An Interview with Clarence Major by Leigh Morgan and Wendy Sheanin

Perhaps most widely recognized for his best-selling,1997 novel, Dirty Bird Blues, Clarence Major has published numerous volumes of fiction and poetry, and edited such critically-acclaimed anthologies as The Garden Thrives and Calling the Wind. He has been called "an avant guard novelist, short story writer, and poet known for his bold experiments with language and style." In a review of Dirty Bird Blues, Booklist said Major "thrills us with some of the wittiest, most melodious inner dialog ever written, and moves us with dramatic confrontations between loved ones that are remarkable for their sensitivity, authenticity, and significance."

Major's most recent book, Configurations: New and Selected Poems, 1958-1998 (Copper Canyon Press) includes selections from eight previous volumes spanning four decades. The Kirkus Review has noted that Major's poetry is often characterized by "an improvisational, jazz-like quality." Major, a professor of literature and creative writing at UC Davis since 1988, is also a visual artist. He created the oil painting showcased on the cover of his latest book as well as the three pieces featured in this interview.

Spark: Is it exciting to have a new book out-or does it become less so when you've published so many?

CM: I think the main thing that we all really have to remember as writers is that the reward is in the process of writing. That's the real reward, that's the real pleasure for me. The thing that matters is the struggle with the sentence. The struggle to get it right, the struggle to articulate what you feel and think. So I think the finished product is nice but it's not the real source of pleasure, because you are always pushing on to the next thing.

About Configurations, it's nice to know that it's there, that I went through it and it represents the best of my poetry. But I'm more interested in what I'm writing now-the poetry that I want to write and the fiction that I want to write.

Spark: What are you working on now?

CM: I just finished two short stories after struggling with them for something like four years. I mean I had drafts, drafts, of those two stories that long ago. Suddenly both of them made sense. What I had to do was so clear and so easy to fix. They were problem stories. They had just been sitting in my computer dormant because they didn't work. I wasn't about to send them anywhere. Then I woke up-I don't know, it's just that something comes. There are moments like that, both of them needed a similar fix. I was able to finish them rather quickly and send them both out. I happened to have on hand a request for stories. In the last couple of years I haven't been able to send out stories in response to requests because I didn't have anything ready. So I was happy to have that solution.

Spark: It sounds like letting a piece of work sit for a while creates a space where a solution can come to you.

CM: It takes me a very long time, sometimes, to see a problem. Sometimes I'll finish a painting or think I've finished a painting and hang it on the wall. And then I may walk by that painting for a whole year, you know, back and forth, without thinking about it consciously. In the back of my mind I'm worried about something that has to do with that painting and I don't know what the hell it is. But something about it bothers me. Eventually, whatever that is begins to surface, comes to consciousness, and I realize exactly what's wrong with it. But it may take a year for me to realize what's wrong with it. Just like with those short stories that didn't work.

On the other hand, sometimes, things come out right the first time. And I know it right away, with a painting or with a poem. Maybe three or four drafts and then it's done, and I know that it's not going to look shabby a year later.

Spark: Maybe it takes a year or more sometimes to find out what's right about something. CM: Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. That's the way I work. In that sense, I work pretty slowly. I work fast and slow. You know, I may be able to put down a draft very quickly, but it's far from finished.

Spark: Can you describe your writing process in terms of where your work begins? Do you know, when you begin a piece of writing, what form it's going to take?

CM: Do I know when an idea needs to be a story or a poem or a novel? Well, with a novel, obviously, you need to think about it a long time. It needs to grow as a very complex network of ideas, feelings and emotions that won't go away. I mean, you should try to make it go away if you can. If it refuses to go away, it probably needs to be a book. But in order for it to be an interesting book, it has to come out of a deep place, I think, in the writer. It has to be not a singular kind of response but a very complex response.

I think there's a feeling when something needs to be narrative or linear. I think of poetry as something that needs to be more circular or less linear. Something that requires a kind of compression. I guess that's the best way to put it. Something that isn't really begging for a narrative line. Although, clearly, there is plenty of narrative poetry around, but I'm just thinking of my own impulses and my own particular approach. So I would say when the idea or feeling is round, I tend to want to make it into a poem. And when it's linear, I tend to want to make it into a story.

Spark: Round versus linear shapes.

CM: I guess the word I want is sequence. When there seems to be a need for sequence, connecting not just one image to another, but stitching together a sequence of scenes that are going to be the best way to render the particular idea. That idea doesn't have to be preachy, it doesn't have to be didactic, it could be just a feeling. It doesn't have to be clear in my mind. It could be an emotional response to something I have experienced or something I have been close to in some kind of way. My worse fiction is the fiction that comes too much out of ideas. And I know it, I know it, but sometimes I find myself so passionate about the idea that I forget that it's going to be bad fiction. Fortunately I haven't published much of that.

In fiction, you have to be, I think, very careful of letting your ideas drive your work too much. Better not to know very much about what a particular piece of fiction wants to be, especially at the beginning. In other words, let it be an act of discovery. If I'm writing something that's based on my own experience, I get better results when I haven't consciously explained it to myself, or I haven't thought about it a lot. I might just look back and think, '"What was that all about?" That's the sort of moment that works best as a basis for a piece of fiction. Something I haven't really articulated for myself very much. The worse kind of thinking is, as I've said, to start with some preconceived abstract idea.

Spark: Do you ever worry about losing the germ of an idea during that time when you're not free to write?

CM: Oh yes. And I have had the experience of not writing down something that I wish I had. Because it's gone forever and I keep thinking, 'Well, maybe it will come back,' but it very often doesn't. I try to jot down things when they appear. Usually good ideas will hit early in the morning before I get up. You know, when I'm lying there thinking about the ordeal of getting up (laughs). I'll have a good idea and I keep a pencil and pad by the bed, and for years I developed a habit of working in the dark. Especially if I'm working on a book and obsessed with the book, I'll wake up all times of the night and jot down things in the dark. Don't even need to turn the light on, just write very large. It's just for me, so I can remember that I need to deal with a particular thing when I go back to the computer.

Spark: It's like the mind is always working on everything that's going on.

CM: Right. Which is why, once you start a book it takes possession of you. And that's why I'm so reluctant to start a book when I have a lot of distractions. It becomes enormously frustrating. But if I can get a draft done, even if I have to put it away for a year-or an academic year. I've done that many times: Get a draft done, put it away, and go back to teaching. It's always back there in my mind, but it isn't as frustrating or worrisome as it would be if I had only done a chapter or so. I like to be able to think of the work as a whole thing. Even with a very, very rough draft, it just feels better to me to have a sense of wholeness there to go back to.

Spark: Do you find it difficult to switch gears between writing and other demands in life?

CM: Not very difficult, no. To switch gears, sometimes it takes a few days. Like, let's say, once the academic year ends and I'm going to pick up the book that I started, the memoir, it'll probably take me a week to warm up to that book. I haven't looked at it in such a long time, but I've been thinking about it and I know what I need to do-precisely what I need to do. But in a sense, it's cold. It's something that I need to get back into in a way that feels fluid. So I know that it'll take a while.

Spark: You've mentioned the memoir you're writing about your mother. How much do your parents play a part in your work?

CM: I've used my parents as the basis of characters before. So, that's one way. But I think we all do probably, one way or another. I don't know that I want to get very far into that topic of the memoir I'm working on because it's a bit premature. But I wrote a novel called Such Was the Season, based on my mother's sister. She was the model for that book, and to some extent, my mother was too. It's written in a first person narrative from a woman's point of view. An elderly woman, a middle-class woman, mother or a minister...I'm getting real life mixed up with fiction, so I have to sort it out here. In real life, he's really a lawyer (laughs). But you know it's kind of interesting how we use people around us, our family and so on, as models. 

Spark: Do you find transferring real life into art happens differently in poetry? CM: I like that word 'transferring,' but I think also what really happens, in the best sense, is that there's a transformation. No experience we have can be transferred into art. I think it has to be transformed into art. The terms of art are

very different from the terms of life. Forms can be imposed on both, but they are very different forms. We know what kinds of forms we're talking about when we're talking about the sonnet and the novel, with chapters and sequence and so on. Life can have order, but very often that order is hard to detect. That's why we have ritual and patterns, and so on, that we rely on. Using experience as a basis for art is, of course, primarily what we have to work with, but it's never a matter of looking at that experience in terms of factual information. But looking at experience in terms of a kind of larger truth about it that has to be reshaped. I had enough failures in my own attempts to know that it has to be done in a certain way before it works.

Spark: Do you think about your readers when you're writing, and how do you imagine them to be?

CM: Well, I think of myself as an ideal reader. You too?

Spark: No, I hadn't thought about that. But of course I'm the ideal reader. (Laughter).

CM: I ask myself, 'Now, is this a book that I would like to read? Is this a short story that I would like to read? Is this a poem that I would like to read?' And if the answer is no, I know I'm barking up the wrong tree. I'm working against my own better judgment. So, I try to keep that in mind.

Spark: Are you in a writing group or workshop?

CM: I get my feedback from editors, or my agent, who tends to love everything a little bit too much. And my wife. My wife doesn't love everything. But, you know, when she does, well it's something I can trust to be a success. She's been right about ninety-nine percent of the time. The two short stories that I just finished, she thought they were great. So, I said wow, you know. That's it, that's it. She doesn't lie to me at all. She doesn't try to flatter me or polish my ego in any way (laughs). It's miserable at times, but she's a very, very tough critic.

Spark: Do you ever write to music?

CM: I do, I do. In fact I wrote that whole book (Dirty Bird Blues) while listening to the blues.

Spark: Which artists?

CM: I played everything. A lot of them were early blues because I was trying to get the flavor of the blues in the forties, since the book is set in the late forties, early fifties. Charlie Patton, Robert Johnson, Jimmy Witherspoon, Lightning Hopkins, Mississippi Fred McDowell.

Spark: A lot of blues have narratives, they're story-telling.

CM: Exactly. Right. And I noticed that someone like Lightning Hopkins will never sing the same song twice in the same way. It's always different. I have different versions of him singing the same song and it's just like a total reinvention of that particular scenario. I have albums on which he is actually making up songs right on the spot, you know. Straight out of his life. Songs with no titles. I mean just pure, sheer invention, just creative energy going. And it's something he can never sing again (laughs).

Spark: Do you play an instrument?

CM: No, but I wish I could. I play around a little bit. I'm not good at making music.

Spark: Though poetry is a little bit like making music.

CM: Well it certainly is. That's the kind of music I make.