Background
Notes:
Paul
Hanstedt is a Professor of English at Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia, a
father of three, a writer, an educator, and a traveler. Besides his text book,
GENERAL EDUCATION ESSENTIALS, his academic work has been published in MLA's The
Profession, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Liberal Education. He
regularly travels throughout the country and around the globe working with
faculty and administrators on general education/liberal education reform,
curricular design and development, course design and development, and
assignment and assessment design.
Part Two of our Interview with Paul Hanstedt
Jan: Let's begin this part of interview by talking about our mutual fear of flying. I must confess I laughed, but I really did connect to your blog essay,
“Confessions of a White-Knuckle Flier.” Roanoke has an 'interesting'
airport nestled in between those hills. So you too hate to fly, and yet you
love to travel. Can you talk about this paradox? How do you manage this
contradiction?
Paul: I can’t stand flying. Can’t stand
it. Takeoffs and landings are the
worst: the arms of my seat will be
soaked in sweat. My hands will be
clammy. I’ll be able to hear my own
breathing. I’ll feel every bump. It doesn’t matter if I’m sitting next to an
engineer who can explain about how much stress wings can take or a pilot who
can tell me about how technology can defeat wind sheer before it even
starts: All of those things are
meaningless compared to the image of myself plummeting thirty thousand feet
straight down.
But
then the flight ends. And I’m somewhere
really cool. The food is different, the
drink is different. I’m surrounded by a
language I can barely understand. The
quality of light is different. I’ve got
a whole new place to explore. I love
that feeling, and it’s a big enough feeling, one that lasts for a long time,
that it will drown out the immediate and finite fear of flying.
Or
it will, at least, until that one final fatal flight where my plane is ripped
in half and I plummet, along with 300 other people, to the rocky ground
below. : )
Jan: Recently you returned from a conference in Korea and you’ve written about the
challenges of traveling when you don’t speak the language. So how 'do'
you manage when language barriers exist?
Paul: It
depends: if I’m alone, I just muddle
through it. I’m clumsy, I’m awkward, I’m
a buffoon, I talk too loud or not loud enough, I make weird gestures, I
exaggerate my expressions—I do all of these things until I’m used to the place
and things become a little easier, until I know enough phrases or enough about
the culture that I can get by okay.
When
I’m with my wife, her energy sort of pulls me forward. She’s a very open person and very good with
languages, and people respond to her well, so I’m able to ride on her coattails
some.
And
when we’re with our kids, none of the rest of it matters: people will approach us, they’ll talk to the
kids, they’ll look at us and smile, they’ll shake our hands, they’ll give us
food. Waitresses will cluster around my
sons and waiters will nod seriously at my daughter. And somehow they’ll be more patient with
us. It’s like the kids are a universal
language, a sign that everything’s okay, that it’s okay to talk to these
people, to help them out. I’d like to
think that it’s the same way here in the US when others come to visit, but I
don’t know for sure. A few years back,
though, we had some friends from France visit right around Halloween, and when
we went to shop for pumpkins, the guy running the stand—a big farmer with
calloused hands and a few teeth missing—was about as gracious to those kids as
I remember seeing anywhere.
Jan: You’re author of a well-received text book, General Education Essentials and
many people know you more for that and your essay readings on Virginia Public
Radio, but as you know I’m a fiction person, so I’d like to know more about the
other creative work that you’ve published in Beloit Fiction Journal, Puerto Del
Sol, and Confrontation. Which of your recent short creative works is more in
tune with your larger writing aspirations?
Paul: I’d say the last story I wrote, called
“Lists” and published in the Beloit Fiction Journal maybe six years ago. It’s a story told completely through a series
of—surprise!—lists, and I liked it for a couple of reasons: first, it let me have a huge cast of
characters for a fifteen page story. It
just moved so quickly and I was able to revisit characters so often that it
felt like the cast of a Dickens novel to me. (I got my PhD in Victorian
literature, and love that stuff).
Second, it allowed me to have a “messy” ending, one that didn’t really
tie up very neatly. I can be a bit anal
at times, a bit too organized, and my fiction often felt too symmetrical, too
predictable to me. This one felt less
so.
All
of that said, there’s a reason why I haven’t written a story in six years: creative nonfiction, by its very nature, gives me the
unpredictability that I crave. I can’t
control where a story goes, I’m stuck with what’s there. I like that.
I feel like the power has been taken away from me, and that allows me to
do some things that I wouldn’t otherwise be able to do. Like, for instance, speak directly to the
reader, saying, “What I want to give you here is X. X would feel good, and we both know it. But what actually happened is Y.” And I like the aesthetics of that, the way it
can surprise the reader.
Jan: Is there a must read book on writing that you would recommend to any aspiring
writer?
Paul: E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel. It’s
short, clean, and almost every sentence in it is a keeper.
Jan: What are you reading now? What are the top four books on your ‘to read’
stack?
Paul: I’m not fudging on this, I’m telling the
absolute truth:
1)
Rory Nugent’s The Search for the Pink-Headed Duck. It’s such an event-filled journey through
India that I sometimes wonder if it’s all true.
But it’s funny and beautiful and powerfully written. He’s got one passage where he talks about the
power of the Brahmaputra River, and how it’s so strong that you can actually
hear the river changing the shape of the islands as you drift by. Great stuff.
2)
Chris Gavaler’s School For Tricksters, about the Carlisle School for Indians, and a
pair of students, Ivy Miller and Sylvester Long, who pretended to be native Americans
in order to get an education there. It’s
set during the time of Jim Thorpe, “Pop” Warner, and Marianne Moore, who taught
typing there. It’s just so well
imagined, so authoritative, so well researched, so powerfully written on the
sentence level—just so accomplished. It
makes me feel like I should be handing out milk and cookies with my book.
3)
Paul Theroux’s Dark Star Safari. Theroux is
obviously one of the best travel writers alive today. I’m not sure I’d like to hang out with
him—and I’m positive he wouldn’t want to hang out with me—but he does a great
job of bringing hidden corners to the page.
It’s slow going sometimes, so I pick this book up and set it down again,
but I always come back to it happily.
4)
M.C. Beaton’s Death of a Maid. Pure cotton
candy, but damn I do love her Hamish Macbeth series. Just quirky, funny, lightly told but
compelling. You can see the world she’s
describing, you get her characters, but you never get bogged down. I have a 50-mile commute to and from work
every day, so I usually listen to her books in the car.
Jan: Wow. That's a great list. I think I will add a couple of these to my reading list. What’s the best writing advice you have ever been given?
Paul: The best advice I ever got was from
Christopher Tilghman who is (or was) the chair of the creative writing program
at the University of Virginia. I’ve
never met him, and he doesn’t know he gave it to me, but nonetheless. It happened a few years ago when I was stuck
in an administrative job that was pulling me away from my writing time. A friend of mine who studied under Tilghman
told me how Tilghman was once asked if he didn’t resent his administrative
responsibilities, if he wouldn’t rather be writing instead. According to this friend of mine, Tilghman’s
reply was, “All writing is writing. It
doesn’t matter if I’m writing a memo or a personnel evaluation, it’s all
writing. It’s all good, it’s all
practice.”
That
helped me, I think. I was writing a lot
of curricular models, a lot of powerpoints, a lot of rationales. This made me think about how I wrote those
things, allowed me to have more pleasure in writing them, in making the
language work the same way I would if I were writing a story.
Jan: And what advice did
you decide to ignore?
Bad advice? I’m sure I’ve received some . . . but honestly, I don’t remember any of it. I suppose that says something, right?
Bad advice? I’m sure I’ve received some . . . but honestly, I don’t remember any of it. I suppose that says something, right?
Jan:
Finally, I wanted to ask this one question for a while. If you could be a
literary super hero, what would your super power be?
Paul: Making people laugh out loud with one
sentence, then cry with the next. And
taking them to a place that they’ve never been before so thoroughly that it
almost feels familiar to them. Or is
that three powers? I always want too
much.
==========
Jan: Thank you, Paul, for your wonderful interview. Readers can order your books online or request them from a local or university book store. Happy Travels!
Jan Bowman’s work has
appeared in Roanoke Review, Big Muddy,
Broadkill Review, Trajectory, Third Wednesday, Minimus, Buffalo Spree (97), Folio, The Potomac Review, Musings, Potato
Eyes, and others. She won the 2012
Roanoke Review Prize for Fiction. Her
stories have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best American Short Stories
and a story was a finalist in the “So To
Speak” Fiction Contest. She is working on two
collections of short stories and currently shopping for a publisher for a
completed story collection. She has nonfiction work pending publication in Spring
2013 Issues of Trajectory and Pen-in-Hand. She writes a weekly blog of
“Reflections” on the writing life and posts regular interviews with writers and
publishers. Learn more at:
Website – www.janbowmanwriter.com
Blogsite – http://janbowmanwriter.blogspot.com
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