The Chicago Tribune once called Richard Bausch a writer’s kind of writer, “the kind passed around and treasured by other writers as models of approach and perception.”
In his expansive career, the 80-year-old Bausch, a writing professor at Chapman University in Orange, has penned 13 novels and 10 short story collections. His work has earned almost too many laurels to count, including the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, the Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize – not to mention numerous nods from the O. Henry Awrd, Pushchart Prize and the Best American anthology series.
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Now Bausch is out with a new story collection, “The Fate of Others,” published by Knopf on May 20. With tales of heartache, familial complications and the soul’s longing for understanding, the collection adds more evidence to why The New York Times Book Review dubbed him “a master of the short story.”
I traded emails recently with Bausch about his approach to writing in general and “The Fate of Others” in particular. Here’s our correspondence (edited for length and clarity):
Q: On your Facebook page, you often offer followers a mini master class in writing. Recently, you posted how fiction is always about the personal, an idea profoundly exemplified in these stories. The drama is all human-scale; the shifts are often small but emotionally devastating. How do you do that so darn well?
Richard Basuch: That’s such a generous question. I don’t really know quite how to answer it, though.
At the Sewanee Writers Conference once, after I gave a reading of a story of mine called “The Weight,” which is about racism, Robert Haas came up to me and said, “Who do you read?” And I said, “I’ve always just gone along with whatever I could get my hands on.” And he said, “Yes, but who would you say occupies the central place?” I said, “Tolstoy. Chekhov.” And he nodded emphatically and said, “Ah. Yes. There it is.” I smiled and was glad, but I honestly didn’t know what he saw in the story that would make him think those two writers had fed it.
When I’m rewriting, quite often, I’m making the kinds of shifts you talk about, but it’s always been rather instinctual, like a shark smelling blood. Most of the time, I’m just fumbling along, saying things as they occur to me, trying to be clear, in terms of whatever trouble has sparked the story in the first place.
Q: There are two novellas and a personal essay among the stories in this collection. When do you know what length of something will be, and what to call it? I understand you never plot anything out, so do you ever start to write a short story and wind up in a novel?
RB: Among my novels, “Real Presence,” “Violence,” “Rebel Powers” (I thought that would be a 10 page radio story), “In the Night Season,” “Before, During, After” and “Playhouse” all began as what I thought were short stories. I thought, “Violence would be the last story in the collection, “The Fireman’s Wife and Other Stories.” My short story “All The Way in Flagstaff, Arizona,” which was in The Atlantic Monthly and was my first with them, was a middle chapter of a long novel called “Spirits,” which I never let out of the house. It took the writing of that novel to get that story, and I thank God for it while begging God that it never happens that way again.
I’ve come to think of it all as expression, long or short, and all I’m ever trying to do with any and all of it is to be clear.
Q: The essay I mentioned is “A Memory, and Sorrow (An Interval),” a touching ode to your twin brother, Robert Bausch, who was also a novelist. It directly wrangles feelings of grief and enduring family connection, themes that more subtly reverberate through other stories in the book. Why was it important to include this essay?
RB: You know, I’m not sure. I had written it back in 2020, I think, two years after we lost him, and I was (still am) going around with the bereft feeling we all know. And, well, I’m sorry for the vagueness of this answer, but it just made a pressure to be written. And then it made a pressure to be included in the book.
Q: You teach young writers as a professor at Chapman University. What do you notice in their work today?
RB: The same things I’ve always seen and the thing that keeps me doing it, in the best instances. Most of them, the good ones, are doing what I do each day and onward: they’re stumbling all over themselves trying to be splendid. They remind of me of me, 40 years ago, and I tell them so.
Q: You were once were a musician in a band. Your writing – especially your dialogue – often feels like it has a rhythm and melody. Is it fair to say that music is a literary influence of yours?
RB: Oh, Lord, yes. I often write to music — wrote all of “The Last Good Time” while the second movement of Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2 was playing. And the new novel I’m presently working on, called “Chopin’s Ghost: A Fable,” is being composed to Chopin’s Nocturnes.
I think the music influences the prose lines in subtle ways, though it’s a mistake to dwell on that. Also, I read a lot of poetry, and have published a book of poetry and prose, “These Extremes,” with LSU Press. In fact, I have two poems coming out in the next Five Points Magazine: “For My Mother, Who Was Helen (1918-1985)” and “Love Poem in a Terrible Time,” for my wife Lisa.
In any case, I can usually tell if fiction writers are regular readers of poetry, because the music seems always to be there in the prose lines, and this language is so beautifully iambic.
Q: You’ve written a lot of great books, Richard. But what are some other great books you wish you’d written?
RB: Oh, far too many to name. Maybe every good book I ever read. Regarding storybooks, a recent one I wish I’d written, truly, is my wife Lisa Cupolo’s “Have Mercy on Us.” I’m a big fan of that book, and keep revisiting it.
But in general, there’s all of brother Bobby’s books. And I have a very long list of friends who are producing wonderful work. In fact, this is one of the richest times in the history of the short story.
Consider this: limiting things strictly to the short story and to people with whom, in all cases, I had friendships, here is a small sampling, keeping strictly to those who have passed away: Robert Stone, Grace Paley, Eudora Welty, John Cheever, Brad Watson, William Maxwell, Allen Wier, Russell Banks, John Updike, John Gardner, Barry Hannah, Bharhati Mukherjee, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Frederick Busch, Raymond Carver, Dorothy Allison, Andre Dubus, George Garrett, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, and Elizabeth Spencer. There is, of course, a vast list of others, and so many young and growing into young middle age, writing stories; so many. You and I are part of a fine multitude, dear, of ‘the sensitive, the considerate, and the plucky.’ [To quote E.M. Forster.]
Q: Finally, the world is in a moment of upheaval, many would say turmoil. What can a simple story offer us?
RB: Solace. A way into the mind and heart of another at a crucial moment.
Someone once said that if we could introduce every living human being to every other human being, wars would not happen so readily. And when you’re writing stories, you’re in fact introducing one human being to another, and also presenting that human being you’ve met with still more imagined others. And when I think of that, I’m heartened. What a beautiful thing about the human species: A creature that actually seeks to feel the stresses of other lives, to feel pity, and hope and sorrow for — well, forgive me, dear friend — the fate of others.
Richard Bausch will present a public reading from his new collection at 6 p.m. on Thursday, May 22, at Arvida Book Company, 115 W Main St., Tustin.
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