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JASON BROWN ARRIVED AT
STANFORD with a stack of short stories, an
unpublished novel and an attitude. He'd been working on the
manuscripts for several years, diving deeper into the
writing as he recovered from a dysfunctional family life and
years of substance abuse. He figured his work must be pretty
good. After all, it had gotten him into one of the country's
best creative writing programs.
But there was a problem: the other Stegner fellows in
Brown's graduate workshop didn't like his stuff. The stories
are misogynistic, some of the women said. Others found the
characters unconvincing. Hurt and defensive, Brown took
refuge in his apartment or found himself shouting at writers
he had hoped would be colleagues. Then one day, he recalls,
"I calmed down and began to admit there's a lot I don't
know." By the end of that first term, he had learned to
listen to the criticism and cull from it what was useful. In
the process, he was becoming a better writer.
The result, Driving the Heart, is a collection of
gritty short stories that capture the pain of growing up in
a senseless world. Brown still has his own voice, but he
says the collective wisdom of the writing workshops helped
him find its full expression.
Fiction writers have been making similar breakthroughs
since novelist Wallace Stegner founded the graduate creative
writing program in 1946. But in the last two years, an
unprecedented number of Stegner fellows were successful in
publishing first books. The crop of new fiction includes
novels by Lan Samantha Chang, Keith Scribner, V. Diane
WoodBrown, Tom McNeal and Peter Rock, and short story
collections by Brown and Michael Byers. "It's as if the book
publishing world suddenly took notice of our writers," says
John L'Heureux, a former director of the program and author
of 17 books. "And they're getting buckets and buckets of
money -- more than I can dream of." Several authors have
been paid as much as $150,000 -- plus royalties -- for their
first books.
The dozen or so poets and fiction writers accepted into
the two-year program each year have a sweet deal. They
aren't expected to earn degrees, and they receive annual
stipends of $17,000 to help cover living expenses. But the
weekly writing workshops can be grueling affairs in which
writers must sit silently while their work is picked apart
by fellow students. The process, L'Heureux once wrote, is
"wanton with energy and talent; it can crush the weak and
empower the crass; it offers endless opportunity to give and
receive injury; it is frequently as frustrating, indeed as
maddening, as life itself."
Over the decades, Stegner fellowships have helped launch
the careers of dozens of important authors. A short list of
fiction-writing Stegner alums includes Edward Abbey, Raymond
Carver, Tobias Wolff (now a professor in the program), Ken
Kesey, Ernest Gaines, Larry McMurtry, Scott Turow and Tillie
Olsen. Yet, at no time in its 53-year history has success
come to so many young Stegner alumni at once. L'Heureux and
current director Eavan Boland believe it's a combination of
luck and talent -- and the growing prominence of the
program.
Once you're in, "then, it's like skating in the
Olympics," says L'Heureux, a professor of English. "You had
to be good to get there, but suddenly you're skating with
and against the best. It does something miraculous to you."
STANFORD talked to these writers
about their lives and work. Here are their stories.
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Linda Cicero
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The Reluctant
Novelist
Lan Samantha Chang
Age: 34
Stanford Writing Program: 1993-95
Hunger, W.W. Norton, 1998
Quote: "I thought if I had a job that
required panty hose, life would make
sense."
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Lan Samantha Chang tried to follow her parents'
advice: don't become a writer. So she earned a
bachelor's degree in East Asian studies from Yale
in 1987, then dabbled in premed courses before
receiving a master's in public administration from
Harvard in 1991. "I thought if I had a job that
required panty hose, life would make sense," Chang
recalls as she sips hot chocolate in the Stanford
Bookstore café. "But I woke up one day in
economics class and said, 'I don't want to do
this.' I was taking a writing course and doing all
my assignments for that course before I did my real
work. That's when I admitted I had always wanted to
be a writer."
Back home in Appleton, Wis., her parents thought
she was going through a phase. She didn't let on
that she'd decided to pursue writing. "I misled
them. I lied," Chang says. "But I had decided I
didn't want a normal life." Halfway through the
master's writing program at the University of Iowa,
she published a short story in the Atlantic
Monthly. Clearly gifted, the Chinese American
with the mesmerizing style was besieged by agents
and publishers intent on discovering the next Amy
Tan. "I was really terrified by this industry and
felt this pressure to write something that could be
sold," she says. "I was afraid that the development
of my work would suffer."
She found refuge at Stanford, where she
continued to sharpen her craft. In each of her two
years in the program, she contributed a story to
the annual anthology Best American Short
Stories. When her fellowship ended she taught
undergraduate writing at Stanford through a Jones
lectureship, a three-year appointment awarded to a
select group of Stegner graduates.
One day while having coffee with L'Heureux,
Chang mentioned she wasn't creating whole stories
but rather fragments. "Oh," he observed casually,
"you must be writing a novel." The pronouncement
shocked Chang, who had never produced a piece
longer than 20 pages. To learn how to handle the
genre, she set a goal of writing a 100-page story.
She studied the novellas of Truman Capote, Philip
Roth and Willa Cather. The end result was
Hunger, which consists of a novella and
several short stories. The book has received
five-star reviews and several prestigious
accolades, including a Los Angeles Times
Best Book of 1998 nomination and a citation from
the Rona Jaffe Foundation, an annual endowment that
celebrates emergent women writers.
The novella tells the story of a Chinese
immigrant couple whose hunger -- for acceptance,
love, success -- can never be satisfied because it
stems from the loss of homeland. Despite all it has
cost them, however, the couple pass their
unquenchable longings on to their two children.
Chang says Hunger is not autobiographical.
Her parents were eager to leave behind the memories
of their escape from war-ravaged China, happy to
embrace the Midwest. But she admits there is a
similarity between her and Tian, the father in her
book, who swims to a refugee ship holding his
treasured violin above the water. He dreams of
becoming a great musician in America. "I'm like him
-- relentlessly interested in one thing," she says.
"Writing is my obsession. It's all I think
about."
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Laura McNeal
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Second Time's the
Charm
Tom McNeal
Age: 51
Stanford Writing Program: 1977-79
Visiting Scholar: 1985-86
Goodnight, Nebraska, Random House,
1998
Quote: "I always wrote, even when there
was no validation. But it's nice . . . to
have people who believe in you."
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Tom McNeal believes in second chances. Consider his
protagonist, Randall Hunsacker, the teenager who
flees to the small town of Goodnight, Neb., after a
suicide attempt and a stint in juvenile hall. He's
a loner, misunderstood and searching for a code of
values. He gets his second chance in Goodnight.
McNeal's fresh start came much later in life --
six years after the official end of his Stegner
fellowship. "My writing career and my first
marriage were falling apart," he says from his home
in Fallbrook, Calif. "John L'Heureux invited me
back to Stanford as a visiting scholar to sit in
with the Stegners. It was a much better experience
than the first time I was in the writing program.
It was a time in which everything had traction. I
learned so much."
The inspiration for Goodnight, Nebraska
came from the stories his mother told him as a boy,
stories that made Nebraska sound as exotic as India
or Egypt. In 1976, when he decided he wanted to
write about Nebraska, he moved to a small town
about 60 miles from his mother's childhood home. He
taught high school, drove the pep-rally bus and
soaked up the local color. McNeal modeled his main
character after a boy who showed up at his school
one fall afternoon and dragged himself wearily
through his classes -- only to play like a hellion
on the football field. When the season ended, the
boy disappeared. In his novel, McNeal imagines the
youth's past and future.
After a year sitting in with the Stegner
fellows, McNeal stayed on at Stanford as a Jones
lecturer for three more. He finished his book and
married writer Laura Rhoton McNeal. They have an
infant son, Samuel, and make their home in
Fallbrook, where McNeal lives on a small avocado
grove and runs a general contracting firm with his
brother.
Having made the most of his second chance,
McNeal is finding that new opportunities keep
coming. In June, Vintage published a soft-cover
edition of Goodnight, Nebraska. He is working on a
second novel. Meanwhile, he won the James H.
Michener Memorial Prize -- a $10,000 award given to
writers who produce a first book after age 40 --
and was named a finalist in Barnes and Noble's
Discover Award for new novelists. "I always wrote,
even when there was no validation," he says. "But
it's nice to have it -- and even nicer to have
people who believe in you."
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Michael
Scarpelli
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Writing Her Way
Out
V. Diane WoodBrown
Age: 37
Stanford Writing Program: 1994-96
HalfBorn Woman, Anchor Books,
1998
Quote: "I had been holding everything in
for 32 years. I was a big knot. Now it's
out."
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For V. Diane WoodBrown, writing has been as much
about psychological healing as artistic expression.
She arrived at Stanford determined to finish the
book she had started while working as a
Massachusetts political aide. "I had been holding
everything in for 32 years. I was a big knot," she
says. "Now, it's out."
The secret to loosening those emotional strings,
WoodBrown says, was to recast her life as fiction.
HalfBorn Woman tells the story of Arlen, a
teenage girl who is physically abused by her mother
and neglected by her father and his string of
trophy wives. Often left to care for herself and
her siblings, Arlen struggles to understand love,
sometimes seeking it in the wrong places, sometimes
coming close to destroying herself just to get a
small measure of affection. The story exudes the
sultriness of WoodBrown's native Florida and,
though fictional, reflects the physical and
psychological damage she experienced as a
child.
She carried that damage with her, developing a
neurological disorder at Stanford that made typing
difficult. The creative writing program helped by
giving her a voice-activated computer. Finishing
the book brought her some degree of spiritual
healing -- and most of her neurological symptoms
subsided. WoodBrown's parents recognized themselves
in her tale, she says, but took its publication as
reassurance that she had overcome her childhood
woes.
Now she hopes to get on to other stories -- that
is, when the demands of her 16-month-old son,
Peyton, don't get in the way. She and her husband,
Douglas, met as students at Tampa State University
and eventually settled in San Anselmo, Calif.,
where he teaches at a private school. Recently,
WoodBrown was in a Capitola bookstore giving a
reading along with novelist Chris Gottschalk. As
the two women traded writing stories, Gottschalk
said it had taken her 20 years to finish her first
book while raising her children. When they were
grown, it took only two years to write her second
book. "It was like looking at my mirror image,"
WoodBrown says. "I hope I won't take 20 years to
write my second book."
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Marina
Brodskaya
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Telling an American
Story
Keith Scribner
Age: 37
Stanford Writing Program: 1995-97
The Good Life, Riverhead Books,
1999
Quote: "I know I'm a lucky man, but if all
else fails, I can always take up the
hammer and pound a few nails."
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Keith Scribner couldn't stop thinking about Sidney
Reso, the Exxon executive who died after being
kidnapped, shot in the arm and locked in a stifling
storage locker by a former company security chief.
The kidnapper, who at one point earned $60,000 a
year, told tv interviewer Barbara Walters he
committed the crime to provide for his family. He
wasn't a bad man, the kidnapper said -- not like
those bums and drug dealers you see hanging out on
corners. "Man, it really grabbed me," Scribner says
of the incident, which he fictionalized in The
Good Life. "It seemed to be a microcosm of
American culture."
Scribner transformed the episode into a dark
tale of misguided motives, failed pyramid schemes
and cruelty. In the process, he explores complex
themes that preoccupy contemporary America --
racism and class prejudice, sin and redemption,
family loyalty and personal integrity. But in his
sunny Menlo Park apartment, Scribner talks mostly
about the blessings of the past few years -- the
Stegner fellowship, marriage to poet Jen Richter
(also a former Stegner fellow), a first book and a
first child, a boy due in August.
Scribner began to think about becoming a writer
in his senior year at Vassar, where he studied
economics. He took a fiction course and fell in
love with the simple grace of E.B. White and Joan
Didion. Until then, he had planned to pursue a
master's or maybe a law degree. Instead, he took a
job teaching English in Japan and began a
self-directed course in writing.
Winning the Stegner fellowship in 1995 was a
turning point. "Finally, you have all this time off
to write," he says. "You're with one group of
people so long, they all know your work and you
know theirs. People are supportive, yet they tell
you when it's not working."
Now a Jones lecturer, Scribner is working on a
second novel. Not that he has given up the
carpentry skills that got him through the lean
years of his writing apprenticeship: he's built
himself a writing desk and a bedroom bureau, all
made in the clean, simple arts-and-crafts style he
admires. "Our dream is to move somewhere where we
can afford some land and teach and write and build
a home, have a family," he says. "I know I'm a
lucky man, but if all else fails, I can always take
up the hammer and pound a few nails."
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Frank
Ouderman
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Snakes, Power and
Spirituality
Peter Rock
Age: 31
Stanford Writing Program: 1995-97
This Is the Place, Anchor Press,
1997, and Carnival Wolves, Anchor
Press, 1998
Quote: "When I left Stanford, I thought,
'It's not hard to write a book a year.' I
definitely got spoiled."
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Before he got to Stanford, Peter Rock had lived
enough to gather material for several books. His
travels took him to a string of inhospitable
places: a junior college on a cattle ranch near
Death Valley, a ranch in Montana where he lived in
an unheated cabin, a polygamists' town in Utah. In
between, he earned a bachelor's degree from
Yale.
His fictional world is anything but ivory tower.
Both his novels are about loners, people living on
the fringes of society, searching for something --
snakes, power, connection, spirituality. The
characters sometimes confound the reader; it's hard
to grasp what they really want out of life. Rock
likes it this way. He says he's never after "an
easy story."
As a Stegner fellow, he found himself having to
defend his raw, confrontational style of writing,
his characters and his plots. "The process pushed
me and helped me see more clearly what I was
after," he says in an interview from his apartment
in Philadelphia. "I'm never satisfied with my own
work -- but for different reasons than everyone
else." Before his second year in the fellowship, he
had a two-book contract. The manuscript for This
Is the Place won the prestigious Henfield Award
in 1996.
Such early success may have spoiled him, Rock
says. "When I left Stanford, I thought, 'It's not
hard to write a book a year.'" he says. These days,
he answers phones and otherwise "works as a lackey"
for the University of Pennsylvania football team
while his wife, Ella Vining, completes medical
school there. Rock says he's lucky to get in a few
hours of writing a day. "Still," he says, sounding
a little like one of his hard-bitten characters,
"it's better than nothing."
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Dylan
Willoughby
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The Road to
Recovery
Jason Brown
Age: 29
Stanford Writing Program: 1996-98
Driving the Heart, W.W. Norton,
1998
Quote: "I felt like I was exorcising some
of the demons when I was writing this
book."
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Jason Brown sits on the futon in the two-room
apartment he rents from a Stanford professor. It's
hard to reconcile his earnest face and open
demeanor with his dark tales of young people
working in "jobs that allow the rest of us to go on
living." His characters deliver human organs for
transplant and investigate scenes of untimely
deaths, then deliver the bad news to loved ones.
One man takes care of an alcoholic mother; another
sits in a detox center trying to remember how his
knuckles got bruised. Reminiscent of minimalist
master Raymond Carver, Brown's stories stay with
you. The title piece of his collection was included
in 1998's Best American Short Stories
anthology.
Brown writes from experience. Growing up in
Maine, he was kicked out of two boarding schools
before settling into public school. He attended
Bowdoin College and got a master's in creative
writing from Cornell University while working a
string of unusual part-time jobs -- delivering body
parts, capping test tubes full of testosterone,
volunteering as a subject in pharmaceutical
experiments. And he wrote. By his early 20s, he had
a serious drinking problem. "But it was the
depression that clobbered me," he says.
Brown and a friend joined Alcoholics Anonymous
in 1991. They rented the top floor of a run-down
brownstone in Ithaca, where he got sober and
recovered from depression. As Brown sees it, his
reward was the Stegner fellowship and the
completion of his first book. "I felt like I was
exorcising some of the demons when I was writing
this book," says Brown, now a health nut and yoga
practitioner who remains at Stanford as a Jones
lecturer. "I came here with a
[still-unpublished] novel I thought was so
wonderful. I'd written it in four months. I'd been
in workshops in graduate school, but I realized I
hadn't ever had the higher level of feedback I
needed. Now I'm writing another novel and it's not
so dark."
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Linda Cicero
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Northwest
Passages
Michael Byers
Age: 39
Stanford Writing Program: 1996-98
The Coast of Good Intentions,
Houghton Mifflin, 1998
Quote: "I see my job as a writer to get
into everyone's head, to make them real
and not caricatures."
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Michael Byers grew up in and around Seattle, which
probably explains why the Pacific Northwest is
almost a character in his stories. But his Seattle
is not the new city of software start-ups and
coffee bars. This is a town of crab factories and
cranberry bogs populated by retired schoolteachers,
carpenters and ferry operators.
Byers starts writing his stories by devising
setting and characters. The action and feelings
come later, through a series of revisions that he
describes as more technical than artistic. "The
emotions come last. I can't do it the other way
around," he says. "I see my job as a writer to get
into everyone's head, to make them real and not
caricatures."
After graduating from Oberlin College in Ohio,
Byers taught elementary school for two years, then
took a year off to write before earning a master's
in fine arts from the University of Michigan. The
two years as a Stegner fellow gave him the time to
finish his collection of stories. "You're expected
to show up and write. You're not given assignments,
but rather you're expected to live as a writer. You
bring your work in when you think it's ready," he
explains. "You don't want to look stupid with
something, so you work as hard as you can. That
kind of peer pressure is something I both dreaded
and enjoyed, but most of all, learned from. It was
the hinge that finally made everything work."
Byers has returned to the Seattle area, where he
lives with Susan Hutton, a poet he met in the
Stanford writing program. The two support each
other's writing efforts, Byers says, but he misses
"the friends we left behind and the people you
could trust with your work."
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Yvonne Daley, a frequent contributor to
STANFORD, writes and teaches in
California and Vermont.
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