Diane Williams: ‘My form is my form.’
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I have read that there was a distinct moment in your life when you decided to dedicate your life to writing. When was that, and how did you come to that decision?
Not one moment … the first occurred when I ended my work as an editor, when my son was born. As a toddler he was quite independent, nearly always busy with his blocks and his cardboard books. More often I felt irrelevant.
I stood at a window to look at the house across the street, and the sight was not enough of a sight. I was bewildered by my own sense of vacancy.
Why did you retire from editing when your son was born? And what had you been editing until that point?
I thought it was an imperative to quit my job. I was brought up to presume that my signal assignments were the jobs wife and mother. But since I did not marry right out of school – I spent ten years as an editor in educational publishing. I loved that work, but was certain that that work was done.
When my marriage ended abruptly, my ambition accelerated. I had to reclaim pride and love, plus devise a whole new world order, and I believed in the alchemy of art.
That ambition is still tangible in your work. Were you conscious of the scale of what you took on, reshaping yourself and your life by creating a new shape in fiction?
I was absolutely conscious of the crazy scale of my ambition and entitled my first book: This Is About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time and Fate.
I wonder how you stand such intensity? I think no one gets a final verdict on whether alchemy was achieved. And yet some artists can’t, won’t, don’t stop. I’m interested in your experience of being one of them.
For me – this experience has been saving.
Early on I found that what was painful in my life, when objectified on the page, gave me a sensation of power. An enormous surprise.
It was also invigorating to assume another version of my own voice, the voice frequently of someone I feared. My fiction provides the chance to relive – inside out or upside down – what I have lived and thought.
However, the first public reading I gave was a terror. At its finale, I hallucinated demons rushing at me (my own awful words aiming to get back into my mouth?). I nearly fainted, though this never happened again.
Thank goodness for that. Maybe the muse visits more violently than we usually think. What was it like to find your reading public? Your art is so challenging and specific. Do you have the readers you want?
I sent my stories out widely to little magazines, early on. I sent fiction to Wayne Dodd at The Ohio Review – who for years rejected me. At long last, he featured my stories – and he thanked me for my persistence. He wrote: ‘You finally taught me what you were doing.’
Courageous of you to persist, and admirable of him to learn over time and say so.
Yes, this was quite a memorable letter from him.
I would send out six or seven stories at a time to six or seven little magazines and wait months to hear back. An ordeal. And yes, today, I have the readers I want! I count you as one of them!
Another inestimable reader is Christine Schutt, who reads my stories before they ever go out elsewhere.
What do you think allowed you to keep faith with your form?
My form is my form. If I were a pear tree I would produce pears.
Let me rephrase that question. Rejection is a constant part of any creative life. How have you developed the grit to continue in the face of it?
I haven’t developed any grit, but I do have the determination to proceed without it.
I have also read that you were a dancer. Was that part of your post-baby reinvention?
No, I began to study dance when I was eight and several years later, my teacher sought to put me on scholarship, to have me dance every day and to join her troupe, but my parents forbade it. I did, though, devote many hours to dance and dance performance throughout my late teens and early twenties, up until I decided not to become a professional.
How does that practice connect to, enrich, contradict, or otherwise interact with your writing?
Well, I knew I was telling a story when I choreographed or improvised. But perhaps it is the necessary zeal which connects the two best for me.
Yet writing disappoints because these labours never physically feel commensurate with the labours I associate with dance. I always fear I am not working hard enough.
I doubt any reader of a Williams story can imagine you not working hard. Many artists describe a connection between writing and the body. Can you say with words what you said with your body?
I don’t think I am able to say in words what I ‘said’ with my body. This is not translatable.
However, I wrote my first story – ‘The Goddess’ – in Philip Roth’s class, and this goddess executed a slow, unfolding leg extension as she entered the scene.
At the time, I was reading The White Goddess by Robert Graves, in which he theorises that a true poem is the invocation of The Muse, The Mother of All Living: ‘[T]he hairs stand on end, the eyes water, the throat is constricted, and a shiver runs down the spine when one writes or reads a true poem.’ (Story. Novel.) The ancient power of fright and lust is thus evoked.
The unfolding of a leg – what an alluring beginning. Fright and lust strike me as better aims, or maybe just a better time, than ‘fear and pity’.
I would prefer not to feel fear or pity. What a very great point!
You studied with both Roth and Lish, each of whom has had a complicated legacy for many female writers and readers. What was your work with them was like?
My work with both was essential. Philip Roth assigned and discussed stories by Cheever and Kafka. We read Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. I don’t recall his practical instruction. There might not have been any. He believed desire was the wellspring for all great writing.
Gordon Lish often lectured about the qualities of literature that – using one of his favorite words – ‘perdures’.
He spoke often about the preeminent importance of establishing authority, of producing an authentic voice, of truth telling, of drama. He paid acute attention to story structure, sentence syntax, to rhythm – to the sound of every phoneme.
The right teachers for the right student: desire, precision and pace. Now those gifts flourish in your work as an editor of NOON. What did you, and do you, hope to achieve in creating a literary magazine?
I hoped and hope to produce yearly, with the assistance of our stellar staff, NOONs filled with luminous and numinous texts. I have always wanted NOON to be open to all comers. In almost every edition we publish new voices, as well as writers publishing for the first time.
I read and respond to all submissions and tax myself to get back to writers as quickly as possible.
I am gratified to hear from many readers that NOON is the only magazine they read through from page one to the last!
Can you describe your work with a given contributor and his or her work? If there is a usefully typical example.
Some stories require no collaboration. We may recommend a different title. If we suggest changes or cuts, the intention is to heighten the effects already present. We might suggest beginning the story several paragraphs or pages further in … We might recommend the modification of an ending. Finding the right ending is so often elusive – can be exasperating.
At times, when we have on hand multiple and uneven submissions from an author – a better ending for the strongest story might be found within the author’s less developed story.
I have read that you become angry when your writing is not called ‘stories’. Why does that anger you?
Which of us has the moral authority to dictate the shape, size or character of such speech?
I love, I revere the word ‘story’. Our forebears surely told stories all the time, soon after they decided to speak in sentences. These are perpetuated and commemorated, or they are not.
You are often described as ‘avant-garde’. It sounds like you aim at something very old instead. Which leads me to a thought I’ve had about your work: that it is intensely literate. The punctuation needs to be seen, the shocks and laughs come from precise juxtapositions that need to be repeated, exactly; are not summarisable or available to be improvised on, without structural damage. So, stories in a highly modern sense. Although that thought is contradicted by your description of your work as ‘speech’.
I enjoy mixing heightened and colloquial speech with language, that, as you say, needs to be seen.
I think my best stories, are the ones I call my best because they give me so much pleasure when I read them aloud. If my language has become musical, I think I’ve been successful.
And perhaps this is not technically ‘speech’, but I like best to experience my own story as a song.
‘Musicality’ is one of the qualities I hear most strongly, feel most strongly to be increasing, in your last three books.
Well, that’s good to hear!
One line (from I Liked Rex) I thought could drop right into a poem is ‘Soon he selected several Tiffany picture frames that framed the grim faces of those who have already had all of their chances.’ And the rhythm of ‘when at the sink, he pried at the uplifted offscourings’ makes me wild. Is there a way to describe how you invite musicality into your sentences and stories?
I have noticed that when someone speaks heedlessly or passionately – their language is often especially lyrical.
When I hear myself or anyone else speak in such a state, this is instructive – productive.
Some sentences in my work are discovered this way. Most are achieved laboriously.
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Diane Williams’s twelfth book of fiction — I Liked Rex — is due out from Granta Magazine Editions this November. The New York Review Books published this title in their Classics series in September. The Collected Stories of Diane Williams appeared in 2018. She is the founder and editor of NOON, the archive of which, as well as Williams’s personal literary archive, was acquired in 2014 by the Lilly Library.
Heather Cass White teaches at the University of Alabama.
Image credit to Brigitte Lacombe for headshot of Diane Williams.
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