By Gail Pasternack
Earlier this week, I had the chance to meet with award winning author Jess Walter—a keynote speaker at the Willamette Writers Conference 2024. Walter believes that if we look at the lives of writers we love, we can see the hardships each of them has had to overcome.
Norman Maclean, known for his award winning novella A River Runs Through It, didn’t publish his first work until his seventies. Jean Rhys stopped writing for thirty years before she published her best known novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, when she was seventy-six. Even Herman Melville had his share of hardships.
Walter has had his share of road blocks as well. He was a first generation college student and a teenage father. For a long time he thought these impediments kept him away from being a writer. Then he realized that all of the challenges he faced made his writing special.
Going Away and Coming Home
“I grew up on a failed cattle ranch next to a drive-in theater,” Walter said. “When I was young it seemed to be the least literary place one could imagine.”
When he first tried to write a novel, Walter didn’t set it in Spokane, where he had grown up. Instead, he set it in New York City, a place he had never visited.
Then, in 1997, something remarkable happened. Walter traveled to Italy and, for the first time, he saw the world through traveller’s eyes. When he returned to his hometown and looked at it through traveller’s eyes, he could see deeper. Suddenly everything about it fascinated him—its history, topography, even its flora and fauna. He realized that not only did the stories of this place and its people have literary merit, they were previously ignored stories that deserved to be told.
Walter believes that as writers we have to look deeper than we’re used to, which is why he still loves to travel. Going away and coming home heightens his vision and enriches his stories. And it is how he tends to write. He sets one story in the places he visits, then he sets his next story in the Pacific Northwest.
He always comes back home.
Celebrating Our Accomplishments
Walter considered how writers live with a constant sense of failure. So many of us think: I’ll be a real writer when I get an agent. I’ll be real when I get published. I’ll be real when I publish two books. When I win an award. When I become a bestseller. When they make a movie from my books. It never ends.
Walter said, “No level of accomplishment really fills the bucket because it’s an appetite.” It’s part of the churning desire that makes us writers.
He sees this pattern in the journals he has kept for over thirty years, journals about the struggles he has had as a writer. And as he reads them, he recognizes that he struggles with the same writing issues today as he did when he first started writing.
He said, “My journals are like someone who lives on the ocean but has no ideas about the tides.” The water’s coming in. The water’s going out. Over and over again.
We as writers need to keep going forward and not let this insatiable appetite for accomplishment overwhelm us. We need to remember why we write and allow ourselves to celebrate every accomplishment, even the small triumphs, which Walter believes tend to be the most meaningful.
What We as Writers Can Learn from Reading
In our conversation, Walter said, “Everything I read teaches me something. We learn from books the same way we learn from our parents. Two things—what to do and what not to do. And sometimes what not to do is just as edifying and instructive as what to do.”
Recently, Walter read several books that he admired, such as Antoine Wilson’s Mouth to Mouth. He found the pacing in this book inspiring—a big lesson of what to do. Others included Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell, one of the most amazing books he’s read in years, and Hell of a Book by Jason Moot. The emotions that roiled underneath in that book left him speechless.
Walter also shared that he rereads War and Peace every few years. “Every time I read it,” he said, “I see some larger human truth that seems beyond me as a thinker as well as a writer. It’s an aspirational text. I keep asking myself, how do you get so conversant with human nature? I see something different every time.”
“We should have a book that we go back to that challenges us to be better writers than we imagine we could be.”
Hear Jess Walter at the Willamette Writers Conference
Jess Walter will be keynote speaker for the 2024 Willamette Writers Conference. His speech, “Don’t Forget Your Story,” will center around “seeing your writing life as a narrative.”
All writers face challenges, yet rather than allowing these roadblocks in our lives to get the best of us, we can use them as inspiration. We can view the obstacles in our writing lives as part of a rich narrative that feeds our art and make it more worthwhile.
About Jess Walter
A former National Book Award finalist and winner of the Edgar Allan Poe Award, Jess Walter is the best-selling author of seven novels, two book of short stories and one nonfiction book. His work has been translated into 34 languages, and his fiction has been selected three times for Best American Short Stories, as well as the Pushcart Prize and Best American Nonrequired Reading. His stories, essays and journalism have appeared in Harper’s, Esquire, Playboy, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Ploughshares, the New York Times, the Washington Post and many others.
Walter has twice won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, the Washington State Book Award, was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize and the PEN/USA Award in both fiction and nonfiction.
His novel Beautiful Ruins was a #1 New York Times bestseller and spent more than a year on the bestseller list. It was also Esquire’s Book of the Year and NPR Fresh Air’s Novel of the Year. The Financial Lives of the Poets was Time Magazine’s #2 novel of the year and Walter’s story collection, We Live in Water, was longlisted for the Story Prize and the Frank O’Connor Short Story Award. Walter’s novel, The Cold Millions, was a national bestseller.
Walter lives with his wife Anne and children, Brooklyn, Ava and Alec, in Spokane, Washington.