William Henry Lewis
William Henry Lewis teaches in Masters in Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing at the University of Maryland, College Park. He has received fellowships and awards from the Virginia Commission of the Arts, the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation, the Fellowship of Southern Writers, the Black Caucus of the American Library Association, the University of Virginia, the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, and most recently, a 2008 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Lewis’s writing has appeared in America’s top literary journals and several anthologies, home and abroad, including Best American Short Stories of 1996, and recently, It’s All Love, an anthology edited by Marita Golden to benefit the Hurston/Wright Foundation. His first book, In the Arms of Our Elders, was published by Carolina Wren Press in 1995. His second collection of stories, I Got Somebody in Staunton was published by Amistad/HarperCollins in 2005.
Interview with William Henry Lewis
NZ: A couple of years after winning a National Endowment for the Arts grant in literature, you returned as a panelist to judge other writers’ fiction and nonfiction. What was that experience like? How did you go about critiquing and selecting works?
WHL: Many writers talk about working on panels as a way of “giving back” or as “service,” and indeed, I felt and feel very much the same. And what could be better than making some writer’s day with a stack of cash?! Seriously, it was never about the money. In retrospect, it was an honor and a treat to work with my panel, full of genius and congeniality, all of us—irrespective of experience—freshly fascinated by what the crafted word does to us and how we want to share it. I’ve heard horror stories about panels, and while it was a hell of a lot of work, I loved every moment.
Everyone took turns presenting work that they had been tasked to represent on the panel over a few days through many rounds of discussion and cycles of narrowing and selection. We all had to read what literally amounted to over a three-foot stack of manuscripts, but I never felt there was any sense of fatigue or aftershock. If anything, the panelists—writers, editors, critics, bookstore owners, literary organizers—cared for every piece, no matter the quality, and it was that sense of handling the fiction as art, something to be cherished, that made the experience feel so special.
But there was more to it than that to me I wanted to contribute to an institution that I believed in, and, quite fortunately for me, chose to believe in me. I would have done it regardless of anything I received from the NEA. Writing and my understanding of myself as an artist took hold of me in the late 80s/early 90s, when the NEA found its funding on the Congressional chopping block. As I witnessed warmongers dice up the legacy of the primary entity that represents the best of our art to the world and history, I realized that writers, as storytellers in a given community, function as citizens, not just alone to themselves at a desk, but in the community, helping to keep our culture alive for those who follow us. I’ve always carried this spirit into my classes and my community work and I felt honored to be among some very high-profile writers who felt the same, all the while, their passion to do the same far out-shining any ego or agenda other than helping further the directive that “a great nation deserves great art.” Sorry for the soapbox there, but serving on that panel carried with it that sort of spirit.
NZ: How did you go about structuring your own short story collections? Did you employ any helpful strategies you could share with us?
WHL: I would love to have some insightful answer here, but I’m afraid I don’t. I write almost every day, but it takes a long time for a story to feel right to me, and perhaps even longer before I feel comfortable with sharing it with anyone. I’m sort of a patchwork, junkman and salvage sort of writer. Whatever I finally see as worthwhile by the time I get to the twentieth or so draft or so comes from my constantly lumping aspects of story, voice, idea and situation together, constantly mixing and juxtaposing, and, at sometimes, in the end, it works. Not a very skillful or smart approach, but I’ve never been much of a smart writer: I just plod and sweat a lot with the hope that I end up with a story that feels right.
I don’t have any firm strategies other than being very particular about the sound and cadence in my work and that characters are developed enough that they are moving as they would as people in their own right, not as pawns to the point I want to make.
Finally, I think the notion of storytelling and story-sharing is important to me: I want folks to enjoy the experience of reading and be eager to know what happens next, just as we are hooked by folktales as children. I may create an interesting turn of phrase that I think is the coolest thing, but if it doesn’t invite and entice the reader to share the story with me, and want to carry it to others, I try to leave it out.
NZ: How do you read a story collection, from start to finish, or somewhat randomly?
WHL: I have no pattern for this. The one occasional pattern I notice in my reading of collections is that, if I notice a story having been published elsewhere, I sometimes take a look at that first. This is my lazy reader’s side, relying on the idea that someone else found a story worthwhile, so I go for that first. It’s not the same in believing in the hype around a story, but sometimes I’m a literary lemming like so many others. But that doesn’t happen every time. I resist this because the stories in my books that I like the most, or that I think are the most interesting are often ones that never got published in a journal or have received very little attention. I figure a writer must love every story she/he writes, so sometimes it’s best to go with their less-popular selections. There are often the most enjoyable gems in the stories that seem precious only to that writer.
I do pay attention to order, occasionally. This after learning how many readers had steered clear of my whole collection because of their narrow reading of the raciness in the second story in my second book. I don’t think it will change the way I write or read, but I do sometimes pay attention to the stories that lead off the collection.
The other pattern I find is that, when I re-read a collection, I often go from front to back. I’m not sure why this is. But perhaps it serves my only real consistent habit, which is that I often read only one story a day from a collection that I intend to read all the way through. I like to read one in the morning and let it sink in, or drift away, through the course of the day. When I find myself thinking on that story at the end of the day, I feel thankful for the gift of that story.
NZ: What do you look for in a collection? What kind of surprises are happy surprises? What kind of surprises are unhappy ones?
WHL: I don’t think I have any criteria here. I’m pretty wide open with what pleases me in short fiction. I may have writers I return to, but those favorites don’t really inform the moments when I’m surprised or taken by something new, or, for that matter, something quite old.
The only “unhappy surprise” I bump into is in getting halfway or into the last third of the story to discover that the quality of the writing, or more often, the wholeness of the story, has not met up to the promise present in the fireworks or clever devices that opened the story. Too many writers get caught up in the idea of a story more so than telling a good story, a complete story. Or, they have a great story opening up, but they don’t sustain the language, the voice, and poise of the narrator throughout. It’s sort of like being put to sleep by a sermon that, while intellectually strong, has nothing in the delivery and one finds parishioners sneaking peeks at their watches.
NZ: What makes you skip to the next story? What are you looking for?
WHL: Maybe some of what I described above.
NZ: What are you working on now?
WHL: I don’t think I’ll talk much about it now, except to say that I’m trying to develop several narratives that have slowly evolved from what I thought was a complete story that I wrote over fifteen years ago, but, in many ways, didn’t satisfy me. As I kept trying to answer the questions to “solve” the story, I realized that it was more about living with that story for a very long time. I didn’t know that’s what I was doing all this time, but now, I feel quite comfortable with it. Now, it has become many stories, many of which are still developing. I hope I can finish it before another fifteen years goes by, but I like working with the characters and learning from the stories enough that I’m in no rush to get it out of the house.
