Indiana’s literary hero Scott Russell Sanders shares thoughts about his life’s passion
Indiana University and Bloomington are dear to acclaimed essayist and fiction writer Scott Russell Sanders for many reasons: It's where he met his wife of 40 plus years (at an IU science camp during high school), where his two children were born and where he settled in 1971 to teach English.
Now an award-winning author and distinguished professor of English with more than 20 books to his credit -- including novels, collections of stories and works of personal nonfiction -- Sanders recently learned that he will receive the 2009 Mark Twain Award from The Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature, putting him in the company of previous winners that include Toni Morrison, Ray Bradbury and Jonis Agee.
His most recently published book, A Private History of Awe, is a coming-of-age memoir, love story and spiritual testament that was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. A Conservationist Manifesto, his vision of a shift to a sustainable society, will be published in 2009 by IU Press. Sanders spoke with Live at IU about his writing process, his family, his passion for environmentalism -- and even offered some suggestions for aspiring writers.
LIU: When did you realize you wanted to be a writer?
SRS: My earliest ambition was to become a scientist. In fact, I first spent time on the IU campus during the summer before my senior year in high school, studying at a science camp, where I met the girl I would marry. This girl -- Ruth Ann McClure, now my wife of 40 years -- went on to earn a degree in chemistry from IU, and our daughter, Eva Sanders Allen, earned her Ph.D. in biology from IU. (Our son, Jesse, graduated summa cum laude from IU with degrees in history and economics.) I entered college as a physics major, but graduated with a degree in English, having been seduced by the pleasures of literature. As I read modern fiction -- especially work by William Faulkner, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Joseph Conrad -- I began trying my hand at short stories, and then at novels. By the time I began graduate school at the University of Cambridge, I had my heart set on becoming a writer, but it would be many years before I felt I could call myself one.
LIU: How has your writing changed or evolved over the years?
SRS: Of course I hope it has become stronger as I have gained experience. I began by writing fiction, and went on to publish four novels and four collections of short stories. But during the 1980s I began shifting toward nonfiction -- essays, documentary narratives, and memoir -- and this is the work for which I have become most widely known. The latest of these books, a memoir entitled A Private History of Awe, was published in 2006, and in many ways was a culmination of a two-decade effort to reflect on and articulate the values that have shaped my life. As I've grown older, I have felt a greater and greater responsibility toward the generations coming along after me, and that has meant writing about the challenges we face as a society and as a species, the sources of hope, and the ways of healing a troubled world.
LIU: What drew you to Indiana University? What have been the highlights of your experience here?
SRS: Many attractions drew me to IU. I spent a summer here during high school; over the course of that summer I fell in love with a girl and with the campus, met Herman B Wells, reveled in the library and the southern Indiana landscape. When I completed my Ph.D. in 1971 and applied for teaching positions, I was offered several, including ones on both coasts, and my friends in Cambridge urged me to go to one of the big cities, where I would have a better chance of making my way as a writer. But Ruth had grown up in Indiana, her family still lived there, and we shared fond memories of Bloomington. Having been born in Tennessee and grown up in Ohio, I felt that I belonged in the great American interior. This was the region in which I'd come to consciousness, and the place where I was most likely to discover my material as a writer. Highlights of my time at IU are countless.
On the private side, I will mention witnessing the birth of my daughter in January of 1973, the first month that fathers were allowed in the delivery room at Bloomington Hospital; and, four years later, witnessing the birth of my son. On the professional side, I will mention being awarded the Frederick Bachman Lieber Award for Distinguished Teaching, being named a Distinguished Professor, directing the Wells Scholars Program and working alongside some superbly talented writers in the English Department's Creative Writing Program. I am profoundly grateful to have been able to spend my teaching career in such a nourishing place.
LIU: Would you describe your creative process?
SRS: My ideal schedule -- which I'm able to maintain only during summers and periods of leave -- is to write from about 6 a.m. until 10 or 11 a.m., then to read or explore the countryside or work with my hands in the afternoons, and then to spend time with family or friends in the evening. When I'm teaching, if I can find two hours a day to write, I feel fortunate. I have always composed at a keyboard -- first at a manual typewriter, then at an electric typewriter, and for years now at a succession of computers. My handwriting is slow, painful and scarcely legible, so the keyboard is liberating for me. Although I sometimes compose when I'm a writer-in-residence or leading a workshop away from home, I much prefer to sit at the desk in my tiny study, surrounded by natural objects -- stones, wood, sea shells -- and carvings and photographs of my family and favorite places. These talismans remind me of what I love and why I write.
LIU: How did you encourage creative expression in your own kids? Did you find that Bloomington was a good place for supporting creativity in kids?
SRS: Our two children are wonderfully and multiply talented. While they may have acquired certain skills and interests from Ruth and me, they are quite distinct from either of us in the nature of their creativity. And that's as it should be. As they were growing up in Bloomington, we involved them in most of the programs available to children -- Hilltop Gardens, Acting Up theatre, programs at the Monroe County Public Library, ballet and music lessons, gifted and talented programs in the schools, youth sports, the early days of WonderLab. We took them outside as much as we could, to local and state and national parks, to the woods and creeks near Bloomington. We took them to museums, here and elsewhere, including the fine ones in Indianapolis. On our vacations, we camped and studied nature. At home, we made things together -- in the kitchen, in the basement workshop, on the dining room table. We watched very little television, and what we did watch was carefully selected. And we read, read, read! Children are naturally curious and creative. Our first task, as parents, is to allow room for the expression of these innate powers, and to fend off the many influences in our society that would stifle them.
LIU: Do you find that writing nonfiction and fiction require distinctly different processes or a different mindset?
SRS: When I'm writing nonfiction, I am witness to a reality outside myself, to a shared history, a shared world. And I feel a responsibility to render that world as honestly and accurately as I can. When I'm writing fiction, I'm free to invent characters, actions and settings; my only constraint is that I must engage the interest and sympathy of readers. So the differences between the writing of fiction and of nonfiction have less to do with craft than with my relation to the material.
LIU: Do you have a favorite book that you have written?
SRS: That's always a difficult question. It's rather like asking a father with 20 children which of them is his favorite. But I do have a special feeling for Hunting for Hope, which I wrote in response to questions posed by my son and daughter and my students, and for A Private History of Awe, which gives fullest expression to my lifelong spiritual search. My feelings for each of my books are bound up with the circumstances of my life at the time of the writing. For example, I wrote a book of tales called Wilderness Plots at a very happy time in my life, when my children were little, my parents were alive, and I was just getting established as a writer. So I have a fondness for that book, as well, all the more so since five Indiana singer-songwriters recently released an album of music inspired by the tales, and created a stage show featuring their songs and my stories.
LIU: Describe A Conservationist Manifesto and why this work is important to you.
SRS: This book, which IU Press will publish in April 2009, addresses what I take to be the single greatest challenge facing our society, which is to shift from a culture based on consumption to a culture based on conservation, from recklessness to care-taking. At present, merchants and mass media, politicians and pundits, agree in defining us as consumers, as if the purpose of life were to devour the world rather than to savor and preserve it. What I propose instead is that we imagine ourselves as conservers, as stewards of the earth's bounty and beauty. However appealing consumerism may be to our egos, and however profitable it may be for business, it's ruinous for our planet, our communities and our souls. The book argues that a conservation ethic is crucial to addressing such threats as the disruption of global climate, the tattering of the ozone layer, the clear-cutting of forests, the poisoning of lakes by acid rain, the collapse of ocean fisheries, the extinction of species, the looming shortages of oil and fresh water, and the spread of famine and epidemic disease.
In A Conservationist Manifesto, I seek to extend into our own time the tradition of thought we associate with such visionaries as Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, John Muir and Henry David Thoreau. I also seek to honor and uphold the heritage of restraint we can trace back through the frugal habits of the Depression and wartime rationing, through agrarian thrift and frontier ingenuity and the prudent advice of Poor Richard's Almanack; back through the Quakers and Puritans, with their emphasis on material simplicity; and even farther back to the indigenous people who inhabited this continent before it was called America. I want to show that the practice of conservation is our wisest and surest way of caring for our neighbors, for this marvelous planet and for future generations.
LIU: Can you offer some simple tips for aspiring writers?
SRS: Above all, read. Writers begin as enthusiastic and attentive readers. Read widely, but read the highest quality literature you can find. Avoid junk, which dulls your ear and pollutes your mind. Turn off the television. Keep a journal -- not a diary, unless you want to keep a record of your daily doings, but a journal, a place where you record images, ideas, favorite passages from your reading, insights, overheard bits of conversation, drafts and random notes. The journal is your practice room and root cellar. Look for others who are interested in writing, and exchange work with them. You might find other aspiring writers through school or college, through the local library, through an arts center or through the Internet. Pay attention. And keep reading.
LIU: What's next for you or what projects are in the works?
SRS: After years of writing nonfiction, I have recently been drawn back to fiction. Right now I'm working on a novel made up of a series of linked stories. I'm about halfway through, with hopes of finishing a draft by next summer. I've been engaged with the Wilderness Plots show that I mentioned earlier, doing performances with five wonderful musicians. I've been collaborating with one of those musicians, Tim Grimm, on composing a play called Bad Man Ballad, derived from my novel of the same title. Interest in the play has been expressed by Randy White, founder and artistic director of the Cardinal Stage Company, Bloomington's promising new professional theatre. Randy directed a rehearsed reading of the play this past fall, and will direct a weeklong workshop of the play next spring. Beyond these projects, I have, as usual, about five essays or stories in the works, all commissioned for anthologies or keynote addresses. And I have in mind, for the longer term, writing a book about healing and restoration -- of persons, communities, nature and the earth.
LIU: Finally, how do you feel about being the recipient of the Mark Twain Award?
SRS: I only learned that I had even been nominated for the award when the chair of the selection committee called to tell me I had won. The formal award ceremony will take place in Michigan next May, at the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature, but they wanted me to know ahead of time so that I could take part in the conference, including responding to a panel discussion devoted to my work.
The award is gratifying for a number of reasons. Mark Twain was the first writer I read in childhood who woke me up to the possibilities of making literature about the American heartland, using the American vernacular, and he is the only writer from my childhood whom I still read with pleasure and admiration. Previous winners of the award include several of my literary heroes, such as Toni Morrison, Jim Harrison and Wright Morris, as well as other worthies such as Ray Bradbury, Jack Conroy, Harriet Monroe, William Maxwell and Gwendolyn Brooks.
Finally, since I chose to make my career and set my writing here in the heartland, rather than in one of the more glamorous locations on either coast, it's gratifying to be recognized for "distinguished contributions to Midwestern literature."
