The University of Cincinnati’s Robert and Adele Schiff Fiction Festival returns to campus April 17-19, welcoming four notable contemporary writers for three days of panel discussions and readings, including Sloane Crosley, Katie Kitamura (see interview, page 34), Uzodinma Iweala and Brendan Mathews.
“These are all writers we think have exciting careers and interesting work, and we try to have a diverse group in terms of their aesthetics, their backgrounds,” says Leah Stewart, head of the creative writing department at UC and author of six books, most recently 2018’s What You Don’t Know About Charlie Outlaw.
“One of the things we really value in bringing in visiting writers is giving students an opportunity to talk to people whose work they’ve read,” Stewart continues. “For undergrads especially, it’s often the first time they’ve had an opportunity like that.”
Through the UC’s Visiting Writer Series, exposure to a variety of fiction, non-fiction and poetry writers is possible, albeit in smaller, one-evening-only kind of events. Founded in 2003, the Fiction Festival affords a more expansive opportunity to not only listen to a writer read their work, but to also hear how they work.
“Much more important than hearing someone’s work read aloud is getting a chance to ask them questions and hear them talk about their process,” Stewart says. “Which can often still be illuminating for me and I’ve been at this for 25 years. I think, for a student who is new to writing fiction, to listen to somebody talk about how they construct a character can often be really inspiring and instructive.”
Kitamura’s third novel, A Separation, was named on The New York Times’ 2017 Notable Books of the Year. Iweala’s debut novel, Beasts of No Nation, was made into an acclaimed 2015 feature film. Mathews’ short story collection, This Is Not A Love Song, was published in February of this year. Crosley is the one outlier, in that she is perhaps best known for her humor-filled nonfiction essay collections, including I Was Told There’d Be Cake and the recently released Look Alive Out There. (Her novel, The Clasp, was published in 2015.)
“I absolutely love talking to younger writers, but I do sometimes get a little bummed out that I’m not helping them because I can’t give them a specific prescription of how to become a writer,” says Crosley via phone from a stop on her book tour for the paperback version of Look Alive.
“Wouldn’t you be comforted to know even your heroes get insecure and have to pump themselves up or they get stuck or they have personal lives that are either going great or in shambles? I would think that would be comforting but they really want a, ‘Well, Balzac had 50 cups of coffee a day, go do that.’ ”
Crosley’s trademark humor is present in both her fiction and nonfiction, but the switch between the two genres isn’t necessarily the hardest: it’s the follow-up to any piece of writing.
“I think it’s just every time I am done with an essay — a book of them (or) a novel — in the immediate aftermath, you think, ‘Well, that’s it. That was fun. I’m done.’ You know, ‘Being a writer was great,’ ” she says.
Of her process, Crosley says each piece of writing she does develops differently.
“Sometimes I have some sort of topic or rumination that’s been rolling around in my brain like a marble and it finally is time to pop out,” she says. “And then sometimes it’s just a real story and I’m looking for the meaning to match so I’m not in danger of just writing a first-person essay about complaining. It’s like, they each come differently and they each take different amounts of time — a week, a year. They’re all different.”
Structured or not, Crosley says there’s no time like the present to do what you are passionate about.
“The one thing I do tend to tell people is — I had a professor in college say, ‘You don’t have to wait to be great,’ ” she says.
The Robert and Adele Schiff Fiction Festival takes place April 17-19 at the Elliston Poetry Room in Langsam Library at the University of Cincinnati (2911 Woodside Dr., University Heights). It’s free and open to the public. Find more info on the Visiting Writers Series page here.
This article appears in Apr 10-17, 2019.