What, exactly, is a “writer’s writer”? Last night, Jeffrey Eugenides, Nicole Krauss, and Jhumpi Lahiri tried to accurately characterize the expression. “It’s the definition of obscurity,” said fiction editor Deborah Treisman, kicking things off with a quote from the Times. She’d heard another, possibly better, description: “Someone who lives at or below the poverty line.”
Perhaps the writer’s writer doesn’t have to toil in impoverished obscurity. “I think you can be a writer’s writer and be the toast of the town,” said Eugenides. But he probably “doesn’t like to go out and do things like the New Yorker Festival.” A writer’s writer is most likely American, Lahiri suggested, and often focusses on short stories. “Everybody writes their first book with a certain innocence, a purity of vision,” she said. “The writer’s writer writes every book that way.” He regularly breaks the rules, “offer[ing] a kind of freedom from the reader’s expectations,” said Krauss. The work can be hard to get through—“because you keep reading the same sentence over and over.” “If you mention a story,” said Eugenides, “Someone will quote a line from it.”
John Ashbery once called Elizabeth Bishop the “writer’s writer’s writer.” The panelists offered up their own writer’s writer’s writers, explaining their choices and reading from favorite stories. Eugenides named Denis Johnson, Vladmir Nabokov, Saul Bellow, Nicholson Baker, Colm Tóibín, and John Hawkes. Lahiri chose Mavis Gallant, Gina Berriault, Andre Dubus, James Salter, Fernando Passoa, and Marguerite Yourcenar. And Krauss picked Bruno Schulz, W. G. Sebald, Thomas Bernhard, Yoram Kaniuk, Yehuda Amichai, and Joseph Brodsky. The panelists’ reading choices may offer just as much insight as their writing choices; after all, Lahiri quipped, “A writer is a reader who can’t control himself and therefore writes.”
