What can reading teach us about loss, healing, and survival? How can we transform anger into empathy? What can we learn from the creative act about turning personal setbacks into opportunities for self-discovery and growth?
Andre Dubus III’s nine books include the New York Times’ bestsellers House of Sand and Fog, The Garden of Last Days, and his memoir, Townie. His work has been included in The Best American Essays and The Best Spiritual Writing anthologies. His novel House of Sand and Fog was a finalist for the National Book Award and was made into an Academy Award-nominated film starring Ben Kingsley and Jennifer Connelly. His most recent books are the novel, Such Kindness and a collection of personal essays, Ghost Dogs: On Killers and Kin.
Dubus has been a finalist for the National Book Award, and has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, The National Magazine Award for Fiction, two Pushcart Prizes, and is a recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. His books are published in over twenty-five languages, and he teaches at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.
ANDRE DUBUS III
All creative writing is that act of reaching for the pieces to put it back together again. And with the memoir, the essay, it's human memory. Your memory for your own existence. With fiction, it’s a dream world where you're reaching for the shards. And I find it's so moving because that's what it feels like when I feel that I might be writing well. It's just uncovering and uncovering.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
I really appreciate how you wrote about your youth in Ghost Dogs, how anger could boil up in you and how you chose to channel this into something more aligned with justice:
I was the boy whose hatred for bullies had become a hatred for injustice of all kinds–for imperialism and colonialism, for racism and poverty, for a world where cruelty and violence and oppression were rewarded with power and vast sums of money for the brutal for the brutal few at the expense of many.
It's so moving. And I find these humanistic principles are woven throughout your body of work.
DUBUS
Well, thank you for saying that. You know, there's a wonderful line from Flannery O'Connor from one of her essays. She says a writer's beliefs are not what she sees, but the light by which she sees. Isn’t that beautiful?
If you want to check in and get some clarity on what you believe, I tell people, well, just write something really honest and emotionally naked and read it back to yourself, and you'll see a lot of what you believe, think, fear, regret, desire, et cetera.
We always reveal ourselves in our work. The truth is, I identify far more with those on the outside than on the inside. And even though from the outside it looks like I'm on the inside – you know, I'm a successful author, professor, white, privileged, educated, straight male from the United States – you can't get more privileged than that in a patriarchal, misogynistic, racist society. But I don't identify with those people. And I don't know if it's because of my youth or just how I am in the world. When you read that passage from Ghost Dogs back to me about my hatred of all those things. That hatred for those kinds of injustices has never left me. In fact, they've just grown sharper.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
You're especially insightful about when you write about trauma. You had this difficult childhood into your early adulthood before you escaped New England and went to college in the Midwest and then discovered a more fulfilling path as a writer. Could you describe the relief you felt when you found your voice?
DUBUS
I wrote about this in my memoir Townie. You know, I was a small boy. I was bullied. My sister was raped. My brother was beaten up by a grown man. I couldn't defend him. I became a fighter and a crazy young man. You know, when I was in my late teens and early 20s, I would really rather die a violent death than see a coward in the mirror anymore. That made me a very dangerous man, but also I hated violence. I hated cruelty. I hated injustice. I found myself going after men hitting women and men smaller than they were, but I knew I was going to get killed doing this. Or maybe worse than that, I could kill someone else. This boy who hated violence could become a killer.
So, as a way to control my violence, I started to box. I said, that'll be my sport. And one night, instead of going to the gym to train – I was training for the Golden Gloves competition, which I was very serious about – something that I can only call the divine made me sit down in a chair and brew a cup of tea.
And Mia, I found myself writing from the point of view of a young woman having sex for the first time with her boyfriend in his car in the misty rain of the Maine woods. I don't know where this came from, but I remember I took a sip of this tea I'd brewed and had been boiling minutes earlier, but now it was almost cold.
I thought I'd been writing for a few minutes, but it was clearly over an hour. And when I put that pencil down, and I'm still in all my workout clothes, it's winter. It's nighttime. I've been working construction all day, and I was heading to the gym to train. I read over what I wrote, and I had never felt more like myself. I felt like Andre for the first time. I was in my early 20s. And I'm not saying that at that moment, I knew I wanted to be a writer, but I knew that in order to keep feeling this authentically like me, I would have to keep writing.
House of Sand and Fog
The character I wrote about in House of Sand And Fog was based on a former colonel and aeronautical engineer in the Shah's Air Force. I watched him work at a gas station. And on his days off, he'd put on his suit and look for better work. One night I'm helping him bring his groceries in, and he said in his thick Persian accent, "You know, I used to work with kings and presidents and prime ministers in my office by myself. Now, I'm serving candy and cigarettes to kids who don't even know who I am."
Crafting Characters Through Acting & Writing
I did some acting in my 20s and 30s. It's an art form I really admire, but it's a sister art form where you are emptying yourself of yourself to become someone else, except you're bringing your humanity to whoever's point of view you're writing from, whether it's a man or a woman, someone from a different race or ethnicity or religious background. We all share far more than we do not, and so we have to find that common thread. It's ironic that you find more of yourself stepping into the private skin of another, but isn't that always also the case being a reader? We read from the points of view of other human beings, sometimes from cultures we've never even stepped into, and we find more of ourselves than we did before. It's the miraculous promise of literature.
I love character actors. I love the actor who or she isn't the lead – and who's that? I've seen him or her before. They get lost in that secondary character and become this other human being. For me, one of the joys of writing, you know, I've got a novel called The Garden Last Days, and the draft I sent to my publisher had 14 points of view, and I tried to make every single one a distinct voice, a distinct vision, from a three-year-old girl to a 9/11 hijacker from Saudi Arabia, to a 26-year-old sex worker, on and on. It was such a joy for me to do that, and it still remains a joy for me. It's got to be radical curiosity like my friend, Elizabeth Strout, whose work I revere, she says, "For me, I have to be desperately curious about my characters."
The Purpose of Education
Self-educate yourself. Information and knowledge are so different. They're not the same thing. And so I teach young people, and I find it immensely gratifying to do so, especially for those who've already found writing in their blood so young. I say, "Do you know how lucky you are to have found something that makes you feel so alive this early in your life? People live whole lives and never find it."
Creative Writing in the Age of AI
I am deeply concerned about the digital world. I do not own an iPhone. I've never sent a text. I've never been on social media. It's because I've seen this horrible depletion of joy in my college students over the last 20 years, 15 years. It's not global warming. It's not mass shootings, which are horrific enough. It's staring at those screens six to 11 hours a day. It's sucking their life force out of them. My deep concern about the handheld is it's casting everybody to be in a trance, and it's taking from them the only thing we have, which is the present moment. Everyone's walking around in a state of continuous partial attention. So, I have real issues with technology, but I love the Internet. I love it's a democratization of information across the globe for those who are fortunate enough to have Internet access.
Embracing a Receptive State in Writing
There's a wonderful essay by the American poet William Stafford, where he says the poet, before writing, must put herself into a place of openness or receptivity. And he said, you're being receptive when you are. And this is really hard, I think, especially for Americans who still eat a steady diet of the following: The point of life is to be happy, and the way to be happy is to be a success. – It's horseshit. This is not the point of life. It's a lie. And the second part is, you must be willing to fail. Not, oh, I'm going to tolerate a little bit of it. I am going to totally fail at this, but I'm still going to do it anyway.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
You’ve discussed your teaching process and writers who have been important for you, but which teachers were important for you growing up? And what would you like young people to know, preserve, and remember?
DUBUS
I don't want to sound self-pitying when I say this, but the truth is when I grew up, we moved two or three times a year. I was always the new kid. My dad lived elsewhere. My relatives lived 2000 miles away. So I didn't have a lot of adults in my life. And I became this kind of shy, quiet kid who did not ask for help from anybody. I didn't reach out for teachers. I still don't. And so the only teacher who comes to mind when you ask about teachers is that when I started to box, his name was Paul Harriman. He taught me how to throw a right cross. And it was the first time in a long time a grown man looked at me, took me in, and gave me about five minutes of his time. And just that one act turned my life three degrees in a more positive direction.
I didn't have a lot of teachers. I didn't have a lot of mentors. I was blessed to have a beautiful writer as a father, but he was more of a buddy. His writing teaches me, but that wasn't there when we were alive together.
What strikes me so much about education or being an educator, you know, the word to educate from the Latin means to draw out or to lead. So, it shouldn't be about stuffing information or data into, but drawing out. Who are you? I try to draw them out through whatever we're reading, whatever they're writing, whatever we're talking about, to draw them out into themselves. Because life goes by like this. And if you're not living an authentic life, you're not going to have a joyful life. And if you're not going to have a joyful life, you're not going to give back freely to people around you who need more and don't have your privileges. I don't think anyone has a better imagination than anybody else. That's not to say that some writers don't write more compelling work than others, but it's not because their imagination is better. It has to do with the tools they're using or not using, which can be taught. The fuel for that, back to where we began, has got to be authentic curiosity about the lives of others. In order to be authentically curious, you must suffer with them yourself. Compassion literally means to suffer with. Young people are so receptive to that way of looking at the world. I think it shows them that they count, that they have value, and that they, too, can do something large by doing something small and humble. And it's beautiful.
