Anyone who followed Tuesday’s announcement of the discovery of Gliese 581c, the Earth-like planet 20 light years away, might reasonably have assumed that John McPhee spent Wednesday night packing his bags. He did not. He was giving a rare reading, with his daughter Martha, to a wet, grateful, SRO crowd at tiny 192 Books in Chelsea. She read a passage from her fourth novel L’America. He read from “Tight-Assed River,” a piece about piloting a tug up a river whose width is less than one-quarter the boat’s length, which is longer than the Queen Mary 2. The essay appears in Uncommon Carriers, his twenty-seventh book. Asked of all those books, which was his favorite, he said, “Martha has three sisters. No favorites.” One of those sisters, Jenny, is also a novelist, and, like Martha and her father, has been a finalist for a National Book Award. Someone asked about fear of not measuring up. He said, “I profoundly believe writers are unique like snowflakes,” and that one could only hone one’s skills, there being “no real deep competition among writers.”
Now seventy-six, he said, “Ninety percent of what I’ve written, long or short, relates to something I was interested in when I was nineteen or eighteen or before.” Only twice has he taken up subjects suggested by readers, both of whom invited him to join a long haul, either by boat or truck (Looking for a Ship and “A Fleet of One“). He corresponded with the trucker for four years before joining him on the road. Asked if he was ever tempted to return to previous topics to write an update, he said he had thought about it a lot but is always looking for something new. He does keep in touch with some subjects from old pieces, and, in fact, the new book is dedicated to Sam Candler, whom he memorably captured cooking roadkill in a piece about Georgia thirty-five years ago.
The longest stint away from family life was when he was in Alaska, writing Coming Into the Country. Martha said, “Apparently I was the only one who wrote to him,” and he agreed, adding that’s why the book is dedicated to her alone.
As for the process of writing, he surprised the crowd by saying that whenever he starts a piece, “I am without much confidence.” He repeated that, more intensely, as if to forestall doubters, and explained that it doesn’t matter how many books you’ve written, the old books don’t write the new one. A great believer in structure, he credits a teacher at Princeton High School with forcing her class to write three pieces a week for three years, always with an outline. When he spoke to Martha’s writing class at Hofstra, he brought a PowerPoint diagram of the complex structure of “A Fleet of One.” For decades, McPhee has taught a writing course at Princeton called "The Literature of Fact," and among his students were David Remnick and two Time managing editors, Rick Stengel and Jim Kelly.
In his own writing, the first draft is always a terrible struggle. Writing Assembling California took two years for the first draft, four months for the second, one month for the third, and one week for the final draft. Before he starts he needs “a lede that’s honest, that doesn’t give a false impression of what to expect.” Then he looks at all his notes and figures out where it’s going to end, and when he has those two things, a good beginning and an end, he’s ready to begin. Readers might anticipate a future piece on Italy, which McPhee says he has been studying for years. He sees similarities between Italy and the Aleutian Islands, both born of volcanoes.
And for everyone who loves an underdog story of persistence rewarded: According to his author's note in The Best American Essays of the Century, McPhee was rejected by The New Yorker "more than a hundred times" before they published his first piece, a profile of Bill Bradley at Princeton. That article grew into his first book, A Sense of Where You Are, published in 1965 when he was thirty-four.
Visit his website, which includes an audio clip of his thoughts on writing.
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