The New Guard: An Interview with Tommy Orange
By Nicole Gomez
Tommy Orange, whose novel There There was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize, visited the University of Montana in October as part of the President’s Lecture Series. Orange not only agreed to meet with me for a sliver of the fully-booked twenty-four hour period for which he was in Missoula, but also offered to forgo his break between talks in order to continue our conversation. Orange surprised and delighted me right off the bat by revealing that he was already familiar with CutBank (I had begun with an introduction of the magazine) because he had submitted (and been declined) in the distant past. After dismissing my semi-serious request that he resubmit by scribbling something on a napkin, we got down to craft talk.
(Read below for highlights from the interview, which appears in CutBank 92. Order the issue to read the full interview.)
Nicole Gomez: You’ve talked about how a lot of MFAs are moving away from the “old white man guard,” and how at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) they taught writing for people interested in culture (interview with the Santa Fe Literary Review, Volume 14, 2019). As a female writer of color, I still feel sometimes inundated by the old guard. Could you speak a little more about how that’s changing, and how it should change more?
Tommy Orange: I think, with diversity in the publishing world, it’s sort of being forced to change. I think there are a lot of people that are hesitantly changing that would rather keep it the old way, but for instance, if you write a story about a person who goes to the store and comes back and has marriage problems or whatever and you never say their gender or their race, it’s assumed white man, and that’s the epitome of white privilege, right? But it’s actually been taught to not write this stuff in, and we have to find ways, like craft decisions, of how to bring it up without it being clumsy. But it’s not talked about in craft ways, it’s talked about in political ways or in ways that have to do with it being 2019, and I think it’s really the responsibility of the author to navigate gender and race in your writing and not just defaulting. Not every piece of writing needs to do it, but it certainly needs to shift.
NG: [In There There] were you writing mostly on intuition, or were you outlining?
TO: It was really just putting in the time and going for it. Whatever my fingers would do at that time. And then, once I had the core cast together, I started thinking about how they would all connect. I had this device built in—they were all connected because they would all end up at the powwow, and that was a convenient device to be able to write into. Like, what are they all doing? When I think about what is the content of their lives, which part of their lives am I focusing on, and it was always related to the trajectory of getting them to the powwow. It got really messy in the middle, trying to figure out organically how so many characters could relate. One of my techniques, even though it sounds like it’s not writing, is long-distance running. A lot of ideas, sort of a deeper solution to these threads that needed to connect, would just pop into my head on a run. So once I realized that was a thing—I already liked to run—it turned into a devotion that was related to writing. Some people get it in the shower or when they wake up the next day. There’s sort of a non-thinking thinking that happens. You can kind of put a problem in your head and then do the thing, and then—it won’t always work—but it worked enough that it became part of my writing practice.
NG: As a teacher, what do you try to impart to your students about the project and process of writing a novel?
TO: I’ve never been asked that. I just taught my first workshop that was not at IAIA. I walk around with a lot of imposter syndrome. It looks one way from the outside and feels a totally different way from the inside. I still feel like the exact same person, with the exact same demons and doubts. And so that carries over into teaching, you know. Why am I an authority on that, right? Just because I had a successful novel? This is something that I grapple with, but I also include it in my teaching, in deconstructing authority and trying not to allow me to be an authority, while at the same time I have things that I learned while writing it that can be helpful. So I don’t think that I have specific advice. It depends on what kind of novel you’re working on. It also depends what kind of writer you are, because some people work really linearly and need to write the whole thing out in a bad draft and then go back and go through again. One thing I tell people to do is at the beginning of the book you need to put extra care and attention to the entry. The doorway to your book needs to be really fancy and nice and inviting, because that’s where you win or lose readers. You need to immediately convince readers that your voice is something they want to stay with. This is their time. They’re choosing to spend time out of their own lives with something you put your work into. So that’s the most important: the entry to your book, and also the entry to individual chapters. Put extra care into those. And as a revisor or editor of your own work, if you put extra work into the beginning of it, you’ll invite yourself into the revision process. Like, well, at least I got this part right. Now I just need to get the rest into as good of shape as the beginning.
Order CutBank 92 to read the full interview.
Tommy Orange is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel There There, a multi-generational, relentlessly paced story about a side of America few of us have ever seen: the lives of urban Native Americans. There There was one of The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of the Year, and won the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and the Pen/Hemingway Award. There There was also longlisted for the National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Orange graduated from the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, and was a 2014 MacDowell Fellow and a 2016 Writing by Writers Fellow. He is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma. He was born and raised in Oakland, California.
Nicole Gomez is a second-year MFA candidate in Fiction at the University of Montana. She is the Editor-in-Chief of CutBank Literary Magazine and a teacher with Free Verse. She has a B.A. in International Relations from Stanford University and was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico and raised in El Paso, Texas.