Quality of attention

I need not retract what I said last time about writers reading their own work in public, but I do need to amend it. I said Friday that the writers I heard read from their work at Writers in Paradise events at Eckard College in St. Petersburg shouldn't give up their day jobs. There were good readers among them, but none of their readings measured up to what they wrote, Andre Dubus III coming the closest to being an exception.

Russell Banks

Then on Saturday night, the finale of the week-long conference, Russell Banks read two of his short stories. Here was someone who, like Charles Dickens, might actually be able to charge admission for reading his work. Partly this was true because of the strength of his stories. "Outer Banks" tells of a retired couple, living in their RV as they travel the country, stopping to bury their dog that died along the way. In "Transplant," Banks writes about a middle-aged man recovering from a heart transplant who consents to meeting the young widow of the man whose sudden death gave him a new heart and a new life.

These stories were simple, powerful and moving, yet the fiction was enhanced by the author's reading, rather than weakened as in the case of some of the other writers I heard last week.

Later Banks responded to questions posed by a fellow writer, Les Standiford, and by members of the audience. He talked about living in St. Petersburg in his early 20s, how he was fired from his job as a department store window dresser and how he fell in love with literature at the public library, thus lighting the spark that made him a writer.

Later he spoke about the "quality of attention," a phrase he said he learned from the poet Ezra Pound. Writers, he said, need to be more attentive, more honest and more intelligent in their work than at other times of their lives. "No other aspect of life requires the same quality of attention," he said.

To some extent, this is true of anyone in any field of endeavor. While trying to make it as a writer, Banks worked as a plumber. To become a successful plumber, he would have had to be more attentive, more honest and more intelligent in that work than in other parts of his life. That is how one succeeds in anything.

Yet still I see Banks's point. Writers, at least the best writers, exhibit an attention to detail, an honesty and an intelligence that shines through in their work. All three were evident in the two stories Banks read Saturday night.