George Saunders remembers walking out of his classroom one day and realizing that all the work, all the “beautiful moments” he’d shared with his students over the past 20 years, might just disappear.
Saunders’ latest book, the nonfiction guide to life and writing, “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain,” published on Jan. 12, represents his two decades of classroom experience as a creative writing professor at Syracuse University.
“I think that was both the motivation to write the book and one of the benefits of writing it, to go, ‘Man, I’ve been doing this a long time.’ And there’s really a lot of wisdom in coming at something again and again and again in different mindsets over the years,” said the author during a pre-Christmas call from his snow-covered Oneonta, New York home (He and his novelist wife Paula also have a home near Santa Cruz). “So if I kick the bucket tomorrow, all that accumulated wisdom just goes.”
Mines, craft
Saunders spent years writing short stories while working as a geophysical engineer in Asia before his first collection, “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline,” was published in 1996, and he spent 20 years getting ready to tackle “Lincoln in the Bardo,” his Man Booker Award-winning 2017 debut novel. In between, he published story collections, a children’s book, a collection of essays, a graduation speech, and also received both MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships.
Readers might recognize that engineering training lurking within the book, which occasionally takes stories apart to see how the pieces fit together. Saunders said the training he got at the Colorado School of Mines has served him as a writer, if not for a long career in engineering.
“I really wasn’t that great at it, but I learned the value of organization. Before engineering school, if I was confused about something, I was just confused about it. I didn’t quite know how to approach it,” he said. “So engineering kind of taught me that on a really large scale.
“I had to get organized personally, but also in terms of approaching a problem. You always broke it down into component parts and you broke the component parts down into component parts until you could solve something. And it was that feeling of, if you could solve one thing, even a tiny thing, then all the other apparently, insoluble problems moved a little bit,” he said. “It’s like when you’re untangling an electric cord, you get one loop out, and suddenly, Oh, you see three other loops. And so it was definitely like that.
“I think about stories that way a lot, especially when I’m analyzing, maybe more than when I’m writing. But it helps,” said Saunders. “It’s just one way to do it, but for me, it takes what’s unknowable and makes it maybe a little more knowable.”
Class acts
This new book, whose title includes a subhead that reads “In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life,” makes good on its claim by combining a mix of reading exercises, writing tools and Saunders’ own essays on life and work. It’s unlike other writing books — or almost any other book — but it’s accessible, wise and funny, such as this passage about finding his voice as a writer after years of Hemingway-esque stabs at realism: “So this moment of supposed triumph (I’d ‘found my voice!’) was also sad. It was as if I’d sent the hunting dog that was my talent out across a meadow to fetch a magnificent pheasant and it had brought back, let’s say, the lower half of a Barbie doll.”
Saunders found the process of revisiting these stories and the classroom discussions surrounding them for the book had an immediate impact on one writer in particular: George Saunders.
“I loved writing it so much, I learned so much and my teaching got better and suddenly I’m more productive in my stories and stuff. I have a bit of an aversion to stasis; I want to keep doing things that are new,” he said. “I thought it was, in some ways, kind of a restorative, almost like a spa day for my mind.”
In the book, Saunders takes readers through short stories by Chekhov, Gogol, Tolstoy and Turgenev, texts he’s spent years examining with students who include “Wild” author Cheryl Strayed and novelist and Harvey Mudd professor Salvador Plascencia.
“Over the years, I found that the most valuable thing is to emphasize to them how simple writing is, I don’t mean ‘not hard,’ right? I mean, simple. It’s not made out of a bunch of concepts or constructions, it’s pretty close to your actual life,” said Saunders. “It’s all right there. You know, it’s not some kind of elaborately constructed mystery club that you can’t get in.
“It’s partly about saying storytelling has been with us forever, people have always done it, and they’ve done it happily,” he said. “Let’s look at our particular mode of storytelling. Let’s get better at reading and writing and interpreting and analyzing because that’s a sort of a superpower that will improve life beyond the page.”
Better living through books
Saunders makes the case that literature can improve our lives and create opportunities for people to come together. According to the author, the book is for readers as much as writers, saying in the opening that the’s convinced that “there’s a vast underground network for goodness at work in the world – a web of people who’ve put reading at the center of their lives because they know from experience that reading makes them more expansive, generous people and makes their lives more interesting.”
Even for readers who might find the notion of reading Russian short stories daunting, the examples in the book aren’t difficult, especially with a seasoned guide to lead the way. Rather, the surprise, at least to this reader, is how accessible these stories, which he refers to as “old friends,” really are.
Saunders says the book isn’t really about the Russians, it’s about the reader and the process of learning to articulate one’s reaction to a story (or a movie or piece of music). “It’s a way of developing emotional intelligence, at least for me it has been. Plus, the Russians are pretty great.”
The stories continue
Looking ahead into the new year and beyond, Saunders said he’s working on stories for a new collection. He’s still got a lot he’d like to say.
“I’m racing to try to get good enough to really express what I feel about this world,” he says, “I’m trying to knock down my own obstructions, get more courageous, and also just develop the technical skills to tell the kind of huge stories that I’d like to tell before I kick off.”
