Joyce Carol Oates Interview (page: 2 / 9) National Book Award	Print Interview

When did you actually decide to emulate other writers and pursue that course?

Joyce Carol Oates: When I was in junior high school, I began much more systematically reading and emulating other writers. I was not conscious of emulating them. I fell under the spell of Faulkner, and under the spell of Hemingway. I remember reading Eugene O'Neill. I was much too young to understand the content of much of what I was reading, but I was so fascinated by the language, the cadences, and the rhythms of their voices that I became really so drawn into it. It was like a rapture.
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Was there one book that made a particularly strong impression when you were young?

Joyce Carol Oates: The one book, probably, of my young adolescence would have been Henry David Thoreau's Walden. That struck a very deep chord with me. Henry David Thoreau is very independent-minded, very iconoclastic, and had quite a corrosive sense of humor. He reminded me of my own father in fact. I think I have grown up to have a Thoreauvian perspective on many things. Though in other ways I live a life he would not have approved of. He believed one ought to simplify, simplify, simplify. Make your life very clear and plain and meditative and not confused. Sometimes my life, in fact, is confused. But I would say Henry David Thoreau's Walden.

When did you actually decide that you would be a writer, and start making a plan?

Joyce Carol Oates: I never conceived of my life as a writer. I think that in the arts, people like to do what they're doing. People play piano because they love it. Or they're working with paints, or they're sculpting. But when one crosses over from the activity, the verb, of writing or doing, and becomes a noun, like "a writer" I think that is an act of supreme self-consciousness that I've never, in effect, made. I write, but I don't like to think of myself as a writer. I think it's somewhat self-aggrandizing and pretentious.

Now, I am a teacher. Literally, I am a teacher. That's a different kind of activity. Being a writer is something I would rather just do, instead of talking about being.

I understand. Was there a teacher that inspired you greatly?

Joyce Carol Oates: I've had a number of teachers including my first teacher who was, I think, a somewhat heroic and Amazonian woman, who ran a one-room schoolhouse in upstate New York, north of Buffalo, right in the snow belt. And in those days a one-room schoolhouse was manned by one person who was a woman. And she took care of the wood-burning stove, as well as eight grades of students, in some cases unruly students, farm boys and so forth. She was a heroic figure. She was quite large, and I remember her very, very clearly because she was my first teacher. I think she was kind to me. I was obviously one of the good girls. I wasn't one of the bad boys. So I was probably one of her favorites.

So I excelled in school. I thrived, like a plant that could only be nurtured in a very small area but would have been destroyed outside this sheltered area.

You mentioned your father being Thoreau-like. What about your parents? Was there a particular way that they encouraged you?

Joyce Carol Oates: My parents inspired me by their example. They both grew up in the Depression, and both of them had to quit school when they were quite young to work, because there actually was no choice. So, though they're intelligent people -- and my father in particularly is interested in books and has subsequently, since his retirement, attended classes at the University of Buffalo -- nonetheless, they didn't have any opportunity to be educated. So they've always impressed me with their resilience, their good spirits, their courage. It wasn't an easy life, and I won't go into details, but there were a lot of problems. And yet they were never defeated.
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Somebody else might have been defeated. Someone else might have been really depressed, or become an alcoholic or something, because there were personal problems and economic crises. But I just remember them carrying on and just doing their lives. They really made a strong impression on me.

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