“There Is No Golden Sentence”: Ron Austin & Eileen G’Sell in Conversation
aug 2020
Teaching for Washington University’s College Writing Program the past two years, Ron Austin is a dynamo of the word, a champion of the sensory human experience. After receiving his MFA from the University of Missouri-St. Louis, he has published work in Pleiades, Story Quarterly, Ninth Letter, and Black Warrior Review, among other journals. His short story collection Avery Colt Is a Snake, a Thief, a Liar won the 2017 Nilsen Prize and was longlisted for the 2020 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize.Raised on the North Side of St. Louis, Austin now counts South City as his home. Sheltering in place with his wife and toddler near Carondelet Park, Austin waxed contemplative about everything from the trials of pandemic parenting to his new nonfiction project in response to police brutality and the tragic shooting of Ahmaud Arbery.
Eileen G’Sell’s cultural criticism, essays, and poetry can be found in Hyperallergic, LARB, Salon, Kenyon Review, VICE, Boston Review, DIAGRAM, Conduit, Ninth Letter, and the Denver Quarterly, among others. In 2018 her first full-length collection, 'Life After Rugby,' was published by Gold Wake Press, and in 2019 she was nominated for the national Rabkin Prize in arts journalism. She currently teaches writing and film at Washington University, and with the Prison Education Project at Missouri Eastern Correctional Center.
The following is a condensed version of their May conversation.
Eileen G’Sell: What’s your background in writing before Wash U?
Ron Austin: I like to consider my writing background in totality. The thing I enjoy doing most and I feel that I’m most efficient at is writing fiction. But before my first book, I was in marketing and communications for about four years, which was interesting. One position was in campus journalism, essentially—interviewing professors and students about programs. I did a lot of blogging and worked on a magazine. Following that position, I had a nice run of experience as far as working for a nonprofit and then a for-profit, and I feel like I learned a lot, but the most important thing I learned is that I prefer academics and writing and those pursuit overall. Taking time away ignited a passion in me to return and work harder.
EG: How does your fiction affect your other types of writing?
RA: As far as writing more analytically or argumentatively, my fiction thrives on exploring in a way that resembles cultural criticism. Its argument is framed more as a question, more in the forefront. One of the nonfiction pieces I feel that I need to sit down and really confront is police brutality and violence against minorities, disparities like that. You know, for the African American population the idea of what happened to Ahmaud Arbery isn’t really new. This is stuff that you’ve been warned about since you’re basically a child. I can’t remember a time in my life that I’ve never been afraid of police officers.
In terms of writing an essay, that’s something that I think about. If you write nonfiction about a situation like that, it is inherently political and you have to think about the way that you approach the argument end of it. As a writer, I’m very much focused on the experience and the emotion of a moment. But I also try to pair that with some kind of message and empirical research. When approaching nonfiction, I’m trying to figure out the way that I can do this overtly, but also in the wisest way possible.
EG: When working on nonfiction, are you thinking about writing a long form essay that has narrative elements, or is it something that you feel is more like thesis-driven? Honestly, I usually discover what a piece of writing is in the process of doing it. I’m not especially prescriptive. But I also appreciate that some writers are.
RA: In terms of fiction vs nonfiction, when I sit down and write more of my personal writing or fiction, I put the exploration up front. But I like the mechanics of writing, the mechanics of making arguments, all the differences in the logical moves you can make. But there are certain types of writing where you really need to get a reader to feel the experience with you.
As far as writing techniques go, I’m very contextual. I don’t believe in there being any definite rules as far as what always works; certain things work better in certain contexts.
EG: How does this philosophy affect your teaching?
RA: It’s one of the big challenges: trying to teach how to craft different forms of arguments—to get your students to produce so many papers over the course of a semester when oftentimes it feels like you can only really get them started on the path. To really get into the exploration of something, it could take a lot of meditation—a lot of fumbling and stumbling. Every one really strong page that you’ve written might take the equivalent of five or ten other pages. And these pages weren’t bad. They just didn’t have that sense of urgency yet.
EG: I think one of the things that challenges a lot of our students is coming into a university setting with an arsenal of tools acquired in high school—these are often more prescriptive skills, like the five-paragraph essay or AP-style timed writing, which is more formulaic and less contextual. One of the things I try to emphasize to students is that when you’re in college and writing a paper, it doesn’t matter if it’s a more conspicuously creative enterprise or argumentative work—there is not one way to do it. It might make sense to have a short paragraph, or a thesis statement at the bottom of page one. Or, if your paper is eight pages long, the middle of page two. The goal is to be flexible with structure, being aware of how your audience is taking part in the reading experience.
Do you have any strategies in the drafting process that feel important to you?
RA: My writing process is really recursive. Whenever I’m getting to a good place with writing something, I back up a little bit. I sit down and I’m like, “I’m going to work on this project and I have to kind of build up momentum, a certain amount of cognitive momentum.” So I try to get myself to start really thinking about the project and everything that’s going into it—to almost create a continuous meditation on it so that I can stay connected to it as much as possible. One thing I do that is fairly practical is take something that I’m working on—like three pages that I’m pretty happy with—and I’ll take the three pages and I’ll reread them. I’ll reread them to myself and look for opportunities to extend the narrative in certain places or if I need to go back and explain something else before I move forward. I’ll mark the three pages up for some changes—they could be big or small—and then from there, I’ll go and I’ll retype it with those changes and print it out again. Usually if I do that, what happens is that at some point either I’ll feel like I can move forward in the story. And I’ll start building from there. Or I’ll take those three pages and I’ll put them in a scrap pile and realize I have to start from a different point.
It’s important for me to have some kind of practical framework that allows me to explore and then keep revisiting different parts of the whole, considering different routes that the story or essay could take because that’s the fun part. But the terribly challenging and difficult part about writing is that there’s a certain point where you feel like you’re pretty proficient at so many things, but it’s not enough to just be proficient.
EG: When I write, I try to imagine myself as a reader at the same time, which means getting a sense of the sound. I do this for poems, but I also do this for essay—read it all out loud! You get a sense of the music, but you also get a sense of when things just do not make sense and, tactically, simple things like typos. Paths open up when you really read.
RA: You could take your argument or your story in three different routes. But sometimes, honestly, I’ll have to write a paragraph trying one thing, and then, I’ll try something else over there. I might feel really invested in a path, like this is what has to happen. And I’ll sit down and write it and it’s almost like I’m making something out of papier mache and you can feel it crumbling. What I’m trying to say, for many students there’s this idea that there’s this golden sentence or correct answer that, if you do it this way, it’s exactly what needs to be done.
But that’s not true, there is no golden sentence, no completely perfect path. There’s this fear that you don’t know where you’re going. Or that if you make a mistake, it’s a waste of time. But really it’s the sense of the unknown that makes writing really great and surprising. You’re fumbling and trying out these different routes, and you’ll come to something that you would have never thought of otherwise.
EG: Exactly. That’s one of the reasons why, for me as a writer at least, rigid outlines have never really worked. When I pitch a certain essay to an editor, I have to distill what I think my argument is going to be, but a lot of times when I end up writing, my argument becomes way more interesting than I first planned. I’m pursuing that kind of trial-and-error process that you articulated; there’s not one way. There’s not one direction that this essay could follow. There are multiple ways. And your first hunch might not be the best one.
RA: This morning, I was working on a story where I got the draft to about fifteen pages, and the stuff that needs to happen is basically there. But then there’s the matter of rendering it. So I came back to it. Maybe the story from last week goes from being a shitty rough draft to a draft to actually feeling pretty good about it. I could take the five pages this morning and turn them into three. Maybe some of those pages are not doing what they need to do. I have probably gone back like maybe three times, and then on the third time I have some edits that I feel pretty happy with. I’m driven by the faith that, if I can get somewhere in the first third of the story, or the first seven pages, the rest of the ideas that I’ve fleshed out can be reintegrated and it will happen pretty smoothly.
For me, I don’t often have a hard time in the middle of a writing project or the end of it. It’s really the beginning the majority of the time. That also becomes the reader perspective, like I’m trying to figure out what exactly the reader needs to know and how much about this or that. How much do they need and how am I going to keep their interests?
EG: Exactly. Yeah, in piquing reader curiosity, there’s a certain amount of ambiguity that I think can be purposeful. The reader needs to keep reading to fully understand. It doesn’t matter what type of writing it is, that curiosity is the readers’ motivation to keep reading. Usually the beginnings of essays take up a lot of time for me as well.
You mentioned that when you were in college, you were more disciplined and focused. What did you study? Did you see yourself as a writer?
RA: I started off as a business major. I was either going to do economics or computer programming. But I was really pretending for a good semester. When I got to my second semester, I knew I was going to major in English.
I started taking writing seriously when I was about fifteen. In a philosophy class we read Black Boy by Richard Wright. And we also read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. I had pretty good literature professors throughout middle school and then a portion of high school. But I also wasn’t reading a lot of diverse books all the time. In high school specifically, we had a whole lot of Shakespeare, but whenever I read something where I could see myself reflected, that really captivated me. After I read Richard Wright for the first time, it was one of the first things that I read where I really enjoyed it, but I didn’t understand it. That mystery was really exciting to me. I was asking my instructors, how does a person do this? Probably the best thing that anybody told me was that sometimes when someone writes a book, it takes them five or ten years. And that’s the reason why it’s so effective. Early on, when I decided to pursue writing, nobody explained it to me on the basis of talent, which I’m thankful for. Nobody said, “Richard Wright is this amazing talent and cranks it out.”
My dad told me, “If you want to be a professor or something, you’d have to like publish or perish. And you’d have to read all these books.” I was like, “That sounds amazing. That sounds like what I want to do with my time.” So I got it in my head. I was like, “I’m not as good as Richard Wright” or anybody that we were reading. I understood that. But if I start practicing for like an hour a day, I’d get better. If I keep practicing, six months from now, I’d be a little bit better. And then six months from there, I’d be a little bit better.
EG: A lot of students seem to blame themselves if they don’t start off with perfection, thinking, “Oh, I must be a bad writer.” Or “I must not be a good writer.” And I tell them that almost every good writer has trouble getting started. When you’re getting started, you’re putting yourself in the reader’s position and trying to figure out how to get the reader invested, along with getting yourself invested. You need to be motivated to finish the damn thing—I mean, it’s work! It’s a lot of work to write well. It’s easy to write something weak, but writing something that is really compelling is very hard, even if you’ve done it for years.
RA: I’ve been writing pretty consistently since then. With Avery Colt, I started writing them when I was about 25 to 35. From 15 to 25 I have probably thousands of pages of work like prose and scripts and everything. I have some poetry that, I mean, I have no intention of publishing even though they are projects that I have felt strongly about and that could be spruced up a bit and sent out into the world. I enjoyed them, and I knew that they were practice. That’s a solid ten years of practicing before I was ready to get to another stage.
Sometimes students think a creative pursuit is purely based on some innate talent. That’s a part of it, but a lot of it is just meditation, work, and a whole lot of patience. When I really push students to try new things, they’re almost surprised by that allowance. It was a shock to them. You can try this or try that—you’re not going to get your hand smacked or anything.
EG: I think perhaps there’s a kind of fear of retribution. Sometimes students are more concerned with what you and I probably consider really micro things, like punctuation. Punctuation is important, but a paper that has a comma splice is not necessarily an inferior piece of prose in the same way that an essay that completely lacks any debatable content. The bigger stuff is more intimidating because the bigger stuff is not right or wrong.
Sometimes students are afraid of emulating other writers because they don’t want to sound like them. But in my experience, usually the student doesn’t really sound like them. Have you ever found yourself stylistically emulating a writer you admire because you felt like the style of writing was something from which you could gain?
RA: The novel Ironweed by William Kennedy. What I liked about that book was that it’s really maximalist and stylistic. As an undergrad I read a lot but I didn’t know what to read. I was dependent upon getting recommendations from professors that I clicked with well. One professor of this course called “Writing on the City” assigned Ironweed.
I used to think I was going to write this 500-page novel, but I’ve come to the point where I’m like, “No, it’s probably actually harder to write fifty pages that really blow somebody away.”
To go back to Ironweed, a lot of the advice that you get when you’re writing early on is about concision and precision. For particular forms of writing, that’s important. And of course, even if you’re pursuing the maximum, concision and precision even just conceptually are important. But with Ironweed the author would go for it. His paragraphs are so rich and so detailed, but also really sharp. It was a good example of what you can do—writing something that’s really dense, but effective too.
EG: I think it’s important to learn what your natural default is, too. I was always a writer who just loves modifiers. I could hang out in a room with adverbs and adjectives all day—and maybe a few verbs. I don’t really need a noun. It’s the modifiers I love. That’s how I am in real life, too.
I love details. I love like describing things and evaluating things, which is what modifiers often do. So I try to read writers who are nothing like me, to learn how to write a really short sentence, to get rid of all modifiers to see how that feels.
I might have a natural style that’s more florid, but I can I strip it down and I like that. I love the modifier “flinty” because it almost feels tactile. Certain prose that lacks all the descriptive embellishment feels “flinty” like that. How has teaching writing affected how you see your own writing?
RA: Overall, I think it’s made me more confident, but it’s also helped me stay on the track of continuous study. I’ve always pursued the belief that the more you learn about something, the more you realize that you know so little. There’s a weird paradox of gaining more tools and skill sets, and then also being able to explain these different intersections to students. To be the most effective teacher you possibly can be, you have to recognize your own strengths and weaknesses, to then figure out a way to emphasize students’ strengths and mitigate their weaknesses. There’s no one answer that’s a blanket statement for all students.
The really fun part is working with students one on one. What’s really exciting is when I can say, “Yeah, I think you can do this and this will work out for you. And here’s a way to do this. Here’s theoretically what you’re doing. And here’s what you’re doing really well, and here’s why it’s effective.” The process keeps you on your toes. It keeps you very invested in your subject itself.