Directly to the Heart: An Interview With Joy Williams

Like many Joy Williams fans, I came across the work on the recommendation of a friend. She’d pointed me toward Williams’ then new book, The Visiting Privilege: New and Collected Stories. It was the book’s cover—an unassuming beige, with one of Williams’ trademark German Shepherds gracing the lower left hand corner—that caught my interest. In those pages I found so much wilderness, so much intangible strangeness, that I became quickly and irrevocably enamored with Williams’ work and began reading, and reading, and reading. For years, I—also like many of Williams’ fans—would sing Williams’ praises at parties, gleefully yelling, rarely sober, about just how thrilling these stories, essays, and novels were. Telling—no, begging—someone to read Williams felt less like recommending a book and more like telling them about a ghost I had seen, or strange, alien lights circling overhead, accompanied by the unavoidable tinge of fanaticism that comes along with saying ‘you’ll need to see it for yourself.’

Though we never quite got to aliens or ghosts, sitting down to talk about spirituality, the natural world, and writing amidst collapse with only fifteen minutes to go before her reading was due to begin, was a delight beyond measure. 

Graham Holmes: I teach “Why I Write” in my introductory writing course. In that essay, you write “The writer writes to serve. Hopelessly, he writes in the hope that he might serve not himself and not others, but that great cold elemental grace that knows us.” 

Thinking back to your first inclinations toward narrative, toward storytelling, was that depth that you’re writing about in “Why I Write,” always present? Was storytelling always something mysterious and fearsome to you?

Joy Williams: The unknown, and fearsome, and all the questions that will never be answered. Thank you for reading that, and teaching it, and quoting it, because that really does say everything I have to say about writing. And it’s rather oblique. The question then, pretty much, people would say, ‘who do you write for? Do you have an audience in mind when you write?’ No, I don’t have an audience. I write for something far greater than me, or any of us, and just hope that it responds or hears in some way. And I know it sounds mystical, or something, but so be it. 

Holmes: But there is something inherently mystical about writing. And I think we lose that sometimes, especially in discussions of craft, and bringing a toolkit to the writers desk. I know your father was a pastor, is that correct?

Williams: He was a Congregational minister back in New England. They’ve now become the United Church of Christ. I think the only Congregational churches are back there. 

Holmes: I think about that tradition of writing. Or I think about reading sermons. That’s a kind of writing that both acknowledges mystery, but also has a utility to it, of community making. I wonder, do you think writing inherently has something of that? Is writing inherently for community building, in some way? Or is writing this inherently lonely, inevitably lonely thing? 

Williams: I think writing, if it doesn’t have some sort of spiritual bedrock to it, no matter how it’s concealed, will never really be powerful writing. Community building…I guess I am more of a loner, and don’t feel as though I belong to any sort of community. And it’s so important now, my god. You have to belong to your tribe. I don’t know—of course we share the journey with others, but ultimately, we’re all by ourselves at the end. 

Holmes: I recently read Harrow, and when I think of the spiritual in your work what I find myself thinking about isn’t a formal spirituality but rather nature. I find myself thinking of these places where your characters are suddenly faced with something larger than themselves, like in “Taking Care,” when Jones sees the hare shot and killed: a moment where there’s a sudden depth. Have the natural world and storytelling always been linked for you? Could you imagine writing without the natural world?

Williams: What are we going to do? What are writers going to do? And it’s so sad around here. I’ve never been to San Marcos before. I’ve been to Austin. And I’m in this hotel, right on 35, and it’s 17 lanes or whatever. It’s mesmerizing. You look out the window at 3 in the afternoon, you wake up in the middle of the night, and still the lights, the streaming is still going on. It’s like this horror film. We, this species, are much bereft with what we’ve done and are continuing to do. And you’re talking about the whole future of literature, writing. Right now, the publishers are still ruling everything. But they don’t know where to go—they don’t know who to crown. And I think the writers…I’m very sympathetic to the writers writing today, young writers. You have to have integrity and sincerity. Without the surrounding that writers of previous generations have been enjoying, participating in, I don’t know.

Holmes: American writers are often pigeonholed in this tradition that is so invested in the idea of wilderness. I think of you in some ways as a Western writer—I think about novels like the Quick and the Dead, and Harrow as well. We have this grand tradition of mystery and nature going back to Whitman and before. 

Williams: That’s true, that’s true. And that all started with what, The Bear? Didn’t Faulkner talk about the funnel, wilderness going down the funnel? It’s a little narrow opening now, and soon it will be nothing.

Holmes: Do you think your thinking on the environment in your work has changed? I just read your guidebook–

Williams: Oh, the [Florida] keys?

Holmes: Yes, my fiance and I took turns reading it, we couldn’t get enough–

Williams: That’s so funny. Did you have the edition with the afterward, when I stopped writing it? When I was just saying ‘but don’t come here and gawk at what’s been ruined,’ and they let me put that in! I don’t think they ever read it. 

Holmes: When was that book first published?

Williams: I think the first edition was published in the late 80’s, before cruise ships. 

Holmes: Do you find that your thinking about nature since then has changed? In that book, it seems that nature and the keys still hold some degree of mystery. I think about the islands in the backwaters of the keys, it seems that nature in those still has some mystery. Yet when I read Harrow, someone talking about an eagle is described as being as foolish as someone having seen a witch. Do you feel that one can still write about mystery in nature today, or have we gone too far?

Williams: Well, you’re not as aware now. Even when I was writing that guidebook, they were putting these transmitters on birds of prey to see what they were doing. And you don’t hear that much now. I just don’t think they have as much to work with. Oh, the mystery! It’s not only that we approach and cherish nature because of the mystery, it’s the beauty and the delight, too. When I first bought the house in Tucson—it was in ’98—there were so many birds, mountain lions, so much, so much! Now the bird population has shrunken terribly. I’m right up against the Catalina State Park. I have six acres, very few neighbors. It’s not sprays, for the most part. They’re gone. Why? Why? Why are they gone? The habitat is shrinking, but I have plenty of habitat. They’re not there anymore.

Holmes: In Harrow there’s this idea that, in some way, humans think the earth has abandoned them, in some way we’ve been victimized.

Williams: They’re pissed off. The earth is making non-negotiable demands, like the removal of spring. But it’s the earth’s problem, it’s taken away spring. 

Holmes: I think it’s oblivion, ultimately. To me, oblivion implies a total disapparation of connection. I think that’s what we’re talking about when we talk about environmental collapse, all collapse. In your introduction to Best American Short Stories in 1995, you wrote “all art is about nothingness. Our apprehension of it. Our fear of it. Its approach.” In the face of environmental collapse, how do you find that art still succeeds? 

Williams: Art is just being so co-opted so quickly, and made for some other purpose. I do think maybe there have to be some old fashioned manifestos coming out, about the new art and what’s required of it. 

Holmes: So often when we have a piece of art that comments broadly on a societal condition, or on environmental collapse, it comes in the form of the novel. Do you think that the short story can be used in a similar way?

Williams: Oh, that’s such a lovely question, because yes. And that is kind of naive, because, what, ‘a short story?’ But oh yeah, I think the short story—it works in such a different way than the novel does. It’s got more power just going directly to the heart than a novel.