A Conversation with John Irving, Part 2 - Season 2, Episode 12

Welcome to The Book Love Foundation Podcast! And thank you for joining us in this celebration of teaching and the joy of learning.

In this episode, Part 2 of Penny’s conversation with John Irving.

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This conversation was recorded as part of the 2017 Book Love Foundation Summer Book Club. The 2018 Summer Book Club is coming up soon. Visit the Book Love Foundation web site to learn more.

Season 2 Ep 12 Show Notes

This episode is Part 2 of a three-part conversation Penny had recently with John Irving.

From Irving’s web site:

John Irving, the modern American novelist, has written thirteen novels over the course of his prolific career, nine of which have been international bestsellers.  The World According to Garp, which won the National Book Award in 1980, was John Irving s fourth novel and his first international bestseller.

Worldwide, the Irving novel most often called an American classic is A Prayer for Owen Meany(1989) the portrayal of an enduring friendship at the time when the Vietnam War had its most divisive effect on the United States.

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Book Love Foundation podcast. The Book Love Foundation is a non-profit 501 3(c) dedicated to putting books in the hands of teachers dedicated to nurturing the individual reading lives of their middle and high school students. In the past five years, we have awarded $223,000. If you can help us in our mission, visit booklovefoundation.org and make a donation. 100% of what you give goes to books.
– Penny

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Creators and Guests

Host

Penny Kittle

Penny is Chairman of the Book Love Foundation and is dedicated to helping students and teachers develop a passion for reading and writing. She has taught English and coached literacy in public schools for 34 years.

Guest

John Irving

What is The Book Love Foundation Podcast?

Celebrate the joy of reading with the Book Love Foundation podcast. This is a show filled with information and inspiration from teachers and leaders across grade levels, states, and school systems. We interviewed authors and educators for the first five years and now turn our attention to leaders in public, private, and charter schools. Find out more at booklovefoundation.org or join our book-love-community.mn.co of 2500 educators from 28 countries. We sustain joy together, one kid and one book at a time.

Kevin Carlson 00:00
Hello and welcome to the Book Love Foundation podcast. I'm Kevin Carlson from the teacher learning sessions. This episode is part two of a conversation Penny had with John Irving last summer. We decided to make this conversation into three separate episodes because there was so much valuable material in it that we thought this would be an easier way for you to get as much from it as possible. So you can hear part one in our previous episode, and after listening to this, please check out part three in our next episode. Now here's Penny and more for conversation with John Irving.

Penny Kittle 00:42
I think about the words of Terence Depress in 1980 who said critics have sometimes missed the horror at the heart of Irving's vision. They've observed his high spirited frolic and presumed mistakenly that Irving's whole point as a writer is play, maybe he says, but with one decisive difference, this kind of play, defiant, boisterous, recklessly brave, is Irving's hard minded prescription for survival. I love how he says that Irving's dance between horror the hardest, hardest truths and lives of these characters he creates, set right next to this playfulness and exuberance is what sets his work apart. I would say that you'll also learn as you listen to this podcast that Irving's work is set apart simply by the way he tirelessly plans and orchestrates masterful complexity within his writing.

John Irving 01:52
We know the things that are compelling to us as readers. We know what makes us not be able to book down as they say, we we recognize when we're reading a novel, especially if it's at all long, if it's any good, we're more invested in it. We're more into it in every way on page 400 than we were on page 40. And if we're not, we'll never finish it right. And if, if you write a novel that's of any length whatsoever, that's longer than a short novel, you better know how to do that. You better know how to make the reader more interested two or 300 pages long than they were 20 or 30 pages long. It's the fact that the pace picks up is not accidental. It's it's not accidentally in when you're cutting a film, that's where the editing work. You want the thing to move. Well, if you have six scenes in as many minutes, that goes at a certain pace. If you have 12 scenes in six minutes, now you're moving more quickly, a very conscious manipulation. You should be climbing the hill slowly, as you get into the story, noticing details that are important for you to retain and remember. But there comes a point when, even though it's you're still climbing the hill when you're there are more things you want to know. Yes, there's a lot you've learned, but there's got to be more ahead of you. Now, because you care about this character or you care about that character and you detest this character, now you sense the collision that's coming. Now you sense the conflict that's going to happen, and you want to get to it. You want to find out the element of what's going to happen begins to intrude in your consciousness, or even in your unconscious mind, and it makes you pick up the pace as a reader. That's not an accident. It's not an accident in the way you cut a film. Movies are made in the editing. I write the occasional screenplay, but the part of every movie I've ever been in, a part of it is. Is the most enjoyable to me is when the actors have all left and you've got all the scenes and you've got the angles and and now it's the editor. If my principal business were the film business and instead of novels, I might have chosen to be an editor instead of a screenwriter, because that's where, that's where it happens, that's, that's where you manipulate the pace. Well, I mean, sentences are like that. You start out slow. We start out every chapter a little slow, and then something's gonna happen, and you have to plant the awareness what it might be, or the sense of not knowing what it might be, either or. And then the farther into a chapter, the farther into a scene you get. The senses get shorter. Dialog picks up. Things move more quickly. That just doesn't you know it's there's time to be descriptive and and a time to move the story ahead. And these things happen repeatedly. The ends of chapters aren't the same as beginnings of chapters. Um, it's like the movie theater, and at the beginning of the world, according to garb, there's a woman who's trying to watch a movie and a guy keeps hitting on her, um, and it's pretty ordinary. We think we've seen it before, until she reaches in her purse and there's a scalpel in it. Now it's different. Now it's going to move very fast. So you know, when you write about her moving seats, when you write about her holding her purse, the sentences change from the moment you get to the scalpel. Now, you can't make that happen, necessarily in a first draft or in a second draft, but when you have the mini unit, which a chapter is laid out before you, you can find a way to lengthen those sentences at the beginning of a chapter, or when you're setting up an action and want people to notice the details, you slow down when you want people to notice the action, sentences get shorter and you speed it up. All those are just acts of fine tuning. Yeah. You know, in my case, my sport of choice for a huge part of my life was was wrestling. It didn't have to be wrestling. It could have been something. But the issue of having any sport that you do pretty well and repeatedly for a sustained period of your life. Well, as any athlete in any sport beyond weekend recreation knows or would tell you, there's a hell of a lot of repetition. Yeah, you you do dumb little things over and over and over again until they are second nature. Because you have to be able to do those things. Yeah, it has to be something that you can do instantaneously without thinking about it. I don't have to tell Bard that there's a difference between you can't skier and somebody who skis every day? Yeah, there is, well, there's a difference between a summer vacation writer and somebody who writes every day too.

Penny Kittle 08:48
Oh, I so agree. I have my students write every single day for that reason, that idea that practice creates confidence and confidence empowers them.

John Irving 08:59
Well, you don't get it any other way. I don't, I don't know how. You know if you are in the habit of walking three or four miles every day, and then there's a day when you want to walk 10 miles, no big deal. Yeah, but, but I feel that way. You know, if I'm I'm writing three or four or five or six pages a day, every day doesn't seem like a lot, but if I don't do that every day, then I suddenly don't get the two days when I'm writing 30 pages a day, you don't get those days. Yeah, if you don't, if you don't do the five day every day for 15 days, Yeah, gotta have to get, you have to sort of earn the right to be able to do more you.

Penny Kittle 10:02
I one last question for you. I have used up so much of your time, which, as you wrote in your blog, you would rather spend on your creative endeavors, so I'm greatly indebted to you, but I am curious about your experience in school with reading, because you you said a little bit in a podcast about what was identified in your son as dyslexia, I believe, and I'm just curious about your experience with teachers and schooling and how that drove you as a reader and a writer.

John Irving 10:33
Well, I don't think I had a name to put on on how slow a reader I was as a kid in school, if I'd been outside the community of Exeter, if I hadn't been an insider, a faculty brat, if I'd applied to Exeter, I would not have been accepted. I'm sure. I don't think I had the academic abilities to have been admitted to that school was the school was very hard for me. So in a way, I was lucky, because I was a faculty brat. They took me. But in a way, another way, I was unlucky, because for five years of my life, I felt I was really stupid, or that all of my friends were smarter than I was, and it turned out that I was fine if I had one thing to do. In fact, I was very good at concentrating on one thing, and I could concentrate on one thing for a lot longer than most of my friends could. But if I had five things to do, what nowadays they call multi tasking, that term didn't exist in the 50s, 60s, but it really threw me. School was misery for me, but there were always individual teachers who recognized that I could write. One of the reasons I had trouble with all my other things was that I spent so goddamn much time on my writing and my reading that I had no time left over for the things I really didn't care much about anyway. But there were teachers, English teachers, for the most part, some history teachers who recognized the care with which I read, and you know how painstaking I'd been about anything I was writing, and then they were kind of shocked and appalled when when I told them how long it had taken me to read these three chapters, or how many times I'd already rewritten The essay I gave them before I turned it in, quite a number of years later, when I'd already written a couple of books and one of my children, my middle son, was in a elementary school, and someone diagnosed him as having this disability, and They said, well, now watch him when he reads. See how he puts his finger on the word and follows it. See how he especially has trouble when he gets to the bottom of the page and has to turn a page and go over there. And everything this teacher was describing to me about my son was what I do. And you know, no one had told me, no one had put a name on it, but I don't it gave me a lot of trouble with the essential, well rounded student thing that you're supposed to have some sciences and you're supposed to have some math and you're supposed to have some history and a foreign language and all these other things and, well, I didn't feel that it was in the right place until I was in graduate program at Iowa in the Writers Workshop, or all I had to do is write, yeah. And I suddenly thought, what part about this that was like being told it's wrestling season, all I have to do is wrestle. I know how to do that. Yeah. I think the people I feel the most sympathy for in the in among students, are people for whom everything is such a struggle. They can't, they can't find the one thing, it's hard to imagine. They have any motivation to sort of put up with all the rest of it. I mean, at least I always had somebody that that, you know, I. And I wrote us. Then nobody was you didn't have classes to write stories. But I was writing stories when I was 15 and 16. I was writing these little stories, and I always found somebody to read them, sometimes my stepfather, who was always a good reader and but usually an English teacher, and that teacher would read something and say, well, it wasn't on the reading list, it wasn't a part of school. But that that teacher would say, you know, on the evidence of what I wrote, and on the evidence of I really like this book, I really like the book, and that teacher would say, well, here's a book. You should try this book. You know, I kind of got through school, because in every term or every semester, maybe you had four classes, maybe you had five, maybe had only three, and you hated most of them, but there was always one good and there was always one teacher who an ally. And I, way I looked at it is, well, just have to pass the goddamn geology course. Um, and you have to pass the Latin person. You have to, you know, you have to do well enough to get over this damn thing, um, so that you can do the thing you want to do. And so there was a lot of just defending yourself and from all the rest of it. And so, in a way, when I first went to Pittsburgh, where I was not one of the best, one of the weakest wrestlers on the team. Our families found myself surrounded, unlike at Exeter, with a lot of kids who, well, they were with the thing they could do, they they were on the wrestling team. Yeah. But everything else about everything else about school, was killing them, and all of a sudden, I saw how I could help out. I mean, I might have no weakness guy in team, but I was somebody that, when somebody was struggling with a paper, I could say, well, you know, this is not, this is not where you use a comma. This is not where a comma goes, and whatever you think this is, it's not what you do with a semicolon. So suddenly, instead of relying on everybody else's help, I could, I could help out a little college was easier than then prep school and graduate school. Easiest of all, the farther you go in the educational world, the more you get to focus on what you love, yeah, and and you reach a point where you don't have to deal with all the things that have no interest. In but, but the demands of school are such that, oh, well, we all have to be well rounded enough to do everything, not that everyone can. Yeah, I find it a great over and over the people say, well, writing can't taught. Do you believe that all this creative writing courses. Now we can't really teach people how to write. Well, nobody ever asked those questions about piano lessons. So true. How many kids who threw piano lesson going to be Glenn Gould, right. Nobody ever asked that. Nobody ever asked how many serious athletes are, you know, we make people do phys ed, we make them go out for sports, but most people aren't into the Olympics. We don't question these things, but there's always this question about, oh, writing programs or you can't really teach that. You can't really teach that. Well, in my experience, no, you can't, but you know, both as teacher and student in writing courses, you know I knew, I always knew who was going to be, who gonna make it. Yeah, he didn't have any trouble knowing that in the wrestling room, however good the room was, he always said, Yeah, well, I'm never going to beat this guy, but I'll, I'll be his sparring partner, and maybe I'll make him better. All you had to do is you work out with somebody once, and you'd say, well, I can't do that. Maybe I can help this a little, but beat him never. Well, I knew the same thing in the writing class. I would think, well, this guy's we're gonna hear from this person. We're never gonna hear from that person. Yeah, I. But there's no reason not to do it.

Kevin Carlson 20:05
As I mentioned at the beginning of the show, this is part two of Penny and John's conversation. Part one is our previous episode, and part three is our next episode, in which Irving talks about endings, how he is an ending driven writer, and how by the time he starts writing his novels, he knows almost everything that happens in them. It is quite remarkable to listen to. This conversation was recorded last summer as part of the Book Love Foundation summer book club. The 2018 summer book club is coming up soon. Look for details at booklovefoundation.org. Thank you for listening. Thank you for supporting the Book Love Foundation podcast, and thank you for supporting the teacher learning sessions. Support comes from Booksource, a leading distributor of authentic literature for K 12 classrooms. Booksource believes that engaged reading is the key to a brighter future, and that creating better readers has the power to create a better world. When students have access to a rich and varied classroom library and the ability to choose books that explore their personal interests, they enjoy reading and spend more time doing so. Visit booksource.com to discover how Booksource can help you foster engaged reading in your classroom by getting the right books into the hands of your students. The Book Love Foundation podcast is produced by the teacher learning sessions, connecting teachers with ideas, experts and each other.