Faculty Member Debra Spark Interviewed in The Southern Review
Debra Spark’s “Finish It, Finish It: Options for Ending a Story” appears in the winter 2018 issue of The Southern Review. Here, she discusses her writing process, her struggle to balance creative work with her professional life, and her penchant for interviewing writers.
Garrett Hazelwood: I understand that “Finish It, Finish It: Options for Ending a Story” had a former life as a craft talk, and it’s clear that in composing it you’ve drawn from myriad sources: personal relationships, your teaching, conversations with other writers, literary criticism, and quotes. Did you collect these fragments here and there until the connections became apparent? Or did the idea for the piece inspire the bulk of the research and collecting? Can you tell us a bit about your process in that regard?
Debra Spark: I teach in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, so each year I have to give a lecture or offer a class for about a hundred students. It is a low-residency MFA, so the school meets twice a year in intense ten-day sessions of lectures, classes, readings, and meetings. I go once a year, in July, and I typically start to get nervous about what I am going to write around February. I am not entirely sure why I tried to write about endings for the summer of 2017, but I do know that two of the people who often lecture in the same semester that I do—Robert Boswell and Charles Baxter—have the knack of making their craft essays both craft essays and something more. Boswell’s pieces are often also personal essays (he has a lovely one about his mother, another great one about how he met his wife) and Baxter’s are often cultural critiques (he has one about contemporary agendas in communication and the implication for dialogue in fiction). I wanted to try that myself, so pulled personal material into this lecture, since my friend’s death was so much on my mind.
Read the rest of the interview here: SOUTHERN REVIEW BLOG
