Faculty

Jane Alison

Jane Alison is the author of a memoir, The Sisters Antipodes (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), and three novels: Natives and Exotics (Harcourt, 2005); The Marriage of the Sea (FSG, 2003), which was a New York Times Notable Book; and The Love-Artist (FSG, 2001), which has been translated into seven languages. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in The New York Times, International Herald Tribune, Boston Globe, Seed, TriQuarterly, and The Germanic Review, among others. She has also co-edited a critical series on women writers, published several biographies for children, and collaborated with composers Thomas Sleeper and Raina Murnak on two mini-operas.

Website: www.janealison.com

Life Philosophy:

You need skin as thin as a newt’s to absorb the world around you and write. Then you need skin like a pachyderm’s to live the life of a writer.

Teaching Statement:

Perhaps because I came to fiction via classical literature and visual art, I first absorbed it through its ancient ancestors—epic, lyric, even pot painting—so see it as an omnivorous and protean creature, not the ruly being standardized as Novel, Novella, or Story. I urge writers in my classes to be omnivorous, too: to be open to narrative designs that may be as much inspired by film, music, painting, or natural patterns as by the dramatic arc; and to absorb as much of the world’s produce as possible. We should keep porous the membrane between what we call creative and what we call critical, letting all that we see, read, sense, or learn infuse what we make. We are famously supposed to write what we know: what we should do is always try to know more.

It’s struck me, in my own struggles, that writers at first often fall into one of two types: those who stand on the roof, look out, and invent; and those who dwell inside, working with the dense material of themselves. But ideally one shuttles between these, turning the lens inward and outward again, so “research” is essential, whether it takes place through books, travel, or pondering, and I urge students to indulge in it. It can start with a step as slight as abandoning writing for a moment and reading entries of a dictionary, getting excited by the nets among words and discovering accidental meanings in your own words, which then lead to new ones. It expands to study—how the summer air smells near a train track, or the names of pigments in Venice—and the detail you find is never just background but organic, feeding the narrative. Research can be slow and extravagant, given how much goes into one sentence. But, wonderfully, it can also be passive, a function of vivid consciousness: an item recorded because the eyes were open can, like knowledge of a language, rise and create meaning later.

In my classes writers cut back and forth between the creative and the critical, between generating material and gathering and dissecting it. I ask them to excavate what they need to write by approaching their subjects from various technical angles and with different tools, to knock material free. At the same time, I urge them to crank open their vision and explore layers of the world beyond their experience, to punch open windows in the text and go through. We anatomize everything—both our own work and outside texts—so that tactics become clear and available. We might examine how Carver builds hidden motion through a sequence of images, for instance, or how Duras uses filmic techniques in The Lover to find a new way of thinking about narrative. Likewise, in workshops we first move inside each text to understand its desires and achievements, and then shift outward to articulate its potential, diagnose its flounderings, and push it to become its fullest self.

I learn easily as much from students—startling new ways of seeing—as I hope they do from me, as I have from my own teachers, colleagues, and all the writers and artists that have awed and haunted for three thousand years. The great honor is, by writing, reading, teaching, learning, to be part of this intense ongoing conversation, part of this ancient continuum.