In fact it seems to get harder to keep exploring and moving ahead. I am never bored as I struggle to write a new story. Sometimes frustrated, but never bored. And nothing is more thrilling than making a sentence come out right.

What first drew you to writing? I'm sure it was reading that first drew me to think about writing myself. I loved to read stories, and I grew up among great storytellers. Early on I decided I wanted to write stories myself. Also, from my earliest memory I loved language. I loved the power of words to suggest, the textures and sounds and flavors of words. My parents and my grandpa were readers and talkers. They had little money or formal education, but they read the books and magazines they could get hold of. Also I was exposed to the King James Bible from infancy. The Bible was read at least once a day in the house. And I heard the Bible read and great preaching at church and revival meeting. Those preachers were artists of the oral tradition.

I was intrigued to find that you wrote much of This Rock in hotel rooms as you promoted Gap Creek. Do you have a specific writing process? Because I taught fulltime for many years, and helped raise three children, I discovered early on that I had to find a special time to write each day. If I waited until I won a fellowship or had a sabbatical I would never get anything done. So I formed the habit of getting up early in the morning, while the house was still quiet, and writing for an hour or two. That became my favorite time of the day, when I could be alone with my sentences and characters. And later, when I began to travel a lot, I discovered that motel rooms are good places to work, because there are so few distractions. I can reenter my fictive worlds there, and live with my sentences, and it helps with the interviews and readings and lectures later in the day.

How does your writing process differ when writing novels and poetry? How do the two genres interconnect for you? For me, writing poetry was a sporadic thing. When I had an idea for a poem I wrote the first draft in a rush in my notebook, and then came back and revised and reread the poem for weeks, sometimes years, until it sounded right. For writing novels I have to keep at it day after day. One of the pleasures of writing fiction is you always have something to work on. I often work on several stories in turn, switching between projects. Brave Enemies, the novel coming out this fall, was started more than ten years ago. But I finished The Truest Pleasure, Gap Creek, and This Rock in the meantime.

Talk about how your life has influenced your writing. I recall reading about your grandfather's stories and church hymns being influential on your writing. More specifically, how do you utilize the stories and events of your life in your writing? When I began writing in college I wondered what material I had to write about. My favorite authors set their stories in exotic places like London, Paris, Moscow, or the Far North. All I knew was the little farm I had grown up on in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Only gradually did I come to see that I had a treasure of stories picked up from my grandpa and parents, from the region, and that the work I had gone to college to escape would become one of my major subjects. And still later I saw that because I came from that world I was able to connect with the rural past in a particular detailed way. I had actually killed hogs and carried water from a spring, and plowed with a horse. I had sawed with a cross-cut saw and carried eggs and butter to the store on the highway to trade for staples such as sugar and coffee and baking soda.

What advice can you offer young writers of both poetry and fiction? The best advice I can give a young writer is: know that you have to be persistent. Many people have talent, but only those who stick with writing over the long haul will succeed. Also write what thrills you. "Follow your bliss," as Joseph Campbell said. For novelists it is especially valuable to study history, to know how the narratives of events unfold across time.

The words "living voices" seem to appear quite often in many of your interviews and essays, especially in Good Measure. What do these words mean, and why did you choose this as your Residency Theme? As you know, my breakthrough as a fiction writer came very late in my career. I didn't really get going as a novelist until I was in my forties. The breakthrough came in 1989 when I realized I could let my characters, especially women characters, tell their own stories. I saw that the way a story is told is part of the story. If you make the voice of the narrator real and compelling you are already halfway there. When we start reading a novel we can tell almost immediately if the voice is alive. Every sentence and ever line of dialogue should seem alive.

You often comment on your passion for music and the influence that it has on you. What do you see as the correlation between your writing and music? I used to say that poetry was very close to music. But after I began to write more and more prose in the 1980s I came to see that prose was more like music, especially classical music. Good prose has a symmetry, a firmness and sureness, a sense of exploration, complication, and resolution, that is very much like music. These days I think of poetry as more like dance, where a pattern is repeated and varied again and again. Poetry is repetition and progression at once. Since I began writing fiction my ideas about poetry have changed. I am very interested in formal poetry these days. Over the years I have come to see hymns I heard so often as a child influenced not only my sense of form and music, but also metaphor and figurative language.

How has your study of math and science influenced your writing? I know I have stolen a lot of metaphors and images and phrases from my study of math and science. The study of science opened up new worlds for me. I was raised in a Fundamentalist household and community, and the study of science freed me to see the world and myself in so many new ways. It has been said by critics that my study of math influenced my exactness, compression, and rhythm.

You speak of writing while being away from a particular place (i.e., when you left North Carolina to teach at Cornell). Do you find it any easier or more difficult to write about a place when you are away? How, if at all, has distance affected your vision and interpretation of "place"? I began writing more and more about Western North Carolina once I had left it in 1971 and come to Ithaca. Out of homesickness and nostalgia distance from the mountains gave me a perspective I would not have otherwise. Living in Upstate New York helped me to see my family and community and region more clearly. Being away so long may have influenced me to write more about the past than the present. But I have gone back to North Carolina often and for long visits, and kept in touch with family and friends there. These days I spend several months of each year in North Carolina.

I found it very interesting that you began "Lightening Bug" in 1969 but didn't find the ending until 1983. How did you finally find the ending, and does this happen? A number of my poems and novels were written over a period of years. I often have to wait a long time to learn how to finish a piece. I think this has enabled me to write poems and books that are smarter than myself. Certainly my writing is often wiser than I am.

You have written that "Poetry exists in the speech of the nonindustrialized people around us." What do you mean by that assertion? I was thinking of the oral tradition there, of the way people who talk and tell stories, and don't watch much television had a more intimate and acute sense of language. I grew up among some people who could not read but could tell wonderful stories, and loved to make up colorful expressions. "Let me bust a match to light this lantern," an old man would say.

You told Suzanne Booker, in a 1984 interview, that the "first step to becoming a writer is to learn to distrust words and the obvious combinations." You also quoted Hollis Summers: "The point of a story is always the point beside the point." Can you talk about how these two ideas converge in your writing? To become a writer you have to rebel against clichés, the easy and obvious use of language. Hemmingway called this the 'built-in shit detector'. You grow by rejecting the obvious and facile. Hollis Summers' idea about short stories is closely related. He means a good story always surprises, yet seems inevitable once we finish it. He is referring to the peripheral vision that is so important to art.