An Interview with Jennifer Egan

Jennifer Egan, author of The Keep and, most recently, Tales from the Goon Squad, is interviewed by Guernica.

From the story...

Guernica: Backing up a little, how did you learn to write?

Jennifer Egan: By doing it wrong. A lot. And finding that out, and little by little learning to do it right. When I went to UPenn, I took a writing workshop with Romulus Linney, the playwright. He’s a really great teacher. And actually after I took that class I worked with him independently for a year. I remember still, bringing in a piece in which in the first paragraph, I noted that “the sky looked like the underbelly of a duck.” Romulus said, “Do you see why that’s laughable?”

Then when I went to England, I wrote a truly terrible book, which was really an attempt at The Invisible Circus; but there was no overlap between the two. And I enjoyed that experience, but the book was really unreadable. I found that out when I came back and sent it out to people and got very bad reactions.

And then I began taking workshops here in New York, just at people’s houses. I took one with Philip Schultz, who now runs the Writers Studio but then was teaching out of his living room. He’s a poet: he won the Pulitzer two years ago.

The thing that Phil really focused on was the importance of an emotional intensity, a rawness. When I walked in there I was writing really really badly: I’d gone completely off the rails in writing this godawful novel. Because I was getting no feedback: I was just in a vacuum, thinking it was fabulous. So the stuff I was writing at that point was just hard to listen to. And Phil would let anyone who brought work read it. But the way that he would get us through all that work was by stopping you when he felt that the group had heard enough. And for a long time I never got through a full story. I think the most I got was about halfway through. And he would say, “I think we’ve heard enough”: then they would all let me have it. But there was finally a point where he did let me finish. And that was a real turning point for me. I finally reconnected with an old impulse in myself that for some reason had just been lost.