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An Interview With Larry Woiwode
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14990 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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9 / 1988 |
4,304 Words |
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Harold Fickett and Gregory Wolfe
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Writer Larry Woiwode, in an exclusive interview for THE WORLD & I with Harold Fickett and Gregory Wolfe, discusses his hopes and concerns.
Q. Writers have seen themselves as craftsmen, magicians, professional liars, unacknowledged legislators, prophets, and media stars. How do you see the writer?
A. As a writer--one who puts together words in a certain way in order to make sense. I'm sure that Shakespeare, who knew his history fairly well, was well versed in human nature, and turned out plays like any good journeyman, would have been appalled to be asked the questions writers today are asked. Or embarrassed. Writers aren't shamans, and the political statements of most of them seem the same empty liberal pieties we've been hearing for twenty years, as if they were issued to writers by some central organization like PEN. In the earlier generation Mailer and Updike were at least original, and often amusing.
Q. Recognition came to you fairly early in life with What I'm Going to Do, I Think, which won the William Faulkner Award for the best first novel of the year. How old were you then? Did the early recognition present any problems for you?
A. I was twenty-seven when the novel came out. It got some good attention and was a best-seller, as I recall, for a while. For four years before that, I had been publishing stories regularly in the New Yorker, so it wasn't as if I rose out of nowhere. But I suspect that the attention my first novel received put pressure on the next, Beyond the Bedroom Wall. I had also become a father, and one always has to
... (1998 of 24208 Characters)
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