Q&A: John McPhee '53

Journalism professor John McPhee ’53 is a highly acclaimed Pulitzer Prize-winning author and has taught the popular “Creative Nonfiction” journalism class for 40 years. On Wednesday, he gave a public lecture in McCosh 50 in which he read from several of his writings on the University and the writing process. Before the reading, he spoke with The Daily Princetonian about his career.

The Daily Princetonian: What first sparked your interest in writing and journalism?

John McPhee: I knew I wanted to be a writer from a very early age, and I never really had any other ambition. It just popped into my head sometime when I was a child, and it’s still there. I have had various really influential teachers but one in particular at Princeton High School ... this teacher was very unusual. She had us write three pieces of writing a week, and I had her for three years. This was true most weeks and she had us read the pieces to the class. It was a real learning ground. Her name was Olive McKee.

DP: Did you know exactly what you wanted to be?

JM: I had no idea. I just wanted to be a writer. I didn’t have any specific ideas. You learn by doing and trying. A young writer ought to try everything because you don’t know what kind of writer you are unless you try it. You learn by doing it, and in this way, you find the place where you are comfortable. I gravitated to long, factual writing.

DP: You’ve written about many different subjects, like oranges or lifting body development of aircraft. How did you develop these diverse interests that have been reflected in your writings?

JM: What all my work has in common is that it’s about real people in real places. You tell the story of the person and in the course of the story, you learn about the subject that the person is interested in. The ideas for that kind of thing are huge, numerous, go by in great numbers.

What makes you settle on [a piece] that you’re going to spend a year on or five years on, rather than all these others? I was once puzzling about that, made a list of everything I’d published in The New Yorker, and I put a checkmark beside it if I was interested in the subject by the time or when I was in college, and it was more than 95 percent. What makes you focus on something — makes me focus on something — is some kind of trigger that springs from childhood and adolescence, basically, these things I was interested back then. Most of the other things that have to do with sports and science and geography and wild country all relate to things that were going on in my existence when I was 12 and so forth.

DP: Why did you decide to come back and teach at the University?

JM: It just popped up one time. I hadn’t really thought about it, but I was here in Princeton doing my writing. I had been by that time 10 years a staff writer at The New Yorker, but it took me a long time to get to it and one of these professors in the [journalism program] that I’m in, there was only one guy. This was the 1970s. Nowadays, there are nine or 10 of those professors in a given year, myself included. In those days, it was a single guy teaching a course in the fall and in the spring. And he suddenly gave it up at Christmastime in 1974, and so universities don’t do things right off the cuff — they had a real problem. They usually think a year-and-a-half ahead. Wow, this course was going to start one month later, I was working right across the street, “Would I come and fill in because the predecessor wasn’t there?” So I said “Yes!” right off the bat. I think because I was ready for that kind of experience. I didn’t give it any thought, and I went over and taught the course in 1975 and I’m still there. I had no idea at the beginning. I was just filling in and solving the problem, but that evolved into this conversation with you!

DP: Did becoming a professor affect your writing at all?

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JM: There are some people who think that it would get in the way. First of all, I always wanted to work for The New Yorker. And it took me 10 years after Princeton when I got my first piece in The New Yorker and then another 10 years and this is all before that phone call from across the street. Had that phone call come earlier and not much earlier, I was 100 percent given to doing these pieces. I had reached a point when it surprised me when I said, “Yes! I’d like to do that!” You can’t write all day, every day, 12 months a year, so from the time I started teaching, I have never written a lick during the spring semester course. What I’m doing is something that’s complementary to writing, taking three months off from my own writing. June comes and I’m ready to go back to my own work. There’s no way to prove this, but I believe that over the past 40 years, I have done more of my own writing than I would have when I’m not teaching that course. So it sort of balances things out.

DP: What were your best and worst moments in your time as a professor?

JM: It’s really good to get to know the students each semester, and after two or three weeks, they turn from 16 homogenous faces into 16 very different people. This is very exciting, individuals become ever more individual as you get to know them better, so it’s a kind of moment. The best moment is when that time comes, when two to three weeks into a course, a person turns into a total individual and that’s great. And well for the worst moment, I’ve missed one seminar in 40 years and that was in 2014. And I’m still suffering from it, even though two of my good friends from The New Yorker happened to be coming as guests that day. But I was home with the flu and really out of it, so that was the worst moment.

DP: Students have told me you’re a big fan of structure, writing out the structure of the piece after the piece itself. Is this one of your biggest rules? If so why?

JM: For the same reason that a skeleton exists inside an animal’s body, including yours and mine. It’s what puts it together and if in the absence of structure — a friend of mine once described a piece of writing analogous to a bowl of spaghetti. I think structure is very important and all or nearly all writers are very conscious of it in one way or another.

DP: What is the most rewarding thing about writing and journalism?

JM: The most rewarding thing comes from the relationship of writer and reader on an individual basis. That is to say, that somebody reads something I’ve written and then communicates with me about it, maybe years later, I don’t know. And these exchanges which happen from time to time are potentially more rewarding than any other aspect of the enterprise. It matters a whole hell of a lot more than awards and prizes; they don’t come near a very occasional letter from somebody.

DP: In raising your children, did you hope that they would pursue a similar career as you?

JM: No, definitely not. I was interested in watching them find their own thing. I hoped secretly that they would go to different colleges. They did. Each one took their own place. They astonish me when they turn out to be writers. Sure, I’m pleased about that, but I wouldn’t wish that on anybody. I’d say just do what you want to do.

DP: Is there a particular work that you are particularly proud of or that you consider to be your best one?

JM: No. No. A common answer I give to that is that I feel like it’s like being asked to choose one of your children.

DP: And lastly, what career or general advice do you have for young writers and journalists?

JM: Writing is a matter of doing it every day. An editor of mine one said that a writer writes. In other words, writing a little bit with considerable frequency. Those little bits add up and I think that’s a best thing for any writer to bear in mind. It doesn’t all come in a big gulp.