Bret Lott returns this year to the College of Charleston's English Department as Professor of English and Writer-in-Residence. For the past three years (2004-07) he served as Editor and Director of The Southern Review and as Professor of English at Louisiana State University. He has written seven novels, with the latest, Ancient Highway, due out from Random House next summer. His novel Jewel (1999) is this year's convocation book at the College of Charleston. Professor Lott has also written two non-fiction books, edited three anthologies, and published three collections of stories.
Professor Mike Duvall interviewed Professor Lott via email in September 2007.
To start, could you talk about your career as a writer and teacher – how you got started with both, how the two go together for you?
I got started by reading my brains out when I was a kid, though back then I wasn’t doing that – reading – with any idea toward becoming a writer. I simply enjoyed stories, enjoyed going somewhere else, enjoyed finding out what people do in certain circumstances. That is, I wanted to find out what happened and why, which is all a good story gives us.
I ended up having four majors in college – forestry, marine biology, education, and then, finally, English; in addition, I took a year off halfway through college to become an RC Cola salesman, believing at that point that college wasn’t for me. But after a year of that, I knew I wanted to go back to school, and so, before reenrolling at Cal State Long Beach, I took a course at Golden West Community College so as to get myself used to having assignments again, readings and deadlines and all that. The only nights I had open were Tuesdays, and the only course that was open on Tuesday nights was Creative Writing, and so I used to show up to class in my RC uniform on Tuesday nights, and had a blast writing things, though I still had no notion of becoming a writer. I then took another creative writing course once I was back at Cal State, and the professor read out loud a single sentence out of an entire story I’d written for class. Then he said, “That’s a writer’s sentence,” and I remember thinking, Maybe I want to do this.
I know this is a long-winded answer, but it is to say that my writing life has been inextricably entwined with that of teaching; without my teachers, I wouldn’t be here today. And as a teacher now, I continue to be invigorated by my students, as the things I teach them are things I must – I must – practice every moment I am writing. I tell my students on the first day of class that the things I am wrestling with as an author are precisely the same things they will have to struggle with: How does this character hold her coffee cup? What does this character see as he walks from this room into that room? What is she thinking as she parks the car in the lot outside the grocery store? These are all I work with, and there have been no breakthroughs beyond this in storytelling, ever. So my students are always, always my peers: we are all in this together, trying to tell stories.
What in particular about the college, about Charleston, has attracted you back to us? What do you look forward to most in returning to the C of C?
As editor of The Southern Review, my job was to sit at a desk and read manuscripts and reject or accept them; my job was to create a journal that appears quarterly and that would make its own unique contribution to contemporary literature; my job was to increase our profile and readership; my job was to run an office. And I found I missed teaching, plain and simple. LSU, where the journal was published, is a Research I institution, which means its professors are first and foremost expected to conduct their research; teaching, it seemed, was an afterthought (if I may be so bold), and what I loved most about my job here at The College was my relationship to students. I missed the commitment the professoriate has to the students. This, plain and simple, was why I came back. I wasn’t teaching, and I missed that, missed the sense of encouragement and hope that comes with being a teacher, and missed working at a school where my colleagues shared that commitment.
You are coming back to us, in part, as “Writer-in-Residence.” What does it mean to be a “writer-in-residence”?
I think it means that I am the guy in that office down the street who is around to talk to students about writing, about what it means to be a writer, and why it is important to follow that dream, if it is a dream you are willing to work your butt off to pursue. Creativity comes through discipline (this is also something I teach my students from the first meeting on to the last), and as writer in residence I want to help any students interested in the art understand what that might really entail.
If you don’t mind getting philosophical for a moment and responding to a rather clumsy prompt/question, what place does or can creative writing (as a field of study, as a practice) hold in a college such as this one, or in the much broader frame, in our society?
A tough question to answer in the context of a Department of English website interview, but I will go ahead and boldly go there: the role of creative writing in a liberal arts education is to call to the student’s mind the fact that our analytical encounters with literature aren’t the reason for literature’s existence. Too often students have an encounter with literature that entails listening to a professor talk about symbols and themes and imagistic patterns and etc. etc. etc.; as a result, students can forget the absolutely integral role of the creation of that literature. Stories, poems, and essays exist because they were efforts to understand the world, in one way or another; they do not exist because of the opportunity for analysis they provide professors. Storytelling existed long before analysis, and classes such as creative writing offer students the opportunity to tap the source of what it means to be a human being: to understand at root who we are through the creation of art. I know that’s a bit philosophical, but you asked for it!
When you’re not busy teaching and writing, what hobbies or other interests do you pursue?
I love to golf, though I am awful at it. I have broken 100 only twice in my life, but golfing allows me time outdoors with friends to do something meaningless and fun. It also allows me an opportunity to have a cigar. I enjoy cooking, travel, and reading nonfiction, primarily history. Pretty boring, I know. But that’s the best I can do.