Most students in the English department know of or have had the great pleasure of taking one of Professor David McGlynn’s courses. His fields are contemporary American literature and creative prose writing. Professor McGlynn teaches various 300 and 500-level creative fiction and non-fiction courses. After just finishing a term of his course, The Graphic Novel (which I highly recommend to avid graphic novel fans and novices alike), I decided that I had to learn more about him. Whether you’re a freshman, senior, or somewhere in between, and regardless of your major, you must make it a point to take one of Professor McGlynn’s courses during your time here at Lawrence. He is the author of The End of the Straight and Narrow and is awaiting the release of his second published work, A Door in the Ocean. He candidly shared his insights on the courses he teaches and how he became a published author.
What is your favorite class that you’ve taught here at Lawrence?
My favorite class is whatever I am teaching! I do love teaching the lit courses and the creative writing courses for different reasons you know and I feel like they feed different parts of my brain. With creative writing, you get to think about and talk about how stories work and how we can put them together and how we can construct them. Students, so often, surprise me with creative writing. They seem like they don’t necessarily think they’ve got stories to tell. And then a little bit of coaxing and cajoling they come out with these stories that often times knock me flat. I never get tired of reading students’ stories. Even when they’re not that great. I love to hear what people are writing about and what they’re thinking about. Non-fiction is fun because I get to hear, and I’m teaching non-fiction now, what things have happened and where people come from. And that’s always exciting for me.
The lit courses feed that intellectual side where you can pluck around and figure philosophies, ideas and theories, social issues and political issues and that kind of thing. And that’s fun too. It’s sort of like sometimes you like watching the Discovery Channel, and other times you like watching, I don’t know what…Desperate Housewives or something—the imagined show. I think that both of those things are equally important. The ways in which we tell stories are really important and I think that we need imagined narratives as much as we need documentary narratives. When Law & Order ended a couple of years ago, I found myself sort of longing for some show that’s sort of like that. Where it’s just fiction, you know. We have a few of those around but it’s not as much as we used to. Now it’s more American Idol and sort of reality T.V. stuff. It also gets kind of boring because it’s formulaic. I like dramas, dramas are fun to think about and fun to image and to create.
What are two facts about yourself that you would want students to know?
Hmm… let me think about that. I mean I’d say, I don’t know if this is what you should write, I probably swear a lot more than I ought to. But I often offer that as a kind of warning. Um, because I don’t mean to—it just sometimes happens!
You get caught up in the passion of heated discussion?
That’s the thing, I do get very into it. Especially when we’re dealing with creative writing. And I guess, you know, not to make this sound too academic, but it probably doesn’t surprise you there is a general bias that creative writing is what we do as a departure from the academic work of an English major or just a university degree program. That it’s somehow fun, diversion, or in that in the most perverted form—easy. I think it’s the opposite, it’s a lot harder to do that kind of work because you have to put your own flesh and blood on the page. And that requires us to be honest with who we are or what we think and what we believe. When it comes to non-fiction, especially, we have to be honest with what happened. That’s hard sometimes. I get really into it but for me the stakes are not that low… Oh, what are my other fun facts?
[Laughter] Share them with us!
I mean most people know, because I write and talk about it but I’m a passionate swimmer. In my new book, which is coming out this summer, has a lot to do with swimming. It’s a big theme and metaphor that’s inside it. And I still swim just about everyday [phone rings]… sorry it’s my wife [momentarily reads over the message] aw- I’ll deal with it later. I love to swim outdoor, open-water races. I’ve gone some that are 3 or 5 miles long. I’m making it my goal to swim death’s door from the tip of door county to Washington island where the ferry goes. It won’t take very long, it’ll maybe be two hours.
That’s impressive. Admittedly, I can barely swim 2 pools before getting winded.
Yeah, but I’m a good swimmer! Swimming is a lot like learning a language. If you grow up in a bilingual household, you just have a native fluency. I learned how to swim in that same way.
I checked out your website and I’m curious if you could tell us what your story collection, The End of the Straight and Narrow, is about?
The End of the Straight and Narrow is, as it sounds, a story collection. It’s not a novel, however the second half of it, the stories are all linked. So those stories form a kind of mini-novel or novella in that they have the same characters that are recurring again and again. It takes up somewhat a consistent theme, which is questions about religion and spiritual life, specifically, American Evangelicalism. Which is always a politically fraught subject and always seems to come into a fevered pitch when we go into the election cycle. From the time I was a teenager, I grew up in that world. I was pretty much a part of it for a long time and it has always been and has often been my sense that evangelicals are mischaracterized, misunderstood and underestimated.
For all the aspiring writers out there, what advice would you lend them?
The advice is very simple, which is don’t stop writing. Just keep writing. I recognized when I was in college that it was something I wanted to do. I tell my students this all the time. Most of the students that I have here are better writers now than I was when I was their age in college. I felt like I was competent and I was certainly passionate about it, but technically, I wasn’t especially great. I had to learn, you know. I spent time after college writing until I could get into graduate school and I got in, and that was a great accomplishment. And then I got to graduate school and I realized how bad I still was. That was a hard thing to come to terms with. So if a student wanted to write, their job is to write. Sit down and work. I tell students in the creative writing classes to write an hour a day, no matter what. And if you’re more serious about it, then go for two. I have long given myself those hurdles to jump.
I tell this analogy sometimes…that Salt Lake City, where I went to graduate school, is in a valley and there is the Wasatch mountains on the east side and the Oquirrh mountains in the west. The university is up on the foothills of the eastern mountains. I used to stand there and think, where I am is where I am, and where I want to be is across that valley, that the other side of that valley is the arrival of my writing life. And how do I get from here to there? I could see where I wanted to go but I couldn’t figure out how I could get there. And my confusion was really a way of saying, what I want is a helicopter to land and pick me and carry me over there. Someone says, “here’s the secret to calling in the helicopter” and it turned out that the secret was much simpler. I had to just walk. I knew exactly where to go, I just had to walk. That was a process of moving away from the idea, the myth, that somehow it involved my talent, but what it really involved was my labor.
What did you write about?
Well, the stories I was working on. I had all this material. For a long time the stories that were in The Straight and Narrow were formless. I had 200 handwritten pages and you know my handwriting is very small, like that [shows me pages of his comments on an unbound stack of papers from a manuscript of his next book] and I didn’t know what to do with it. I just didn’t quit. One way or the other, I kept plowing ahead.
I had the fortuity of getting an email from an agent who had read a story I had written who said I think you have the talent to publish a book. I really didn’t have anything, I showed him what I had. He wrote back and said I don’t this is very good, goodbye. So that was the end of that. But it made me go and make something, shape something. So I just kept going back to all this formless, amorphous material and making it into stories. One at a time. Slowly, slowly, slowly. I started working on that material in 2001, and the book was accepted for publication in 2007 and then published in 2008. I started working on the material that is in this new book right about the same time– 2000, 2001. I worked on it in earnest from the time the first one was accepted, from 2007, it took until 2011 to get it accepted for publication. And then just today- just a few minutes ago- I got the galley of the book [turns his computer screen towards me and shows me the galley front and back of A Door in the Ocean].
That looks great!
This is the galley cover, so the book will have a more stylized back cover to it, but before a book gets fully published, it goes around a galley so that we proofread it and sales reps take it and show it to people.
Do you write the content on the back cover?
Yeah. I didn’t write this line [reads it out] “one man’s journey.” The editor did that. I didn’t like that line, but he said “tough.” I didn’t really like the cover either, but I like it okay.
To what extent do you have input on the final product?
I have input. I don’t the final say, the press has the final say. I pushed hard for certain things about the cover. And I did write all of this stuff back here [referring to the written content on the back] and I worked with the editor to tweak it up to the way that we wanted it to be. The final sign-off is the publisher press and my editor had a bit more control. Eventually he just said “look, this is how it’s going to be and it’s in your interests to let this ride.” That’s the thing, when a book sells to a press it is what it sounds like—it’s sold. Here it is, you can have and you give me some pitiful amount of money, which is not even a fraction of the labor I put into it. Do with it as you please. It was their decision. My editor has worked with a number of big, well-known writers before and he said in the old days they didn’t even see the cover until it showed up in the catalog. Now that we have more control, is better. The fact that I even had input is a step forward. It used to be that the graphic designer just did it and whatever cover you got was the cover that you had.
Photo Source:
http://www.david-mcglynn.com/