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- - - - Copyright Young Chang, JHU News - Letter
- - - - JHU's Stephen Dixon reflects on his life's work By Young Chang
Stephen Dixon shambles about. He rarely strolls or runs. Instead, jeans hung low on his waist as if they had fallen from the velocity of his gait, his feet shuffle against the floor, creating an audible chaos of flying dust. Head protruding forward and eyes seemingly searching, author and two-time National Book Award finalist Dixon looks every bit the frazzled professor, with his stereotypical, bulging, brown leather attaché. Wearing his trademark black turtleneck and baggy blue jeans, Dixon ambles into his office for an interview. He slams the attaché atop his desk and digs beneath the papers protruding out to find something deeply buried. Piled on his large desk are countless other stacks just waiting to be organized. At the edge of his desk lies an ivory-colored manual typewriter. A bookshelf standing to the left of his desk displays a wall-full of books; some of the authors are Kafka, Dostoyevsky and Beckett. Accompanying these books are stacks of old manuscripts, and the occasional strewn manila folder. He seems to have finished organizing his still-cluttered work space, and sits down. The thin gray hairs scarcely covering the top of his head are shooting out in all different directions, and Dixon's sudden change in attitude is startling. His behavior indicates that he is ready to speak as he leans back and makes himself comfortable, but his downturned eyes look critical, even sarcastic. He is no longer shambling about, and up close, Dixon's presence is daunting. Stephen Dixon is the author of 19 works of fiction as well as a professor in the Writing Seminars Department. Seven of his works are novels; the remaining 12 are short-story collections. In 1991, his novel Frog was nominated for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner award, and in 1995, Interstate was also nominated for the National Book Award. Such critical acclaim is important to most of his readers, but Dixon really doesn't care. "This is not baseball that I'm doing - the awards don't mean anything to me," he says, waving away the notion with his hands. "I don't compete in that way when I write. I just write as well as I can and if one happens to be nominated for a major award, that's good for the book, good for the publisher and obviously good for the writer too, but it could also be bad for the writer." In his short story "The Loser," from Long Made Short, Dixon explores the idea of awards and how awards can deter a writer. The two characters are both writers; one is a loser, and the other a winner. The loser is a loser because he doesn't win an award for his writing, and the winner is a winner because he does. But in the end, the winner becomes unable to write anymore because he is pressured to write a second award-winning story, and the loser becomes the winner in that he not only continues to write, but improves his writing. Dixon began his temporary nonfiction career soon after graduating, working as a newsman in Washington for two years, as an editor with CBS for one year and finally as a technical editor for a systems analysis firm called TRW in California. While working as a newsman in Washington, Dixon wrote his first novel, but he never published this early attempt. He soon stopped with "those kinds of jobs," though, and at 26 took on jobs that would enable him to write only fiction. "I decided I had to do one or the other. I went on my own," Dixon explains, leaning back in his chair. "Meaning, I just used employment to subsidize my fiction writing because, by that time, I knew I wanted to be a writer." Dixon lived the typical role of a struggling New York bachelor bartender who just happens to be a writer as well. Other jobs included public school teaching - sometimes as a substitute teacher - and waiting on tables. This writing tactic worked, and 15 years later, at the age of 40, he published his first story collection No Relief, which was followed a year later by the novel, Work. 17 publications have since ensued. Dixon writes in a very systematic way. Seated always before his manual typewriter, he writes two to three hours a day, seven days a week. He begins by writing a first draft of a chapter or an entire short story. He then rewrites each page until the story or chapter is finished, and moves on to another short story or chapter. He only writes one thing at a time and explains, "Even when I'm writing a novel and going from scene to scene, each of the scenes is complete. If you read Gould, you'll see that each of the scenes are complete." Gould, Dixon's most recent novel, is two novels in one. The first is titled Abortion, the second, Evangeline. In Abortion, Dixon tells of six different abortions caused by his main character, Gould. "Each abortion has its own paragraph, each is a complete story... and every paragraph is a self-contained unit," he says. Dixon's current work, Thirty, is a sequel to Gould and is also written in his separate yet connected style. This yet unpublished novel comprises thirty different fiction pieces which are all interconnected and composed of the same characters. "It's easy to work that way," he adds. When asked about his one-word titles such as Gould, Interstate, Frog, Garbage, Thirty, and Work, he shrugs and replies, "They're simpler to remember if a reader goes to the bookstore to buy a book. They can easily remember a title like Garbage or Frog and it just seems simple. Long titles seem to me a little... not pedantic, but showy." Dixon usually commits two weeks to a month to write a short story, and anywhere from half a year to a year to complete a novel. "But Frog took me five and a half years and Interstate took me three years," he says. "Everything depends on the length." Dixon is grateful to John Irwin, former chairman of the Writing Seminars Department and editor of the Johns Hopkins press series called Fiction and Poetry Series. In 1980, Dixon sent Irwin a collection of his short stories entitled 14 Stories. Irwin liked what he read, asked Dixon if he was interested in teaching, and had him give an interview. Dixon impressed the Writing Seminars department heads, accepted the offer and has since been teaching at Hopkins. "Of course I like Hopkins a lot," says Dixon matter-of-factly. "I like the students very much; they're very smart." He emphasizes that Hopkins' independent Writing Seminars program is especially appealing. "This is a good program because it's not connected to the English Department. I like my colleagues, I like working with both undergraduate and graduate students, and it's given me a sufficient living," he adds. Students of professor Dixon have abundant praise for his teaching methods. Junior Franklin Chen studied with Dixon in the course Rudiments of Fiction and sincerely comments, "He's one of the best professors I've ever had." Chen shares that before taking the class, his fiction-writing style was quite verbose and long. "It was no problem for me to write ten pages of prose; it was really easy," he admits. He remembers Dixon asking him, "Why are you writing all this stuff? It sounds so clumsy and clunky," and helping him make his prose very terse and short. "It was really good because every sentence in my prose became... necessary... and pertinent. It had strength in it, whereas before it was a lot of fluff. After taking his class, it was hard for me to write even four or five pages because everything I wrote became more packed and stuffed," remarks Chen. Of Dixon's skills in both writing and teaching, Chen and graduate student Pedro Ponce have plenty to say. Ponce explains that in a workshop setting, there are always many aspects of a story the professor could address. And in Dixon's case, he is very skilled at looking at the overall structural elements. "But he could pinpoint all the weak points in a long story just very easily. He's very sharp, in terms of finding the weak points in plot, structure, and basically, everything else," he praises. Ponce adds that Dixon is incredibly well-read in many different fields of story writers, and that this is more than apparent and helpful during class discussions. In Dixon's case, the adage "Those who can, do, and those who can't, teach," does not apply. Leaning forward and crossing his arms on the desk, Dixon shares an adage of his own: "Rewrite a work until you feel it's perfect. Don't let anything go until you feel you've done everything you can to make it a complete work, and don't fool yourself into thinking it's any better than it is. If you think that [the work] is not up to what you feel are your standards, you won't be able to get away with it." - - - -
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