The Muse and the Marketplace kicks off on May 1st at the Park Plaza Hotel in Boston. In anticipation of the conference, we collected micro-interviews written by authors, agents and editors who will be attending the event.
Micro-Interview with Douglas Bauer, author of Dexterity, The Very Air, and The Book of Famous Iowans as well as many non-fiction works.
What is the best book you’ve read this year?
The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James. I read it, for the third or fourth time, in order to teach it to an undergraduate honors seminar at Bennington College. Like every true masterpiece, it’s distinguished by its newness, its freshness, on re-reading. What I was struck with this time is the astonishingly detailed patterning James achieves in the narrative of quite a long novel. By which I mean, again and again, a moment or event or utterance on say page 50 reappears in a deeper and more resonant way on say page 350.
What is your favorite independent book store?
I have two, Newtonville Books in Newtonville, MA and Porter Square Books in Cambridge, MA. What they share is the immediate impression, on entering either store, that this is a place run by people who love literature. The quality and depth of the inventories make that clear. Additionally, in the case of Newtonville, it’s own and run by a married couple, the husband of whom I first met 20 plus years ago when he was a MFA student at the Bennington Writers Seminars, where I was teaching. It’s a treat to see that literary love on such a continuum.
What is the strangest place you’ve ever been?
If by “strange” you mean the most foreign, the least immediately simpatico or recognizable to me and my instincts and experience, I’d Jacksonville, Florida. Or a neighborhood on the outskirts of Jacksonville, where I stayed in a motel one night whose other guests were a large truckload of what in retrospect were likely undocumented workers being supervised by a menacing chain-gang leader sort, and where the nearby steak restaurant featured steaks so tough mine literally bent my knife when trying to cut it. More so than Dubai, more so than Zanzibar, more so than rural Mexico, all places I’ve spent time, the American South is, for me, a foreign country.
What is the strangest interaction you’ve had with a reader?
After a reading I gave of my first novel, Dexterity, a young woman came up to me and said, “I am Ramona.” She was referring to the protagonist of the novel, a hard-luck, but finally resourceful woman who survived an auto accident that cost her her right hand, and who later abandoned her infant son in a flight from her abusive husband, and who finally made the brave decision to return to that son and to a world she had no certainty she could survive in. I was struck speechless by this reader’s pronouncement. Where does one beginthat conversation?
Douglas Bauer’s novels are Dexterity, The Very Air, and The Book of Famous Iowans. He has also written three nonfiction books, Prairie City, Iowa: Three Seasons at Home; The Stuff of Fiction: Advice on Craft; and What Happens Next?: Matters of Life and Death, a linked collection of personal essays that won the PEN/New England Book Award for nonfiction in 2014. In addition, he has edited two anthologies, Prime Times: Writers on Their Favorite Television Shows; and Death by Pad Thai and Other Unforgettable Meals. His stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Harper’s, Esquire, Tin House, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Massachusetts Review, Agni, and other publications. He has received grants in both fiction and nonfiction from The National Endowment for the Arts. He has taught at several colleges and universities, including Harvard, Smith, The University of New Mexico, Rice, and since 2005 at Bennington College, where he is a professor of literature, teaching courses ranging from the works of Charles Dickens and Henry James, to twentieth-century writers such as Willa Cather, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Most recently, his course entitled “How to Read a Story,” looks at the work of Chekhov, Carver, Alice Munro, and Denis Johnson. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Bennington, Vermont.
