PHOTO COURTESY OF
JESSICA LOWRY
Joining DePauw’s English faculty this spring semester as the Mary Rogers Field Distinguished University Professor is highly acclaimed writer, Rick Bass. He’s won numerous awards including the PEN/Nelson Algren Award for fiction, and has taught at several universities such as the University of Montana and Beloit College. Sixteen students are enrolled in his workshop, titled “Fiction and Environmental Nonfiction Workshop.” The DePauw had an opportunity to speak with Professor Bass, and this is what he had to say:
The DePauw (TDP): How was your professorship at DePauw arranged?
Rick Bass (RB): David Fields created this endowment to honor his wife, and it’s a rotating appointment where writers of different genres come in and spend a semester, just being available to students, teaching a class, a workshop in my case, and interacting with other classes as desired. It was an incredibly generous gift. And I’ve been thinking a lot about how, and I don’t mean to sound self-congratulatory, but it’s amazing how just one person’s gesture can help a school. Not many schools have this kind of a gig.
TDP: What are some of your goals for the semester?
RB: I want [the students] to improve and grow in their revision abilities, and to take joy in cutting. I would like them to become more comfortable with working off the map or off script, not knowing how a story or essay will end. I have some basic goals for them. Improving through repetition and coaching basic fundamentals, almost like a boot camp kind of thing.And then a larger more abstract goal in infusing their work with passion. There can be a tendency of younger writers to be careful when caution is not their strength, and one should always write to their strengths.
TDP: How did your upbringing shape your writing style?
RB: I grew up in Texas, in Houston, in the suburbs. I think the simple brute geography of the place really influenced me a lot in voice and style. It’s a place that’s between two other places. It’s at the edge of the west, and yet it’s at the edge of the south. You have the whole Texas vibe going back then: the furthering frontier of the West, of the imagination, opportunity just a little farther west. And so you grow up with that mythic idea of big space, spaciousness, opportunity, independence, which of course is a myth. It’s not a reality, but it’s a storyline. Another influence is the deeply oral and stratified souther storytelling tradition. “So-and-so begat so-and-so begat so-and-so.” They just don’t get in a hurry with the stories in the South. The discursiveness, the digressiveness, the fecundity, the languor, the luxuriant prose and storytelling.
TDP: What is at the heart of your writing?
RB: I’ve always written a lot about time and time’s relationship in human lives versus the lives of animals or the processes of geology. Our unique or singular or peculiar definition of time, the myth that we can exert some influence or control in our lives, is interesting to me. I’m interested in themes of excess and posits at every level, like a productive environment versus an environment of limited productivity. What’s the value of beauty in humans' lives under a time of duress, a time of war? I consider that a fair bit these days. What is the cost of being engaged? What is the cost of being benumbed? They are protective mechanisms either way, they are evolutionarily valuable. They are here for a reason. When should you exert your influence to step from one to the other? What are the cumulative effects of habit and routine? I don’t know. Different things, different things.