THR Interview Series: John Holman
The Headlight Review continues its interview series in a conversation on writing with author and professor John Holman. His most recent publication is “White Folks” in The Sun, but his fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Oxford American, and many other publications. He is also the published author of three books: Squabble and Other Stories (1990), Luminous Mysteries (1998), and Triangle Ray (2016). Our fiction editor Tennant Ross caught up with Holman over a Zoom call, where he spoke from his office at Georgia State University.
Tennant Ross: How have you been lately? With the pandemic, the election, and everything else?
John Holman: Calm, compared to everybody else. I guess my anxiety is just a bit more under the surface.
[We get distracted talking about Lydia Davis and Raymond Carver and putting stories inside different frames. Even with a COVID-imposed barrier of laptop screens, Holman is earnest, and speaks of fiction with a fondness that is familiar to any writer. ]
TR: Have you been working on anything new since the pandemic began? How has it changed writing as a practice for you?
JH: Well, I haven’t been writing as much since the pandemic. I’ve had an ongoing project; I was trying to put together a group of stories set in a gentrifying neighborhood like the one I live in in Atlanta. I think the pandemic has caused me a little bit of rethinking on the value of that subject matter. Because it’s all conceived before the pandemic–– the stories–– I’m trying to find out if they should include this current atmosphere, and how that would happen. You know, in the New Yorker Magazine I’ve seen a few stories published that are pandemic stories, or reference the pandemic, and it surprises me that someone has the ability to look at it in that kind of objective way to make some fiction out of it.
TR: So in a regular world, not in pandemic times, how do you typically find your stories?
JH: I don’t really know the right answer to that question.
TR: That’s fair.
JH: It’s a mysterious process. Often, I think that I get an idea for something to write about from reading somebody else’s work. Something that they include will remind me of some aspect of my past I’ve forgotten that I now remember could be the start of a story. That happens a lot. Other times, I’m just trying to pay attention as I go about my life. Day to day, overhearing conversations, or noticing an image that I think could be showcased in a work of fiction. Then I just have to build a world around that thing.
TR: What is “White Folks” about, in your own words?
JH: Well it’s about time. It’s a frame story, so it’s got a sense of the narrator in the present time telling a story about his childhood. It’s about what happens over a lifetime, in a way, but it skips a lot of years, right? It’s when this kid is nine years old and then when he’s in his late sixties. So in some sense it’s about time, in another sense it’s about race–– in that a lot of the story in that frame subtly mentions aspects of race. I mean, “White Folks” is definitely a blunt title on a racist subject. It’s also about death, and change, and things like that.
TR: “White Folks” centers primarily around storytelling about family. Do you find it easier to write about things like that, that are close to your heart, or do you find it more difficult?
JH: I don’t think I’ve written about family in quite this way before, where I actually focus on this family unit. Most of the stories I’ve written prior are about people somehow detached from that family, somehow out in the world in other ways. I think it probably felt harder to write about something that close. But nowadays, I’m trying to challenge myself to do that. In early days of my writing I probably didn’t know what I was writing about or what I wanted to write about, and was probably not pulling out much emotion from my stories. The older I get, the more I’m able to work with more emotional material.
TR: Do you think that most good fiction involves that close emotional material?
JH: I think you want to feel something from the fiction you read. Good fiction does affect the emotions, and it also affects the intellect–– depending on what you’re reading. Good language can break your heart, just like some aspects of a relationship can break your heart.
TR: I think so too. I read in your conversation with The Sun that your first published piece in print was a poem; I find it really intimidating to cross genre lines in my own writing. How did you do it, and what made you choose fiction instead?
JH: I really didn’t know what I was doing, writing as a poet. I felt like I didn’t have enough knowledge to even call myself a poet. In those days, I learned that a lot of journals, if they paid anything, they paid by the word. I realized that I could probably make a little more money if I wrote longer pieces–– a poem is barely a page. If I could put together fifteen pages and get published, I could get that better paycheck. That’s the real reason I switched.
TR: What drew you to writing fiction instead of any similar genres like memoir or creative nonfiction?
JH: I don’t know that creative nonfiction was a term when I was in school trying to learn how to write. I went to college with the intent of becoming a journalism major–– that’s what I thought I’d do. I used to read a lot of journalism, a lot of Time, Esquire; I enjoyed the nonfiction profiles. But when I was in college taking my English Literature classes, it occurred to me that it might be more interesting to make up stories than to report on what already is.
TR: You’re a professor at Georgia State, and you’re also the former director of the Creative Writing Program. What do you think is the best part of teaching writing? What’s the main difference in teaching undergraduates vs. graduates?
JH: I don’t know what the best part is, but it’s got to do with interacting with students who love what I love. There’s always something new to read, always a new story. Being with a community of young people who share that same enthusiasm that I do about fiction–– those are the best parts. The difference is that undergraduates lack experience; they haven’t read as much. Their idea of what makes a good story is different than what I would hope it is. Often, their language skills are… subpar, in terms of avoiding clichés, caring about the language enough to take the mechanics seriously. That’s a challenge for those undergraduate students.
Graduate students are great in the sense that they come with more awareness of contemporary fiction than even I have, so I often learn a lot from them. It’s easier to pay attention to the content of their work since I don’t have to worry as much about the surface parts of it. The graduate students are selected to come to the program; they’re hand-picked based on their existing talent. It’s like going to the movies and seeing a movie you know you want to see, instead of one you don’t know.
TR: What is one story you teach as an example of good literary fiction?
JH: I like to teach Anton Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Dog.” That’s one of my favorites to teach. It’s a story about the development of emotion, so the plot is internal within the character instead of foregrounded as actions happening to them. It’s more things developing within them. I also like it as an example of how to manipulate third-person point of view… Chekhov does something special with distance–– looking through and looking at the character. I don’t even know if that’s coherent.
TR: It completely makes sense. Did you find the transition difficult from writing short stories to writing your first novel?
JH: I did find the transition difficult. I still don’t know that I know how to write a novel. The novels that I write tend to be linked stories. Learning to write fiction in college is learning to write on a semester basis, and you can’t write a semester in a novel–– so I learned to write short stories. I had no experience in writing a novel. The transition was difficult; I had to figure out how to think about scope, and time–– how to marry a character to a larger sense of setting. It’s still a challenge. I sort of solved it by thinking of the parts of a novel as one story at a time, instead of thinking I had to write a whole novel.
TR: Do you think you focus on planning different aspects between when you write a short story and a novel?
JH: With the novel, I just try to think, “if I wrote this series of stories, what would be the unifying aspect of them?” I’ve only published three books–– one of them was a collection of short stories, and the others I just consider novel-like. The one I’m writing now, if it ever gets finished and published, will be the fourth one. Luminous Mysteries was about place, really–– a group of characters in and around the same community. Triangle Ray was a series of stories about one character. I try to figure out what the common thread is among all the pieces. In one book, that thing was place, and in the other, it was the protagonist.
TR: If you could only teach your writing students one thing about writing fiction, what would it be?
JH: The one thing?
TR: It’s kind of an unfair question.
JH: Yeah! Well, I think I would say to use sensory language. We were talking earlier about appealing to emotion, and I think you do that through the senses. Sensory language shows a reader the experience of the characters. Not only does it provide a gateway to the emotional life of the characters, but it is, at the same time, providing something to pay attention to. It’s… let’s just stick with the emotion thing. Sensory language can do a lot in an important way.
TR: What are your favorite literary magazines to read?
JH: I subscribe to The Sun and The New Yorker; those are the things that come to the house with fiction in them. But I also like the literary magazine published here, Five Points. Over the years I’ve subscribed to different journals, but those are the ones I have now. I’ll also pick up the “best of:” anthologies, because some editor has culled them over the years for me.
TR: Makes sense. It’s efficient.
JH: Right. Then I don’t have to read all of them to pick the best.
TR: Exactly. Do you have a comfort story, or a comfort author, that you return to for inspiration or solace?
JH: Chekhov for sure. I like to go back to Chekhov to remember something about how to write a clean, objective sentence, that somehow has emotion and something strange and interesting in it. It sounds like a cliché, because I think every writer says Chekhov. Everybody says this too, but I like George Saunders for how he takes a concept and makes it more than that; he puts some heart and humor into it.
I appreciate a somber story, but I can’t say I appreciate them all the time. I like writers who make me laugh–– ones that give me some fresh way of seeing the world.
Holman’s new story, “White Folks,” can be found online here. It’s more than worth a read.