Charles Baxter is one of the most well-known--and admired--short story writers alive. Last year, he won the Rea Award for the Short Story, a prestigious prize judged by his peers. What you might not know is that for 20 plus years, he's been organizing and hosting literary readings to raise money for hunger relief in the U.S. His fifth annual Hunger Relief Benefit at the University of Minnesota takes place 7 pm, Tuesday, April 2, at McNamara Alumni Center. As becomes clear below, Baxter is not the type of writer who spends all his time focused on his fiction, although his healthy output of well-loved novels (such as Saul and Patsy) and collections (Gryphon was named a Notable Books of 2011 by The New York Times) might argue otherwise. The guy likes a challenge. This past fall he published his first memoir piece in an issue of Ploughshares edited by Regents Professor Patricia Hampl. "After being in a rollover accident and surviving it," he notes dryly, "I was ready to write about the experience." We feel lucky to (still) have Baxter here as the Edelstein-Keller Professor in Creative Writing. More . . .1. This year marks the Fifth Annual Hunger Relief Benefit sponsored by the Creative Writing Program and hosted by you. How did this tradition start?
What I think happened was that an organization called Share Our Strength initiated nationwide readings for hunger relief in the late 1980s. Over 50 MFA programs participated. One year, I was the national chair for the project, and we had several good readings at the University of Michigan, where I taught before I came here. And then, somehow, the project lost momentum, or the organizational energy failed, and MFA programs gradually stopped staging such readings, with a few exceptions, including New Mexico State University. I felt that such readings were praiseworthy, and I wanted to bring this tradition back to Minnesota.
2. This semester, along with your usual highly acclaimed graduate fiction seminar (see novelist Amanda Coplin's testimony), you are teaching undergraduates in the class Persons & Places. (Baxter the teacher is "brilliant, enthusiastic, funny, and honest," says student Aaron Bristow. "Charlie should be a required course for undergraduate English majors.") What's that been like?
Our undergraduates are lively, sharp, and very alert. It's hard to generalize about them otherwise, because they have very different aesthetic views and approaches, and I try not to impose a particular aesthetic on them. Instead, I try to expose them to a variety of narratives, and in each case--since the class is a combination of interpretation and craft--I try to show them how something was done, i.e., how a writer achieved a particular effect.
3. You recently served as editor for what has been celebrated as a "long overdue" compendium, Sherwood Anderson: Collected Stories (Library of America, 2012). How did that happen?
Max Rudin, the editor-in-chief of the Library of America series, approached me to edit the volume. I think he chose me because, like Anderson, I'm a Midwestern writer, though I'm from Minnesota and Anderson was from Ohio. Anderson was noted for his stories, as (perhaps) I am. I did my best to immerse myself in Anderson's work, and along the way I rediscovered how important he is to contemporary writers, particularly in the theme of a young person leaving the provinces and commerce for art (think of Lena Dunham's HBO series Girls) and in the technique of presenting characters with heavy burdens of feelings but little or no ability to articulate what they feel. He loved inarticulate narrators. Raymond Carver's stories grew directly out of that situation.
4. Your criticism is regularly published in The New York Review of Books, among other places. What interests you about writing on other fiction writers' works?
I never request a particular book for review. In every case, the editor sends me a book and asks if I want to review it. What I enjoy about the work is the challenge of describing the author's body of work--I've reviewed Katherine Anne Porter, Jonathan Franzen, Haruki Murakami, John Irving, and many others--and I do my best to convey how a volume succeeds or fails. Such an assignment forces a writer, any writer, to describe what constitutes a success or failure and to be convincing about it. I think you need to be a practicing novelist to meet this challenge. You have to know what you're talking about. You have to know something about how the book was put together.
5. Your collection Gryphon: New and Selected Stories was published in 2011, one factor leading to you winning the Rea Award for the Short Story a year later. What are you working on now?
I'm working on a book called There's Something I Want You to Do, and in each one of the pieces, the narrative mosaics, one character turns to another and says, "There's something I want you to do." Almost all of the sections take place in Minneapolis, and the first half of the book concerns various virtues, and the last half concerns the vices. I try not to moralize on them, however.
