A Quote by Jane Smiley

Literature - novels, plays, and poems - can have an uncanny dual life, where they simultaneously represent something eternal and something historical, and this is often how they are taught in school.
I wanted to write plays. I was at Yale graduate school at the time for English literature, not for acting... I liked the idea of collaboration, and I thought if I'm gonna write plays, I should learn something about speaking the lines that I might try to write.
Poems are taught as though the poet has put a secret key in his words and it is the reader's job to find it. Poems are not mystery novels.
I can't think of a single one of my plays that does not represent a coincidence between an external and an internal event. Something outside of me, outside even my own life, something I read in a newspaper or witness on the street, something I see or hear, fascinates me. I see it for its dramatic potential.
We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even the stars . . . everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you’d be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There’s something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being. -stage manager, in the play OUR TOWN
If you write a book set in the past about something that happened east of the Mississippi, it's a 'historical novel.' If you write about something that took place west of the Mississippi, it's a 'Western'- and somehow regarded as a lesser work. I write historical novels about the frontier.
When I was young, I would write all the time. Novels, plays, and poems. It's like a disease - my life is filled with fantasies, and I have to write them all down.
I've always felt that the poems I've written which have historical context are hopefully not just simply plucking something out of history and saying great, let's write about that. In every case what has happened is that I've become fascinated or haunted by something and couldn't shake it.
I mean, every novel's a historical novel anyway. But calling something a historical novel seems to put mittens on it, right? It puts manners on it. And you don't want your novels to be mannered.
I can only write one novel at a time. The author of the Perry Mason novels, Erle Stanley Gardner, often worked on four novels simultaneously, and produced a million words a year. I'm envious.
I'm told I was acting in school plays when I was a tiny little boy at the age of three, so they must have seen something then. And even when I was practicing piano eight hours a day, I was still doing school plays.
I was in school for literature, and read so many 19th century and early 20th century novels that it was hard to break out of that and read an average Jeanette Winterson book or something.
It was not just that Ross Macdonald taught us how to write; he did something much more, he taught us how to read, and how to think about life, and maybe, in some small, but mattering way, how to live.
A surprising number of people - including many students of literature - will tell you they haven't really lived in a book since they were children. Sadly, being taught literature often destroys the life of the books.
[My poems] of course, it's symbolic, in the way that things in a poem can be - that is, pointing to something beyond its mere ordinary meaning, while also retaining all the qualities of that ordinary meaning. In other words, it's a bear, but it's also suggesting something else, just by virtue of the attention to it. But it's not "symbolic" in that way we are taught to think about things in poems.
When I go to the shore, I take along the poems of Pablo Neruda. I suppose it's because the poems are simultaneously lush and ripe and kind of lazy, yet throbbing with life - like summer itself.
My wife, Keisha, came home once, and I had these violinists playing for her, and I'd prepared dinner for her, and I write poems. She's pretty amazing, so I like to celebrate that. She's really taught me how to celebrate life; that's something I've learned.
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