Interview by Lex Schroeder
Summer 2010

Aaron Devine

LS: What do you love about writing?

AD: I like that it’s a conversation that brings writers together and people together and that it can be a conversation with yourself. I like when I get going and the blood’s pumping and the words are flowing and I can write something that just feels like a home run… that you didn’t even know you knew. That’s what I love about writing—the discovery of something new.

LS: What kind of writing are you interested in doing?

AD: I appreciate writing that has something important to say. I like writing that tells a story you might never have expected. I like writing that blends languages together and shows you your own language in new ways. I love Pnin by Nabokov—

Vladimir Nabokov

LS: So many squirrels!

AD: So many squirrels. And I would think, oh, this is English? It’s not my English, but it’s English and it’s awesome.

LS: What kind of things are you interested in reading?

AD: I’m interested in reading about squirrels… [Laughs] about Boston and Cambridge… about young men in this day and age and how they’re finding their male identities. I’m interested in reading about sports and good sports stories… about problems in our world and how people are trying to fix them. [Laughs]. And I’m definitely interested in how they’re screwing them up, too.

LS: Who are some of your favorite writers?

AD: It sounds cliché to say, but the first writer who showed me writing in a different way was Jack Kerouac. I was reading On the Road and thought this writing is not just words on a page, it’s going in different directions, it’s got tone and pitch, it’s going up, it’s going down, fast and slow. I didn’t even necessarily like the book very much, but I was aware that the writing was unlike any other kind I’d seen.

I love Milan Kundera. Sherman Alexie, because he doesn’t conform to one genre. He writes poetry, fiction, plays, screenplays. He’s got a voice and he’s unabashed about it. I like the Minnesota newspaper columnist Thomas Friedman. I don’t always agree with what he says, but I like the way he organizes a column and fits a message into a kernel of an idea. I like Pablo Neruda to read out loud.

I like local writers: Christopher Castellani, who writes beautifully about his Italian heritage, and Rachel Kadish, who teaches at Lesley and gets more ideas and information into her sentences than most writers I’ve ever read—without losing the reader and with beautiful effect.

LS: What is something you’d like to get better at in your own writing?

AD: I’d like to get better at revision and being able to have flexibility within the revision process. I think you start out with an idea of where you want to be going many times and you need to be able to let your work go in different directions. That’s hard to do, especially when you’re in the nitty gritty of revising. I’m talking about stories, fiction writing. That’s where my focus is over the next couple of years. And I’d like to get better at keeping my sentences crisp and clear [Nods].

LS: What are some stories you’re noticing in your own life?

AD: I’ve always been very aware of my life as a story, which felt pretentious as a young man until I was able to grow into it a little bit more. Just seeing your life in scenes and acts and chapters—I always wanted a life that would be worth writing about. Not because I was going to write about it, but because I envied the characters in books that I read… Books were so filled with experiences, sensations, and travels, and I wanted all of those things.

Art Spiegelman

Right now, I’m the most settled and located as I’ve been since I was a child. So the story that I’m seeing is one of a young writer trying to maintain that engagement and absorption of experience while also building a story from a good foundation, building a story upward. I remember hearing Art Spiegelman talk about how the word story has a relation to buildings in architecture—think of stories going up—how each of his stories are built with a structure, an architecture. He builds one story on top of another.

Maybe in the earlier part of my life I was always building outward, trying to expand my experiences. Now the challenge of the story I’m trying to write involves building on top of the foundation that I already have.

LS: What word(s) do you consistently misspell?

AD: I always slow myself down spelling tomorrow. [Laughs]. I get it right, but I always slow it down, I always spell that one out. I’m bad at i before e sometimes, too.

LS: Why do you write?

AD: It’s what I turn to. I always have to have a journal going. But I can go days or weeks without writing, and it frustrates me sometimes to hear writers say, “If you’re going to be a writer, you have to write every day.” Eventually, I do have to write, but I can go for a time without it, and there are other things that fill my spirit that I get busy with because we live in a very busy time. But it’s something I keep coming back to. After a while if you keep coming back to something, you realize there’s a reason for it.

LS: Do you have a favorite word?

AD: [Laughs]. I have a current favorite word. In a workshop I was giving recently, a 10-year-old kid heard the word ruminate, which I had volunteered as one of the words I liked. And he said, “What is that? Like when you eat in your room?” I thought that was charming, so that’s my current favorite word.

Aaron Devine is currently pursuing a MFA in fiction writing at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. He has volunteered with The New Prosperity Initiative (NPi), Grub Street, and the City of Boston’s Memoir Project. Learn more about Aaron Devine and his book Wonder/Wander: 522 Days in Latin America at aarondevine.net.