In late April, Christopher Buckley graced the halls of LBCC, offering valuable insight about his work with creative writing students. In addition, he was quite gallant and agreed to speak with one of our editors, Bonnie Bolling, about the art and the technique that is creative writing.
bb—You've written many collections of poetry and "Sleepwalk" is one of your books in the genre of creative non-fiction. Why would a prolific writer of poetry approach a creative non-fiction project and does the writing process/approach differ from that of poetry?
CB—Lee Gutkind is known as the “Godfather” of creative nonfiction. He has written many and varied books of nonfiction, has authored text books on the writing of nonfiction, and has, for many years, been one of the most energetic and visible proponents of the genre. He heads the MFA program at the Univ. of Pittsburgh for creative nonfiction and he is the editor of the first and most important literary journals dedicated to nonfiction, Creative Nonfiction. All of this to point out that early on in the life of that journal, in the second or third issue, (they are fast approaching issue # 40), Gutkind focused on poets writing creative nonfiction. In fact that issue was comprised only of poets. I had published an essay in the first issue and I was included in this poet’s issue along with senior writers such as Adrienne Rich. Gutkind’s short editorial essay that opened the issue made the point that creative nonfiction is, on the whole, much closer to poetry than it is to fiction. I know many poets who also write creative nonfiction and very few poets who write fiction; off the top of my head it runs something like twenty-five to one in favor of creative nonfiction.
In creative nonfiction, there is no invention. Period. Contrary to a few famous types who have made it onto TV, the genre does not provide for, admit, embellishment or addition. Unlike fiction then, the writer does not make up characters or plot. The writer knows the “story” and the principals. Creative nonfiction, unlike fiction, is not plot-driven or character-driven. Like poetry, it is theme-driven; there is most often a synthesis of emotion and idea at the center of the writing. And so it is a comfortable and almost natural move for a poet to write creative nonfiction.
How then, they ask, is it “creative.” Simply, creative nonfiction employs the techniques of fiction—dialogue, scene, dramatic arc—in the service of telling a true story. Making the leaps or associations between details and events, choosing which parts of a true narrative are expendable or do not contribute to the theme/focus, realizing the meanings or epiphanies inherent in the connection of facts and events constitute the “creative” aspect of creative, or literary, nonfiction. In his talks and lectures, Gutkind always speaks to his “three Rs”—Real life, Research, Reflection or Rumination. Just as in poetry, time and distance from an event and the writing and re-writing process help the writer realize the larger or deeper meanings of events, large or small.
For narrative poets especially, the transition from one genre to the other seems almost automatic. I was encouraged and helped to write creative nonfiction by Judith Ortiz Cofer whose book Silent Dancing actually combined nonfiction essays and narrative poems. And it was my long time pal Gary Soto who first pushed me in this direction. He was editing an anthology, California Childhood, and suggested I write a piece about my childhood and being a tennis prodigy, all the pushing from my father. At that point in time, Gary had published four poetry books with the Univ. of Pittsburgh Press and at least two creative nonfiction titles, his first, Living up The Street, selling out of a second printing. It was difficult, but not nearly as difficult as I thought it would be. In fact, it was much the same process as writing a long poem—piecing all the bits and details and memories together, going through many re-writes until the theme and overall realization emerged.
Writing my first book of creative nonfiction—Cruising State: Growing Up In Southern California; Univ. of Nevada Press, 1994—took on very much the same process as poetry writing, only the “poems” were longer. The summer I wrote most of the drafts for that book, I just got up every morning, put a yellow legal-sized sheet in the electric typer, checked my note book for the ideas and subjects I had jotted down, picked one, and let her rip. Unedited stream of consciousness, typing as fast as details and memories came, throwing it all against the wall to come back later and see what stuck. I wrote fourteen or fifteen pieces in this rough rough draft form, came back to each to organize and edit a couple times, and the filed them. I was staying in Santa Barbara for the summer, and when I returned to PA where I was then teaching, I spent the next year re-writing and refining those first drafts. I re-wrote each essay ten to twelve times, had editing help from my wife and my friends. Poems generally see thirty to forty drafts, but overall the process of writing nonfiction is very similar to poetry; you are working from your own life and trying to make sense of what has happened and what you observe. The aims are much the same.
bb-Your California/Catholic upbringing surfaces in "Sleepwalk" and also in your poetry. How have these influences formed you as a writer?
CB—Well, the California influence is much more important and resonant than the Catholic. The images from Catholic school and the bizarre tales and people, make their appearance in the early poems. However, overall those images are jumping off points, situations for irony and speculation. I did not believe much that they were dishing out after I was eleven or twelve, but nonetheless, the focus on some possible metaphysical construct behind the physical posed a question which I have continued to try and answer throughout the years, going back and forth between one side and the other.
Early on, I did not much question the poems and subjects as they presented themselves to me; I was just thankful that poems were coming and that they seemed to move in groups that made more or less coherent books. But almost as soon as I took a job in Pennsylvania, I realized that one of my main subjects was “Home.” Home as in “there’s no place like . . . “ That held true for poetry and for especially creative nonfiction. Growing up in Santa Barbara, the Loss of Eden theme was right there for me. And that is true especially in the last ten years or so even though I managed to escape exile to the gulag of PA and get back to California. I have not been able to afford to move back to Santa Barbara and the difference between the environment and the demographics of my youth and present day is dramatic to say the least. Still, these two considerations—cherishing of home and environment and metaphysical speculation–have formed me as a writer.
bb—You teach in the creative writing department at UC-Riverside. Which poets/writers do you specifically require or recommend to your own students as essential reading?
CB—There are a number of poets I recommend as “essential”—more than you can include in any one ten week quarter. The best and most important to my mind and to my teaching experience over the last thirty years is Philip Levine. I think his New Selected Poems is a book every beginning poet should own. I have seen students learn more about writing and the possibilities for their voices from Levine than from anyone else. James Wright, Stanley Kunitz, Stafford, Wm. Matthews, Gerald Stern, Charles Wright, Wislawa Szymborska, Milosz, Vallejo, Neruda, Machado, Lorca, Hernandez, Amichai, Mary Oliver, Larry Levis . . . I could go on but those are the essentials that come immediately to mind.
However, one of the things I think a good writing teacher should be doing is reading constantly and bringing in new and current books to students. Lately we’ve been looking at Dorianne Laux’s Facts About The Moon, Jack Gilbert’s Refusing Heaven, Adam Zagajewski’s selected, Dixie Salazar’s Blood Mysteries, Peter Everwine’s From The Meadow. Newer books I’m adding are Robert Wrigley’s Earthly Meditations and Mark Jarman’s Epistles. And Ed Hirsch, a fine poet, has also put out two books on poetry that are wonderful for poets and which bring energy, passion, and a variety of voices forward—How To Read A Poem and Fall In Love With Poetry and Poet’s Choice.
bb—There are many creative writing programs now. LBCC is a two-year, junior college. What specifics should a transfer student look for when choosing a creative writing program?
CB—First I would say it’s important to assess just how much of an emphasis on creative writing there really is. At UC Riverside we are, and our students are, very fortunate to have an undergraduate major in creative writing as well as a creative writing department which is autonomous. Not many universities have that, so short of that, check to see just how many classes in creative writing are offered in each genre, how many genres (is there creative nonfiction for instance?) and how developed the offerings are. By “developed” I mean are there only one or two courses offered in a genre, or is there a sequence of courses, such as beginning, intermediate, and advanced fiction or poetry workshops. Is it possible to arrange an independent study course?
Is there a reading series, a literary magazine? How well published are the writers who are teaching writing? What can you learn about those writers as teachers of writing? How many writers from the undergraduate program have gone on to MFA or PhD programs in creative writing?
bb—Congratulations on your Guggenheim. What can you tell us about your next project?
CB—Next projects. I am doing the last editing on two new books which are due out in 2008: MODERN HISTORY: Prose Poems 1987-2007 from Tupelo Press, and ROLLING THE BONES, from Eastern Washington Univ. Press.
I have edited and co-edited several anthologies of contemporary poetry. The most successful has been THE GEOGRAPHY OF HOME: California’s Poetry of Place which I co-edited with Gary Young in 1999. Gary and I are at work now on a new anthology, a really BIG and we think ground-breaking anthology: BEAR FLAG REPUBLIC: Prose Poems & Poetics from California. There are about 83 poets from California in there as well as about 25 essays on the prose poem, its function, strategies, and history, as well as the individual processes employed by the poets. There are many senior important poets such as Robert Hass, Milosz, Charles Wright, Philip Levine, Diane Wakoski, Al Young, Luis Omar Salinas, as well as some of the most well known prose poets such as Killarney Clary, Morton Marcus, and of course Gray Young. There are also about twenty or more young poets in their 20s and 30s, just starting out, or with only one book published. So we have a great deal of variety of ages, regions, voices, backgrounds. This will be out in January 2008.
The main project over the next year or so is a New & Selected Poems, that is the project which the Guggenheim Fellowship has provided time for. I need to select among sixteen books and uncollected work and then of course write the “new” poems. My hope is that given this block of time the new poems will come.
In creative nonfiction, there is no invention. Period. Contrary to a few famous types who have made it onto TV, the genre does not provide for, admit, embellishment or addition. Unlike fiction then, the writer does not make up characters or plot. The writer knows the “story” and the principals. Creative nonfiction, unlike fiction, is not plot-driven or character-driven. Like poetry, it is theme-driven; there is most often a synthesis of emotion and idea at the center of the writing. And so it is a comfortable and almost natural move for a poet to write creative nonfiction.
How then, they ask, is it “creative.” Simply, creative nonfiction employs the techniques of fiction—dialogue, scene, dramatic arc—in the service of telling a true story. Making the leaps or associations between details and events, choosing which parts of a true narrative are expendable or do not contribute to the theme/focus, realizing the meanings or epiphanies inherent in the connection of facts and events constitute the “creative” aspect of creative, or literary, nonfiction. In his talks and lectures, Gutkind always speaks to his “three Rs”—Real life, Research, Reflection or Rumination. Just as in poetry, time and distance from an event and the writing and re-writing process help the writer realize the larger or deeper meanings of events, large or small.
For narrative poets especially, the transition from one genre to the other seems almost automatic. I was encouraged and helped to write creative nonfiction by Judith Ortiz Cofer whose book Silent Dancing actually combined nonfiction essays and narrative poems. And it was my long time pal Gary Soto who first pushed me in this direction. He was editing an anthology, California Childhood, and suggested I write a piece about my childhood and being a tennis prodigy, all the pushing from my father. At that point in time, Gary had published four poetry books with the Univ. of Pittsburgh Press and at least two creative nonfiction titles, his first, Living up The Street, selling out of a second printing. It was difficult, but not nearly as difficult as I thought it would be. In fact, it was much the same process as writing a long poem—piecing all the bits and details and memories together, going through many re-writes until the theme and overall realization emerged.
Writing my first book of creative nonfiction—Cruising State: Growing Up In Southern California; Univ. of Nevada Press, 1994—took on very much the same process as poetry writing, only the “poems” were longer. The summer I wrote most of the drafts for that book, I just got up every morning, put a yellow legal-sized sheet in the electric typer, checked my note book for the ideas and subjects I had jotted down, picked one, and let her rip. Unedited stream of consciousness, typing as fast as details and memories came, throwing it all against the wall to come back later and see what stuck. I wrote fourteen or fifteen pieces in this rough rough draft form, came back to each to organize and edit a couple times, and the filed them. I was staying in Santa Barbara for the summer, and when I returned to PA where I was then teaching, I spent the next year re-writing and refining those first drafts. I re-wrote each essay ten to twelve times, had editing help from my wife and my friends. Poems generally see thirty to forty drafts, but overall the process of writing nonfiction is very similar to poetry; you are working from your own life and trying to make sense of what has happened and what you observe. The aims are much the same.
bb-Your California/Catholic upbringing surfaces in "Sleepwalk" and also in your poetry. How have these influences formed you as a writer?
CB—Well, the California influence is much more important and resonant than the Catholic. The images from Catholic school and the bizarre tales and people, make their appearance in the early poems. However, overall those images are jumping off points, situations for irony and speculation. I did not believe much that they were dishing out after I was eleven or twelve, but nonetheless, the focus on some possible metaphysical construct behind the physical posed a question which I have continued to try and answer throughout the years, going back and forth between one side and the other.
Early on, I did not much question the poems and subjects as they presented themselves to me; I was just thankful that poems were coming and that they seemed to move in groups that made more or less coherent books. But almost as soon as I took a job in Pennsylvania, I realized that one of my main subjects was “Home.” Home as in “there’s no place like . . . “ That held true for poetry and for especially creative nonfiction. Growing up in Santa Barbara, the Loss of Eden theme was right there for me. And that is true especially in the last ten years or so even though I managed to escape exile to the gulag of PA and get back to California. I have not been able to afford to move back to Santa Barbara and the difference between the environment and the demographics of my youth and present day is dramatic to say the least. Still, these two considerations—cherishing of home and environment and metaphysical speculation–have formed me as a writer.
bb—You teach in the creative writing department at UC-Riverside. Which poets/writers do you specifically require or recommend to your own students as essential reading?
CB—There are a number of poets I recommend as “essential”—more than you can include in any one ten week quarter. The best and most important to my mind and to my teaching experience over the last thirty years is Philip Levine. I think his New Selected Poems is a book every beginning poet should own. I have seen students learn more about writing and the possibilities for their voices from Levine than from anyone else. James Wright, Stanley Kunitz, Stafford, Wm. Matthews, Gerald Stern, Charles Wright, Wislawa Szymborska, Milosz, Vallejo, Neruda, Machado, Lorca, Hernandez, Amichai, Mary Oliver, Larry Levis . . . I could go on but those are the essentials that come immediately to mind.
However, one of the things I think a good writing teacher should be doing is reading constantly and bringing in new and current books to students. Lately we’ve been looking at Dorianne Laux’s Facts About The Moon, Jack Gilbert’s Refusing Heaven, Adam Zagajewski’s selected, Dixie Salazar’s Blood Mysteries, Peter Everwine’s From The Meadow. Newer books I’m adding are Robert Wrigley’s Earthly Meditations and Mark Jarman’s Epistles. And Ed Hirsch, a fine poet, has also put out two books on poetry that are wonderful for poets and which bring energy, passion, and a variety of voices forward—How To Read A Poem and Fall In Love With Poetry and Poet’s Choice.
bb—There are many creative writing programs now. LBCC is a two-year, junior college. What specifics should a transfer student look for when choosing a creative writing program?
CB—First I would say it’s important to assess just how much of an emphasis on creative writing there really is. At UC Riverside we are, and our students are, very fortunate to have an undergraduate major in creative writing as well as a creative writing department which is autonomous. Not many universities have that, so short of that, check to see just how many classes in creative writing are offered in each genre, how many genres (is there creative nonfiction for instance?) and how developed the offerings are. By “developed” I mean are there only one or two courses offered in a genre, or is there a sequence of courses, such as beginning, intermediate, and advanced fiction or poetry workshops. Is it possible to arrange an independent study course?
Is there a reading series, a literary magazine? How well published are the writers who are teaching writing? What can you learn about those writers as teachers of writing? How many writers from the undergraduate program have gone on to MFA or PhD programs in creative writing?
bb—Congratulations on your Guggenheim. What can you tell us about your next project?
CB—Next projects. I am doing the last editing on two new books which are due out in 2008: MODERN HISTORY: Prose Poems 1987-2007 from Tupelo Press, and ROLLING THE BONES, from Eastern Washington Univ. Press.
I have edited and co-edited several anthologies of contemporary poetry. The most successful has been THE GEOGRAPHY OF HOME: California’s Poetry of Place which I co-edited with Gary Young in 1999. Gary and I are at work now on a new anthology, a really BIG and we think ground-breaking anthology: BEAR FLAG REPUBLIC: Prose Poems & Poetics from California. There are about 83 poets from California in there as well as about 25 essays on the prose poem, its function, strategies, and history, as well as the individual processes employed by the poets. There are many senior important poets such as Robert Hass, Milosz, Charles Wright, Philip Levine, Diane Wakoski, Al Young, Luis Omar Salinas, as well as some of the most well known prose poets such as Killarney Clary, Morton Marcus, and of course Gray Young. There are also about twenty or more young poets in their 20s and 30s, just starting out, or with only one book published. So we have a great deal of variety of ages, regions, voices, backgrounds. This will be out in January 2008.
The main project over the next year or so is a New & Selected Poems, that is the project which the Guggenheim Fellowship has provided time for. I need to select among sixteen books and uncollected work and then of course write the “new” poems. My hope is that given this block of time the new poems will come.
