Jared Carter Poetry

IndiAnnual Interview

In the mid-1980s George Fish and Jared Carter were both living on the Near Eastside of Indianapolis—Fish in Woodruff Place, Carter a stone's throw away in Windsor Park. They got together for an interview that was published in 1987 in the literary magazine IndiAnnual.

George Fish: You've had a certain amount of success with your poems, yet you continue to publish fiction, nonfiction, and book reviews. And even photographs. Are you losing interest in poetry?

Jared Carter: No, I think it's more a case of trying to stay in shape. Writing, like athletics, involves a great deal of practice. You keep honing different skills. The athlete with natural ability can perform well on the gridiron or the basketball court, then go out and shoot a good round of golf, and move on to still other games involving quick reflexes and physical grace—darts, table shuffleboard, pool, tennis.

The same thing is true of writing. Fiction, journalism, poetry, TV scripts, personal correspondence—they're all made of words. The more practice you put in on anyone of them, the better your overall writing skills become.

Fish: You mentioned "natural ability"—are you suggesting that the good writer is born rather than made?

Carter: It's both. And again, it's like athletics. You have to be born with the right equipment. We can see that a kid who is seven feet tall by his junior year in high school is born for a particular game. But whether or not he succeeds at that game will depend on how hard he wants to work. A writer's equipment is internal, so it's harder to scout. Yet when you're starting out, you have to have the intuition that you've got "the right stuff."

Most successful writers had the ambition to write from an early age. The hard part is doing it, making it happen. Convincing yourself, convincing your parents, your spouse. Making the sacrifices, avoiding the compromises, devoting your whole life to it. "Playing up to your potential," as Coach Knight says.

Fish: How can you tell if you've got the potential? I mean, you're some sort of bookworm in high school, some outcast—everybody else is going to football games and weenie roasts—and you like to stay in the library and read Franny and Zooey. Is that how you know—because you're so different?

Carter: It's easy to oversimplify. If you'd check, you might find that the nose tackle and the fullback read Salinger, too, and are good writers, and so is the Chicana cheerleader. And the scrawny kid back in the library might be a true wimp who can't write his way out of a wet paper bag. In his alienation and unhappiness he might dream of becoming a writer. And good for him, he has my sympathy.

But unhappiness doesn't necessarily correlate with ability. There's no typecasting in the arts. Anybody can have writing talent. It's randomly distributed throughout the population. The first task is to recognize it in yourself, to have the dream; the second is to summon the time and strength necessary to develop that talent.

It takes even longer than athletics. If you're any good, you can be pitching for a major league team by the time you're twenty-one. And you can be over the hill by twenty-five. Most writers aren't even warmed up by the time they're thirty. Up at Purdue, Phil Stefanile puts it very succinctly: to want to be a writer is to make a twenty-five-year bet with yourself.

To that I would add, it's always a bet, all that time. There's no guaranteed payoff. It may take fifty years. Or it may not happen at all. That's a frightening prospect, when you're just starting out. That's why so many people only talk about writing, and never get around to doing it.

Fish: What should they do instead?

Carter: Realize that there's a difference between talking and doing. Even between thinking and writing. Understand that writing is in many ways a physical activity, like pitching horseshoes or playing basketball. You've got kids shooting around in the back alley; and you've got the Boston Celtics winning the NBA. It's all basketball, but it's played at vastly different levels. Beginners should look at writing that way, see it in the larger perspective. Be realistic about where they fit in now, where they hope to be in five or ten years.

Find out, too, all you can about that spectrum. Don't pretend it doesn't exist. At one end are the youngsters, the beginners, the weekend workshop people, the Sunday writers. At the other end are Gabriel Marquez and Gwendolyn Brooks and Solzhenitsyn and Eudora Welty and Günter Grass. Now, this is a continuum, and Solzhenitsyn only got to be Solzhenitsyn by starting out like the rest of us, believing in himself, patiently learning the craft, putting his pants on one leg at a time, every morning, over and over . That's how Larry Bird got to be NBA MVP three years in a row, too.

The transition from one end of the continuum to the other is a gradual one. Some people think they can take short cuts, or that they can dispense with the apprenticeship, the paying of dues. They think they should get published because they have some advanced degree, or because they support this or that political cause, or represent this or that minority. But it doesn't work that way.

There are no entitlements in art. Many are called, but few are chosen. Moreover, I think some of the most important people in the writing world today are the ones who are still learning the craft—the ones who do pay their dues, who buy the new books, who turn out for the local readings, who attend the writers' conferences.

They write because they love it. And they get published, too. They've discovered how important writing is, how rewarding it can be. They have other responsibilities—work, family, children—so they're not in a position to write full-time. But they make a special contribution to literature by serving as part of that "great audience" that Whitman said great writing requires.

Fish: You have a couple of national prizes under your belt, some hefty fellowships, and a well-received book of poems from a major publisher. Do you see yourself as being apart from those beginners, those weekenders? As someone who's already paid his dues?

Carter: Not at all. Bruce Chatwin and Stanislav Lem and Louise Erdrich and Terrence McNally are still so far ahead of me, so far down the track, I can barely see them on the horizon. I may have moved out of the pack, and gone around a curve or two, but it's both a steeplechase and a marathon, and there's still a long way to go before we reach the end. It's an awfully fast field, too.

But those metaphors can mislead. As a human, as a Hoosier, a Midwesterner, I don't see myself as being any different from the people around me—the school kids, the people out farming the land, the factory workers, the teenagers taking orders at the Dairy Queen, the folks in the retirement home. A writer has to be in touch with all elements, all strata. If you let your arrogance, your ego, hoist you up above your neighbors, you'll find, like Antaeus, that you only get weaker and weaker.

Fish: Is that why you write so much about Indiana, why so many of your poems and stories have Midwestern settings? Put another way, do you consider yourself a regionalist writer?

Carter: I didn't set out to become a regionalist, and again, that's one of those words that depends on the context, on who's using it. When the governor gives you an award and the local press calls you a regionalist, they're happy about it. You're focusing attention on your home state. When some eastern critic calls you a regionalist, it's frequently a way of dismissing you, of saying your writing lacks breadth and universality. It's condescending.

Anyway, I write about Indiana because that's one of the basic commandments: write about what you know. But I've also written about lots of other things, lots of other places, especially in my poems. The Hoosiers just haven't seen much of that material yet. Almost no one has. It's been published in the little magazines, but it hasn't been collected and reissued in book form.

Fish: Do you have plans for doing that soon?

Carter: That reminds me of a question people are always asking—do you plan to give a reading in Fort Wayne soon, or in Columbus, or wherever? As though writers set up such things. No, you only give readings when you're invited to do so. There's no hard sell in this business. It's like being any other kind of professional—you can't advertise. You wait for the calls.

It's the same way with getting published. You only get something in a magazine if the editor wants it there. You have to work like the devil to put the poem in front of him; but you can't twist his arm. Or her arm.

So let me say, instead, that I have all sorts of hopes for future collections, future chapbooks; but the plans will have to wait until the right publisher or backer comes along. Of course I think the prospects are good. Always be optimistic; if you're not, you shouldn't be in this business.

Fish: Are you optimistic about contemporary writing in Indiana? And how do you view your own work in the context of Indiana writing?

Carter: I've always been interested in this subject. In the spring of 1982 I created a semester's course in Indiana literature for Indiana University East, out in Richmond. I offered the same seminar a year later, at Purdue. I wanted to do it for two reasons. First, because no one else in the state was doing it. And second, and more important, because I really believe we have a fine crop of Indiana writers at the present time. I wanted to tell the young people about them.

Fish: In a television interview with Channel 20's Cathy Miller not long ago, you even suggested that Indiana is entering a new "Golden Age" of literature.

Carter: Well, yes, although I'm wary of the phrase, even now. We've lived for so long with this antiquated notion of a first "Golden Age"—a time eighty or ninety years ago, when we had all these important writers living here. But since they're all dead, there's also the assumption that there are no more possibilities for literature in Indiana today.

From there it's an easy step to the next assumption—a provincial notion, by the way— that if you're an Indiana writer and you're still living here, you couldn't possibly be any good, and you ought to go live in New York. I think that's silly. If the midwest could have a literary boom from 1900 to 1925, it can have one from 1985 to 2010. As Robert Creeley says, "Nothing just happens. It depends on who comes along."

To say there was a Golden Age once, but only a long time ago, is to adopt a particularly pessimistic cosmology, like saying the universe started with a big bang, millions of years ago, and now it's running downhill all the way. In writing and literature, I favor the steady-state model. There are always new people coming on, always new writers emerging. It takes wisdom and taste to recognize them, and generosity to encourage them. But doing so is part of being a writer anyway.

Fish: What do you mean by that?

Carter: That part of being a writer is serving others. Recognizing other people with talent and trying to encourage them.

Fish: How do you do that?

Carter: By writing sympathetic reviews. By upholding high critical standards. By buying copies of the new good books, even more than you need or can afford, and giving them away to others. By working behind the scenes. By not accepting sham writing, backscratching, or political hype. By not associating with poseurs, poetasters, propagandists. By trying to contribute to a true community of concerned writers rather than giving in to a wasteland dominated by opportunists and elitists and narcissists.

Fish: Pretty strong stuff. Tell me, what do you get in return?

Carter: You don't get anything. That's the point. You're like the Zen monk, sweeping the floor, having no mind, being empty, doing the task for the sake of the task alone. Expect no reward or return. Being involved in the making of literature, in the furtherance of community, is its own reward.

A great deal of contemporary writing is bad precisely because it is produced by people who consider themselves above this common ground of community and neighborliness. Much of today's "literary scene" is interlocking and incestuous and closed-shop— obsessed with privilege, with degrees and credentials, with special interests, with networking and pecking orders and sweetheart contracts. It's cliquish and petty and in many cases bureaucracy-ridden. But that's always been the case. Every good writer faces that. You simply have to rise above it.

Fish: It sounds like this could be a very difficult, at times even discouraging, process. Yet you continue to plug away. Is it worth the struggle?

Carter: Certainly it's worth it. Let's go back to the notion of a Hoosier literary renaissance, and look around, add up the score. I say we've got more good professional writers now at work, both in the state and representing the state, than ever before in our history. To acknowledge this, you simply have to give up that snobbish, provincial point of view—the one that diminishes all of us, that tired notion that the literature we import from San Francisco or New York is better than what any of us can create here—and start reading.

I've said before, and will say again, that, line for line, Marilyn Durham is the best writer in the state. That she doesn't write about Indiana per se is of no consequence. Neither did Wallace or McCutcheon. Also down in southern Indiana we're blessed with James Alexander Thom and Walter Wangerin, Jr., two very fine novelists. Up north we've got Harry Mark Petrakis—not only a good writer, but also a first-rate speaker.

Fish: But what about Vonnegut?

Carter: What about him, indeed? Quite clearly, he holds the same relation to our age that Voltaire and Twain and Orwell held to theirs. He hasn't lived here for forty years, and I don't think he ever will. But Joyce didn't stay in Dublin, either.

Vonnegut is typical of a large class of writers who still must be taken into account when you speak of Indiana writing—the Hoosier expatriates. There have been a great many of them—Janet Flanner and Jessamyn West and Dan Wakefield come immediately to mind —but right now I think the two most important expatriates are Kurt Vonnegut and Jean Shepherd.

One thing that convinces me that we're at the beginning of a new period in Indiana writing is that during the last few years we have begun to invite these out-of-state Hoosiers to come back to talk with us. And they've been willing to come.

There's been no more of this small-minded resentment on the part of a few local die- hards, no more pretending that because Vonnegut and Shepherd have been gone for a long time, they don't count, and we won't even acknowledge them as Indiana writers. That was tried with Dreiser , and it didn't work.

Fish: You mean Dreiser was excluded from the Indiana canon because he had only lived here for a short time as a young man?

Carter: That was the reason given, and of course it's completely beside the point. The sculptor David Smith didn't live here very long, either. Neither did Sidney Pollack or Kenneth Rexroth or Twyla Tharp or Robert Indiana. The question is: are you willing to acknowledge that their origins were Hoosier? And that what they do now may just possibly be an outgrowth of what they learned when they grew up here? That their roots have some sort of relationship to their achievement?

That's what Vonnegut has said all along—that he acquired his notions about world peace and disarmament while he was growing up here and going to Shortridge High School. But this has been such a conservative state for so many years, there have been a lot of people who have been unwilling to accept that. And that's the real reason why they rejected Dreiser.

For his time, Dreiser had some very advanced notions about everything from sexual freedom to the rights of the working class. He got those notions while still a young man, living here in the Indiana of Gene Debs and George Ade. His first two novels were about women—very unusual women, too, not your ordinary home-grown variety. Carrie Meeber and Jennie Gerhardt may have seemed scandalous in 1902 and 1910, but they would be admired today for their courage and independent spirit.

But it's an old story—the prophet without honor in his own country. Almost fifty years after his death, Dreiser is seldom mentioned or read in our schools today. There are no streets named after him in his home town, no festivals honoring his legacy. And this isn't because he played hard to get. He was quite willing to be considered a Hoosier. He even came back and wrote a book about his experiences in Indiana. But no one was listening to what he had to say.

Fish: Is this sort of moss-backed, die-hard attitude changing?

Carter: I should hope so. Dreiser and Vonnegut aren't changing; they're the same as they've always been. We're the ones who are changing, we Hoosiers. At least I think we are. We're finally catching on to what our best writers have been saying to us all along. It's hard to admit we've been so backward. But it's absolutely necessary for our long- term growth.

I don't mean the sort of growth you measure by building downtown skyscrapers, or how many Colts tickets you can sell, or how many hotel rooms you can fill per annum. I mean true growth—progress toward social and economic justice for all citizens, and genuine intellectual and cultural achievement at the grass-roots level.

Fish: And you think writers can help us do that?

Carter: They always have. That's why they've traditionally been so unwelcome in places like Nazi Germany, and Stalin's Russia, and even Indiana during the Ku Klux Klan days in the 1920s. And it's precisely those places where writers are needed most. The visions of writers on the order of Dreiser and Vonnegut are larger than life. They encompass and then transcend our flaws as Hoosiers, and Midwesterners. Rather than try to hide our problems, our shortcomings, they help us to confront them, to deal with them.

The great problems in Dreiser's day were caused by rapid urbanization and industrialization. In Vonnegut's, the major issues are disarmament and post-industrial survival. These are our problems, too, as Hoosiers. They're not issues we can palm off on New York or leave to the bureaucrats and politicians in Washington. If we want the rest of the world to think this is a great state, if we don't want them to think that we live out in the sticks, we've got to stop acting like we live out in the sticks.

If we accept the responsibility to become involved in contemporary issues and challenges, we must read Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse Five, along with the rest of good contemporary writing. And when the horror of Star Wars and nuclear weapons proliferation becomes too much for us, and we want to affirm our humanity and our identity as flesh-and-blood Hoosiers, we can find momentary refuge in the short stories and humor of Jean Shepherd.

Both Vonnegut and Shepherd are extremely important in providing this sense of identity for Hoosiers. To celebrate their achievement is ultimately to encourage the new writers who are working and living among us, right here in the state, adding to that heritage.

Fish: Then it's not simply a question of celebrating the older, established writers, the Lockridges and Tarkingtons and Rileys?

Carter: It's a question of being rich already, in literary terms, and wanting to get richer. Once we acknowledge that today, just as in Tarkington's day, Indiana writers are not simply good for the tourist industry, or as something we can boast about in the hope of luring more industry here—once we can see that, more than any other kind of artist, a serious writer explores and celebrates the essence of our being, our landscape, our common history—then it gets really interesting, and we discover writers who have been Hoosiers all along, and whom we have never recognized or honored.

Fish: Could you name a few?

Carter: Let me mention some of the prominent expatriates, writers I fear have been unfairly overlooked. I don't know how you'd classify Marilyn Sharp, for example; she lives in Washington and has roots in Muncie. And she's been getting good notices in the Indiana press all along, and deservedly so. But what about Ward Just, another very fine writer from the Washington, D.C. area, with a number of novels to his credit? He comes originally from Michigan City.

Or how about Philip José Farmer, one of the most admired science-fiction and fantasy writers now at work? He lives over in Peoria, Illinois, but he was born in Terre Haute. Fred Mustard Stewart, a successful writer of thrillers and supernatural novels, lives in the east but comes originally from Anderson.

Joseph Hayes, novelist and playwright, grew up in Indianapolis and went to Tech. He's been in New England for a long time, but he still comes back now and then. More than any other living Hoosier writer, he should be in line for a governor's arts award. We should have given such an award to Kenneth Rexroth, too, while he was still alive, and that we didn't was a great shortcoming on our part.

These are people with proven track records as professional writers. They've been out competing in the marketplace all of their lives, paying their dues. The more we, as Hoosiers, pay attention to their accomplishments, buy their books, invite them to our conferences and workshops, and try to learn from them, the more we can find out about how we can work at becoming writers, too, right here in Indiana.

Fish: One more question—and it's the inevitable one. Your advice to the aspiring writer.

Carter: I said this at the end of an interview a couple of years ago, and the editors cut it out. I don't think they understood me. But one of my specific bits of advice, when you sit down to write, is to think small. At the beginning, you're not going to change the social system or elaborate a new theory of human behavior .

If you're good enough, you may contribute to that sort of change, eventually. But always, as a writer, your first obligation is to keep the language healthy, to make it honest. And you do that in extremely small increments: by writing intelligent sentences, by finding original images.

To put it another way: as you leaf through the newspaper of everyday life, don't read the headlines, read the filler. The lead stories contain the version the establishment wants you to believe. The filler—the little paragraphs of non sequiturs the paste-up people drop in to fill out the columns—they don't edit that stuff.

Every once in a while something strange or obliquely revealing sneaks by them. That's what the good writer is always looking for: what everybody else has already overlooked.

About the Interviewer

George Fish is a freelance journalist and longtime peace activist in Indianapolis. His articles on contemporary leftist politics have appeared in Monthly Review, Against the Current, NUVO, and Indianapolis Peace & Justice Journal. His reviews of the Indy blues scene have been featured in Living Blues and Indiana Blues Monthly.