Interview with Richard McCann
- Interview with Richard McCann
Richard McCann came to MSU in March of 2009 as the judge of the English Department's annual Creative Writing Awards. On his visit he worked with creative writing students and gave a reading from his current work-in-progress, The Resurrectionist, a memoir about his experience as a liver transplant patient. Richard McCann's creative nonfiction has appeared in Best American Essays, and his collection of short stories, Mother of Sorrows, won the John C. Zacharis/Ploughshares Award in 2005. Ghost Letters, a collection of his poetry, won the Beatrice Hawley and Capricorn Awards. This transcript is from an interview conducted by Jim Porter, a former student of McCann's.
I'd like you to talk about how you work across genre: in fiction, in poetry, in creative nonfiction. I remember Henry Taylor talking about when he was stuck with a poem, he'd switch to fiction and he'd write a story as a sort of exercise. Or he'd write a story in earnest and that would get him unstuck and then he'd go back to his poem. For him fiction was a tool to get him back into poetry. That doesn't seem to be how you do it. Everything you do is for keeps.
No, that's not true. It's not all for keeps. It's all an exercise … until something is good [laughs]; it's nothing but exercise.
How do you make decisions about what mode you're going to work in: poetry versus fiction versus creative nonfiction?
It's not a decision. It really isn't. I write mostly in prose now. But I [End Page 112] still work as if it were a poem. That is to say, I don't write in lines, but I still work by asking 'what are the key images that have depth that can be explored and unpacked?' Then, I'll try and get some phrases or lines and sentences that feel strong and that present an image. And I try to get a voice going. Then once I have that, I can start. So, actually I still feel like I'm working in a poetic method by starting with an image and a voice.
In another interview you talked about trying to make the language "crystallize"; is that working in that poetic sense too—getting the prose as concentrated, as dense as possible?
That's exactly what I meant: concentrated. Or "distilled" is the word I've always used. The chemical process of distillation involves bringing together volatile compounds, so that's always appealed to me as a metaphor. But, I actually wouldn't mind leaving that somewhat and writing a little looser. My original idea of what was good was like a Louise Gluck poem: something that was very hard-surfaced. I mean hard-surfaced like a gem—extremely compact—and yet that also had a kind of vortex leading to blackness. It's a kind of black-hole method, I guess.
There's a short story in Mother of Sorrows written in a different mode: "My Brother in the Basement." I've been trying to follow some of that way of working more, trying to get intensity from places other than distillation.
I remember you told me once that part of your writing and revising process was walking. You would rent a cabin in Virginia, right? And you would walk a lot, and that got you deeper into your material. Maybe that was part of generating the material, maybe it was part of revising the material? Do you still work like that?
We haven't been back to that place in Virginia in a long time. It's a sore point between my partner and me [laughs]. I'm sick of it. But I do need to walk a lot. I don't know why that is. It doesn't have to be that place in Virginia. I think partly it's because my work is very inward. I get really caught up inside my head and I need to go out. But I...
