Michael Krasny offers his impressions of 7 influential contemporary American writers.
“I was mad for literature,” writes Michael Krasny, host of NPR’s award-winning radio program, Forum. These words form the opening line of his memoir—a memoir that traces a life stretching from Buckeye State fraternities to Bay Area literati, telling of Krasny’s coming of age during the heady 1960s and vividly describing his journey from a student of literature to that of a struggling novelist, an educator, and—somewhat accidentally—a radio host.
As Krasny creates a portrait of himself, with his writerly struggles, his love of literature, and his quest—always—to make himself in the image of his role model, 3-time National Book Award winner, Saul Bellow, he also offers portraits of the many poets, playwrights, authors, and essayists with whom he crossed paths over the course of his career. Punctuating the chapters of his life, Krasny offers commentaries and observations on some of the leading literary luminaries of the century—from Joan Didion to V.S. Naipul—exceptional writers and thinkers, who had occasion to step into his studio and under his inquiring gaze.
Tonight at the Bankhead Theater in Livermore, Michael Krasny will share some of his insights and behind-the-scenes accounts of a life enamored with literature and studded with celebrity authors. In anticipation of this event, gathered below, are a handful of portraits of some of the most influential contemporary American writers, as described by Krasny in his biography, Off Mike: A Memoir of Talk Radio and Literary Life.
Joyce Carol Oates
Every time I talk to [Joyce Carol] Oates, I wonder what fires her imagination. She links it to daydreaming, fantasizing, dreaming while asleep. “The psychological is what I am interested in,” she tells me. “It’s what is close to my heart.” She calls Nietzsche the greatest psychologist and talks about how he uses his aphorism like a scalpel. She appears fragile, vulnerable and owl-like with a trill, high but dulcet voice that hides those secret places in her heart that push her imagination into darker realms.
Joan Didion
Joan Didion still says she is from California even though she lives in Manhattan and has for over a decade. Her identity is linked to California. It’s everything she is. She would never describe herself as a New Yorker. But then California is not really a geographical place to her any more than it is in her enchanted Where I Was From. California is a state of mind.
What, I wonder, is under her halting and stammering, her nervousness and her pauses and her girlish, nearly flirtatious laughter? What is under the woman who writes such fastidious and precise and poetic prose, who one woman caller breathlessly says changed her life and another rhapsodizes over as “our greatest American writer?” In response to the praise she quotes Robert Penn Warren. “Only the writer knows where the rot is.”
Alice Walker
Walker says she learned in Mississippi how bright and fearless the human spirit can be. Her love of writers like Jean Toomer and Langston Hughes and the Indian lore that is also part of her heritage—and, also, the Buddhist teachings and meditations she has absorved—all make her celebrate and honor the santity of humanness, make her heaven bent on teaching compassion and love. Her mother was a teacher and a healfer and that is what Walker has become. Literature and literary art have come to mean much less to her now, dwarfed in her mind by the necessity to heal the ancestors, enshrine the human spirit and root out and speak out against violence and depravity.
Michael Chabon
I’ve told Michael Chabon a number of times that he is who I wanted to be. Just to have a novel like The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. He also has a Pulitzer, but when People magazine wanted him to be one of the year’s best-looking men, he declined the request, asking “Why would you want a nebbish like me?”
Michael does have an inner nebbish. You can see it in him and occasionally hear it in his voice. He was the archetypal comic-book-reading fiend, a Jewish kid whose parents divorced when he was twelve. Chabon wanted to reenter that glory age of comic books, to find a way in and to time travel back. He loved magic too. The figure of the magician is, he tells me, a seductive on to writers because magicians try to create illusion and distractions and keep us from seeing what they are really trying to pull off.
Colson Whitehead
Before meeting MacArthur genius award recipient and much praised, Harvard-educated, Gen-X black novelist Colson Whitehead, I was expecting a different young man than the T-shirt-wearing, quasi-“nerd,”—as he describes himself—with the nervous laugh and slight stutter who greeted me pleasantly. We start right in talking about names. His is Arch Colson Chipp Whitehead. The name Whitehead is Seminole and literal. “We’re not so whiteheaded anymore,” he quips, and says wryly that he saw a bar on the New York’s Upper West Side called Chipp’s and wondered if he might have been conceived there. That’s how his imagination roams. The fantastic and absurd seem normal to him. Beckett’s blasted plain and Borges’ worlds seem normal to him. Pynchon and Ishmael Reed are real, not surreal. “It’s the way I see the world. Walking down the street is postmodern.”
Margaret Atwood
I’m crazy about Atwood. Her intelligence and thoughtfulness and girlishness charm me.
She talks bluntly about gender differences. Men’s images of their loved ones, she says, are all shot through with gauze. Women are harder and more practical. “Guys love at first sight more. They’re visual. Appearance to them is more important.” She will tell me in another interview that some fellow once told her that she had risen above being a woman. How feminism to her means three words. Separate bank accounts. She adds, “I take no stand on cosmetics.”
Jonathan Safran Foer
Jonathan says he intentionally writes, but not necessarily with intention. He opens himself up. It is intuitive. The editing is intentional. Writing books is like singing in the shower. “I like the way the voice sounds, and I enjoy it. You choose your tunes and the key knowing your voice range.” Writing is intimate. He writes in cafes, libraries, subways, lying down. Just him and the words. It can become an intimate reflection, but he is glad when writing inspires more writing. “There aren’t enough writers,” he says, making me think of Flannery O’Connor’s crack about there being too many.
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