By the station’s elevator, a large woman in a denim dress had a long coughing fit. A wild-bearded man with a vacant stare shambled from one end of the concourse to the other and most of the way back, oblivious to passengers hurrying for their trains. A student sat cross-legged on a bench, staring intently at a spreadsheet on his laptop. Now and then a faint scent of urine called attention to itself.
Any other day I might not have noticed any of this. But I’d been invited to a celebration of Joyce Carol Oates’s years of teaching creative writing at Princeton University, and I’d grabbed a couple of her books at random to read on the way up, and one of them—Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart—opened like this:
“Little Red” Garlock, sixteen years old, skull smashed soft as a rotten pumpkin and body dumped into the Cassadaga River at the foot of Pitt Street, must not have sunk as he’d been intended to sink, or floated as far.
By the time I found myself in Trenton, waiting for the train to Princeton Junction, I’d met a cast of characters so unfortunate, so unlikeable, and so compellingly real that I mistrusted everyone who came into view. When my train was announced, I was almost afraid to walk down to the platform for fear of being shoved in front of the engine as it rolled past—by the wild-bearded man? The coughing lady? The student?
Ms. Oates is best known elsewhere as a prolific author, having published more than 100 books, and in almost every imaginable style and category—Gothic novels, mysteries, short-story collections, children’s books, poems, and more. But here at Princeton she’s also known as a teacher and mentor.
She has taught in the creative-writing program since 1978, leading two 10-student workshops every semester and advising seniors on book-length thesis projects. Now 76, she is about to retire from full-time teaching, although she plans to teach at Stanford University next spring and has promised to offer one course at Princeton each fall for the foreseeable future.
Though she said she had worried “that it would be just too, too embarrassing for me,” Ms. Oates agreed to what became a daylong celebration of her teaching career—a lunch, two panel discussions with former students who have made names for themselves as writers, a reception, a dinner.
The crowd in the appropriately Gothic rotunda of the Chancellor Green Library included teaching and publishing colleagues, friends, and former and current students. There was a great deal of hugging, and waving from one side of the room to the other, and planning to go get a drink after. Only once did Ms. Oates say that the whole affair left her “feeling really posthumous.”
Which she certainly was not. In person, she is wry and quick and far livelier than several decades of Emily Dickinson-like book-jacket photos have suggested. “I always hear your students laughing,” said Edmund White, the novelist, who also teaches in the creative-writing program and has an office just down the hall from her classroom.
Ms. Oates never expected to become a writer, she said at one point. Growing up in Lockport, N.Y., “my first thought was to be a teacher"—and even today, she said, she puts down “teacher” as her occupation when filling out forms. She cited as her greatest literary influences those of her youth—Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, along with Dostoyevsky, whom she started reading in her teens.
She has read widely since. “The impression I always had was, This woman has read everything,” said Boris Fishman, a writer who graduated with the Class of 2001. He and other former students recalled Ms. Oates’s recommending books and authors to them in person and in letters: Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks for Christopher Beha, a writer and deputy editor at Harper’s; John Cheever for Jennifer Anne Kogler, a novelist; the collected stories of the West Virginia writer Breece D’J Pancake for Pinckney Benedict, who is also from West Virginia and who is now a short-story writer and a writing professor at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. He had never heard of Pancake, who committed suicide in 1979, Mr. Benedict said, but as soon as he began reading the stories, he recognized familiar West Virginia landmarks.
‘Lineage of Students’
That Ms. Oates cares so much for young writers makes a particular impression on them. “You felt when Joyce took interest in your work you were part of a tradition, this lineage of students she’d had an influence on,” said Mr. Beha.
Jonathan Safran Foer, the novelist, remembered arriving early for class one day and hearing Ms. Oates say, “I’m a fan of your writing.” He was, he said, thrilled just by the thought that there was such a thing as his writing. “I was so malleable,” he said.
Everyone in the workshop he took with Ms. Oates could have been published had they kept at it, Mr. Foer said, adding: “Joyce is very, very good at giving us reasons not to stop.”
That said, he noted that Ms. Oates “doesn’t conceal her enthusiasm or her lack of enthusiasm,” for students’ work. Once he turned in 60 or 70 pages he was extremely proud of, he said, and when she returned them there was just one comment, at the end: “Confusing but uninteresting.”
“You sort of see what the traffic will bear,” Ms. Oates said of giving students feedback on their work.
In an interview by email, she said she assigns both classic and contemporary short stories as workshop readings. “Most writers who teach workshops hope that their students will learn to read very carefully—that is the first step,” she said.
She picks writing assignments “which are generic enough to allow them much individual leeway,” she said. “Their work is often very, very good when they have assignments—it is a little harder for a young writer to think of a subject about which he/she can write more than a few pages.”
Once work is handed in and distributed to everyone, she said, “we pretend in the class that we’re all editors at The New Yorker. What can we do to make these stories stronger?” That, she said, helps avoid " ‘negative’ criticism of the sort that (I have heard) is withering and paralyzing in some graduate programs.”
What do her students remember learning?
“The fact that something is true is a pretty pathetic defense” if the something doesn’t pull its weight in a piece of fiction, said Julie Sarkissian, a novelist who graduated in 2005.
“Don’t pull your punches,” said Mr. Beha.
“That I could take a piece of my DNA and grow it in a petri dish into a character,” said Jonathan Ames, a member of the Class of 1987 who is a writer and television producer.
‘Wonder Woman’
Ms. Oates said teaching had been a perfect complement to the solitude of writing. “Working with young writers is expansive,” she said. Besides, “in no other arena in life could one spend 50 minutes looking at a text, noticing the punctuation.”
Students and colleagues alike said Ms. Oates’s prodigious output inspired them, though the more accurate verb might be “shamed.” Mr. White called her “Wonder Woman.”
Walter Kirn, a novelist who graduated in 1983, said: “If my conscience as a writer has a face, it’s hers.” He also noted that, while Ms. Oates “is manifestly prolific, nobody ever catches her at writing.”
“I wonder if I’ll go home this afternoon,” he said, “and find she’s been tweeting the whole time.” She has 110,000 Twitter followers, after all.
Mr. Beha recalled that some years after he graduated from Princeton, Ms. Oates asked him to be her co-editor on The Ecco Anthology of Contemporary American Short Fiction. They divided the writers they wanted to include between them and began picking a story to represent each, Mr. Beha said. “To me this was all-consuming, but right in the middle of it she published a 600-page novel.”
Sheila Kohler, a friend and colleague of Ms. Oates’s at Princeton, recalled her as “this incredibly famous writer who was very modest and came to every meeting we were called to.” On top of that, Ms. Oates throws legendary parties—so good that when Ms. Kohler recently wrote a blog post called “On Giving a Perfect Dinner Party,” the unnamed hostess she praised was Ms. Oates.
But the day’s best story—or at least the best one offered publicly—was almost certainly one Mr. Ames told. His senior thesis was accepted for publication shortly after he graduated, he recalled, but it needed to be twice as long as it was. Months passed, and he made no progress on it. He grew desperate.
“My young life was falling apart,” he said, so he decided to write to Ms. Oates, not even knowing what kind of help he was seeking. After he composed the letter, he put it aside until morning, and before he sent it he happened to look at a quote-a-day calendar.
That day’s selection? “‘No person can save another’—Joyce Carol Oates.” He never sent the letter.
Or so he said. Ms. Oates disagreed. “I do have that letter,” she said with a laugh, adding that what she had liked about Mr. Ames’s work was how it “moved from the lurid to the macabre and back"—which, of course, brought to mind the coughing woman and the wild-bearded man.
Then she said, with a hint of mischief that broke their spell: “I’m keeping a lot of work from my students as blackmail. You win the Nobel Prize and you can buy back your senior thesis.”
