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An Interview with Sandra Gilbert (continued from home page)
by: Josh Cembellin & Samantha Lê
JC: Is there anything that you would like to take from your experience at SJSU?
SG: I think what I take away from all my experiences teaching is that I learn a lot. I always learn. I hope I learn new strategies as a teacher, but I learn from students. I learn the ideas that my students have and from teaching different texts in different ways. Also, I learn how to read new poems and new stories in surprising fashions.
SL: Do you teach fiction as well or always poetry?
SG: I have taught fiction, but it’s been a long time. And I certainly would not feel as competent to teach fiction as I do to teach poetry. Something I’ve never taught, which is what I actually write a lot now, is non-fiction, “memoiristic” prose. At Davis, for example, we only just started having a specialist in creative non-fiction. I’ve never taught it, but I would be interested. Certainly, when I was teaching at Princeton where there was no graduate verse writing program, or creative writing, but there was a very rich and amazing undergraduate program, but I don’t think there was any creative non-fiction.
SL: But that’s very popular now. Everybody’s going to that genre.
SG: It’s so popular now. I know, that’s something that, one of these days, I’ll hope somebody will want me to teach. I know people who show me manuscripts that they would like my views of. And I would have to say that even though I write it, I would need to learn how to teach it. Because, since I’ve never done it, I don’t know what works best with students. It would be challenging, but it would be interesting.
JC: Are there any particular authors, or memoirists, that you like?
SG: Oh, that’s too hard. Impossible! I mean there are so many amazing memoirists—certainly Nancy Meyers, who writes a lot about disability, for example. You know, there are so many people. There was that Joan Didion book The Year of Magical Thinking that was on the top of the Best Seller’s list for a long time. Every issue of the Times Book Review has another interesting set of memoirs that they blueprint. It almost gets to be too competitive a form.
One of my favorite creative non-fiction writers is Susan Griffin. She’s wonderful, marvelous; she’s got an uncanny way; she’s a poet, but she’s also a writer of creative non-fiction. And she’s wonderful at incorporating personal memories and autobiographical material with meditative ideas and reportage; and that’s hard to do. I note how hard it is to do, and that’s why I would approach teaching such a course with some trepidation, because I would not know yet how to teach people to do it. I’m still trying to teach myself!
JC: In the graduate poetry workshop, you’re focusing on the “Estrangement and the Art of Poetry.” How did you come up with this concept and what makes it a successful approach?
SG: Well let’s hope it’s a successful approach. I taught that course before at Davis with different texts. I added a new mix of texts and some new prompts. But I actually think that poetry is a way of defamiliarizing or estranging the world. I actually think that poetry is looking at everything in a new way, as if you were seeing it, not for the first time necessarily, but from a strange perspective, like in that poem by Craig Raine, “A Martian Sends a Postcard Home.” Looking at the world with Martian eyes or in some strange way lets you really have a fresh sense. I think the most important thing is to get people to flee from clichés.
JC: Since women’s literature classes are not often offered at SJSU, what are some important ideas you hope that your students will take away from your class?
SG: I can’t believe that! Maybe you shouldn’t quote me, but I can’t believe that in 2009 there aren’t more courses. I have met a couple of people in the English Department who have said that they would like to teach those courses. The most important idea that I want people to take away…two major ideas: one is that there are female literary traditions; there are literary traditions that are shaped by women as a gendered group. But moreover, there are ways in which writing by both men and women are shaped and reflected as we would expect: by gender identity. And it’s just so important, and it seems to be now so, not obvious, but important. That’s what I want people to take away.
There was a moment in the ’70s and ’80s when everybody was doing that and establishing Women’s Studies programs and Gender Studies programs, and now there are even Masculinity programs. And if that moment went by, then the energy probably would
have lapsed.
JC: How would you compare the Bay Area to other locations in which you’ve taught and lived?
SG: Since the Bay Area is my favorite part of the world other than Paris and Florence, I would say it’s the nicest place to teach! There is a difference. There was always a difference between— I would say this particularly about undergraduate poets—my undergraduate poets at Princeton and my undergraduate poets at Davis. Graduate students are more sophisticated. But my California students were more free and imaginative. My Princeton students were more uptight. It was very hard to get them to think metaphorically. So some of the things I did with this estrangement course I may actually have begun thinking about while I was at Princeton, because they were very good at doing strict forms. They were better than my California students at writing sonnets, and they got very upset if I didn’t assign sonnets and villanelles. I think that the general kind of student who goes to Princeton is maybe more “Sciencey” or more quantitative. It was hard to get them to loosen up.
SL: Do you think it’s a cultural difference between the schools or a result of their location, such as a difference between East Coast and West Coast writers?
SG: I thought of it as an East Coast, West Coast difference. You also could say it’s an Ivy League difference, but I’m not sure. I taught at Indiana, and it’s true that the Indiana students are more like the California students--more good at being imaginative, and less good at uptight, strict, formal kinds of writing. I prefer to start working with imaginative students and then get them to learn how to write strict forms. It took me a long time to realize at Princeton what I had to do to get kids who weren’t used to thinking in a visionary or metaphorical way to think like that. It was an interesting challenge.
SL: Do you think poetry can be taught?
SG: Yes. I think there has to be some innate passion for poetic thinking. But I think it’s possible to, especially in a workshop where there are a lot of people collaboratively thinking about their art, get people to imagine new ways of writing and stretch themselves creatively. I mean if there’s nothing there then there’s no interest in it. But people who take a workshop must have some interest, and there must be something to be taught. I hope it can be; otherwise what am I doing?
SG: You could also make the argument that many, many people are potentially poets who don’t even know they are. And then of course, there might be people who think they’re poets…but I like to be very optimistic about the possibilities for what people can learn. I have a body of material to teach in the women’s lit course. There are actual, not just ideas, but facts, that I can transmit. I don’t think that’s so much true in a verse writing seminar. I think there’s something that people can get out of it, something people can gain, something that I gain. And if I can gain then other people can gain, to put it very narcissistically!
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Sandra M. Gilbert is the author of seven collections of poetry, a memoir, an anthology of elegies, along with a number of critical works and essays. For a complete biography and list of publications, please visit: www.sandramgilbert.com
Climbing Upward and Looking Back
into California’s Mountaineering History (continued from home page)
An interview with Dan Arnold
by: Vincent Bergado
VB: Was it hard to narrow the information from California’s history and make it dovetail with your
own thoughts and experiences?
DA: In each chapter, I tried to pick one specific intersection between the historical climb and my own experience to serve as the thematic bridge that held the chapter together. So, for example, in Chapter 3, it was the philosophical relationship between science and adventure (many of the early mountaineers were geologists); in Chapter 7, it was environmentalism
and wilderness.
VB: You’re very agile and precise with the imagery. Did you ever find yourself struggling with new ways to talk about or describe the mountains? Did it ever feel like it was too much for words?
DA: All the time. I spent a lot of hours staring at my mental images of the Sierra and searching for phrases that captured both the visual appearance of the mountains and the experience of climbing them. I wanted—perhaps almost to a fault—to avoid scenic clichés, because I felt that a reader wouldn’t really see the mountains unless the words were fresh and stimulated the imagination. Mentally, I often bumped up against catch-phrases, words like “indescribable” or “beyond words,” and I tried to use them as self-motivation.
VB: How did you document your adventures? Was this harder to do when you were very limited by your gear?
DA: For nearly all of the climbs I had a small notebook with me, and I would write in it at least once a day. Each notebook became completely invaluable when I sat down to work on that chapter. I have a pretty good memory, but still, there were small, wonderful details that I wrote in the journals but had forgotten. And reading through my notebooks would take me back to the mountains in a way that simply sitting there and thinking about them didn’t.
VB: Do you have a specific writing routine when you are at home?
DA: I try to write every day that I’m not away climbing, even if it’s only for an hour. I find that writing consistently makes it much easier to get started each day and makes me more productive. Ideally, I get up and start to work first thing, because that’s when my head is clearest, and write for four to six hours.
VB: Is there a lesson from early in your exploration of writing or something from the workshop that continues to resonate with you?
DA: Probably the most valuable lesson I learned from the workshop process was the importance of taking the time to make the words right. I write really slowly. If I can get a good paragraph out of an hour or two, I’m usually pleased. I hope someday I’m a little faster, but right now that’s what it takes for me to make
good prose.
VB: Finally, how did you market your manuscript? Any words of advice?
DA: I had a pretty unpleasant relationship with an agent that lasted for about a year and a half. The experience taught me that if things don’t seem right, and lines of communication aren’t open, it’s probably best to move on.
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Dan Arnold has also been the editor of the Stanford Alpine Journal, and is currently working on a collection of short stories.
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