Amanda Larson
An Interview with Garth Greenwell
Garth Greenwell’s writing strikes an incredible balance between the experience of shame, and the potential of freedom from it. My first introduction to Greenwell’s prose came from seeing him read from his latest novel, Cleanness. What struck me was the beautiful cadence of his work: Greenwell’s lyric prose consists of long, sprawling sentences, and a narrative voice that renders the emotional and physical potentials of a moment, before continuing to create the actual scene. These possibilities are never dismissed as trivial; rather, they demonstrate the complications of an emotionality that is operating under the pull and tug of a narrative conscience. Greenwell’s tone is constant, precise, and both generous and dignified. He is a writer with a deep compassion for his characters, one careful not to exploit them, but to honor them.
Greenwell’s work often moves through queer desire and its perception. He has described the structure of Cleanness as analogous to that of a symphony: the plot does not move in linear progression, but rather throughout various moments of intensity. In our interview, he clarifies that this intensity “might be of various kinds: it might be a kind of pain, it might be a kind of shame, or it might be joy, or it might be desire.” Though the novel is, at times, shocking, it never feels as if Greenwell is exploiting his characters for the sake of shock-value, or to evoke interest. That all of these emotions often exist at once in his work speaks to its metaphysical chops: to read it is to experience transcendence.
Greenwell is also the author of What Belongs to You, which won the British Book Award for Debut of the Year, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and was a finalist for six other awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, it was named a Best Book of 2016 by over fifty publications in nine countries, and is being translated into a dozen languages. Cleanness was published in January 2020, and was named a New York Times Notable Book, a New York Times Critics’ Top Book of the year, and a New Yorker best book of the year. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, A Public Space, and VICE, and he has written criticism for The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, and the New York Times Book Review, among others. He was a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow. I spoke to Greenwell on the phone in November 2020 about his life as a writer and his writing processes; he is currently living and teaching in Iowa City, Iowa, with his partner, the poet Luis Muñoz.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: The first question I have for you is actually related to the pandemic. In your interview with The Millions, you talked about recording the sensory details of a place that you were writing about, and how, going back to Sofia, you wrote down all the details that you could in order to get the best sense of it on the page. This struck me because, during COVID, this is obviously impossible. I was wondering how your way of writing a place has changed over the past few months, and if this has been difficult for you, at all.
GARTH GREENWELL: It’s been hugely difficult. I really am someone who needs the experience of a place to be able to write. My plan had been for my next novel to be set in Kentucky, my home state, and I haven’t been able to get real purchase on that project, because I feel like I need to spend a significant amount of time there before I can dive into that world. The answer is that I haven’t figured out a way around that, and I feel like that project has stalled.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Did you have any plans to go back to Kentucky?
GREENWELL: My plans are really dependent on the pandemic. I also had a health crisis at the end of August that was hugely disruptive, and put me in the hospital. As a result of that, I have to be super careful about COVID. So, I am not going anywhere until there is a vaccine, and things feel completely safe. I do feel pretty paralyzed on that project. And it made me really sad in the first month of the pandemic, because there is a kind of deep sense of companionship that comes from working on a project everyday. And I didn’t have that. Cleanness came out in January, so I was on book tour, and my plan had been, after book tour, to spend these months in Kentucky that I feel like I needed to spend, and instead it’s just been kind of a suspended animation.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: I’m sorry to hear that. It makes sense to me, though; your writing doesn’t seem separate from reality to me. It very much reads to me like a way of navigating a place, and the sense of being seen or not seen in that place.
GREENWELL: Yeah, and place is the thing that I can’t invent when I’m writing fiction. I can invent so many things, but not place, and I envy writers who can. In some sense, I do just want to slap myself and say, “Get over it,” and make stuff up. But there’s a way that it feels crucial to me, and crucial to what writing is, in some sense, for. It is that kind of engagement with a place, and writing as a way of thinking about place.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Yeah, absolutely. Moving on from that, but also in the same line of the pandemic, I was wondering about how several chapters in Cleanness center around teaching, and around the dynamics and boundaries between teachers and students. What interests you about this dynamic? Does your teaching now inform your writing?
GREENWELL: I think the teacher-student dynamic is kind of fascinating, and it’s fascinating for the way that all human relationships are interesting, in that they are these morally perilous endeavors. There is a potential to do great good, and there is a potential to do great harm, and it is often very difficult to know what makes the difference between one and the other. Teaching was central to my life for a decade, and especially for the seven years I taught high school, which was a very particular experience, very different from my experience teaching at the tertiary or graduate level. It was also, really, an integral part of my becoming a writer in fiction, in a way that I don’t fully understand. Both moving to Bulgaria, and also teaching high school for seven years, were crucial to my becoming a novelist, to having a certain pitch of interest in other people’s lives and the exterior world that I’m not sure I had before.
Teaching, for me, was a great moral education, in the sense that it revealed a capacity for emotional response that I hadn’t been aware of. In Cleanness, I wanted to think about high school teaching, and about the particularly fraught nature of working with adolescents. In some sense, teaching college and graduate students feels less fraught to me. In part, that’s just because the relation is kind of necessarily less intense, because you don’t see them every day, and because they are more set, as people. Especially teaching graduate students, you really are encountering people in a kind of professional stage of their lives, or at least a professionalizing stage of their lives. That’s very different from encountering fourteen-, fifteen-, sixteen-year-olds, who are experiencing the big questions and the big passions for the first time. There’s an extraordinary privilege in having a job that consists in large part of watching that process happen.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Were you writing when you were teaching? You were writing poetry, I believe?
GREENWELL: Yes, I was. I took a job teaching in Ann Arbor in 2006, when I decided to leave my PhD program. For the first year, I didn’t write a word. It was so all-consuming that I didn’t write, and I didn’t really miss writing. My life felt very, very full. It was at that point when I realized I had to do something or I would stop being a writer altogether. So that’s when I started this practice, that I continued through the rest of my high school teaching career, of getting up at 4:30 in the morning and writing for two hours. Which was hard—but now I look back on it in this kind of romanticized way. Those six years that I kept up that practice were probably the most disciplined of my life.
I was working on poetry until I moved to Bulgaria. It was maybe the summer after my first year of teaching in Bulgaria that I started writing fiction. I started writing what would become What Belongs to You.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: What drew you to fiction initially, versus poetry?
GREENWELL: It’s very hard to say. It didn’t feel at all like a choice, and it was a big surprise to me. I finished a manuscript of poems that I had been working on for many years, and I put it in a drawer, set it aside for a while, with the idea that I would go back to work on it more. I was very surprised that then I started hearing, or feeling, sentences that were not broken into lines. I got a notebook and started writing sentences. I really did think of it as writing sentences; I did not think of it as writing a novel, or writing fiction, just as writing sentences. And that’s how What Belongs to You started.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Oh, I love that. I’m very interested in the relationship between the two, and I had a question surrounding that, and surrounding the planning for Cleanness. In the same interview I mentioned earlier, you talked about sex as a way of navigating the desire not-to-be. I’m really interested in the way that overlaps with a similar desire, one that could arise from a traumatic experience. I wanted to ask about how you develop a character to navigate these conflicting desires over time. For context, I’m a poet, so these desires seem much easier to write in a sin- gular sentence or line, than as you do, within scenes in a novel.
GREENWELL: I do think that dynamic is at the heart of what I think poetry does. It’s always felt true to me what Yeats says about rhetoric being an argument with others, and poetry being an argument with the self. That seems to me true of all art, or all art I really care about. Which is to say that it starts from a sense of contraries, from a sense of being unable to navigate something that feels immensely complex without the tools of art. When I was writing poetry, I was drawn to poems that were interested in kind of creating, or inventing, or inhabiting structures of contrast. I loved the metaphysical poets; Frank Bidart and Carl Philips were two of my most important teachers, and I think of both of them as inhabiting that kind of realm. There is something really important to how I thought of that in the structure of Cleanness, once I was aware that it was a book, in that I wrote the chapter “The Little Saint” to be kind of an inversion of the chapter “Gospodar.” There are similar relationships among other chapters.
I’m trying to think about what to say about the resources of narrative in doing that, versus the resources of lyric. It’s really easy for me to theorize about the distinction between the two, but I think, in my own practice, I really am writing fiction with the resources of a lyric poet. Even to the extent to which I use scene—and I do think scene as being crucial to my writing—but I think it’s a very lyric approach to scene: the Jamesian maneuver of stopping time, and inhabiting a moment, which seems to me basically to be something stolen from Wordsworth. So there’s a way that even my approach to scene feels very lyric to me.
It often feels to me that what I’m trying to do in fiction is very similar to what I wanted to do in poetry. And that somehow, for reasons that remain pretty unclear to me, when I started writing sentences that were not broken into lines, I entered a space of greater freedom that seems to give me greater access to the things I wanted to do in poems. I don’t mean freedom in a kind of formal sense; Idon’t mean that there was a kind of formal constriction in writing poetry. I think, instead, it was this very personal way that the extent to which I had internalized a lot of instruction about poetry became kind of confining. There was something very freeing for me about working in a genre that had no instruction, and having a certain set of tools that I could use more freely because I was taking them out of the context in which I had learned them.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Now I want to write fiction because I have no instruction in fiction.
GREENWELL: I think it’s great, actually. There was this wonderful sense of privacy and quiet. All of the workshop voices that had filled my head just disappeared. And not just workshop voices, but mentors’ voices: knowing what Frank Bidart would say about a line, or what Carolyn Forché would say about a line. I feel so grateful for that instruction, and I would not be the writer I am without it. But there was something wonderful about the silence of writing prose, and not feeling any instruction. I value that very much.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: When you’re writing these moments of intensity, is it clear to you how the scene is going to end when you begin writing it, through use of a linear plot?
GREENWELL: The trajectory is usually either entirely unknown or very, very sketchy. I might have a sense of two or three beats, or two or three turns that I know, or suspect, the scene is going to take. But, really, “plotting,” if that takes place for me, that’s inextricable from the movement of individual sentences. I really do feel like the sentences are the means. What a scene does is it demarcates some territory. What a good conception of a scene does is—and again, this is a very lyric way of thinking about it—it places a character in a situation that feels pregnant with certain questions. And then the sentence is the machinery, the tool, the technology, for exploring that territory. So I feel like certain questions I might have might determine the situations into which I place certain characters. But it doesn’t determine what happens, what unfolds from that situation.
I do like to front-load narrative material. I like to lay all the narrative cards, all the plot-cards out at the start. The idea of withholding information, or of a scene as being a way to discover a certain kind of narrative information, is not something that I’ve found super interesting to this point. Instead, I like to put all the plot elements up front, and what a scene is doing is sort of examining the consequences of that, what unfolds from that. This is not a procedure I would recommend for anyone else, it’s just what I’ve been doing up to this point in writing fiction.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: I do think it works very well, I don’t think you should change it. Re-reading things in preparation for this interview, I was so moved by the ways that you present certain possibilities within a scene, and then you take them back. The possibilities appear in the reader’s mind, but that’s not necessarily what narratively ends up happening. It sounds like you decide what happens mostly based on impulse, and I was wondering if you could explain that a bit more. How do you decide what is going to happen to a character, in those situations?
GREENWELL: I’ve sometimes talked about sentences as a kind of heat-seeking device, something that turns towards the space of greatest intensity. That intensity might be of various kinds: it might be a kind of pain, it might be a kind of shame, or it might be joy, or it might be desire. When I feel a space of various alternatives, what I’m hoping will happen is that the story will turn towards the space of greatest intensity. It really is, for me, a process of feeling it out. It’s important for me to write slowly, and it’s important for me to write by hand. One of the reasons those things are so important to me is that it helps me to feel things out, moment by moment. And there accrues a sense of inevitability. There comes to be a feeling that one of these choices of various possibilities is the right choice. But the process by which that happens is pretty mysterious to me.
I guess you’re always weighing the question of plausibility, the question of hokeyness, the question of emotional truthfulness. You’re always balancing inevitability and grace, and to what extent characters are trapped by the situations you place them in, and to what extent they can find a kind of freedom from them. I don’t think there’s any formulaic way to think about any of those things. You set up a situation that has a lot of trouble in it, and you let your characters feel their way through it, and you feel your way through it with them, I think.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Speaking of inevitability and grace, you said in another interview that art making is this attempt to strike a balance between willfulness and passivity. I agree with that, and I think that’s very true, and I see it in your sentences and syntax a lot. I thought it was interesting to think about in concurrence with the deliberation necessary to make a career as an artist. And I was just wondering how you negotiated those things.
GREENWELL: That’s a really hard question, and it’s a question I’m still figuring out. I can say, in general, that I wish I had been more courageous as a young person, in terms of thinking about the possibility of a life in art. I think part of the inheritance of being first-generation, raised off the farm in Kentucky, and not having money as I was growing up, is that it was sort of hard-wired in me that security was very important, and primarily financial security. That I always needed to know where my next paycheck was coming from. I understood very clearly that I did not have a safety net. My decision to go directly from undergrad to an MFA, directly from an MFA to a PhD program, a lot of that was this sense that I needed to be on a path that led somewhere, that made sense. I regret that now. I regret not having made more leaps, and not having had more faith in my ability to cobble together a life, as opposed to having a life that made sense to other people because it had been lived so many times. That’s a lesson that I’m constantly trying to relearn, and it’s a lesson that repeats itself in different ways.
Something that I’ve talked about a lot as being a big surprise to me after I published What Belongs to You in 2016, and became a public writer in a way that I had not been—I had been writing for twenty years, but it had always been very, very private—is the extent to which being a public writer, being a writer in the world, is exactly the opposite of the real work of writing, the work of trying to make art. I think every writer feels that, and every writer feels the need to try and find a balance between the public and private life of a writer.
The pandemic made my life as a writer come to a screeching halt in the middle of a book tour. And then, even more dramatically, I had a health crisis that forced me to think of myself as mortal in a way that I did not expect to have to do for another couple of decades. Those two things have made me stop and take stock, and realize the extent to which I feel like, over the last four years, I’ve gotten that balance between public and private wrong. I’m hoping that moving forward, I will be able to devote much more of my time, having been reminded how finite that time is, to the work that feels really important to me, which is the work of making what I am able to make. The public life of a writer has taken up so much time, and is in some ways so seductive, and can be so distorting of one’s real sense of value. I have to reaffirm my commitment to what is my real sense of value, which is making art, and not being seen as an artist.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Thank you for sharing that; it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot. Do you feel like the process of writing Cleanness was different from What Belongs to You because of that?
GREENWELL: Yeah, I think it was. One lucky thing was that, by the time I came to the Iowa Writers Workshop, I had the complete manuscript of What Belongs to You. And then, by the time What Belongs to You came out, I had at least a third of Cleanness. So the project existed, and had a kind of purchase on reality, but I still think I lost at least two years to the craziness of publishing a first book, and having it get some attention. I would have been totally lost if I hadn’t already had some kind of purchase on a new project. The whole question of how to survive as an artist is so hard, and the answer is different for everybody, and no one gets it exactly right.
You do come to feel that there is a lot of compromise involved in being an artist in the world. I don’t mean in terms of the work you make. The books I’ve published have been the books I’ve wanted to write. I mean in how you invest your time, and where you seek a sense of value, and how you come to feel your own value as an artist.
The primary reason, I feel, I had to leave a PhD program at Harvard was because I felt like Harvard was this weird world that had this incredibly powerful sense of gravity to it, and being in that world meant being within a gravitational field that was distorting my own sense of value. I felt myself coming to care about things that I didn’t really care about. The same thing happens when you publish a book. Even though all of my favorite books sold thirty copies and went immediately out of print, even though all of my favorite writers are poets who nobody knows, you can be seduced or tricked into feeling that things people are talking to you about, like how many units are you selling, how many lists are you on, how many prizes are you up for—even though you know none of those things have anything to do with the real life of art—you can suddenly realize that you feel as though they do, because you’re in this weird gravitational field that distorts your sense of value.
It’s very hard, I think, as a young writer, not to be drawn into that field. In some sense, this health crisis, though I won’t say I’m grateful to it, has been a real reminder of reality, and reality is not where I have been spending a lot of my time in the last few years. So yeah, the challenge is to be sure that making art is really the center of my life. Not talking about making art, or being seen as making art, but actually making art.