Anatomy of a leading author
HARVARD-educated medico-turned-author Ethan Canin is coming to Australia for the Melbourne Writers Festival. He talks about his obsession with politics and love of writing.
LEAH KAMINSKY
THE morning of September 11, 2001 was a turning point in the life of author Ethan Canin. As professor of English at the University of Iowa Writers Workshop (IWW), and author of six books, he stopped writing fiction for two years after the traumatic event.
“On that day I became serious about the world,” he says. “I found myself more urgently involved with history, politics and the nature of power.”
It was only last year that Canin returned to fiction-writing and published America, America. The novel tells the story of a plumber’s son, Corey Sifter, who becomes a yard boy on the grand estate of a powerful family.
After the family generously sends him to a private boarding school, Sifter becomes an aide to New York Senator Henry Bonwiller, who is running for US president. Sifter then finds himself entangled in a world of politics, sex and morality.
“I am a political hound. I am obsessive,” Canin admits. “I used to follow sports as a kid, and now I follow politics.”
It was America, America that led to our meeting in the first place. I was in Iowa City attending a fiction-writing intensive at the IWW. Sitting at the table next to him in a restaurant, Canin politely introduced himself after he saw me heavily engrossed in his novel America, America.
We chatted over coffee and Canin explained that the book was his ambitious attempt to write a great American novel.
“I think one of the battles for fiction writers is how much to invent or exaggerate. Politicians are already exaggerated. They’re bigger than life in every way -— their appetites, ambitions, personalities, failings and magnetism. In a sense, they’re made for fiction.”
Canin was born in 1960 and spent his childhood years in Ohio, Pennsylvania and California.
His father taught violin in the music department at the University of Iowa, before the family moved from Iowa City and eventually settled in San Francisco, where Canin spent most of his childhood. He earned his undergraduate degrees in English from Stanford University.
“My dad’s dad was a cigar salesman. My mother’s father was just poor, just failed. So my dad was lower-middle class; my mom was lower class. And they could live in New York, in Manhattan, when they were young. He was a violinist. She was an artist. Now, you can’t even live there if you’re a plastic surgeon married to an orthopaedic surgeon.
“I have to tell you, living in a college town is the way to go. What I don’t like about life in the city these days [is that] money has become such a barrier and an object of desire for everyone.”
Today, he’s still in Iowa City — now married with three young daughters. As much as he loves living in Iowa City, Canin admits that sometimes he misses being part of a larger Jewish community.
“I feel profoundly Jewish by culture — perhaps even more than I feel like an American -— but I lived in small towns for most of my childhood and thus grew up without much exposure to a strong Jewish community.
“I do know that the first time I set foot in New York City, at the age of 21, I felt that I had, for the first time, come home.”
His previous novel, Carry Me Across the Water, was the only overtly Jewish book he has written.
In 1984, Canin studied at the IWW at the University of Iowa. After his studies in the humanities, he considered himself a failure at writing and applied to Harvard Medical School. At 27, while completing a medical degree, he published a best-selling short story collection, Emperor of the Air, which was well received in the literary world.
Canin then commenced a medical residency at the University of California in San Francisco in 1991. Somehow, while working in the medical field, he found time to write and after the publication of The Palace Thief, he decided to focus on writing.
“For me, medicine was easier and certainly less emotionally turbulent than writing. Writing fiction is agony,” he says.
So in 1998, he joined the IWW faculty. There he has mentored writers such as Nam Le, Yiyun Li, John Murray, Sana Krasikov and Lan Samantha Chang.
Though he is content as a writer, he jokes that if he had to choose another career he would be a builder or a woodworker. “I think one of the things essential for happiness in life, or at least for non-sadness, is producing something. I guess that’s why I spend so much time and agony writing books,” he says.
Canin has built a treehouse for his children in his spare time and adds that working on carpentry “is sort of like all the pleasure with none of the agony”.
Ethan Canin will be appearing in three sessions at this year’s Melbourne Writers Festival:
“History’s Long Shadow”, “Ethan Canin in Conversation with Russ Radcliffe” and a panel discussion, “Is the Pen Mightier than the Stethoscope?”
MWF events with Jewish authors and themes
Friday August 21
1pm, ACMI 1
Love and Truth with Howard Goldenberg and Rupert Isaacson
Saturday August 22
10am, ACMI Studio 1
Spotlight on Andrea Goldsmith
11.30am, Festival Club
The Road Less Travelled featuring Rupert Isaacson
1pm, ACMI 2
Why I Read with Raimond Gaita ­(pictured)
4pm, ACMI Studio 1
Adventure Story featuring Rupert Isaacson
7pm, ACMI Cinema 2
The Reader with Bernhard Schlink
Sunday August 23
11.30am, Festival Club
Raft launch: Martin Flanagan will launch Howard Goldenberg’s novel
2.30pm, BMW Edge
Guilt About The Past: A Response with Louise Adler and Raimond Gaita
4pm, BMW Edge Theatre, Federation Square
How do communities heal after traumatic events? Paul Valent, Rob Gordon and author Maria Tumarkin talk about the Holocaust, Ash Wednesday and the recent Victorian bushfires.
Monday August 24
1.15am, BMW Edge Theatre, Federation Square
John Boyne discusses his film The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. He will also talk about the film on August 25, at 12.30pm and August 26, at 1.45pm.
Thursday August 27
11.30am, BMW Edge
Holocaust survivors Thomas Buergenthal and Paul Valent discuss the legacy and Buergenthal’s memoir, A Lucky Child.
Friday August 28
10am, BMW Edge
History’s Long Shadow with Ben Naparstek
10am, ACMI 1
Testing Times with Andrea Goldsmith
11.30am, ACMI 1
Spotlight on the US chaired by Henry Rosenbloom
4pm, ACMI Studio 1
Fly Like a Butterfly … with Eli Horowitz
Saturday August 29
4pm, ACMI 1
Is the Pen Mightier Than the Stethoscope? with Leah Kaminsky and Ethan Canin.
Sunday, August 30
10am, BMW Edge
Writing the Unmentionable with Thomas Buergenthal and Morris Gleitzman
11.30am, ACMI 1
Memory Guide My Hand, Makor Libray’s anthology of autobiographical stories about Israel. Passages will be read by Pip Mushin.
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