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Writing Careers
Interviews with Professional Writers |
By Todd Campbell
[I
was not too certain that I would remember her, even though I had worked to
memorize the pictures from her jacket covers, but I relaxed as I saw a
somewhat familiar face walk through the door of El Maguey, her eyes calmly
appraising the situation.
I stood up to greet Dr. Amy Blackmarr, author of Going to
Ground: Simple Life on a Georgia Pond, a collection of essays
chronicling her five-year sojourn on her late grandfather’s farm and
fishing pond in Lax, Georgia, and House of Steps: Finding the Way Home,
essays which depict two years of her life in McLouth, Kansas where she
pursued her Ph. D. at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.
She removed her coat, gloves, and hat and, tossing them onto the
bench, settled into the booth across from me.
The waitress came and we ordered dinner and drinks and dove into
the chips and salsa.]
How
did you start writing?
Is writing what you wanted to do "when you grew up" or
did it just happen?
I think
professional writers have always written, but in some cases our writing
has taken various forms. In my case I was a musician so I wrote songs and poems and
letters that I slaved over. I
edited my letters, which should have told me early on, even when I was
eleven or twelve years old when I was writing long letters.
Even through my years as a secretary I wrote, I wrote what came to
me, and then I went to a writer’s conference at a college, the first
time I knew they had such a thing. Julie
Garwood gave a talk and read some children’s stories I had written, so
we became better acquainted. When
I left the conference, I was so excited; I thought, “I want to do
this!” I really loved it; I had always loved writing, but that’s
when I started seriously thinking about making writing a career.
How
did you end up getting an agent and/or your contract the first time?
When I
was living at the cabin and attending classes at Valdosta State, the
campus newspaper asked if I could do a column.
I told them I couldn’t do a column, but maybe I could do this
nature writing. Sometime
later I read two of my essays at a poetry reading, and someone asked me,
“Have you ever thought about submitting these to public radio?”
I said, “No, not really,” but I thought I’d give it a try, so
I went to ABAC—Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College—and a friend there
got me in the studio.
We taped a few essays and sent them off.
To my surprise, Susanna Capelouto called me a few days later and
said, “I’d like to have these three times a month.”
I started writing the pieces for the newspaper and changed them for
radio. I
attended the Sand Hills Writers’ Conference in Augusta that year and
took some of my column/essays.
Nick Taylor, who has written a number of books, was judging the
essays and took these early drafts.
We had a number of conversations and got to know each other pretty
well. The
next year I took Nick more of the essays which would later go into Going
to Ground, my Master’s thesis at Valdosta State.
I told him that this was the first book I wanted to submit for
publication and asked him to critique it when I finished writing it.
He said he would, and a few weeks after I sent the completed book
to him in New York, he called to ask if he could show it to his agent.
Of course, I said, “Yes.” A few weeks later she called me and
said, “I love your book and I think I can sell it.
Would you like me to represent you?”
She sent me a contract and three weeks later she sold my book to
Viking Press. On
one level you could say it went really fast; on another level, I worked a
long time to get to that moment.
What
would you say is the most difficult hurdle for writers to overcome,
besides the obvious difficulty in getting published and maintaining
marketability?
The great
challenge of all writers, especially writers who think they know anything,
is that they want to sit down and tell you everything they know.
The challenge for a writer, especially one with a decent intellect,
is to move that ego aside and let that writing come through and be what it
is. If
you sit down with the intention of where something is going to go, then
that is where it ends up and you have limited that piece of writing to the
very small piece of knowledge that your small intellect can come up with.
What
is the most important element to your success as a personal essayist?
It
is about intimacy; you can’t think about the reader when you’re
writing anything.
It’s funny because you do it on two levels.
On one level that’s all you can think about but on the other
level you have to completely ignore it.
It’s sort of a divided consciousness:
you don’t want to have so many intentions that you sit down and
tell the writing what to do, you want to let the writing tell you what to
do. To
connect to the intimacy issue, the deeper into yourself you are able to
go, the harder into the mirror you are able to look, the more honest you
can be with yourself, the more one you connect with every person out
there. As
Montaigne said, “Every man has inside himself the entire human
condition,” and that’s the whole reason to write because after all,
who am I anyway?
The inner world and the outer world reflect each other. . . . Do
you enjoy your journaling?
I do.
In fact I spent about a year and a few months where I would read
one of the Psalms from the Book of Psalms and write a journal entry.
It got to the point where I wrote just to write and I didn’t care
what other people thought.
In the journal for this class, I write, but I’m not writing
because she’s my instructor, I simply write.
I really don’t care what other people think.
When I do care what other people think, it changes me . . .
It changes
the writing too.
And I
can’t have that.
If
you start thinking about that, you freeze up.
And
that’s when “the block,” well, . . .
You
mean there is such a thing?
Well,
some people are superstitious . . .
I’m
not superstitious.
I believe you create your own reality.
In fact, if you were to take one central idea that’s at the
center of everything I write, that’s it.
It’s about seeing and not seeing, it’s about perception and how
we choose to perceive and choose not to perceive and how what we perceive
orders our reality or throws it into chaos.
Life is about seeing beyond the illusion we see as reality.
In Going to Ground and House of Steps, you deal with
fear. In Going
to Ground you deal with fears of sounds and critters and such, and a
similar fear enters House of Steps in
a particular chapter where you encounter a number of situations, including
sneaking up on the “neighbor’s house” only to discover it is yours.
What impact, if any, does fear have in your writing?
I was terrified to write those books, but you
ignore the fear.
You can choose a different genre, you can choose to write in
fiction where you can distance yourself a bit more from those things
you’re talking about in your writing class.
But when your genre is nonfiction, when your genre is the personal
essay, you’re stuck; you are your subject whether you like it or not.
The late Jim Kilgo at the University of Georgia told me he didn’t
think I had written enough, he told me I hadn’t gone deep enough, and I
can see his point because I did stay away from a number of gritty details.
Life is overcoming our fears and that blind leap into the void,
that empty-handed blind leap into the void where you trust that process,
whatever name you want to put on that process.
Do you
always write in the morning or do you try to scatter it throughout the
day?
To
be honest I write whenever; morning or evening really doesn't matter to
me. It’s ironic: I’m more disciplined when I have the time than I am when I
don’t have the time. I have
more discipline when I have more time, and when I have little time, I
don’t have as much discipline. I
think it’s because I don’t want to give up the few hours that I have
not to be doing something, to be writing.
Writing and working at the same time is next to impossible because
even on weekends, I have to write, so I have no free time.
Do
you have any rituals?
I know in Going
to Ground you went to a monastery once, but do you follow any
particular method or use any particular color of paper or turn around
three times and kiss a frog?
No,
I’ve never been superstitious like that. I do sometimes, if I want to be
writing about something, try to set a mood in the room where I am working
because that seems to help, sort of like going to church.
It helps to get me in the frame of mind that is more conducive to
opening up. I’ll light a
candle or burn some sweet grass or sage or incense or something and just
let the candles keep burning and that helps to set a mood.
Once
you have set that mood, can anything completely destroy your writing frame
of mind?
I
can’t abide noise, noise has a terrible effect; it’s very hard for me
to write if there’s any type of noise.
In fact, noise is horrible for me anytime.
In here, it’s okay, for now, but I couldn’t take much more.
It’s become company for us in the place of our selves.
It’s much easier to externalize than to sit and deal with
ourselves. It’s
very hard for people--it’s hard for myself--to be comfortable with
ourselves. Let
me put it another way:
you have to learn to be still.
Don’t you think?
I think most people have a hard time being still.
It’s amazing how much more facile our minds and our imagination
become when we don’t have something like television to do the work for
us.
We often get so caught up in all the colors
and movements and shadows and highlights that we don’t see the full
picture. Tom
Brown teaches his wilderness survival students how to see by making their
eyes bigger to see the entirety of the picture.
Certainly, you have to teach yourself not to
attach to any one thing.
Instead, be open to everything because the moment you get attached,
I’m talking about your eyes here or even your ears or, for that matter,
metaphorically over your whole life; if you get attached, you are trying
to look. If
you get attached to seeing one thing, then that is what you are going to
see and all the other things that are happening around you won’t be
noticed.
[At this point in our conversation the entire wait staff began
clanging and singing to a booth opposite ours, apparently to celebrate
someone’s birthday.
We both cringed, much as roly-polies and armadillos cringe when
prodded or poked, or as people do when they hear metal scrape against
porcelain or fingernails scratch down a chalkboard.
She sighed and her warm blue eyes rolled a little.]
What
current project are you working on?
I
have a new book coming out September 1st, set in North Georgia,
called Above the Fall Line, the third in this series of books and
probably the last one I’ll do like this.
It’s been very difficult to write because I’m sharing many
substantive, intimate details about things that have happened to me and
how I dealt with those things--not always well.
It’s hard to think of people thinking of me as such a fool, but
that’s the whole point.
The other two books are coming back into print next fall as well
and are being re-edited and revised.
How
closely do you work with your editors?
I’ll
tell you some war stories.
When I sent Going to Ground to the publishers, the editor
asked if there was anything I wanted to add, so I added another chapter.
The copy went straight to the copy editor whose remarks took me
three weeks to pour through.
She was the most meticulous editor I have ever known; nearly every
page was covered with blue pencil.
She made that book 30% better by picking out little changes and
clarifications. There
was no substantial editing otherwise, even though I felt the book could
have used it. I
sent House of Steps off six months before it was really ready, and
the editor sent it back with a note saying, “This area needs more
focus,” but nothing that dealt with pace or wording.
As it turns out, my acquiring editor was leaving that publisher and
the budget for the book was cut so a different copy editor was used for
this book. I
ended up rewriting the galleys but the book was still published six months
premature. It
was a beautiful book, it looked pretty, but it’s not very good.
No editing happened with that book.
At my current publisher, Mercer University Press, I have an editor
who is working with me and telling me when things fall flat or some parts
are more amateurish or whatever because that’s his job.
When I got back this most recent draft, my first reaction was
“WHOA!” But
I look at the comments he made and he’s right.
Seventy-five percent of his comments I agreed with, but it’s hard
to find an editor who will go into such detail with a book.
What
motivates you to write?
I
write because I’m a writer.
I don’t write because . . . fill in the blank.
I am exactly what I am.
Not that I’m not motivated; it’s more of a compulsion, it’s a
decision, it’s a commitment to a particular path I chose because it’s
the right one. When
you identify that core of yourself, your purpose for being on this earth,
when you commit to that path, you have to be willing to make changes and
not remain attached to a label you have made for yourself.
When that identity shatters, you have to remake yourself.
With
the things I have read in the Issues and Research class, I have been
validated that I am a writer.
After talking with you, I feel comfortable enough to send you all
my stuff and let you tell me what you think.
(Laugh) You do that and I’ll send it right back. Make sure you include a self-addressed stamped envelope.
Posted with the permission of Todd
Campbell
and Amy
Blackmarr. © 2003, 2008 Todd
Campbell.
