Snippets
The Rumpus has got a piece by the great Jim Shepard at the top of their page right now- An Appreciation of John Hawkes. Apparently, Shepard was a student of Hawkes’s at Brown. Aside from painting a fascinating picture of Hawkes, I really feel like Shepard is getting at something fundamental and urgent about the way that effective writing instruction functions, the inextricable dimension of personality, the deeply human nature of the whole enterprise. I said as much in the comments, which by the way have so far garnered responses from two other former Hawkes students: James Robison and Rick Moody (whose first story collection, The Ring Brightest of Angels Around Heaven, is dedicated to Hawkes), and the Brown-but-not-Hawkes-alum Shya Scanlon. Seriously. Go read this piece. Then order a copy of Travesty.
This is awesome! Thanks for directing me to it.
Hawkes’s work has been extremely influential on my development as a writer, and as a thinker about literature. When I first read The Lime Twig, maybe about seven/eight years ago, I felt for the first time (in my reading life) like I had really found a kindred spirit. Here was somebody who cared about sentences more than stories, who cared about language more than anything else (nearly a decade before Lish became Captain Fiction).
His work offered me permission to write the kind of thing I knew in my heart-of-hearts I wanted to write: not that Aristotelian crap all those workshops kept trying to beat into me, not all that Freudian/Shakespearean psychological crap either, but instead: language assemblage. His work stood as a counterexample to all that orthodoxy shoveled down my gullet in the classroom and in countless craft writing anthologies. His work was like a remedy.
“Have you ever let lodgings in the winter?”
Oh, man. Hawkes rules.
This is awesome! Thanks for directing me to it.
Hawkes’s work has been extremely influential on my development as a writer, and as a thinker about literature. When I first read The Lime Twig, maybe about seven/eight years ago, I felt for the first time (in my reading life) like I had really found a kindred spirit. Here was somebody who cared about sentences more than stories, who cared about language more than anything else (nearly a decade before Lish became Captain Fiction).
His work offered me permission to write the kind of thing I knew in my heart-of-hearts I wanted to write: not that Aristotelian crap all those workshops kept trying to beat into me, not all that Freudian/Shakespearean psychological crap either, but instead: language assemblage. His work stood as a counterexample to all that orthodoxy shoveled down my gullet in the classroom and in countless craft writing anthologies. His work was like a remedy.
“Have you ever let lodgings in the winter?”
Oh, man. Hawkes rules.
thank you justin. now i have two authors i need to read (schutt, hawkes). this is a good day.
thank you justin. now i have two authors i need to read (schutt, hawkes). this is a good day.