Joyce Carol Oates in Conversation with Alan Cheuse

On November 14, Moment fiction editor Alan Cheuse spoke with fellow writer Joyce Carol Oates at the Moment Magazine-Karma Foundation Short Fiction Contest awards ceremony at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan. This interview is adapted from that conversation. To read the full text and watch the video, visit momentmag.com.

Cheuse: How did you begin writing?

Oates: I was very interested in literature and was reading ever since I was eight or nine when I was given Alice in Wonderland. I had tablets that I drew pictures on a little bit like Lewis Carroll’s, and then I graduated to the typewriter about the time I was in ninth or tenth grade, when I was reading Hemingway and tried to write Hemingway-inspired stories. My grandmother gave me the typewriter, which at the time was an astonishing thing. I was sure I was the only one in the whole county with a typewriter.


Cheuse: Did your friends know what you were doing?

Oates: No, but I gave some of these stories to my teachers. I also had phases in which I was influenced by Faulkner and Fitzgerald. I was like an apprentice to these great writers. I remember how exciting that was, pretending I was a real writer, typing away.


Cheuse: Your family encouraged you to write at a rather early age.

Oates: My grandmother encouraged me—I had a Jewish grandmother. We didn’t know she was Jewish. She was from a family that came from Germany in the 1890s, and they disguised their identity and came to western New York. Why anybody would willingly go up there where it’s so cold, I’ve got no idea. We lived out in the country and it was relative wilderness. This part of the family didn’t want to say they were Jewish. They just had a kind of amnesia. My grandmother never talked about her background at all. She was the person who bought books for me and took me to the library in the city. I was her favorite, and I think I’ve become a writer because of her. She was always giving me books. So I came away with a false idea of reality. I thought my grandmother was someone whom I knew. I didn’t know her. I only knew a grandmother. I knew somebody who was playing a beautiful role with her family, but she must have gone home and she must have been really lonely. But the German-Jewish strain, and here I’m sorry to talk in clichés, but this is the intellectual strain. I think, “Why do I read books and why do I love books?” I think it’s probably that inheritance. There is something about Jews who revere books and education and language and art and music in a very wonderful way.


Cheuse: Your teachers must have encouraged you greatly.

Oates: I was very lucky to have teachers who were encouraging. I went to a one-room schoolhouse out in the country, and it was very rough and kind of primitive. It was one large room, one teacher and eight grades. I’ve written a lot about that school because it was such an interesting experience, and people don’t have any idea what it’s like today. Books were so prized and valuable—and in my household there were so few of them—that to me, the book was an aesthetic object. It had a sort of magical value, whereas I think younger people today, who may just be reading online, don’t have that same feeling for the aesthetic properties.

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