An Interview with Larry Woiwode

Where and how did you grow up in North Dakota?

I was born in the Carrington hospital, the first generation of my family on either side not born at home. An uncle five years older was birthed in front of a cookstove oven because it was that cold in the house where my grandmother released him to the world. I grew up in Sykeston, a village of a few hundred, fourteen miles west of Carrington—small, but with a large enough Catholic population then, including farmers, to support a sound and stimulating parochial school, St. Elizabeth’s, taught by Presentation Sisters through the eighth grade. I spent my first three years at St. Elizabeth’s, where the third-grade class met in the same room as the fourth and fifth grades, each taught separately over the day, so when my family moved the next year, as they did, to central Illinois, I had learned enough so that I was able to coast through public school until the sixth grade. That’s a partial answer to how I grew up, explicitly as a cradle Catholic, immersed in mystery and iconography, those elements referred to by critics as hidden meanings and symbols.

One way of reading your work is as a reaction against or correction to the excesses of the sixties. Is that how you see it?

My first novel, What I’m Going To Do, I Think, which sold the most hardback copies of any, was afloat in excesses of the sixties, with its sexuality, unmoored anger and destructive ennui, though most people of that decade in their twenties, as my main characters are, were labeled practitioners of love and peace. Not so the fellow, Chris, who buys a rifle while he and his wife are on a honeymoon in the Michigan wilds. The novel received the William Faulkner Foundation Award for the best first novel of 1969, the year of Woodstock.

My next, Beyond the Bedroom Wall, opened in the 1930s after a prelude, including a backstep into the 1880s, and carried four generations of a North Dakota family forward to their dispersal to Chicago and New York and other postings into the late sixties. In my desire to understand the values of the earlier generations, I began to read the Bible. I should insert here that in the pre-Vatican II days of my growing up, the Bible was generally frowned on by the Church. “It’ll only confuse you,” I was told. And it did. From the time I could think, I thought of myself as a child of God, though I seldom acted that way, and in the confusions caused by the Bible I felt either a denizen of the lower levels of Dante’s Inferno or in a celestial realm. It’s no secret I used scenes analogous to my experience as the chronology of the novel touched on my generation. The writing took six years, although I published chapters over a ten-year stretch, and to sew this up quick, I woke one day in a hospital to a voice reading Psalms to me at my bedside—a former missionary to Eritrea, booted when the Marxists took over—and with his voice and the words of the Psalms, my faith seemed confirmed. I was out of the dark woods the complexities of the novel sent me into with no overseeing guide.

I intended only for it to be as honest about each generation as my research and sensibilities were able to determine, with no idea it might be seen as a correction to the excesses of the sixties. Those excesses, such as they were, now seem mild, naive, compared to the present-day cultural chaos.

At Middle West Review we take a keen interest in writers who pay particular attention to region and place. Some intellectuals, including your friend Susan Sontag, were resistant to regionalism as a recent biography of her notes. How do you understand Sontag’s position and the fate of regionalism?

Place is essential to authentic fiction. Characters have to have a specific spot of earth to walk on. William Maxwell, who...