When she wrote the title piece of her new story collection, Why I Don’t Write (Knopf) Susan Minot was referencing our age of distraction. The story’s seemingly random scraps of news, chatter, thoughts, whatnot neatly evoked our fragmented, device-driven lives. But fast-forward a few months to the book’s late summer arrival, when the pandemic was in full bloom. Suddenly the story seemed Covid-ready.

Since June, the award-winning author, novelist, and screenwriter has hunkered down at her summer home, on an island off Midcoast Maine, where she remains today, teaching from her kitchen table via Zoom. Minot is on the faculty at Stony Brook Southampton, where she teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing and Literature.

”That I can be on this island where I can go out and take a walk, and I can dig in my backyard — I’m knocking on wood, how lucky I feel,” she says.

“Why I Don’t Write” is the author’s first story collection in 30 years, following the success of her several novels including “Monkeys,” “Folly,” “Evening” and “Rapture.” Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Kenyon Review, and Atlantic Monthly, among others. For The National, Minot spoke with Joan Silverman about writing and teaching, and the rewards and challenges of each.

Q:  What I like most about your new book is that it’s so surprising. It’s got these complicated stories of identity, love, memory; it’s both mainstream and experimental. It’s also interesting that the stories were written over a couple of decades. Has your writing changed much during that period?

A:  I think it has. Let’s hope it has! There are four stories from the ‘90s. Then one or two that I wrote in the 2000s, but mostly the pieces are from the last five years. I’ve been working on a novel for a long time, so I started writing stories just to get something finished every now and then. Then, about a year ago, when I wrote the story “Why I Don’t Write,” it seemed different enough. I thought maybe this could be the headliner of a collection.

Q:  The title story certainly anticipates aspects of the plague that we’re living through. When you were writing it, were you thinking more of the technological craziness that we’re all part of?

A:  Yes, that was very much a part of it. But, you know, weirdly, a writer’s life follows a lot of the tenets of the pandemic: Don’t go out. Don’t see people. Stay at home in order to get work done.

Q:  As I was reading it, the title story felt like an essay. 

A:  Well, some people think it’s a poem.

Q:  Actually, you do a wonderful thing, near the end, inserting a little prose poem into the story. That certainly got my attention amid all the fragments of distracted thinking!

A: That’s so interesting, because that’s just the kind of thing that I think is only interesting to me and no one else. But the title is a play on those “Why I Write” essays that writers are often asked to produce. I’m always interested in reading those — to hear each writer’s different version.

There was a long period when I wasn’t writing that much. There were good and bad reasons for it. I was tired of paying attention to what I thought or observed about things, or putting it on the page. It’s one thing to be distracted and not write, but there are other things that pull you away from wanting to impose your words on things. Then it became about how one’s thoughts just drift along in one’s head.

That’s the reason maybe that it moves out of an essay and becomes a story. It’s saying, “This — why one doesn’t write — is a subject to write about.”

Q:  You know how most writing tends to have a natural ending. With this story, how did you know where to end it? It could have ended in so many places.

A:  It could have. And it could have gone on longer. I think it ended when I came to the realization that all of these things, even if they’re keeping one from writing, are also what one will write about. And that’s the last line — another story will come, so you think I won’t write this now.

Q:  At one point in the story, you say, “You write if without it, you would die.” Is that true for you personally, or is that part of the story?

A:  I certainly can’t imagine my existence if I didn’t write. I don’t know how I would  occupy my perceptions without thinking I’ve got to put words around this.

Q:  That’s really interesting from someone who also works in another medium. Not many authors are painters, as well. Is writing somehow more essential to you?

A:  I’ve put more of my eggs in that basket. Not out of choice so much, but that’s how it’s happened. I figure, after 40 years of writing, I’m going to keep on going with this!

In the last four or five years, I’ve been doing a lot of collages because I love my newspapers, and I hate throwing the images away. I like to cut them out and make collages, which is very much what the “Why I Don’t Write” story is like. It’s definitely more fun than writing. If I could sell my collages, that’s what I would do all day long. But I just can’t make that bridge of really trying to hawk my wares.

It’s also the way I write poetry. Now and then, I’ll maybe send a poem out. But I don’t want that to be part of something I need to think about — the practical side of it. I don’t want to have to deliver it. 

Q:  What do you consider the essential unit, or parts, of your writing? Do you write for the eye, the ear, something else? 

A:  I write for the feeling — the feeling that the words will be able to convey. You want to tell a story. You want people to be engaged. There’s nothing better than a good story. So you want something compelling in the narrative. I do like thwacking the reader! You have to set that up and keep their interest. You want to convey what it’s like to be alive, or to articulate how mysteriously disturbing life can be. I’ve certainly found in the reading I’ve done, and the other art that I take pleasure in, that artists give me that. So, I’m trying to kind of give that back. I don’t even know what that pleasure is — sometimes that pleasure is to be a little bit disturbed.

Nabokov said that a writer should be a storyteller, a teacher, and an enchanter — but the enchanter is the most important part.

Q:  When you’re working on a piece of writing, what are the issues that you tear your hair out over?

A:  Is this going to matter? Does it matter? Is this interesting? You know, the story “Why I Don’t Write” has some of that in it. Then it becomes a challenge: Okay, I want to get at this thing — a feeling, a rub between two people, an experience. I want to try to capture it, but it’s rare until I’ve worked on it a long time that I feel like I’ve brought it off. So you have to live with yourself really not bringing something off most of the time.

Q:  How often are you pleasantly surprised?

A:  One out of every two times that I write, I think, “Okay, I’ve got something there.” You’d think with that percentage, I’d be able to get myself to do it. You know, I can do a lot of work around things. I’m going through files, I’m looking over things — that may be all part of the writing. That’s when I’m allowed to say I’m working! But I know the real moment of truth is getting those sentences down and then working on them.

Q:  I’m wondering if what you just said is part of the preamble.

A:  It is. Oh, there’s so much preamble! You only nail it by the end. Ideas are part of the warming up. Then you’ve got to see what you have in front of you. When I was younger, I used to sit down and write more directly. I’d just sit down, write, and then I’d go back and revise. Now I do it a lot more piecemeal.

We don’t hold sentences in our brain, so how can we possibly know what a book is going to be until it’s on the page? That’s what I say to my students all the time. You read stories and you think it’s all there, it’s all contained — as if you can hold that in your mind. You can’t do that before you write something.

Q:  Speaking of your students, what are the most difficult things to convey to grad students about writing?

A:  There’s a lot I can convey, but I don’t know what’s getting through to them or not. Everyone is amazed that you can be writing a story and feel both very confused by it and also compelled by it. You don’t have a total handle on a story until you’ve written that last sentence. It keeps people from writing because they think, “I’ve got this sort of idea, but I don’t really know how....”

Well, of course you don’t know — you haven’t written it yet!

Updike said writing a story is like seeing something out of the corner of your eye. And I think that’s a very good description. So you write that impression, then you create a world, and you try to fill in all the brushstrokes, so that someone can occupy it the way they occupy a dream. You want to feel things, see things, and also be interested in what’s going to happen.

Q:  So, what motivates students to keep going?

A:  Hopefully I’m encouraging them when I say, “You don’t need to know.” And the reiteration of: Sit. Down. And. Write. I mean, that’s just step number one. A lot of people think that they have to think of something first. You find out what you’re going to write about by writing.

Q:  Not unlike figuring out what you think by writing.

A:  That’s right. And you come upon something that wasn’t on the top of your head. 

Q:  What things can’t be taught — are just not teachable ?

A:  You can’t teach charm. You can’t teach a poetic sensibility. But I think people can find things in themselves through writing that they wouldn’t be in touch with otherwise. In that way, writing can be not just helpful, not galvanizing even, but profound for anyone who really gives it the time.

I’m not sure if MFAs produce writers; I think they produce good readers of literature. The more you learn about writing, the deeper will be your appreciation. And it will be something you’ll have all your life not just as a great pleasure, but as solace.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.


Joan Silverman writes op-eds, essays, and book reviews. Her linked essay collection, “Someday This Will Fit” [Bauhan Publishing], was a finalist for the 14th Annual National Indie Excellence Awards.