The Habit of Art: Best Stories from the Indiana University Fiction Workshop

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION [ix] Introduction Like an audience at a magic show, as the lights fall dark and then illuminate the magician’s appearance on the stage, devoted readers of fiction await the next new work, hoping to be shown something they’ve never seen. All that either artist asks of the audience is that they pay reasonable attention to what is unveiled and that they come to the performance with an open mind and a willingness to suspend their disbelief. “Literature is news that stays news,” Ezra Pound pointed out in his 1936 book ABC of Reading, and by this the modernist master meant not that literature should adopt the limited techniques of reportage but that the very best writing conveys something intrinsically vital and engaging to the reader. The energy and freshness achieved by such work has the capacity to stick in the reader’s mind in much the same way that the surprise and thrill of the expert magician’s trick can be recalled long after the show is over. Magic and art. How all of us long for both, but how few of us can truly define either term other than to say that we know it when we see it? “The scientist has the habit of science; the artist, the habit of art,” Flannery O’Connor proffered in “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” an essay made up of some of the public lectures O’Connor gave audiences during the 1960s about writers and the creative writing process. Frustrated with audiences who, in their attempts to understand and learn the art of fiction, would ask her whether it was better to compose with a number 2 pencil or a fountain pen or typewriter, or whether while writing they should sip coffee or tea, or work in the morning or afternoon or late at night, O’Connor responded by observing that the serious writer wasn’t so much interested in external habits as he or she was in an internal process, or “habit of art,” a term she learned from the Neo-Thomist philoso- INTRODUCTION [x] pher Jacques Maritain. To O’Connor’s way of thinking, the habit of art was not simply an external process—something as pedestrian as a daily routine or a writing schedule—but, more essentially, something internal, “a certain quality or virtue of the mind.” O’Connor explained, “Art is the habit of the artist, and habits have to be rooted deep in the whole personality. They have to be cultivated like any other habit, over a period of time, by experience; and teaching any kind of writing is largely a matter of helping the student develop the habit of art.” This quality or virtue, when combined with the writer ’s talent, is capable of heightening writing to a point that nears perfection. This seems to me to be the highest aspiration of any graduate creative writing program: to instill in each of the writers who pass through the program a lifetime habit of art. The evidence of that success is the anthology of short stories you now hold in your hands, stories penned by graduates over the past twenty-five years of the graduate creative writing program at Indiana University in Bloomington . A brief history. The study of creative writing on Indiana University ’s Bloomington campus began in the early 1940s, when a host of highly distinguished, internationally known writers—the beloved poet Robert Frost, who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in both 1937 and 1943; Indiana native Marguerite Young, remembered most for her exquisite novels, Angel in the Forest and Miss MacIntosh, My Darling; Robert P. T. Coffin, recipient of the 1936 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; poet, novelist and critic Robert Penn Warren, who would later receive three Pulitzer Prizes; and the enormously influential critic and poet John Crowe Ransom, among others—were teaching courses to anyone interested in poetry and fiction. A few years later short-story writer Peter Taylor developed within the department of English a Master of Arts in Creative Writing program, making Indiana University one of the first North American universities to offer the graduate degree. The first writer to graduate from the program was poet and novelist David Wagoner. In 1980 Indiana University INTRODUCTION [xi] expanded its graduate writing program and began accepting students working toward the terminal Master of Fine Arts degree. This anthology marks the twenty-fifth...