An informal interview with Paul Harding

By michele on July 13, 2010 | Add a Comment

What are your five favorite bands of all time?  
Impossible question! Off the top of my head, five of my all time favorite bodies of music are:
    1.    Pretty much anything by the Rolling Stones
    2.    Beethoven’s piano sonatas
    3.    John Coltrane’s classic quartet
    4.    Sly Stone’s album, Fresh
    5.    Prince’s album, Dirty Mind
 
But that list already makes me feel very disloyal to a whole lot of musicians and composers…. 


What about your five favorite books of all time?

 Mostly, the usual suspects….
    1.    Moby Dick
    2.    War and Peace
    3.    Absalom, Absalom!
    4.    The Magic Mountain
    5.    Moby Dick, again….
 
This makes me feel disloyal, too…. 


What’s the best book you’ve read this year?  
Either Sarah Orne Jewett’s, The Country of the Pointed Firs (which I reread to teach) or Nikolai Leskov’s, The Enchanted Wanderer.

If you could have any superpower, what would it be and why?  
A good memory increasingly seems like a superpower to me….

What’s your favorite quote from a book?  
I can’t say I have a favorite quote. I do spend a lot of time thinking about that line from Stevens’ “The Auroras of Autumn”: “Of what disaster is this the immanence?” Although, as I type that, it sounds a bit pessimistic, taken out of context. Within the poem, it’s astonishingly fraught and beautiful. 
 


What writing advice do you give to your students?  
I more or less urge them to be precise, emphasize that fiction writing is not about lying but about telling the truth imaginatively, and beg them to write clearly about real mystery rather than obscurely about received opinion. 


What’s life like after winning the Pulitzer?  
All of the attention can be a bit dismaying, but my personal experience of it is that I understand a bit more every day the magnitude of the thing, my unbelievable good fortune, and the amount of hard work and humility it’s going to take to be equal to it over the long haul. And, I love getting to talk about all kinds of art and ideas with people from around the world every day; that’s a real blessing. 


What’s your writing routine?  
Ideally, I have long periods of apparent dormancy, when I sort of doze and wake on the couch in a pile of books that I chew on like cud and ponder, followed by say a couple months at a time when I write every morning and revise every night. Less than ideally, and more commonly, I write wherever I am, whenever I get a bit of free time.  

What book made you realize you wanted to be a writer?
Carlos Fuentes’ novel, Terra Nostra. I sort of wanted to be a writer as soon as I knew what one was, but that was the novel in the middle of which I actually remember thinking, That’s it; I’ve got to try this for myself. Except for a couple things in an undergrad creative writing course, though, it was a few years before I acted on it. I’m kind of a slow study.