Janet Kauffman was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and raised on a tobacco farm. She lives in Hudson, Michigan, where she has restored wetlands on her farm and works for sustainable agriculture with Environmentally Concerned Citizens of South Central Michigan.
In addition to mixed media projects, she has published nine books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, most recently the novella Rot; a collection of prose poems, Five on Fiction; and Trespassing: Dirt Stories & Field Notes, a collection of short stories and essays centered on the pollution from industrial livestock operations in her area.
This interview was taken from the Question and Answer session between Janet Kauffman, guest writer for the Creative Writing Visiting Writers Series, and Interlochen's Creative Writing students on March 5, 2009. - Edited and compiled by Victoria Elliott, co-editor.
IAA Student: When you have an impulse to write, how do you assess which genre the piece is going to become?
Kauffman: That's a difficult question. I think it often takes several forms, for me at least. I mean, I just start writing and I often start with just a beginning statement, like a line. I started writing poetry originally, so in many ways I think I write more like a poet than a traditional fiction writer. So I start writing a sentence, and sometimes it goes along like a poem or a prose poem and other times it really leads to something a bit more meandering that can go into what looks like a story. Since I don't write in extremely traditional structures, and I don't care too much what it is, or what it's called.
The only writing that has a specific shape is when I'm writing about an issue, like a political issue or an environmental issue, and then I know I really want to make it clear to people. So it takes a more decisive prose form. Or, if I want to write about the issue's dark side, you know, the side of it that's irrational, that's when I use fiction or poetry. I don't know if it's a decision except for when I know I need to write an op-ed. It's more of a need: I know this needs to be said.
But in the old days, when I was just writing out of my own requirements, the writing took multiple forms and sometimes the same thing would appear in a couple different ways. It's probably the same process all of you experience. I've never separated the genres. I feel like I don't have to make a decision so exactly.
IAA Student: Can you talk about how your process and your objectives in writing have changed since you realized what was happening with the environment around your home?
Kauffman: Well, its changed drastically, because I never liked to write essays. I did it in college, but the structure of essays always made me a little crazy - to be reasonable, to be clear, you know? It always seemed false. I'd draw conclusions that always seemed false.
I've had to compromise some of my basic beliefs in order to be understood. I've learned a lot and I've learned not to feel that it's compromising my whole being because I really do want to communicate with people and I really do want to be able to talk to people and have them experience or understand what all this is about. So the process has changed.
Now I do a lot of research and I never liked to do research. I got a PhD in Lit, but I always swore "I'll get this degree and I will never write another scholarly article again." And I never have, but I did learn how to research stuff. For some of the essays in the book, I spent a lot of time in libraries and online, and also at the drain commission, looking up old files. I have come to like that part of the process - documenting things and talking to people.
I wouldn't have anticipated that I would ever write like that because I worked one summer as a reporter for a newspaper. It was writing for weddings, that kind of thing. And I hated that job so bad. It took me half an hour to write a little paragraph. (laughs) Do you put the description of the gown before this? I was fretting like a writer and I shouldn't have been spending all that time. So I never thought I would want to do anything close to journalism but now I do. I like it.
It's still important to think about how you choose words, how you have to help people read the language as closely to the way you want it to be read as possible. So all those parts of the process are still there.
IAA Student: Did you write when your were young and if you did, did you write about these issues?
Kauffman: I wrote for many, many years. I didn't write when I was your age. I liked to read, and I studied poetry as literature, but it wasn't until after I got out of graduate school that I started "writing." And then I did write poetry. The first books I published were poetry books and then I wrote short stories once I realized short stories don't have to have a beginning, middle and end. It was a revelation to me, so then I could write short stories.
I've written three novels. Really little ones, real short. Everything I've done is relatively short because I really don't like to read big books, I like to read little books. So, in a way, I was prepared to do any kind of writing. By the time I got to this, I'd been doing some other stuff.
IAA Student: What are your primary influences?
Kauffman: Oh, I'm so terrible at remembering what has meant anything to me. Isn't it terrible? I have a very, very bad memory; this is true. Now let me think a minute. Actually, its funny to think about this, but there are prose writers that I somehow feel closest to.
I'm thinking of a woman writer - she's dead now - but she was writing about twenty years ago, Grace Paley. Her stories. When I started writing fiction, her stories really made me have the confidence to write because they didn't have beginnings, middles and ends. It would be a couple women, mostly Jewish women in New York City, sitting around talking. That's all they did, talking. Talk, talk, talk. And I thought, you know, I can write fiction if that's fiction. And so most of my characters sit around and talk mostly. Or walk. They go outside and walk. Her characters sat other places and walked. So Grace Paley's fiction, I still think is... I'm thinking of people I reread because they seem valuable to me and Grace Paley I reread frequently.
Another is Joseph Conrad. I don't know why, because they're kind of cumbersome novels, but he has a global sense of things. It's really a political view of the world, I think. And grim. Really grim. I like that. I hated The Heart of Darkness the first time I read it, and now it's, of course, one of my favorite books. It's really murky and miserable.
But poetry, I don't know. I did my graduate work on Theodore Roethke. He's a Michigan poet, died in the 1960's. He grew up near Saginaw, Michigan, and his family had greenhouses. I think in the earliest days of writing poetry his work meant a lot to be me because he wrote really short poems that were just about a shoot or the root of some plant. Roethke's writing was based very much on plant life and the natural world. They were just strange, just twisted slightly, in ways I liked.
IAA Student: Would you talk about the poet side of yourself and how that figures into your work?
Kauffman: I really think of myself as a poet more than anything else. Even though I haven't written as much poetry, probably, as other things, especially now.
The poet's thought process about language, with language being what you're working with - not just writing something that tells something but playing with language - that is what I love. I love to play with language. Not always for a purpose; I just like to fool around with it. I change words and see what happens. I think of language as a really physical material, like it's air coming out of my body, that sound. And when you put it on paper it has lines and shapes. Letters have a shape. If you write a whole line that's got an awful lot of L's, it's very visible; there's a lot of vertical lines. I just love that physicality of language.
