Tobias Wolff
Tobias Wolff
Tobias Jonathan Ansell Wolffis an American short story writer, memoirist, and novelist. He is known for his memoirs, particularly This Boy's Lifeand In Pharaoh's Army. He has written two novels, including The Barracks Thief, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and an array of short stories. Wolff received a National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama in September 2015...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth19 June 1945
CityBirmingham, AL
CountryUnited States of America
Had he learned nothing from all those years of teaching Hawthorne? Through story after story he'd led his boys to consider the folly of obsession with purity - its roots sunk deep in pride, flowering condemnation and violence against others and self.
I recall that my workshop leaders were tactful in their ways of acquainting me with my shortcomings as a writer. So much so that I hardly realized they were doing it. I want always to keep that sort of thing in mind when I'm teaching. The way you get better in everything in this life is to make mistakes. Otherwise you're probably doing it right by accident. But you have to do everything wrong before you can really start with some authority to do it right.
I teach one semester a year, and this year I'm just teaching one course during that semester, a writing workshop for older students in their late 20s and early 30s, people in our graduate program who are already working on a manuscript and trying to bring it to completion.
Because I don't have to be careful of people's feelings when I teach literature, and I do when I'm teaching writing.
That, for me, is a very important test of a young writer's commitment because most of them are going to have to continue doing that when they've finished the program.
Of course it's why you want to become a writer - because you have the liberty to do that, but once you have the liberty you also have the obligation to do it.
Because the more you write the more you're aware of the weight of your tradition and the difficulties of the form and the more you have already done that you do not want to do again.
Anybody can be very destructive in that position without at all meaning to be, and I know that I have been inadvertently destructive in the past for certain people on certain occasions.
And you can tell the writers who do it - Robert Stone, for example, who with each new novel is doing something new. I appreciate that in other writers.
The reader really has to step up to the plate and read a short story.
Most of us don't live lives that lend themselves to novelistic expression, because our lives are so fragmented.
The short story, on the other hand, is the perfect American form.
When I was about 14 or 15 I decided to become a writer and never for a moment since have I wanted to do anything else.
A novel invites digression and a little relaxation of the grip because a reader can't endure being held that tightly in hand for so long a time.