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June 2005: Jim Grimsley

Emory writer Jim Grimsley wins two major awards

Emory University's Jim Grimsley, director of the Creative Writing Program and senior resident fellow in creative writing, has recently received two major awards recognizing his work in literature. In May, he picked up the 2005 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The Academy Award is given each year to eight writers who “show exceptional accomplishment in any genre.” Then in June, the Lambda Literary Foundation (LLF) presented him with a Lambda award in the science fiction/horror/fantasy category for his science fiction novel The Ordinary.

Not only is Grimsley admired and recognized for his life’s work, but he is also living the life he wants to live. “If I'm not writing I'm gardening,” he says. “If I'm not gardening I'm reading. If I'm not reading I'm writing. I'm doing what I always wanted to do, and I'm happy doing it. There aren't a lot of people who can make that claim, so I feel as if I'm leading a blessed life.”

For this month’s artist profile, Grimsley answered a few questions about his life and work.

Q: Tell us about what your recent awards mean to you.
A: The Academy Award is a prize given to novelists, playwrights, screenwriters, poets, essayists, translators; in other words, to a whole range of writers to recognize their body of work as exceptional. To get this prize from the Academy is a sign that I'm taken seriously by my peers, which is good news for any artist. At the award luncheon I was seated at a table with John Updike, Lore Segal, and Edmund White; at the next table over was Grace Paley; and at a table on the other side of mine was Tony Kushner. These are all heroes of mine. To be part of that event and this group of people gives me a feeling of peace that I've done some good work. That's a very special feeling.

The Lambda is a big honor. I've been a finalist a number of times and won the prize once before, for my fantasy novel Kirith Kirin [Meisha Merlin Books, 2000]. I'm particularly pleased to win a prize for my genre writing, so this is a sweet year for me in many ways.

Q: Do you approach writing plays differently than you do novels?
A: Plays, for me, are very idea driven, often very stylized; fiction is very personal and intimate. The public nature of playwriting and theater makes it a good pairing with fiction writing, which is almost entirely private. I write fiction out of material that often is very close to my own life, or at least that's been true in the past. In the future, I don't know what direction I'll take with either of these; I'm about to turn 50 and feel the need for a change in material, though I'm not sure what that will be.

Q: How involved are you in the production of your plays? What do you do when a director wants to take one of your plays in a direction you didn’t expect or don’t like?
A: Directors always have their own visions of plays; if you respect the director, you yield to her or his vision. When I was a young playwright I was very involved in productions, often helping with the casting of parts to actors and sitting in on production and design meetings. I've pulled back from some of this involvement in recent productions, though I'm not sure this has been a good idea; sometimes this has been my own choice and sometimes this has been forced on me by circumstance. I think the local production of my play In Berlin, the last new play I did here, would have been better if I'd been more involved. Being more involved, though, often means getting into fights with people, and I've never been very good at that. I don't enjoy arguments, especially about my own work. So I've tended to be more hands-off than a lot of playwrights I know throughout my career.

Q: Being a Southerner yourself, your characters always have a home base in the South, whether it’s in Atlanta or in rural North Carolina. How significant are your forays out of the American South?
A: I have never been bothered by my Southern identity though I know that a lot of people, especially Northeasterners, continue to make assumptions about white Southerners in particular, that we're slow, lazy, inescapably racist, yearning for a return of slavery, all that. I am who I am, and that includes the fact that I was born and raised here and have a deep attachment to this place. That's true of my material as much as it is of me as a person.

I only feel comfortable writing when I know a setting very well, or else feel free to make it up completely, as is the case in my science fiction and fantasy. While I've traveled a lot in Europe, I've never spent enough time there to feel comfortable setting fiction there. One exception is Berlin, where I've spent a good bit of time. My play In Berlin explores the inner life of a man who needs such a big change in his life that he goes to Berlin to find it, even though what he does in Berlin—introducing himself to sadomasochism—he could have done in Atlanta, too. In that case, the feeling of the journey to a distant place is part of the plot inherently. I doubt I'd have been comfortable writing that story as fiction; making fiction about Berlin would have required a more certain knowledge of the place than I have.

The significance of any one of my stories being set inside or outside the South, then, is more a question of nerve on my part. I detest fiction that feels fake in terms of place. It takes very intimate knowledge of a place to get it right. I had a lot of trouble with Boulevard [Algonquin, 2002] for that reason, trying to get the New Orleans setting right; I had lived there for four years and felt I could do it, but it required visits to the city and a lot of work recovering memories.

Q: Tell us how you came to be at Emory University.
A: When Frank Manley retired, the university did a search for someone to join the writing faculty. Ha Jin encouraged me to apply for the job, and I did. While I did not have the proper terminal degree for the tenured position, Lynna Williams and her English Department colleagues pushed the dean to hire me anyway, and he gave me the lectureship that I currently hold.

Q: What do you bring of yourself to your role as a teacher of creative writing? How do you gauge your own success as a teacher?
A: I bring everything that I know about writing to what I teach. The teaching of writing is not the sharing of didactic information about writing; it's the initiation of students into the process of writing, the kind of motion required to think about writing and make it happen. I gauge my success by the move that each student makes in his or her writing during the semester; I try to find out where each student is as a writer and move the student forward in some way. Any student should be able to learn to make better narrative writing, regardless of talent.

Q: You have said that a very important piece of advice that someone once gave you is that successful writing is more about persistence than about talent. Is there any other advice you try to pass on to your students?
A: What I teach is that fiction is about energy and motion, that fiction has to move forward strongly, and that strength in fiction writing comes from the author's closeness to the sensory detail that comprises the present moment in a character's consciousness. If a young writer is going to take one thing away from my workshops it should be that fiction exists best when the writer inhabits the senses of a character rather than simply registering the thoughts of that character, which is a different process.

Q: What projects do you currently have going?
A: I am fighting with my editor at Algonquin Books about two novels that I finished last fall; I'm writing another novel, The Last Green Tree, for my science fiction publisher, Tor; and I'm writing a play called 99 Uses for a Naked Man.

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