Super-secret Michael Chabon & Ayelet Waldman visit

This morning, in town for a speaking engagement at the Carnegie Library, Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman sat down with Pitt’s fiction students. As all Pitt writing students know, Chabon did his undergrad at the University of Pittsburgh. Chuck Kinder, the author who runs the Pitt creative writing program, said of Chabon, “I gave him special permission to sit in on graduate classes because he was clearly one of the most brilliant young writers I’ve ever been around.” That’s Michael Chabon on the left, Chuck Kinder on the right.

Sadly, I didn’t get a photo of Ayelet Waldman, who shared the stage — er, table — with her husband as they answered questions and shared stories about writing. Some of what they told us, hastily transcribed:

Chabon: What a good writing program does is give you time to do your writing. A writing program ought to be a way to change your life so you have more time for writing.

Q: Some undergrads are worried that if they’re not published by 23, they won’t really be writers…
Waldman: I think Michael’s one of the only people in the world who isn’t embarrassed by the book he published at 23.
Chabon: Oh, I’m embarrassed.

Chabon: If you write every day, you’re a writer.
Waldman: Michael’s model has been sufficient guilt to keep me at my desk.

Q: What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever gotten?
Chabon: Dennis Bartel, a teacher I had here: If you want to write a novel, you have to sit on your ass. At the time, I was like, Yeah, whatever, dude.
Waldman: story about the Golem as novel, a creature that you create but that you can’t necessarily control, ending with: It’s not anything good unless there’s a certain element of danger to it.

Q: What’s it like working in film, like Spiderman 2?
Chabon: It’s a totally different thing. so much goes unmade; he’s written 2 original screenplays, 2 pilots, years, 15 drafts of Kavalier and Clay. It’s not very fulfilling…. Usually the first draft is fun … but you don’t become a writer because you like sharing.

Q: What kind of research/prep did you do for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay?
Chabon: Part of the reason I wanted to do that book was because of the research; I knew there was a lot I didn’t know (so he read a lot of old comic books, 50-year-old copies of Life magazine and interviewed Stan Lee, Will Eisner, Gil Kane.) My dad grew up in Brooklyn in the ’40s and ’50s and infected me with the sense of wonder of the time.

Q: How do you create the internal logic of Kavalier & Clay, in which superhuman feats appear naturalistic?
Chabon: Try to find books that give you permission to do the kind of work you want to do: E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ Love in the Time of Cholera.

Q: Literary fiction vs. genre fiction?
Waldman: I started with murder mysteries. Who did I think I was? I was just a lawyer on maternity leave. My goal was to write something no worse than anything I’d ever read. I didn’t call myself a writer until I had 4 or 5 books published.
Chabon: When I was here, writing, the work that I did, the stories I wrote and the stuff that I wanted to do when I grew up was strongly influenced by what I read — science fiction, hardboiled detective novels. There had to be a way to write within genre and transcend genre — to write literary fiction true to its genre roots. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh was an anomole, naturalistic. All of my primordial great reading experiences were genre, in one way or another, starting with Arthur Conan Doyle when I was 10.

Michael Chabon’s upcoming novel, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, is due out May 1. Ayelet Waldman’s latest, Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, is now out in paperback. Big thanks to them for spending time with us Pittsburgh fictioneers!