Dan Jenkins

How did you become a writer?

You can blame the movies. As a kid, all I wanted to be was a wise-cracking newspaper guy. Clark Gable in It Happened One Night or Cary Grant (or even Rosalind Russell) in His Girl Friday, the classic remake of The Front Page. My folks gave me a typewriter when I was 10 or 11 and I used to copy stories out of the local paper and play-like I wrote them. Then one day I started to RE-WRITE them. Then I knew I had the disease, no doctor could cut it out, and I would WRITE. Something. Somewhere.

Name your writing influences.

The humorists first. S. J. Perelman, James Thurber, Dorothy Parker. Then John Lardner, the greatest sportswriter who ever touched a keyboard, although he was actually an essayist. Ring's son. I live by some things people said. I was accidentally thinking it before Elmore said "If it sounds like writing, I re-write it." I was agreeing with Dottie Parker before she said, "Wit has truth in it. Jokes are simply calisthenics with words." And an old New York driniking pal, Freddy Finkelhoffe (wrote Brother Rat, the play and movie), once told me, "There's only one rule in fiction. Get 'em up a tree, throw rocks at 'em, get 'em down again."

Today I read strictly for pleasure, and that means the good story-tellers and crime and terrorist busters—Michael Connelly, Robert Crais, Vince Flynn, John Sandford, Grisham, Margolin. That crowd. But I've never had more fun that reading Herman Wouk's Winds of War and War and Remembrance back to back. It gives War and Peace 2-up a side. And the early Le Carré was great. I've studied him and I still don't know how he leads me in and out of flashbacks without me realizing it and without interrupting the narrative. I guess you call it talent. No teacher in college ever taught me shit about writing.

When and where do you write?

At home. In my office at home. This was also true while I wrote in newspaper and magazine offices.

What are working on now?

I'm calling it a "journalism memoir," and it's a pain in the ass, although fun. Fiction, you don't have to ask anybody anything. Just let your fingers outdistance your brain, or maybe it's the other way around. But non-fiction? Christ, you have try to be accurate, and that takes time.

Have you ever suffered writers block?

No. Too busy earning a living. Always on deadline. Learned it on newspapers. As a wise old man once said, "The first obligation of a daily paper is to come out every day."

What's your advice to new writers?

If they think that's what they want to be, do it, don't just fucking talk about it. Get a job on a paper, if any still exist. Read the Great Books. Read "successful" authors and find out what you don't like. Personally, I like the old Barnes & Noble first 3 pages test. Something better happen or I toss the dude. If you prefer brooding, introspective writing, better see another guy.

Dan Jenkins was born and raised in Fort Worth, Texas, where he attended Texas Christian University (TCU) and played on the varsity golf team. Jenkins has written for various publications including the Fort Worth Press, Dallas Times Herald, Playboy, and Sports Illustrated. In 1972, Jenkins wrote his first novel, Semi-Tough. In 1985 he began writing books full-time, though he maintains a monthly column in Golf Digest magazine. His new book is Jenkins at the Majors. Jenkins was elected to the World Golf Hall of Fame in the Lifetime Achievement Category and will be inducted in May 2012. 

Al Martinez

How did you become a writer?

I didn’t actually become a writer; I always was one. At whatever age in childhood one learns to use words I began writing story-letters to a favorite uncle, incorporating whatever I heard on the radio, like the Lone Ranger, injecting myself into the plots of their stories. I did this and drew pictures to illustrate the stories for as long as I can remember. In junior high school, teachers began noticing that I could write, especially one named Calla Monlux.  It was during the depression. There wasn’t enough to eat, my father had taken off, an angry, hostile step-father ruled over a dysfunctional family. A laborer kicked out of the Navy for fighting, he couldn’t find work. There was never money in the house, we moved it seemed whenever the rent came due, we sat in houses without food, lights or heat. Literally, there were times when there was not food in the house to take for lunch at school. It was a terrible time.

Name your writing influences.

Calla Monlux was about 5 feet tall, short hair, long dresses; a classic old maid at the time. I remember her expression was a slight, secret smile, as though she knew something the rest of us didn’t know. Anyhow, I stuttered badly back then and when forced to stand in front of class as an assignment to tell what we had done during the summer, I stammered uncontrollably and was humiliated by the laughter of the class seeing me trying to talk. I swore I would never get up there again. When it became clear to Monlux that I meant it, she assigned me to write three “themes” we called them then; short essays. This was near the start of WW2. I remember lying on a hillside near our East Oakland home one evening when there was a blackout. Sirens sounded and the lights of the city blinked off one by one, which made the stars seem brighter. I wrote about it: man may turn out the lights of the city but God controls the lights of the stars. She was blown away not only by the idea but my words. She saw the writer in me and kept me after school, had me close my eyes and read me Wordsworth’s poem “Daffodils.” She kept insisting that I see in my “mind’s eye” what he had written about; golden fields of yellow flowers, gleaming in the sun, swaying in a warm wind. This went on for weeks and then one day I experienced a kind of epiphany. I could not only see the golden flowers but could feel the warmth of the sun and the gentle touch of the summer wind. When I told her this she replied, “You have learned what every writer must learn: how to visualize, how to recreate in words what you see and what you feel.” It was a kind of go forth and write. And I have ever since.  Word seemed to spread among the teachers in junior high and high school and they paid me special attention. I discovered books and fell in love with the rhythms and cadences of Edgar Allen Poe. I found Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Truman Capote and Shakespeare and so many, many others. I bought “Elements of Style” and experimented with writing, i.e., short fiction and poetry. During the war, the man who was to become my brother in law was drafted and I accompanied my sister Emily at 4 in the morning to see him off at a train station. A hundred or so draftees were there and so were newspaper reporters and photographers, stirring a mood of excitement and destiny. I think at that point I wanted to be what they were: a journalist.

When and where do you write?

I write at home after many years of writing in newspaper offices. I began with a small Bay Area newspaper, the Richmond Independent, and moved on after three years when I won a SF Press Club award; I stayed at the Oakland Tribune for 16 years, 10 of them as a columnist, and was summoned south to the L.A. Times by Otis Chandler in a golden era. I stayed there for 38 years, 25 as a columnist, writing both in the office and in my home office in Topanga.  I write anytime: early morning, mid afternoon, late at night, depending on what I’m working on and what deadlines I’m facing.

What are you working on now?

I’ve begun several writing projects and have settled on my memoirs, covering my life from depression to recession, while observing a slow decline in print journalism for the length of my 60-year career. I lived through an era of front page journalism in the 1950s to modern, electronic journalism in the 2000s, observing pathetic efforts by newspaper owners and editors trying to figure out in which direction they ought to be going. Confusion reigns on the print journalism scene with embarrassing projects like “the Huffington Post” making it, and the NY Times, LA Times and other great newspapers in the country slowly sliding into oblivion. I’m not with them anymore, so the cluttered little home office I had created, a womb of comfort and creation, is my writing den now.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

I’ve had moments of writer’s block, I guess, but I have so many projects going at the same time that when I can’t seem to push on through a blockage in one, I go to another and then return to the first one later. I’m never without the facility to write. Writing defines me, my life and my physiology. I am a writer. Period. It’s the only me that exists, ergo I cannot tolerate writer’s blocks.

What’s your advice to new writers?

I created the Topanga Writer’s Workshop when I left the Times about 3 years ago. I tell those who want to write to read, to observe and finally to reach down into their souls where answers lie and to bring them to the surface. I tell them about Calla Monlux and tell them to visualize. I recite a short verse she gave me from Alexander Pope: “True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learned to dance; Tis not enough, no harshness gives offence, the sound must seem an echo to the sense.”

Bio: Born in Oakland, California, schooled there, three years of college at SF State where I worked on the paper and met my wife Joanne, who is still my wife, activated as a Marine Reservist to fight in the Korean War, finished up my education at UC Berkeley. Began newspapering at the Richmond Independent in 1952, to the Oakland Tribune in 1955, to the L.A. Times in 1972. Worked as a national feature writer for the Times, became a columnist in 1984 and left the Times in 2009. A part of three teams that won Pulitzers, and individually won many, many national awards. I have written a dozen books, hundreds of magazine stories and essays, dozens of short stories and dozens of movies, pilots and episodes for television. My papers are being collected by the Huntington Museum and will be exhibited in March, 2012.

Phillip Lopate

How did you become a writer?

Slowly. I always liked to write when I was a kid. I was the one who was made to write the Thanksgiving poems, and the George Washington Day poem, and all that kind of stuff. But I didn’t think I’d be able to be a writer because I thought they were geniuses. So I decided to be pre-law when I entered college. But then I hung around the students who wanted to be writers and they didn’t seem any smarter than I was, so I decided to give it a try.

I began writing fiction and later switched to poetry and eventually to nonfiction. Since I didn’t have much money—I was working class—it seemed a very risky thing to do. But I made some money as a ghost writer for a while.

You really can’t get a certificate saying “You’re a Writer Now.” The way that I became a writer is by reading a great deal and wanting to enter into the conversation with other authors, many of whom were dead, and imitating their style, however unconsciously.

Name your writing influences.

I guess the first influence was my father, who liked to write poetry. He’d started out as a newspaper reporter, but then, during the Depression, the newspapers that he worked for went bankrupt so he had to take a factory job. But I watched him write. He had a very concise way of writing. He was always trying to take out extra words. I have a more maximalist way of writing, which I suppose was something of a rebellion against his style. But he certainly was somebody who read a lot even when he was working in factories. He introduced me to Dostoevsky and to Kafka and to Faulkner. He brought a lot of cheap classics into the house—Pocket Books and the like. These were the days when the Modern Library and Pocket Books were all geared toward the self-taught worker.

Then in high school I began reading a lot of those New Directions books like Sartre’s Nausea and No Exit, Garcia Lorca’s poems—I suppose I became a good little Modernist. It was all rather bleak and despairing, you know? Even before I went to college I was reading contemporaries like Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow. In a way, precisely because I was a next generation of American Jewish writer, I felt that they had taken up a lot of the territory. And given my natural perversity and impulse to fall in love with the old, in college I was much more interested in older writers like Fielding and Laurence Sterne and Diderot. I read a lot of Nietzsche, a lot of Flaubert. I had a friends who were much hipper than I, like Ron Padgett, who was a poet in the New York School. He’d say, “Why don’t you read Gertrude Stein and William Burroughs and Raymond Roussel and get with the program?” So I’d read them for a while, but then I’d go back to Stendhal and Flaubert and Balzac and George Eliot. I was very comfortable in the 18th and 19th centuries. I was drawn to ironic fiction. Italo Svevo and Machado de Assis influenced me the most, two writers who are ironic, who are playful. I suppose they came out of the tradition of Laurence Sterne and Tristram Shandy. I like that mischievous tone. Some of that was rooted in Dostoevsky, like Notes from Underground, you know? It was the heretic or marginal tradition that I connected with very strongly.

Are there any teachers that stand out?

At Columbia I studied with some great thinkers: Lionel Trilling, Eric Bentley, and Meyer Schapiro. They were all rather remote, and in some ways I preferred the remote, withdrawn teachers to the ones who tried to be our friends. I was intimidated by the ones who wanted to go out drinking with us. I didn’t want to do that at all. I think because I had come up from the ghetto in Brooklyn, I had a kind of class mistrust of mixing with teachers. Somehow they were the enemy. I liked teachers I could watch but they weren’t necessarily watching me. That was certainly true of Lionel Trilling. He was a great mind but not a particularly good teacher, not a particularly good lecturer. There was something very poignant about the way he struggled to bring the interior swirl of his mind into the public space.

Again, I was separating myself from modernism and trying to find an older tradition and thinking that when I wrote it would matter even though I wasn’t taking the next step in Hegelian progression of Art. For instance, at one point I liked Heinrich von Kleist a lot and started imitating him. I think when a writer begins there’s a lot of imitation.

When and where do you write?

I write at home, in my office on the third floor of a brownstone in Brooklyn that we own. It’s fairly tiny now because of the piles and piles of manuscripts and books around. I’ve only gone to one writer’s colony in my life, and that was last May when I went to Civitella Ranieri in Italy. That was because they said, “Would you like to spend a month in an Italian castle?” Essentially, I feel comfortable writing at home and I don’t feel like leaving it to write. I’m not a night owl. I generally write during the morning hours and sometimes in the afternoon. You can’t get much intelligent writing out of me after 5 PM. You might say I keep banker’s hours.

What are you working on now?

At the moment I’m finishing two books: One is a collection of personal essays, which is my fourth collection after the trilogy of Bachelorhood, Against Joie de Vivre and Portrait of My Body. The second book is a collection of teaching essays about the craft of nonfiction that I’ve been writing for several years. I often have a column in a magazine called Creative Nonfiction. It’s kind of my pedagogy of nonfiction. In a way the two books are Theory and Practice and I hope they’ll be perceived that way.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

Only once, when I was running away from my first marriage. I lived in California for a year in 1968. California was strange to me and I think I felt a lot of inner emptiness in the face of all that beauty. I was used to New York City. I’ve never had writer’s block since. I write nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. If I get stuck I switch genres. Plus at this point in my career I’m often asked to write book reviews, articles, responses, and so on, so a lot of what I write is really initiated outside myself and I’m on deadline and have to do something. I do the best I can.

What’s your advice to new writers?

My advice is to read a ton and don’t be afraid of being influenced. Allow your brain to be reconfigured by thousands of pages. Don’t be in a hurry to get published, but try to amass a backlog. I think it’s a good idea to try to get published in small magazines, magazines that friends edit—don’t necessarily aim for The New Yorker or Harper’s right off. Get your work out there. I participated in a lot of open meetings when I was a poet and published in a lot of mimeographed magazines. It’s important to start to communicate with readers on however modest a level.

Phillip Lopate was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1943, and received a BA from Columbia in 1964, and a doctorate from the Union Graduate School in 1979. He has written three personal essay collections -- Bachelorhood (Little, Brown, 1981), Against Joie de Vivre (Poseidon-Simon & Schuster, 1989), and Portrait of My Body (Doubleday-Anchor, 1996); two novels, Confessions of Summer (Doubleday, 1979) and The Rug Merchant (Viking, 1987); two poetry collections, The Eyes Don't Always Want to Stay Open (Sun Press, 1972) and The Daily Round (Sun Press, 1976); a memoir of his teaching experiences, Being With Children (Doubleday, 1975); a collection of his movie criticism, Totally Tenderly Tragically (Doubleday-Anchor); an urbanist meditation, Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan (Crown, 2004); and a biographical monograph, Rudy Burckhardt: Photographer and Filmmaker (Harry N. Abrams, 2004.) In addition, there is a Phillip Lopate reader, Getting Personal: Selected Writings (Basic Books, 2003).

He has edited the following anthologies: The Art of the Personal Essay (Doubleday-Anchor, 1994); Writing New York (Library of America, 1998), Journey of a Living Experiment (Virgil Press, 1979), a best essays of the year series, The Anchor Essay Annual (1997-99), and the forthcoming American Movie Critics (Library of America, 2006). His essays, fiction, poetry, film and architectural criticism have appeared in The Best American Short Stories (1974), The Best American Essays (1987), several Pushcart Prize annuals, The Paris Review, Harper's, Vogue, Esquire, Film Comment, Threepenny Review, Double Take, New York Times, Harvard Educational Review, Preservation, Cite, 7 Days, Metropolis, Conde Nast Traveler, and many other periodicals and anthologies.

He has been awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts grants, and two New York Foundation for the Arts grants. He received a Christopher medal for Being With Children, a Texas Institute of Letters award in the best non-fiction book of the year category for Bachelorhood, and was a finalist for the PEN best essay book of the year award for Portrait of My Body. His anthology, Writing New York, received a citation from the New York Society Library and honorable mention from the Municipal Art Society's Brendan Gill Award.

After working with children for twelve years as a writer in the schools, he taught creative writing and literature at Fordham, Cooper Union, University of Houston, New York University, and Hofstra University. He is currently the Director of the Nonfiction MFA Concentration at Columbia University.