Today we are pleased to introduce the second part of our Critical Symposium on Andre Dubus. For this installment we interviewed Richard Ravin, another one of Dubus's former students. In this special interview Ravin, who works in media, provides an intimate look at Dubus as a teacher and craftsman. To see more of Ravin's work about Dubus please read his essay on Dubus that appeared in Salon in 1999.
The Working Life of Andre Dubus
An Interview with Richard Ravin
On Dubus’s working methods
Andre, as I recall, wrote in long hand, and on typewriter after that. One of the most important things he told us in the workshop was that he didn’t believe in doing outlines or any preparatory notes. It didn’t matter what you imagined you might write, what you thought about it in advance, only what you managed to get onto the page. He always left off in the middle somewhere, and in a place where he was feeling good, so he’d have a positive jumping off place the next day.
He talked about the objective correlative — how the outer world of details you chose to create a scene or moment or whatever, should mirror — be a correlative — to the inner world of your character. That if you were in proper focus, had made a commitment to what you were doing, then you couldn’t help doing so. The example he gave was from Madame Bovary — how after the great country ball, Dr. and Mme Bovary are in their coach driving home. The horses are large and confined by the coach’s braces — as Mme Bovary is confined in her life. In the road, there’s a glimmer, and the doctor sees a lost cigar case (or so I remember). Coach stops, doctor admires the case’s mechanics. Mme holds it in her hands and imagines a woman gave it to her lover.
Andre told us this tip and example in one of my very first meetings at the workshop, perhaps in 1994. The memory is as fresh as if it were the day before yesterday
On Dubus’s favorite writers
Andre loved Chekhov and referred to bits from stories often, Lady with a Lapdog was a particular favorite, if I remember it right. He loved the Russians, Tolstoy especially.
He revered Hemingway and once read "In Another Country" in its entirety at workshop. In Meditations From a Movable Chair, he wrote a great essay about teaching the story. You can see the Hemingway simplicity in Andre’s work. Andre once quoted Hemingway — and I know I have mangled the quote, but maybe you know it — that the job of the writer is not to describe, but to "make." It’s easy to say "Joe was sad." It’s much harder to make the reader sad by how you put Joe on the page. This made a big impression on me and I’ve tried to heed this advice in my own writing.
He admired Alice Munro highly and we often talked about her in workshop — noting that it was hard to learn from Munro because she pulled off stuff that shouldn’t work but did, and it was almost impossible to figure out how she did it.
He admired the work of Gina Berriault and was happy when Women in Their Beds won out over Dancing After Hours for the ’96 National Book Critics Circle Award — because she deserved more attention than she was getting, Andre said. He must have loved her because, like him, she was admired by fellow writers more than the commercial marketplace.
He once quoted Norman Mailer — again I mangle the quote, but it’s from 16 years ago — "Isn’t it great to finish your writing day and look over your typewriter up at Mt. Faulkner." It’s interesting, given that Andre was from Louisiana and there was shipped-in andouille sausage in his freezer — that we don’t really think of him as a southern writer. Too much snow in the stories, I guess.
On feedback in Dubus’s workshop
It’s important to remember that there was no advanced reading for Andre’s Thursday night workshop, and no homework. In workshop you handed out copies of your work and read it aloud to the group. It could be a challenge to figure out what you thought about something, right on the spot. Andre’s main thing was to foster the idea that what made good writing was commitment. Ass to chair. Be there with your characters. Accept them as human and don’t fear their faults. Don’t feel obligated to make them likeable. As I said earlier, he thought anything you did in terms of outlines or detailed notes was a waste of time. All that matters is what you can get onto the page on any particular day. He counted his words at the end of a writing day, noted them on his notebook page and said ‘thank you.’
Andre sometimes talked about proportion. Maybe you’d spent too much time focusing on a scene or a detailed quirk of character, the specifics of any given moment, and had forgotten to spend enough time on something more fundamental to the story. He’d bring it up when a writer would read from work that was drowning in detail, as if every notion that had popped into the writer’s head was equally important to every other — this is a common trait among less developed writers. He often charged writers to show not tell, which I thought was pretty interesting, given how amazing Andre was with telling in his own work. But I recognized that some writers, like Andre, are so gifted they can tell and tell without stealing energy from the story or smothering the reader’s experience. Not as true for less experienced or less talented writers.
Andre was devoted to giving praise in workshop, even to those whose work was labored. As I’ve said, he’d sometimes lose sleep and call somebody in the morning if he thought he’d been too hard. And so, Andre worked faithfully to fill the workshop with people who could be supportive and not killers. Before my time, he almost pulled the plug on the whole thing because the writers were getting too mean with each other.
On his favorite Dubus story
I’m especially fond of Andre’s story "The Fat Girl." Maybe because he told us about how it died on him midway through, and stayed dead for years. Then one day Andre was out on a run, and some words popped into his head: ‘Get her married.’ He went home and finished the story in a few days.
On Dubus’s impact on his own fiction
I’ve never been to graduate school, never took a creative writing class. As I said before, Andre’s talk about the Objective Correlative made a big impression on me, and I struggle to find details for my scenes that create sympathetic vibration with my characters’ inner lives. Andre’s ideas about making a commitment to the work, that momentum and focus are as important as anything, are another teaching I subscribe to. That writing is about a process as much as a destination. Why would you want to know how your story ends before you got there, Andre would ask. What would be the point of writing that? We write toward knowledge, not from knowledge.
But workshop was also about the fellowship of writers, of finding community with everybody in the room. The workshop still meets, by the way. Many fewer of us now, and we don’t meet as frequently as when Andre was alive. But a half dozen of us still get together on a Thursday night to listen to one of us read and talk about the work. Of that group, more than half were in the workshop while Andre was alive.
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Read the other parts of our Critical Symposium on Andre Dubus here and here.