the washington post book world sunday, december 12, 2010 l l
2 EZ THEWRITINGLIFE
Sit. Fidget. Jump up and get out in the world. I’
BY DAVE EGGERS
ve been avoiding writing about “The Writing Life” ever since I first heard those words about 10 years ago. When I hear them, I hear the voices of high school and
college friends, ofmy uncles andmy cousin Mark, who would have rolled their eyes andmaybe punched me, gently, in the face, for even trying to weigh in on the subject. They would say the phrase seems pre- tentious; it’s pretentious to ponder the writing life, even more pretentious to write about it in a newspaper such as this one, with its history of doing the seriousworkof preserving our democracy. By comparison, the writing life, at least
as it concerns me, is not so interesting. I just re-watched “All the President’s Men,” whichIdoevery year or so, and, every time, I marvel athowinterestingWoodward and Bernstein’s lives were at The Post, and how well the film explains the reporting pro- cess, its doggedness and randomness, and how great an excuse it is to get out in the world and ask every seemingly obvious question you can think of (What books did the man check out?), because you never know, you might bringdowna government that has it coming. When I watch that movie, I also think
about how mundanemy own “writing life” can be. For example, I’m putting together this essay, not in a bustling metropolitan newsroom, but in a shed inmy backyard. I have a sheet draped over the shed’s win- dow because without it the morning sun would blast through and blind me. So I’m looking at a gray sheet, which is nailed to the wall in two places and sags in the middle like a big, gray smile. And the sheet is filthy. And the shed is filthy. If I left this place unoccupied for a week, it would become home to woodland animals. They probably would clean it up first. And here is where I spend seven or eight
hours at a stretch. Seven or eight hours each time I try to
write.Most of that time is spent stalling, which means that for every seven or eight hours I spend pretending to write — sitting in the writing position, looking at a screen—I get, on average, one hour of actual work done. It’s a terrible, unconscionable ratio. This kind of life is at odds with the romantic notions I once had, and most people have, of the writing life.We imagine more movement, somehow.We imagine it on horseback. Camelback? We imagine convertibles,windsweptcliffs, lighthouses. We don’t imagine — or I didn’t imagine — quite so much sitting. I know it makes me sound pretty naive, that I would expect to be writing while, say, skiing. But still. The utterly sedentary nature of this task gets to me every day. It’s getting to me right now. And so I have to get out of the shed
sometimes. One thing I do to get out is teach a class
on Tuesday nights. Back in 2002, I co- founded a place inSanFrancisco called826 Valencia, which does everything from af- ter-school tutoring to field trips, publish- ing projects and advanced writing classes for kids from age 6 to 18. For the last eight
years I’ve taught a class, made up of about 20 high school students from all over the Bay Area, and together we read stories, essays and journalism from contemporary periodicals — from the Kenyon Review to Bidoun to Wired. From all this reading we choose our favorite stuff, and that becomes a yearly anthology called “The Best Ameri- canNonrequired Reading.” Sometimes we read things that are okay.
Sometimes we read things that we find important in some way — that we learn from, but that don’t particularly get us all riled up. And sometimes we read some- thing that just astounds and grabs and makes itsway into the bones of everyone in the class. A couple Tuesdays ago someone on the teaching committee picked up a journal called Gulf Coast, published out of the University of Houston, and he found a story called “Pleiades,” by Anjali Sachdeva. None of us had read this author before,
so we read her story without any expecta- tions. But one page into it, I thought,Man, this is a great writer. This is something different. This shows great command, wonderful pacing. The story — about sep- tuplet sisters conceived via genetic manip- ulation — could have been told in a thousandterribleways, but she’smanaging tomake it sing. Inthe story, after the initial triumph of conception, the sisters begin to die, one by one, leaving Del, the narrator, alone and forced to choose between await- ing her fate or taking control of her destiny. The story seemed tomesome kind of small masterpiece, and I hoped the class felt the same. But I knew to temper my hopes; often I love something and the kids think I’
mnuts.This time, though, I didn’t have to wait long to know I wasn’t alone. Gabby, who takes an hour-long subway ridefromEastOaklandeveryweektocome
Literary evangelist
It would be hard to find a more big-hearted writer than Dave Egg- ers. At 28, he founded a journal that showcased writers rejected by main- stream publishers; McSweeney’s went on to publish Joyce Carol Oates, David Foster Wallace and MichaelChabon. At 30, he produced his runaway bestseller, “A Heart- breaking Work of Staggering Ge- nius,” which described losing both his parents to cancer while he was still in college, then dropping out to raise his8-year-old brother. At32,he published “You Shall Know Our Ve- locity,” a novel about twoyoungmen traveling the world, trying desper- ately to give away a windfall. By the time he turned 35, Time had named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Now 40, and having fought, as he
DAVID REINBOLD
to this class, was leaning forward, waiting to speak, practically holding her copy to her heart. Describing what she loved about it, she made an impassioned speech about connectivity, about the limits of science, about Del’s search for a more human, even humble, path, and what this means to her, to us all. Nick, who had brought his own little
sister to class, was floored by the ending— how, in the final act, the protagonist reclaimed a life both made possible and doomed by science. At the end of the class, when we voted Yes, No or Maybe, all the hands said Yes and I went home feeling electric about the possibility of the written word. I don’t need to be reminded of it all that often—I’d just read Philip Roth’s “The Humbling,” and holy hell, that guy, even at 76, can still write something so ferocious, kinky, horribly depressing and yet full of themanicmessof life!—but truthfully,any reminder helps. When you spend eight hours in a shed to get a fewhundred words down, you need every bit of inspiration you can get. And the best place to find inspira- tion, for me at least, is to see the effect of great writing on the
young.Their reactions can be hard to predict, and they’re always brutally honest, but when they love some- thing, their enthusiasm is completely with- out guile, utterly without cynicism. And I thought, okay, the writing life —
damn that phrase — it doesn’t have to be romantic. It can be workmanlike, it can be a grind, and it can take years to make anything of any value. But if, at the end of it all, there’s a Gabby who holds the words to her heartandrides thesubway through the night, back to Oakland, thinking of what those words on a page did to her, then the work is worth doing.
bookworld@washpost.com
puts it, “allmy demons” in that first memoir, he prefers to focus on oth- ers. (“What Is the What” concerns the Lost Boys of Sudan; “Zeitoun” is about a Syrian American caught up in Hurricane Katrina.) But his real passion these days is spreading the love of writing to the young. A staunch teachers’ advocate, Eg- opened
gers
826DC
(
www.826dc.org) in Washington this past fall. The “store” calls itself the Museum of Unnatural History and sells cans of Primordial Soup and packets of Resplendent Plum- age. But its real purpose is in the back, where it houses a busy hive of youngsterswhocomein after school for free tutoring and to sharpen their writing skills. One of eight centers of its kind in the country, 826DC is staffed entirely by volun- teers (writers, editors, poets, artists) and is dedicated to the proposition that all children deserve one-on-one attention. Eggers got the idea from friends — overworked inner-city schoolteachers—who felt their stu- dents would shine “if only I could clonemyself!” The center works in neighbor-
hood schools, helps children with homework, even organizes field trips. “If we do it right,” says Eggers, “we’ll start when they’re 6, follow them through middle school, then take them all the way to college.” Withlots ofgoodwillandanice dose of funding, the place may be solvent within two years. “I’mvery lucky to be writing for a
living,” Eggers says. Like the young men of his first novel, he’s trying desperately to give away that wind- fall.
—Marie Arana
aranam@washpost.com
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