UPDATED: Oct. 15, 2018 at 5:38 p.m.
George Saunders was at London’s Guildhall when his novel, “Lincoln in the Bardo,” won the 2017 Man Booker Prize for fiction writing one year ago. For the past ten days, he has lived out of suitcases, traipsing across cities to deliver his lecture series at different universities. But right now, at the top of Saunders’ to do list is finishing a load of laundry.
“I’m just here, kind of settling in a bit and trying to be a person again,” he said.
Since 1997, Saunders has been a professor of English at Syracuse University’s College of Arts and Sciences, at the forefront of the college’s renowned creative writing program. This year, he will help kick off SU’s fall 2018 University Lecture series, delivering a lecture in Hendricks Chapel on Thursday at 7:30 p.m.
The university selected Saunders as a featured speaker not only because of his immediate connections to the university, but also his contributions to the creative writing industry, SU Vice Chancellor and Provost Michele Wheatly said in a statement.
The goal of the lecture series is to present SU students, faculty and staff with a speaker who will provide perspective, Wheatly said — and Saunders’ discourse paired with his inspiring work will do just that.
But a lot has changed for Saunders between when he first stepped on campus more than three decades ago and when he’ll walk onto Hendrick Chapel’s stage Thursday evening.
When Saunders arrived in Syracuse in August 1986, he had $300 in his pockets and had never taken a college English class in his life. He had graduated with a degree in geophysics from Colorado School of Mines before spending several years working in Asia, “being really crummy at (his) job.” It wasn’t until illness forced him to come back to the United States that he reevaluated where his passions lied.
“Even if I work really, really hard at being an engineer, I’m going to be a mediocre engineer,” Saunders said. “Whenever I read or wrote, I felt myself come alive.”
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Saunders’ love of writing wasn’t born out of illness or a quarter-life crisis, he said. It came from the teachers in his life, who came to him in his formative years and reminded him of his own potential.
The first time he felt a pull toward writing came in the third grade, when his teacher at the time — a nun, with whom Saunders had a self-professed “big crush” on — recommended he read Esther Forbes’ “Johnny Tremain.” The novel was complex, refined and nuanced. And suddenly, he was hooked.
“The style struck me as really strange, struck me as kind of literary and refined and really spoke to me,” he said. “It was the first book where I could really feel another human being on the other side, talking directly to me.”
It wasn’t until college that he felt that same tug toward writing, etched in the pages of Ernest Hemingway, Tobias Wolff and mid-19th century Russian literature. But the common thread weaving itself through the spines of these stories and their impact on Saunders, he said, was the encouragement shown to him by his teachers.
It’s that same passion for literature he learned from his own teachers that he now strives to show his students every semester, he said.
“To be part of the lineage of the program — the program took me in back in the ‘80s when I was a really high-risk applicant,” he said. “They took me in and they nurtured me and they taught me how to write —and more than that, taught me how to be a full person.”
Each semester, Saunders said, is an opportunity to come face-to-face with the best and the brightest of the coming generation of writers. Twenty-one years since he began teaching at SU, he said that same palpable energy and love for the craft hasn’t dimmed.
“The big thing is just that you’re reminded every semester that talent is eternal. Every generation has the same amount of talent,” Saunders said.
But higher education, he said, isn’t a one-way street. Just as Saunders’ students learn from him, he turns to them to discover new ways of interpreting the world and eternalizing the moment with ink and paper.
“To always be in the face of these young people, who are challenging and who are living in a different world certainly than I grew up in and are trying to make sense of that through art, it’s always exciting and rejuvenating,” he said.
In his nonfiction writing for magazines such as The New Yorker and GQ, he has traveled along the Mexican border, lived in homeless camps and followed then-candidate Donald Trump on his 2016 presidential campaign.
Saunders said the moments where he’s forced to question the roots of his beliefs and his perspectives on the surrounding world keep him from remaining stagnant as a writer.
“You get older and you start to become a little too solid in your belief system, and to go on a magazine assignment like that is so wonderful because it just knocks the crap out of you,” he said. “So then you’re in that beautiful state of being like, I really don’t know what’s going on, and now I get to observe the world and see.”
Saunders said the secret to his writing is going into every project with “very little intention, with no plan and no agenda.” By immersing himself in the artistry of the craft instead of the logistics of the process, he said he’s been able to see the world through newfound perspectives.
It was that same tactic that proved successful for him when “Lincoln in the Bardo” won the Man Booker Prize in 2017. Baroness Lola Young, the 2017 Chair of judges, praised Saunders’ novel for its roots in both experience and empathy.
“The form and style of this utterly original novel, reveals a witty, intelligent and deeply moving narrative,” she said. Colin Thubron, a judge at the shortlist stage, called it a novel “with a rare capaciousness of mind and heart.”
Saunders takes the praise for his work in stride. He maintains a constant state of gratuity while being recognized as a best-selling author, an inductee in the American Academy of Arts and Letters and one of Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World”.
The accolades are admirable, he said. But those are just an added bonus to what he defines as his own success.
Success, he said, doesn’t come in the form of a venerated plaque, a paycheck or even his name being synonymous with a profound vision of American artistry. For Saunders, success echoes back to that moment in 1967, when a book so complex and intricate gave way to an undiscovered world of creativity. It’s that same hunger and passion that carries through with him during the early morning hours when he sits at his desk, enveloping himself in his next journey.
“When I really get down to the depths of it, writing is a temporary reprieve from self,” Saunders said. “The temporary cramped little person that I am disappears, and something else is coming through me. It feels a bit like being in touch with divinity.”
Cover photo courtesy of Jessica Ruiz
CORRECTION: In a previous version of this article, SU Vice Chancellor and Provost Michele Wheatly was misquoted. The Daily Orange regrets this error.
Published on October 15, 2018 at 12:41 am
Contact Kelsey: katho101@syr.edu | @writtenbykelsey
