MARY

TOM BARBASH

He doesn't know this, but I first saw Tom Barbash at an after-party for a mutual friend who had just finished reading from his fourth book. I'd heard Tom was going to teach a nonfiction workshop at St. Mary's where I attended, and I was encouraged to introduce myself to him. But I was feeling shy and I didn't necessarily want to know my professor before class had even started. What if he was a jerk? So I sidled up by the food table and eavesdropped on Tom as he laughed and told jokes with friends. Recon accomplished: Not a jerk.
    Still, personalities have a way of changing depending on the setting, and I wondered if he'd be different in the classroom. My worry was unfounded. Tom has proven just as affable on campus as he was that long-ago evening. More than that, he's shown himself to be a knowledgeable resource, always handing us copies of essays or excerpts that respond to issues we've discussed in class or reminding us of ideas from literature's long tradition. (Tom once lectured us about the importance of the objective correlative.) He's also constantly offering to read work you've written outside of class or, heck, work you'll write after his tenure as a visiting writer at St. Mary's. His accessibility and enthusiasm is startling and welcome, like a very sweet puppy dog, albeit a very informed and talented puppy.
    In person, Tom is given to loose-necked button-downs, jeans, and sudden grins. On Wednesday afternoons, he lopes into class with a backpack slung over one shoulder, settles into a seat, and asks how we're doing. Most of us are unpublished and struggling with unruly paragraphs, so the answer is usually an anemic "Okay," but Tom transmits an infectious confidence about our efforts and each week feels a little better than the last.
    Of course he's an authority on the writing game, having under his belt The Last Good Chance (Picador, 2002), a novel that's drawn comparisons to Richard Russo's work, and On Top of the World: Cantor Fitzgerald, Howard Lutnick, and 9/11, A Story of Loss and Renewal (HarperCollins, 2003), an account of brokerage firm Cantor Fitzgerald after the attacks on the World Trade Center. Tom very generously sat down with MARY Magazine on a blue-sky day to discuss his latest writing project, the benefit of writing programs, and how cats contribute to the writing life.

Cielo Lutino
March 2007
Moraga, California

"Anyone who's avoiding nonfiction because they think it's a dryer form of fiction is nuts."

MARY Magazine: You're coming out with a collection of short stories soon. Can you tell us a little bit about it? Are the stories linked, or what issues, formal or otherwise, you tackled with this work that you hadn't addressed previously?

Tom Barbash: There are a lot of stories about family. I think I recognized the links and the themes in the stories after having written them. Uncomfortable relationships within families. There's death in some of the stories or divorce. Usually there's some sense of loss and a lack of understanding about that loss and often characters acting to make amends for those losses in inappropriate ways. I'm interested in how people misunderstand each other and misunderstand themselves and act in ways that, ultimately, if you step back from it, you can figure out what it means, but at the time, you probably didn't know. You thought it meant something else. A lot of my short fiction seems to focus on those sorts of things.
    They're from all different perspectives, too. One story is from a fifteen-year-old kid's point of view—I have two stories from kids' points of view, but I have, you know, a father, a husband. I have four stories from the point of view of women. A couple of them take place around bad car accidents, but these are things that surface at the end of it. A couple of them were written while I was writing the novel, and then I just had a binge. I went to the Yaddo Colony, and I wrote something like ten stories while I was there and kept five of them. I was only there for only six weeks, so it felt like a really productive, good period.

MM: Why do some ideas take the form of a short story and some, a novel?

TB: Well, with the novel, I began with place. I'm a New York city kid. I grew up on the seventeenth floor of an apartment building near Central Park west, and I lived in this small town in upstate New York. It was such a different life for me; my eyes were sort of wide open about the place. And it was I think, in many ways, a beautiful, dying town, a town that bloomed at the turn of the century with great, old Victorians and a lot of space and a beautiful lake. But it had a shadow side as well. So I think I needed a broad canvas since I wanted to do something about this place. I mean, I populated it with four main characters, but the novel represents just about everything I knew about anything from any aspect of my life from that point.
    A short story is much more focused and intense. I usually begin with a voice. I have some sort of a character wanting something and not getting it. Or I can start with a single image. I have one short story that began because I was invited by a friend of mine to a room in which there were photographs of the family that my friend had joined, that her mother had married into. And there were these spectacular shots of these kids traveling to these exotic locations and I wondered what it would be like to suddenly find yourself in this glamorous family and feel less glamorous than the rest of them and maybe a little bit isolated from the sort of conversations that had been taking place for years. And so, just from sitting in that room and looking at the photographs, I began to imagine a life. I can begin with something like that and find myself a way into a story.

MM: Do you outline? Do you begin with a sense of where a story is going to go and the meaning behind it?

TB: No. I don't really know what it's going to mean, and I don't usually outline. And when I'm working well, I can write a lot in one, extended, long breath, and then I can go back and figure out what it is I was doing and what I said. But with the stories—and in a lot of sections of the novel—it very much is putting a character into a situation, almost a form of Method acting. I step into that particular moment and then I'm watching it evolve in front of me. I mean, there is a lot of control to it, too. There are certain things you manipulate as a writer, but when you're working really well, it does have that sort of dreamy quality.

MM: Can you talk about revision and how you approach that?

TB: Yeah, I'm pretty obsessive, as you know from what I've talked about in class. I read things over and over again.

MM: What are you reading for?

TB: Sound, to see how the words sound. And for meaning, if I've used some sort of abstraction when I can be more specific, to see if I'm sort of full of it in certain sections where I'm trying to say something meaningful but I haven't said anything that's particularly interesting.
    I look for energy and see if there are areas that are sort of flat and things that I thought were essential but weren't, that don't further the story in some sort of way. So I try to look for problems, and I'm pretty good at that at this point.

MM: Would you describe your writerly identity, or how you present your work, as realist or realism?

TB: Well, that was written on the back of the book, you know: Am I a realist? I suppose so. I think my stories are stranger than traditional realism.

MM: In what way?

TB: I like to focus on people in a period in which they're a little off in some way. I have one story, "The Break," in which a mother starts almost to stalk her son at night. It has more to do with her husband who has left her, but she ends up following her son out on a date in her nightgown with a coat on. Seems like a lot of my characters are in situations that they could have never imagined that they would be in. I like that kind of strangeness, and I don't suppose there's anything sort of magic—there's nothing that takes you out of something that could actually happen.
    I think there are tremendous possibilities in realism, but I am drawn, both in what I teach and what I like to read, to strange moments in people's lives.

MM: Having written nonfiction yourself, can you talk about what realism might mean in a genre like literary nonfiction, which encompasses writings about "the truth" by writers with wildly divergent approaches? Jo Ann Beard and John McPhee, for example.

TB: Yeah, I'm very excited about the collision of fiction and nonfiction, the idea of creating a text that's dramatic using one's storytelling abilities and descriptive abilities and ability to get at deeper truths and to apply that to the so-called "truth." A lot of what I put into my fiction has either happened to me or to someone I know, so it actually is mostly drawn from real things.
    And then in nonfiction—you talked about Jo Ann Beard. She really employs a kind of layered text in which there may be three or four different storylines going, and one informs the other and she can say one thing that's true in one section but that has a deeper truth in another current of the story. So, as a "realist," as a fiction writer, I guess I'm excited about what is possible, it seems to me, in nonfiction. Anybody who's avoiding nonfiction because they think it's a drier form of fiction is nuts. Because it has all the possibility of fiction.
    One of the pieces I like to teach is Janet Malcolm's "Forty-One False Starts" in which she has forty-one first paragraphs of a feature on a painter. So she comes at it from all those different angles and she never ties it up and that's the piece. It has all the imagination and experimentation of a good piece of fiction, and all of it is true.
    I encourage all my students in nonfiction to write fiction, and I encourage all my students in fiction to write nonfiction. I'm doing both, and I think it's possible for the rest of us, too.

MM: How has writing nonfiction helped or hurt your fiction?

TB: Well, it gets you out into the world. The life of a fiction writer and professor is one in which you meet with your students, but there's not a lot of other contact with the outside world. You go into your office, you spend many hours there—and necessarily. You have to do that. And I think that when you do a work of nonfiction, especially when there's some reporting to it in one way or another, it throws you out into the world. And I think the self-examination, if it's memoir, especially is important, and the better you know yourself, it can only have a positive effect on your fiction writing. So, yeah, I think in ways it's helpful.

MM: Are you working on more nonfiction in the long form?

TB: Yep. I just did a five-year follow-up on Cantor Fitzgerald for Business Week, and that was interesting. I'm going to do more work for them. I just proposed—[Barbash laughs]—I better keep quiet about what the next one is, or someone will scoop me. But they're looking for good writing, so I would definitely do magazine. I've been doing book reviews for the Times and the Chronicle. I find that fun and interesting.

MM: How does that help your writing? I know some writers who think that doing book reviews is really kind of hurtful. They end up editing themselves because they're looking so critically at other works.

TB: I think teaching can do that to you as a writer. It can get you constantly thinking in that mode, not submitting to the text, looking at sentences and wanting to correct them all the time rather than dropping into the dream of it.
    And reviewing is very demanding. I find it really, really intellectually demanding and very hard work, but I think it's ultimately rewarding. A lot of terrific writers write reviews. It's a demanding form, but it's really important in a way because books really depend on reviews. And I think they depend on a reviewer who does a thorough job and who takes it on its own terms. They don't necessarily need to like or dislike it, but they need to spend time with the book and not do a superficial job of it. So, I feel like it's giving back to a certain extent. If I want a life of letters, if I want to be a writer, I want to be a part of the writing world and community. It's something that I feel I'm contributing, and it's important. I wish more people could do it and do it really well. I think there's a lot of bad, sort of shoddy reviewing that's out there.

MM: What exactly do you mean by "reviewing it on its own terms"? What does that mean for a reviewer and also for a reader?

TB: Oh, I think—and this is what I'd say to any writing class—it means not imposing your aesthetic onto a book. Try to imagine what the book is trying to be or what form it's in and see if it's succeeding on its own terms, rather than you saying if you love detective fiction and you like that kind of pace and you're reading something that's much slower and meditative, and you criticize it for not being fast-paced enough or vice versa, then you're not taking it on its own terms. It still might fail on its own terms, but you have to read it in terms of what it is.
    And I think that's true in any sort of writing class. If you're looking at your friend's manuscript, you may want to turn it into something else, depending on the type of writer you are, but it's best to sort of figure out what they're trying to do and say, "Well, how can I make this be the sort of work that they seem to heading towards?"

MM: Can you talk about your writing routine, if you have one?

TB: Yeah, I like to work in the morning, but when I'm in the middle of a book, I'm working pretty much all day. I need naps. I'm a big fan of naps. I feel like a good nap gives me two writing days. If I work in the morning and I take a nap, I wake up and I pretend it's a new day. I get started again.
    It's tougher to get long stretches of writing time when I'm teaching, so that's what summers are for. Seven days a week.

MM: For how long? You said before all day, but that's in the summer. For someone like Hemingway, "all day" may be something like six hours or, if you're Gertrude Stein, half an hour.

TB: Three-and-a-half, four hours a day.

MM: I find that really a relief to hear. I know some people who say "eight hours," and I think to myself, Who are you?

TB: I think in the middle of a project you do. When I wrote On Top of the World, the deadline was short, I worked sixteen hours a day. Literally, I would wake up and I'd go all day long on it until the night. And at the end of it, there was such a rush. I had my two editors from HarperCollins in the other room at my stepmother's apartment, waiting for pages. They'd edit it and turn it back, so we were really just right up against the gun, working around the clock.

MM: You're teaching now. Can you talk about the proliferation of writing programs and why you think writing classes persist?

TB: Hopefully, it's connected to a love of reading. I think that the first step towards being a writer is that you love to read and you want to reproduce whatever it is you're admiring.
    So why have they persisted? Because they're effective, for the most part. I think how I would define a writing program is: You could learn these things on your own, but if you take a class with me or you take a class with Lysley [Tenorio] or you take a class with Brenda [Hillman], we could save you two years. I think people want to get better, faster, and having a decent teacher who puts the right books down in front of you—a big part of it is just knowing what to give the students to read, noticing their tendencies, noticing when they're falling off course. It also gives you a sense, when you're in a writing program, you don't fall into that existential pit where you feel no one's going to read your work. You know when you're up [in workshop], people are going to read your work, and it's a little more exciting. It feels a little bit more important to you, and I think that's a good thing.

MM: So what's the best piece of writing advice you've ever heard?

TB: That's a good question. I remember one writer early in the process telling me to treat it as a job and punch the clock each day and be in that room and to understand that, if you sit there in the first half hour and nothing is happening, you still might be headed towards a terrific writing day. It might happen in your second hour, it might happen in your third hour. But if you don't put in those hours, you don't ever find that out. And I think, up to that point, I had fooled around with writing stories—we all do at some stage—but I think if it wasn't coming to me, you know, I'd quit after fifteen minutes. It seems like, in most things, if it's not happening, why waste the time? And knowing that, No, it was my job now to go do that, I think that was one thing.
    Another thing you don't realize when you first start to write is how many drafts you have to put the work through and how exciting the draft process is. Because we have a good burst of writing and we fall in love with it and we think, "Oh, boy, I don't want to touch this." And you can't really see the flaws and you don't want to see the flaws and you're very defensive and that idea of being open to the possibility that things can be improved—those are two big things.

MM: So what happens when you have a draft? You were saying you look at it, but do you share it?

TB: Eventually I do. I have some close friends, and that's one of the things I'd say to you guys: I went through the program at Iowa and Stanford, and in both cases I got three or four good readers who are some of my best friends. We read each other's work still to this day. We're all acknowledged in each other's books, so we're first readers for each other and we're hard readers. I always know I'm going to get a good read on whatever I write, and that loosens me up a bit.
    I share it before I show my agent or my editor. You definitely show it to your friends, and you share many drafts. Actually, you have to spread out the readings a bit. You can't ask someone to read your four hundred-page novel four times without doing that.

MM: How does poetry inform your practice?

TB: I like to read it, and I took a seminar in it at Stanford. And if you read poetry, it's almost impossible to be lazy about language after you've read it. It sort of sharpens your sense of the line. I don't pretend to be able to write poetry, but I can admire it and learn from it, but I don't think, of all the genres I've moved into, it'll be one I'll enter into.
    I'm a bit intimidated by poets, for whatever reason. I feel like whatever they do is harder than what we do. I think what we do is harder in other ways.

MM: You've talked in class about "mentor books," those books that mentor whatever a person is writing. Does the mentor change with each piece of writing, or are there unchanging touchstone texts?

TB: I guess my most intense reading experience was Anna Karenina in terms of just falling in love with a book and feeling I could be at a party or having a great time and feeling still this need to get back to that book because it was so vivid and intense and insightful. That book blew me away. In fact, I learned a lot about how you structure a novel with multiple, close third-person point of view, which is ultimately what I wrote.
    Another book I learned a ton from, a very sad book, but Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road. It's just incredible, a really, really smart, dark book, but I like it very much. It helped me a lot. He's just a wonderful writer.
    I read different things depending on what I'm working on. I read so much. I guess I have to for teaching and for reviewing and I just like to stay on top of what's being published. And my tastes are really wide and every time I get excited about a book I've just read, I feel like I've learned something that's sparked my imagination, wanting to write something that's closer to what that writer's doing. I think you're better off as a writer figuring out what you can and can't do, but also being open to the possibility that you're going to go through transformations as a writer. You're going to evolve and that's an exciting thing and if you do, you're not going to be bored with your work. So I like to expose myself to new forms and not tell myself I'm this type of writer or that type of writer or reader.

MM: Is there something you find is a common mistake or trap that beginning writers can fall into?

TB: A lot of it has to do with creating a consciousness on the page. Whether it's in fiction or in nonfiction, you're creating a psychology of personality, a mood that you're writing from that doesn't get travel-brochure dry where there's sort of random details placed down but details are informed by a particular sensibility. In nonfiction, it's often the narrator and their particular connection to the past or to the person they're describing. That sort of pressure on personality and on the sentence, and there are ways to teach that and to insure that you create that in your work. It takes a long time for me to describe it exactly and I try and do that in a class, but when it happens, you can feel it. I think all the mistakes arise from that, when the distance is too great, when the writer is borrowing phrases from outside the material. They've dropped down some sort of familiar cliché or some packaged way of describing something. It's not organically coming from the story and how you get that—it's tricky, mysterious stuff. But I'm obsessed with learning how to do it and obsessed with learning how to teach it.

MM: What's the deal with writers and cats? You know—Cortàzar, Tom Barbash, Pete Rock?

TB: That's right. Well, I married into my feline relationship, but they give you space. I mean, they're perfect. They give you a lot of time, and they're complicated, too. You have to be able to read them in some sort of way and understand their moods. It's intellectually satisfying.