Photo Albums

Writer, editor and teacher Ian Stansel visited campus Jan. 27-28, 2014, on the heels of his latest work, Everybody's Irish. This photo gallery shows his talk to Professor Eric Freeze's creative writing class. All subsequent photo captions are Stansel's quotes taken from that discussion.

Second person (narrative) always seems slightly dream-like to me. It puts this gauze of slight unreality to the story. I felt as though that worked as the story went on. It was kind of a good fit. If it feels right, you have to go with it, but it is a gamble.

I’m always working on way too many things at once. I’m early in my career. I just put out my first book, so nobody really knows who I am. My philosophy is to say yes to everything. Put yourself out there wherever you can because the invitations are few and far between. You don’t want to pass one up.

I took a class during the third or fourth year of my Ph.D. where the professor had us writing a story a week. He’d give us prompts, but we had to write a draft every week, which was bonkers, honestly. None of them were more than eight pages long and most of my stories are 20 to 30 pages or more now.

The last story in my collection is a longer story that is all that is left from a failed novel that I wrote. It went from 350 pages and all I really got out of it was about 34 pages of usable text. It’s just didn’t work out. The main thing I learned from writing this novel was that you have to make things happen. Stuff has to happen. You can have these well drawn characters and beautiful sentences, but there has to be a story there.

I think it’s a bad idea to go back to old stuff. It’s so tempting, but it didn’t work for a reason. There is some fatal flaw in it that can’t be overcome, or else I would have figured it out at some point. You should be moving forward.

It can be geography. It can be social strata. It can be a style that defines you. I’ve written a lot of stories and essays that talk about “Literature of the Suburbs” or “Literature of the Midwest.” It’s been really good for my writing to explore that from different angles, but as often happens, I’m getting restless. I’m interested in getting out a little more.

Those clichés persist. You read about the suburbs and it’s the same images being recycled for 50-60 years now. It’s the same damn story being told and that wasn’t my experience. It was never like that. I’m not interested in writing about manicured lawns and tidy little streets.

That’s why it’s so important to read widely to try and find your place within a literary lineage. What are the stories that you are trying to emulate and what’s different about your take? Everybody is unique. Life isn’t experienced the same way, so what are you experiencing that isn’t being voiced elsewhere?

There are stories everywhere, everywhere. I heard something on the radio and I thought, ‘that is a perfect novel right there, this little story.’ Use something in the newspaper or something that your friend posts on Facebook. Develop the mind of a writer and once you develop it, it’s really hard to get rid of, even if you wanted to. You are just taking mental notes all over the place.

The characters emerge through writing. Writing isn’t just the articulation of a thought. The thought happens while you are writing. You have an idea and you start to write it. Through having to put that idea actively into words, your brain is doing things it wouldn’t otherwise do...If you want to come up with a storyline or a character, you have to be writing.

Is this a story? Does it have a narrative arc? Does it satisfy in the way that a story is supposed to satisfy? The first novels were an autobiography or a found diary. There had to be some excuse for it to exist. It wasn’t until later where writers really said, ‘No, we can just write stories. We don’t have to make excuses for there to be a narrative.’ I don’t see them as tricks. If they are a way into the story you want to tell, then go for it.