E-mail a friendTobias Wolff
airdate May 2, 2008
Tobias Wolff has been described as one of America's most renowned short story craftsmen and literary memoirists. He's the author of two memoirs—This Boy's Life, which chronicles his growing up with an itinerant mother and abusive stepfather and was turned into a movie; and In Pharaoh's Army. He's also written two novels. Wolff served on Syracuse University's faculty for 17 years before taking his current position at Stanford. His new release, Our Story Begins, is his first collection in over a decade.
Tobias Wolff
Tavis: Tobias Wolff is an acclaimed author who is currently a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Stanford. His previously best-selling memoirs include "This Boy's Life" and "In Pharaoh's Army." His latest book is a collection called "Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories." Tobias Wolff, nice to have you on the program.
Tobias Wolff: Nice to be on, Tavis.
Tavis: It's a pleasure to meet you.
Wolff: Likewise.
Tavis: "Our Story Begins." That title is meant to suggest what?
Wolff: It's a good question. That would be the kind of thing that I recall people saying when I was young when they're about to tell you a story, so it's kind of invitational in a way and it's also, I think, a signal to the reader that these are stories about people, that they're not academic, that they're kind of wide open, generous stories and the kind of thing that they might have enjoyed listening to.
Tavis: Since you flash back to your childhood, I wonder whether or not you think that storytelling is a lost art.
Wolff: You know, storytelling is not a lost art. I do think that listening to stories may be a lost art.
Tavis: Point well taken.
Wolff: Because, you know, I see so many wonderful story writers out there. Juno Diaz's great collection, "Drown"; ZZ Packer, "Drinking Coffee Elsewhere"; Julie Orringer's "How To Breath Under Water"; David Foster Wallace writes great short stories. I could go on all day. The young writers out there, Jhumpa Lahiri's "Unaccustomed Earth." There's a fantastic vitality to the American short story. I wish more people would read them.
Tavis: In your capacity as a professor of creative writing at Stanford, I want to stay with this theme of telling short stories and reading short stories and, in your case, teaching creative writing in a contemporary sense. Can you tell me how your teaching creative writing has changed over the years and - let me stop there. Has it changed and, if so, how?
Wolff: When I was younger, I think I tended like the young to have very doctrinaire ideas about how things should be, how they should be taught, what forms things should take. As I've gotten older, a lot of those certainties have dropped away. So I no longer tell people how they should write. I try to help them write the stories that they want to write and not the ones that I would have written.
I think probably my best contribution to the young writers that I work with is that I think I'm pretty good at teaching them how to be good editors of their own work for the stories they want to write, to look at their work with the kind of detachment and unsentimentality that they would bring if reading someone else's story. That's the only way you can get to the next level is to be a pretty good editor of your own work.
I can't put talent into somebody. I can't really teach them to write, but I can help them become good rewriters and that's where the sheep get separated from the goats, I think. If you're really willing to roll up your sleeves, after having put that first draft down and say, "Okay, what's here? What can I do to make this better?", that's where it really happens.
Tavis: So I hear you, Tobias, and I respect your point that you have learned to be less rigid, less strict, less definitive over the years about your teaching creative writing. Yet the flip side of that question is whether or not there is a danger in getting too far from the shore.
Or to put it another way, a danger in not having rules and expectations about creative writing so that all you ever need to do is to rewrite what they write, but there's a standard that we're not hitting anymore where good writing is concerned. Does that make sense?
Wolff: It does. I understand your question. Oh, no, absolutely. Holding up a standard to the young writer is essential. I don't teach only writing. I also teach literature classes and -
Tavis: - and English (laughter).
Wolff: Indeed, and English, and I teach the Russian short story and French short story. Even in my workshops, which are supposed to be the writing classes, they're really literature classes as well. So always at the beginning of each workshop, we discuss a story by Chekhov or James Joyce or Katherine Anne Porter or Flannery O'Connor or James Baldwin, somebody who has written a great story that we would all benefit from looking at and talking about.
That way, the standard remains the best work rather than just their own work. It gives them something to aspire to and, as I'm talking about their work and as they're talking about their work, they can refer to this. After a while, they accumulate a kind of treasury of great stories that they've read and have thought about that they can refer to and that becomes a kind of standard.
Tavis: What for you, since you teach this and since you write rather well yourself, what are the elements? I'm not looking so much for an example, although I'm happy to take it. I'm not looking so much for an example as I am for the elements of what you think makes for a good or a great short story.
Wolff: Well, that's a good question. I suppose the first thing is that it be of compelling interest to the reader in some way, that the reader should feel that even though the character may comes from a different country, different ethnicity, different faith, that what is at stake for the character in a short story is somehow at stake for you too, that that shared humanity is somehow made - that the reader is made to feel that with the character.
So what is consequential to the people in the story is consequential for you as the reader. That, I think, is what you're after in the novel as well as the short story. From then on, I think, you know, all bets are off. How you do that is up to each writer, but that's the essential.
Tavis: That's a good answer. I like that. That said, how would you describe the new and selected stories in this text?
Wolff: Well, I hope that, in some way or other, they all, each in its own way, advance that sense of particular humanity and the various moral and spiritual crises that all of us undergo, that somehow they're tracked in these stories. Our tendency to duplicity, to self-interest, to putting conditions on our love, to posing, all those sorts of things that we, in ways large and small, find ourselves doing.
The short story, I think, is a very good form for that. It kind of catches those moments beautifully. In a novel, in a more sustained narrative, you need more colors, you know, more facets, but a short story is very good at catching that thing, you know, seen almost out of the corner of the eye in your own nature. So I find dramatic form for these things and that's how these stories took their shape.
Tavis: Let me ask you - I'll put you on the spot here and I don't want you to go too deep into it because I don't want to give the story away. Give me one example of the new and one example of the old in this text that you really like.
Wolff: Well, I do -
Tavis: - I assume you like all of them because it's all in here.
Wolff: Yeah. Well, there's one. I won't give it away too much, but there's one story in here. I was years and years ago a high school teacher. I was teaching in a very strict Catholic school, an inner city school in San Francisco, a Christian Brother's school with a very tough honor code.
I caught a kid cheating. It was a boy. It was a boy's school, a child of immigrants. His parents had sacrificed a lot to get him in this school. I caught him cheating and I knew that, if I turned him in, he would be expelled. So it became a kind of wrestling match in me a bit.
But then, you know, it led me to a meditation on how much pressure is on the children of the immigrant in this country because, to use a term I've heard, they're the locomotives to their family. They're gonna pull their family up, you know. They're maybe gonna be the first to go to college, all that sort of thing.
So the consequences of what that would mean for me to follow the rules very exactly, turn this kid in, then what happens to the family afterwards and to him? As it weighed heavily on me at the time began to give shape to a story in here called "A White Bible."
There's another story in here about - an older story. In fact, it's the oldest story in this collection in which a husband and wife are washing dishes and they get into a conversation about whether white people should marry Black people.
The husband expresses the opinion that they shouldn't because the backgrounds, the culture, would be different, and the wife is deeply offended by the sense, first of all, that her husband really believes he knows her that well, you know (laughter).
Tavis: I'm just your wife (laughter).
Wolff: (Laughter) Yeah, right. That's right. He says, "You know, well, you wouldn't really know him." She says, "Like you know me?" He says, "Yeah." He's not getting it at all and he thinks he's kind of mastered the mystery of his wife. His wife doesn't think so and he has a rude awakening. So it seems to be a story about race, but it's actually about the kind of conditions that we put on our love.
His wife's discovering actually her husband's love is conditional and he's kind of discovering this too and, you know, they have to make that broken place stronger after this conversation or it will remain broken. So, you know, these are two stories from very distant times, but they have certain themes in common, I think.
Tavis: Speaking of themes, writing is a theme in your family. You are a best-selling writer. Your brother, Jeffrey, also a best-selling writer. How did that happen? The two of you out of the same family. Two Wolffs and both of you -
Wolff: - not only that, but we grew up on opposite ends of the country. He grew up with my father and I grew up with my mother. I grew up out west and he grew up back east and he's eight years older than I. But at a certain point when I was about fourteen, I got back in contact with him after many, many years of not even knowing where he was, but I managed to track him down.
We started sending our stories back and forth to each other. It was very sweet of him because he was a college boy at that time and he was very kind and read my work and encouraged me. Also, the very fact that my older brother, even though I didn't know him well, really thought that writing was cool.
That also encouraged me, you know, just subliminally almost. If he had thought it was trivial or a stupid way to spend your time, that probably would have had an influence on my sense of vocation later on.
Tavis: You think so? Even though there was a distance in the relationship?
Wolff: Yeah. I mean, it's funny. Sometimes distance can make someone even more important to you. You know what I mean? Because if you live with them day after day, you know all the warts and everything, right? Their socks are on the floor and everything and the underwear is hanging off the knob in the bathroom.
But you can romanticize, you know, like a distant father or a distant brother and it gives them a tremendous power over you and a kind of influence. So the fact that he was so helpful and encouraging was definitely a positive step for me in the whole writing life.
Tavis: One-half of the writing Wolffs is with us tonight. His name, of course, Tobias Wolff. His new book, "Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories" from the Stanford professor. Professor Wolff, nice to have you on.
Wolff: Thank you, Tavis.
Tavis: Thanks for your work.
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