Colm Toibin is a visiting lecturer in creative writing in the Lewis Center for the Arts. Toibin is an award-winning author and critic. He is teaching ENG 405: Dublin: The City and CWR 204: Creative Writing (Fiction) this semester. Toibin's latest book, "Brooklyn," will be available in May.
Q: How has being a writer helped you as a literature professor?
A: I think you can talk better about how [literature] is made and what it is made from. I know how some tiny trauma, some small experience, some sharp memory, is made into a book, and I can actually play with that in class. As a writer, you know much more about process than project.
Q: This semester you are teaching a course titled "Dublin: The City." How does Dublin influence the work of Irish writers?
A: In a semester, you can do work from Swift, Yates, Beckett and O'Brien. We take one figure, who is really an immensely important figure in English literature, whose Irishness is essential to his identity. And if you don't have an Irish background, you could miss a large part of his work. The student at the end of the 12 weeks will walk away knowing a lot about how an Irish book was made and from what ingredients it came. I am dealing with a lot of levels of ambiguity. If you read Yeats and Lady Gregory only in one way, you misread them. These figures emerge out of English-speaking Ireland, out of the city of Dublin, out of a sort of second city of the empire, and the capital city of Ireland at the same time. All these things actually affect the varied language the tone, the language and the rhythm the writers use. So it's very difficult sometimes to not to talk about history, because history makes its way into everything.
Q: In your latest book, "The Master," you discuss the life of American writer Henry James. What are some of the obstacles of writing a novel with a protagonist who was actually a real person?
A: I suppose I had to be careful. The book had to be understood by someone who didn't know anything about James and hadn't read James. It couldn't be filled with recondite references that would be hard to understand. If you have read a lot of James, there are a lot of jokes and references you could get, but if you haven't, you could still sit down and read the book, because it's a novel. The character has to be fully imagined, and therefore I suppose I spent a lot of time before I wrote the novel figuring out who James would be. I realized that the life he lived was quite an exciting one, though it didn't seem like it.
Q: What was your writing process like when you wrote "The Master"?
A: I wrote the book very much in chapters. I didn't write a book, I wrote a chapter. I wrote a lot, and then I would type up the chapter. Then that chapter was done. But each chapter had to have a dramatic center and a way of ending so the chapters almost stood alone. I was under no pressure at all when writing the book, because I didn't think anyone would read it.
Q: Does writing about a past author, someone you can read and research, make it easier or harder as a writer?
A: It was easier to some extent, because if you were wondering what the character might do, you could find out. You could find out from James' March 1898 letters what he was writing and the stories he told. You could sit down and go through the letters and something, unless you're a complete fool, will spark off something else. A phrase might be enough just to get you going. With a completely invented character, you really have nothing. There's nowhere to go but inward if you are looking for an image or a way out of a problem. It made it easier in that way, but, at the same time, you would have to fit what you found out to the tone, rhythm and the overall sense of the character. You couldn't just copy and paste. I had to fill in the gaps between the memories and the moments. Sometimes, you get up in the morning, and your job is to fill a gap.
-Interview conducted, condensed and edited by Leah Samaha '10
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