carolyn kellogg

Yesterday Pittsburgh became George Saundersland, with a lunch, a Q&A session, a (rumored) dinner with faculty, and a reading (pictured) at the Frick Fine Arts auditorium. Trust me, that figure at the mic is George Saunders.

Since the students were too shy to venture many questions, the Q & A session was mostly A. Highlights?

George Saunders: Teaching writing and talking about it has got a kind of high bullshit quotient.

George Saunders on drafts: What comes out in a first draft isn’t really you.

George Saunders on revision: If I’m looking at a piece of prose and I know my main job is to compress it, that gets me excited.

George Saunders on voice: I was trying to find a voice that would respond to my world, rather than the other way around.

George Saunders on his early writing: If anyone had read the essay before the one that got me into the MFA program at Syracuse, they would have said, ‘You’re like Somerset Maugham on quaaludes — and it’s 1985.’

There was more, of course, but I’d get sucked in by what he was saying and then lose track of the notes I was taking. He spoke quite a bit about revision — a first draft isn’t you because your true voice is hidden by a lot of writerly stuff (oh, I’m paraphrasing terribly). He gave us a funny example that began with “John walked into the well-appointed living room and sat down on the yellow couch” — why well-appointed? he asked. What year is this? Then, why walked in? It’s the beginning of your story – so John’s just now appeared on the page. If walking in isn’t important to the story, cut it. By the end of his example, he’d killed everything but “John.” (too bad, I really liked the yellow couch).

It had been a long day; several of us grad students decided to go get a drink after Saunders’ reading and signing. And then, he joined us at the bar.

I know it’s too much to say that it was the platonic ideal of a writer’s visit, but it kind of was. Ideal.