On Teaching (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1)
Richard Price, Clockers
Picking up the thread begun with T.S. Eliot on teaching, I give two stories on the subject by Richard Price. Both demonstrate the value of teaching as part of the writer's life.
In the first, Price discusses teaching writing at a rehab center. This experience bore directly on the creation of Clockers (the arduous revision of which has been discussed here):
Richard Price: Let me tell you how Clockers got me back into fiction. First, I had had my own painful experience with cocaine, although I had been clean for about eight years by the time I started on the novel. In 1986 to 1987, crack hit the newspapers. You couldn't pick up a newspaper and not find the word crack in every article, including the weather report and the sports page. It seemed crack was the new nihilistic monster that was going to destroy us, the ultimate thing that was going to lead to the undoing of civilization. My own drug experience was such that I fell apart on your typical middle-class sniffing cocaine. But after I straightened out, this demon, this crack came along, ten times more potent, addictive and debilitating. It seized my imagination because, although I was clean, I was still having nightmares. This new thing seemed like kryptonite and to make amends for being a coke-jerk all those years, I began teaching in a rehab center in the Bronx. My students were adolescent crack addicts or crack dealers -- many of them from broken homes, homes in which some of the parents had criminal histories, homes in which there were intravenous drug problems, sexual abuse, physical abuse, suicide attempts. Some of these kids going home to a house where, if the father was there and not in Rikers, he was chopping up lines on the table. And there I was, educated, mainstream, in my early thirties, financially solvent, professionally established, having almost fallen through the earth on pedestrian coke-sniffing, looking out at a room full of adolescents with nightmare backgrounds who had fallen prey to the same drug that almost killed me, but who were taking it in a form ten times more pernicious, and they were saying to me that they smoked crack in order to cope? That made me crazy. So Clockers came about through the teaching experience, the crack epidemic, my not too ancient memories of drugs, and (last but not least) returning to the world of housing projects from which I came.
In the second story, he's teaching at an unnamed school and then at prestigious Yale. The subject is if writing can be taught.
Tip: Take up the stories you have, not the story you are expected to have:
Share on FacebookPrice: You can't teach talent anymore than you can teach somebody to be an athlete. But maybe you help the writer find their story, and that's ninety-nine percent of it. Oftentimes, it's a matter of lining up the archer with the target. I had a student in one of my classes. He was writing all this stuff about these black guys in the South Bronx who were on angel dust . . . the most amoral thrill-killers. They were evil, evil. But it was so over-the-top to the point of being silly. He didn't know what he was talking about. I didn't know this stuff either, but I knew enough to know that this wasn't it.
I said to the kid, Why are you writing this? Are you from the Bronx?
He says, No. From New Jersey.
Are you a former angel-dust sniffer? Do you run with a gang?
He says, No. My father's a fireman out in Toms River.
Oh, so he's a black fireman in suburban New Jersey? Christ! Why don't you write about that? I mean, nobody writes about black guys in the suburbs. I said, Why are you writing this other stuff?
He said to me, Well, I figure people are expecting me to write this stuff.
What if they do? First all, they don't. Second, even if they did, which is stupid, why should I read you? What do you know that I don't know?
He turned out to be one of these kids in the early eighties who was bombing trains with graffiti -- one of these guys who was part of the whole train-signing subculture, you know, Turk 182. He wrote a story, over a hundred pages long, about what it was like to be one of these guys -- fifteen pages alone on how to steal aerosol cans from hardware stores. He could describe the smell of spray paint mixing with that rush of tunnel air when someone jerked open the connecting door on a moving train that you were "decorating." He wrote about the Atlantic Avenue station in Brooklyn where all the graffiti-signers would hang out, their informal clubhouse, how they all kept scrapbooks of each other's tags. Who would know that stuff except somebody who really knew? And it was great. The guy was bringing in the news. Now, whether it's art or not depends on how good he is. But he went from this painful chicken scratch of five-page bullshit about angel-dust killers to writing stuff that smacked of authenticity and intimacy.
That is the job of the writing teacher: what do you think you should be writing about? At Yale I had the same problem. They'd write ten pages of well-worded this or that, but where's the story? I finally came up with an assignment. I hate giving assignments. I hated getting them and I hate giving them. But -- the last of the good assignments -- I made them all find a photograph of their family taken at least one year before the writer was born. I said, All right. Write me a story that starts the minute these people break this pose. Where did they go? What did they do? We all have stories about our family, most of them are apocryphal, but whether you love or hate your family, they're yours and these are your stories. On the other hand, Tom MGuane once said, I've done a lot of horrible things in my life but I never taught creative writing.
