An Interview with Emily Barton

West 10th: Have you ever worked on a student literary journal? What do you see as the purpose or potential of such publications?

Emily Barton: In college I served on the fiction boards of the Harvard Advocate and another, alternative magazine called Padan Aram. One of my favorite things about student literary journals is that people really read them—budding writers are able to share their work with the community, get feedback, and see the diversity of what other young writers are working on. Journals also provide an opportunity for professors to come to know their students in a different light.

West 10th: In your review of Francine Prose’s “Reading Like A Writer,” you wrote that because of their “poisonous atmosphere,” you “used to inveigh against writing workshops —right up until the day I started teaching one.” Can you elaborate on your perception of the value of workshops?

Emily Barton: When workshops at Iowa went badly (and they sometimes did, despite my teachers’ and peers’ many gifts) one of two situations seemed to arise: 1) A deeply flawed story would land on the table—one whose premise was shaky, or whose grammar was unintelligible—and no one would have the strength of character to talk to the writer frankly about the ways in which the story might improve, or 2) A cabal of students who were chiefly interested in “expressing themselves” (whatever that means) would complain that an author had no right to use sophisticated vocabulary or to write about any topic more intellectually demanding than that of the standard workshop Boy Goes Fly-Fishing With His Dad and/or His Dog and Has Some Kind of Epiphany story. As a result, the workshop could at intervals feel fakey-fake nice—to the detriment of writers’ real growth—and normative in a way that never sat right with me. It sometimes seemed that that aim of a workshop was to make all the stories conform to a single pattern, when clearly the aim should rather be to help each story become more fully itself.

When I began teaching my own workshops, I realized I could address these issues with my own students right from the start by setting the standards for workshop behavior higher. I could teach them to read intelligently and critically, and model a manner of delivering a critique honestly but kindly. I could explicitly state my goal of helping each writer grow in whatever ways she most required, and encourage them to adopt a similar stance.

I believe workshops are valuable not only for the ways in which they improve student writing, but also for the ways in which they improve student reading. Often a workshop is the first classroom setting in which a student is required to become awake to the wild complexities of language.

West 10th: Tell us the best writing advice you’ve received.

Emily Barton: My husband routinely reminds me that a little writing is better than no writing; if I wrote only a word or day, a hundred thousand days from now I’d have a novel, whereas if I wrote no words a day, I’d have no novel. The fact that I won’t be alive 273 years from now to see that word-a-day novel completed is immaterial; it’s helpful to remember that a little work is infinitely better than none.

West 10th: What would you advise students to look for when comparing MFA programs?

Emily Barton: When my students ask for advice about MFA programs, I always tell them that the most important thing about attending one is not to get yourself into debt in the process: An MFA isn’t a law degree, and there’s no clear way of earning that money back once you get out. So once you’ve chosen programs to apply to based on their reputation, their faculty, the recommendations of others who’ve gone there, choose the one that offers you a scholarship or in-state tuition and a teaching fellowship.

West 10th: Who’s your favorite fictional character?

Emily Barton: There are so many. But at this moment, I’ll pick Daniel Deronda.

West 10th: When did you realize you wanted to be a writer?

Emily Barton: I always knew I wanted to write. I loved to read, and like many only children I had a fertile imagination and time on my hands, so I was writing novels at a very young age. When I knew I wanted to “be a writer” is more complicated. I suppose the answer is “always,” but I didn’t take it for granted that it would come to pass. I always imagined myself having some other career, though what it might be remained nebulous. While I was writing The Testament of Yves Gundron, I hoped it would someday be published, but I also accepted that it might not be, that fiction writing might end up being my hobby. I would have been okay with that.

West 10th: How long did you work on your first novel?

Emily Barton: My first published novel? I actually wrote it very quickly; I think it took nine or 10 months from the day I started writing it to the day I sold it. My second novel took something more like seven years.

West 10th: What’s it like to look back on the writing you did as a student? Do you have a sense of the things you or other writers lose and gain at different life stages?

Emily Barton: Well, I’ve grown up a lot since I was a student. I’m interested in broader topics and in writing about more different kinds of life experiences. I think this is a natural progression and that most writers (and most people who mature successfully) go through it. Also, it was the heyday of minimalism when I was a student: No writer was more revered than Ray Carver. So I was trying to write a kind of minimal, domestic fiction. As it turns out, my talents lie elsewhere, and as I’ve grown older I’ve grown more comfortable with writing what I want to rather than what prevailing tastes dictate I should.

West 10th: What do you use as a bookmark?

Emily Barton: Anything at hand. I also don’t scruple to fold down corners on books that I own. If I’ve borrowed them I treat them more kindly.

West 10th: Is there still a significance assigned to gender in the literary world, and if there is, how would you characterize it?

Emily Barton: This is a vast question. Francine Prose published an excellent article, “Scent of a Woman’s Ink,” on the topic in Harper’s in June 1998. She concludes, “There will always be categories into which fiction falls, standards that have less to do with stereotype and preconception than with originality and revelation, with the ability to translate life—in all its simple and endlessly mysterious complexity—onto the printed page. But there is no male or female language, only the truthful or the fake, the precise or the vague, the inspired or the pedestrian.” To deny that I’m a woman writer would be absurd; what I generally deny is that this fact has any real significance to my work or its place in the world.

West 10th: Who do you read when you’re feeling blocked?

Emily Barton: I don’t think I experience what people call writer’s block. I’m not always writing, but usually there’s a good reason for it. I always turn back to George Eliot when I need advice. At her best, she plots a novel better than anyone I’ve read, and her insight into and compassion for her characters is unparalleled. When she’s having an off year, her novels can get badly out of control. I find it heartening that she’s capable of both of these things.

West 10th: Are books sacred, or are you a spine-breaking margin-scribbler?

Emily Barton: The latter, unless a book belongs to a library or a friend.

West 10th: Guilty pleasures: Is there a book you love that you’re hesitant to own up to?

Emily Barton: I don’t have a thing for any particular raunchy or cheesy book, but my taste in film is more catholic. Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein and The Producers are on the list, as is Hayao Miyazaki’s Kiki’s Delivery Service.

West 10th: Your website links to “I Can Has Cheezburger” and “Cats That Look Like Hitler.” What’s that about.

Emily Barton: A) I like cats. B) Some cats really do look like Hitler, which is funny, even though Hitler is never supposed to be funny. (See exception for The Producers, above.) C) “I Can Has Cheezburger” is doing as much to upend mainstream spoken English as anything has since, say, Public Enemy in the 1980s. And also features cats.

Emily Barton is the author of two novels, The Testament of Yves Gundron and Brookland, both of which were named New York Times Notable Books. In 2006 she received a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.