Finding Writer's Voice

Calling Suzan-Lori Parks' visit to Austin this week a homecoming may be overstating the case, but the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Topdog/Underdog did call Texas home for a time in her youth, and the state looms large in her life. Her memories of it, particularly the part of West Texas where she spent a few years while her father was stationed in Vietnam, led her to make it the setting for her 2003 novel Getting Mother's Body, in which a poor and pregnant teenager sets out to dig up her mother's grave and retrieve the jewelry she was buried with before a supermarket is built on the spot. Parks ordinarily stays pretty busy writing – in addition to a second novel in the works, she's scripting a stage musical about the life of Ray Charles, and did you catch her television adaptation of Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God for Oprah's Harpo Films last year? – but she'll put down her pen long enough to come here and talk about how she got started in writing and the creative process, to read from her work, and even to sing a few songs, as part of KLRU's Spark lecture series. In anticipation of her visit, the Chronicle talked to her about writing, teaching writing, and how she feels about her onetime home state.

Austin Chronicle: I know you had written prose before you started writing plays. Did coming back to it after writing plays feel any different at all?

Suzan-Lori Parks: It felt very different because for me – and all playwrights are different – for me the novel was a chance to do a couple of different things. One of them was to create whole sets, if you will, in the mind of the reader. You know what I mean? 'Cause in a play you're basically creating one set, and the audience member comes and sits down and looks at what you've put in front of them, like you have a room and a chair or whatever. But in Getting Mother's Body, I got a chance to describe things and then, you know, people just think what they will. You say, "She's tall," well, tall to me might not be the same as tall to you, so you imagine what tall is. And I say, "She has brown hair" – brown to you is probably different than brown to me. You know what I mean? So it's fun to create the world in the mind of the reader or allow the reader to create the world in their own mind. Also, I loved writing something that was so landscape dependent. Because for me the novel is really about the landscape of West Texas, which I absolutely love.

It's funny, I ran into somebody from Houston the other day, and they were like, "Oh, you're pretty much from Odessa? Huh. Ya know, I drive through there on the way to something." And I was like, yeah, everybody drives through. But I love that part of the world. It's kind of beautiful and plain, and I really wanted to create it in the novel, and it's not something that I felt like I could do in a play. A play just wouldn't do it justice. A screenplay, sure. I suppose you could film it, but there's something really magical about writing the description of it down on the page and then having the reader imagine it. You know that quote by John Steinbeck, "Texas is a state of mind"? You take that one step further: "Texas is in your mind." You have that huge landscape, and Texas is a state in your mind. It's kinda cool.

AC: As you were writing the novel, you were revisiting that landscape in your mind. What was that experience like?

SLP: Well, we also went back and hung out for a while, 'cause my mom's from out there and all her sisters and brothers and stuff, and when my dad was in Vietnam, we lived in Odessa.

AC: Well, for me there's a distinction between when you go back to some place you've been in your mind and that whole Thomas Wolfe "you can't go home again" thing when you actually go back and things have changed and all that. When you're just revisiting it in your memory, you kind of distill it into something basic.

SLP: You're right. In the novel, Odessa's the sort of mother ship, but the novel takes place in a town that's not Odessa. And the Lincoln, Texas, of the novel doesn't look like that. You go back in your mind, and it's exactly how you want it to be, and you can move buildings around, and you can remember this road and forget that road, and, I don't know, it's more maybe romanticized or beautiful, you know.

AC: Is there some essence of that landscape that you were reaching for in setting the novel there?

SLP: The enormity of it. The people we knew and my mom's family, growing up and hanging out with them and stuff, I always got the feeling they were not people of great means, you know, but they were enormous to me. Tall. Big. Big personalities. With that sky as a backdrop. Huge sky. Maybe small house. And this person standing in the front yard framed against this big sky, this person with a big personality. So that's what I wanted to put in the novel. So of course the novel is just filled with all these characters – capital "C." [Laughs] 'Cause it's really about these people who are a lot like some people I used to know.

AC: Did you have any difficulty finding your voice as a writer, or were you discouraged from developing the voice you have?

SLP: I had teachers who weren't encouraging – I wouldn't say they were discouraging, but they weren't exactly encouraging. And, you know, it's funny, I think teachers and parents and whatnot sometimes think, "Oh, let us try to save these children from the sadness of the world. Let us steer them toward a career in medicine or astrophysics or something and away from the writer thing or the painter thing or the musician thing, because it's only going to have them end up penniless and in the gutter." So I think a lot of times when our quote-unquote parents discourage us, they might be trying to save us from something. There were some of those along the way, and there were some people who encouraged me.

But finding my voice ... You know, I think I have to find my voice every day. I really do. I really am one of those writers, I don't think I decided I was going to be a writer over 20 years ago and I've just been coasting. I think a lot of writers coast. I meet painters or musicians or writers or whatnot, and they say, "I've been writing like this for 30 years." And sure enough, they have, you know? And I think what happens is the pipeline between the writer and the spirit is pretty clogged if that's the life you're living. You're not listening anyway. You're just kinda, I don't know. I don't know what you're doing, but you're not listening.

AC: It is so much about listening, isn't it?

SLP: For me it is. I always qualify it: For me it is. 'Cause who knows what other people say? But yeah, that's been my experience. It's about listening. For example, when I thought to myself, "Gee, I'd like to write a novel now," I had some people in the playwriting world tell me, "Don't write a novel. You got a good thing going with playwriting. Why you want to write a novel?" 'Cause I'm listening. And I'm gonna do what I'm gonna do. I'm not gonna keep just doing the playwriting thing just 'cause I kinda got a foot in the door already. That's not who I am. Maybe 'cause I moved around a lot. I don't know. Who knows?

AC: How do you work with young writers?

SLP: I love working with young writers. I used to teach at CalArts. I left about three years ago, maybe two years ago – only because it was just too much with everything else I had to do – but I really enjoy working with students. And this is what I do – and I've heard it's rather unorthodox, 'cause I have this belief that writers know what they're doing, so my job is to listen to them. So, in my classes, I would have them bring me their writing and read it out loud, and we'd all give them feedback. You know, like, "This is what we're hearing. Is this what you're meaning? If so, go forward. If not, let us maybe together, in a safe, cool environment, you know, nonjudgmental, totally supportive and loving and encouraging, let us maybe give you some suggestions to help you get to where you are thinking of going." Instead of – instead of, right? – "Let me tell you where you should go. Let's do a lot of exercises in these 10 different styles of writing, so you can be encouraged to produce very cute, witty, facile, impressive-to-your-peers bits of things." Know what I mean? I often think exercises are nice, but you want to write plays, well, write plays. Don't give me exercises, write me some plays. So I use a lot of encouragement, a lot of belief and faith in the writer, a lot of redo work to me out loud, and tell me about your process: How's the writing? Does it feel good? Does it feel shitty? Are you putting enough time in? Are you slacking off? How can we help you manage your writing process? How can we help you combat those monsters that you seem to wrestle with these days? How can we help you with your process? And of course, feedback for one writer helps all the writers in the room.

So that's pretty much how we work. We have deadlines, and we write a hell of a lot, and we churn out a lot of stuff. 'Cause I feel like the best teacher is the page, you know what I mean? It's like I do this form of yoga, and every day I realize the yoga poses are my teacher. I mean, I have a wonderful person, a yoga teacher in the room who will twist you and help you and whatnot, but the yoga postures actually are the teacher. Same with writing. The act of writing is the best teacher.

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Suzan-Lori Parks speaks in Austin Monday, May 15, 7:30pm, at the Paramount Theatre, 713 Congress. For more information, visit www.klru.org/spark/parks.html.