Over the span of her forty-year career, American author Lydia Davis has garnered numerous awards for her short story collections (and one novel). In 2003, she received a MacArthur Fellowship, and in 2013, the Man Booker International Prize. In 2009, James Wood of The New Yorker described Davis’s body of work as “unique in American writing, in its combination of lucidity, aphoristic brevity, formal originality, sly comedy, metaphysical bleakness, philosophical pressure, and human wisdom.” We couldn’t agree more––so naturally, we just had to pick her brain.
What texts would you consider integral to your genealogy as a writer?
Essential influences? It is very hard to pin down the most important. I read a great many writers, both prose-writers, and poets, starting at an “impressionable” age, say seven years old, and on up. I’m convinced they all played a part in shaping my imagination, first, and my emotional development, maybe second, and finally my sense of how to handle language. I read Beckett way back, when I was a teenager, but even before that I remember reading a book by John Dos Passos, and that book––whichever one it was––was the very first that made me stop short and think about the prose as prose: how the book was written, not just the story as a story. Skipping forward in time, to my early twenties, Beckett and Kafka were the main influences––among a great many.
I’ve read that the moment of encountering Russell Edson’s prose poems or short stories was a turning point in your writing career when you first realized you didn’t need to write long to write well. Have there been other momentous points in your writing where you encountered a particular piece or body of work that changed you?
All through the years, there have been pieces of writing that showed me another form to try. David Foster Wallace’s “Interviews with Hideous Men” showed me a form for my story “Jury Duty.” Charles Reznikoff’s “Testimonies” showed me it was possible to convert prose into lines of poetry, something I started a few years ago in my (ongoing) adaptation of a memoir entitled “Our Village” by an ancestor of mine. Reading Anne Carson’s Short Talks makes me want to write some short talks of my own––it’s a wonderful thing she’s done. Michel Leiris’s collection of dreams inspired me to write my own dream pieces. It is hard to isolate another particular author or work that changed my direction. I had another “breakthrough” in the early 1980s when I realized I could create a story out of a real event with little fictionalizing ––but it did not result from something I read.
Can you offer any advice for emerging writers seeking to publish work formed outside the expected conventions of the 15-30 page “short story?”
What I did was gravitate to like-minded writers, so that I could find support from contemporaries I respected who were as open as I was to all kinds of writing. Some of them started small presses or little magazines and were eager to publish what I wrote. I would advise the same: find contemporaries who are interested in starting publications, either print or online, or start one yourself. I see young people starting magazines all the time. I publish in them, too, since I like the openness of young people. Don’t worry about publishing in the more established places until you’ve really developed as a writer, maybe not even then… And don’t worry about “career” (or think you can earn money writing)!
You sometimes work with found material (letters, listserv emails, stories and dreams from friends, language incorporated into our everyday experiences, like product packaging. Have you ever felt concerned about the point at which it becomes your own artistic construction?
It is somewhat of a concern, yes, but not a great concern. For one thing, I have an important hand in selecting, shaping, and titling the material. Also, I am not really worried as long as I’m also writing other, more fully invented pieces at the same time. And I tend to take the long view of my methods and subject matter: this particular form or theme will exhaust itself eventually, I’m confident, and I’ll be trying another one. If I did simply repeat myself for years on end, then I would do something radical to change that. But it hasn’t happened yet.
Some writers perfect each sentence before composing the next, while others spit out a “shitty first draft” [à la Anne Lamott] that they then revise and revise and revise again. How do you approach the process of revision, especially since your work is known for its distillation, and what’s left unsaid?
Well, to start, I don’t perfect each sentence before composing the next. And I would never write a shitty first draft, either. The way it usually works is this: I write the first draft very quickly so that I don’t lose anything that might come to me spontaneously. But I do write well, even in the first draft, so although I’m not stopping to revise––I’ll make a quick change of a word here and there, as I go along, but I’ll never reread––the first draft will be quite good. What may need work is the ending, typically, because I may run out of steam before I really conclude the piece. At that point, I may leave the piece alone for a while, or I may start reading it through again right away. Before it’s really finished, I will have read it through many times, but perhaps making only small changes each time. Sometimes it still has a weak ending. I may have to leave it for quite a while before I see how to end it. Patience!
You’ve said you find interesting what other people might find mundane or boring, and many of your stories, such as “The Brother-in-Law,” hone in on some minute social interaction or situation. Did your work receive much criticism/rejection in your early writing years for not doing what people conventionally expect stories to do? And if so, how did you develop/maintain the confidence to persevere?
Well, I’d have to go back to my earlier answer about finding like-minded friends and fellow writers and/or artists, people who are not just open to new ideas and a variety of forms, but actively hunger for them. I always had support of some kind, enthusiastic support, for what I was doing, so my own excitement about it found reinforcement and response from others. (I’m thinking back to my mid-twenties or so.) I did not expect the so-called “establishment” to like what I was doing, necessarily. There are all kinds of readers out there, and readers have different moods and needs, too. You can’t please everyone. It is important to have friends who can talk to you about what you’re doing. It may take a while, a bit of trial and error, to find the right readers. And certain readers are good for certain of your pieces and not for others. You don’t try out your strangest piece of writing on your most conventional friend.
Does the boundary between fiction and non-fiction ever concern you? I guess what I’m asking is: do you ever worry that people will make assumptions about the real people on which you’ve based the characters you’ve portrayed?
What is important to me is that the piece is completely formed, fully developed, finished, solid. Then it has its own identity and life, and where it may have come from does not matter. It is transformed, as I work on it, from something personal to something more objective. Also, since there are always fictional elements in what I write––even if only in the voice of the narrator, or in some of the details––one can never assume that any particular story is “true” to my own life.
