fall M - Department of English - University of Minnesota

CHABON—continued from page 3
where cultural icons like Orson Welles and
Salvador Dali make memorable appearances.
But what I really loved was
Chabon’s language—his stunning vocabulary
and his ability to strike the perfect
final note in each sentence, in each paragraph,
in each chapter. It took me a long
time to finish Kavalier and Clay, but it
didn’t matter. I could pick it up, reread the
chapter where I had left off and I would be
back in the story.
After this reading experience, if I could
have chosen a contemporary writer to
meet, I would have picked Michael
Chabon. (Like I said, sometimes I’m
lucky.) I started telling my students about
Chabon and his visit on the first day of
class. In preparation, we read some of his
short stories, his wonderful essay called
“Maps and Legends,” and I encouraged
the students (that is, I gave them extra
credit) to read his novels and attend his lecture.
Still, on the morning of his visit, I
was nervous.
Meeting Michael helped calm my nerves
a little. He was soft-spoken, sweet, and
grounded. But I still spilled my coffee on
the table while introducing him to the
class. After that, I sat down and let him
take over. He, too, had taught composition
in graduate school, so he was comfortable
and funny with students. He talked about
how and why he writes:
He thinks reading is the key to good
writing and says “just like you can’t trust a
thin chef, don’t trust a writer who doesn’t
read.” Unlike his wife who is a “monogamous”
reader, he reads from three to seven
books at once.
He loves libraries. He called the fact that
there are quiet places with free books
“miraculous.”
He loves to do research, including online
research. He finds it difficult to stop
researching a book and concentrate on
writing.
He believes that narrative, not themes or
ideas, drive a book. He thinks that themes
grow up unconsciously. As an example he
claimed that when he was writing Kavalier
and Clay (which has an obvious theme of
escapism), he did not realize that his book
was about escaping until he read about a
real-life magician called The Escapist.
This is how he describes his writing
process: he writes a paragraph, then goes
back to the beginning, reads it over and
revises. He writes the second paragraph,
then goes back to the very beginning, reads
it over and revises. And so on through the
book.
I’m still not sure if I believe that description
of his writing process—how could you
do that with a 600 page book But I know
that my students and I were all struck by
his sincerity, intelligence, and kindness.
One student said, “It’s good to know that
not all writers are weirdos.” Another
enthused, “Michael Chabon was the first
Pulitzer Prize-winner I have ever met—and
I hope not my last!”
I take with me the note that he wrote in
one of my family’s summer copies of
Kavalier and Clay, which he said was “really
beat-up”: “Molly, I really enjoyed teaching
with you—Michael Chabon.”
BAMFORD—continued from page 5
Movies and television have also become
part of Bamford’s resume: she appeared in
the films Stuart Little 2 and Lucky Numbers,
and lends her voice regularly on the
Nickelodeon cartoon Catdog. Currently
Maria is starring in an independent film
called Stella’s Search for Sanity and is scheduled
to appear in a new game show called
National Lampoon’s Funny Money on the
Game Show Network in early June. In her
success, however, this funny lady from
Duluth has not forgotten her Minnesota
roots. Bamford’s favorite stage to perform
on is still in Minneapolis, at the Southern
Theatre on Washington Avenue. Every
Saturday at midnight the theatre puts on a
sort of creative art free-for-all called BALLS
and Bamford said she enjoys partaking
because “you can do anything you want
and it’s just lovely.”
Still keeping things local, Bamford also
cites fellow Minnesotan Garrison Keillor
as one of the comedians who influenced
her career most, along with Steve Martin,
Roseanne Barr, and Ellen Degeneres. In
fact, Keillor’s having studied at the U of M
is one of the features which originally
attracted Bamford to creative writing. She
said she admires Keillor for “creating his
own genre—his own show to do and present
exactly what he loves” and for “always
putting things out there.” Bamford, who
has since written and performed for
Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion radio program
on MPR, carries on that spark of creativity
and originality in her own work.
The most rewarding part of her job, said
Bamford, is “performing new bits—creating
them and performing them—when new
ideas come up on stage.” Her material is
full of the same passion that shows when
she speaks about her career. Of her comedy
subjects Bamford exclaimed, “the more
strongly I feel about it the more time I put
into enjoying the process of finding the
words I want to use and the inflections—
the more I want to say it and practice it
and perform it.” In light of all her recent
successes, this angle seems to be working.
Bamford’s career did not unfurl immediately
from Minneapolis clubs to stardom,
however. Her income this year was
respectable, but Bamford didn’t really start
making money in comedy until about 3
years ago. Bamford says that before then
she had to learn “to take care of herself as
a business person and artist” and that
“there is no shame in having a day job.”
Now she says her only real challenges are
the limitations she puts on herself. She
marks coping with and understanding
imperfection as the best learning experience
she took with her after graduating
from the U of M. “I get really down on
myself if I’m not the best at something,”
remarked Bamford, “I just did my best and
handed things in. And that’s how I graduated.
That’s how I do my work today. Just
keep showing up, even if you’re in zebracontinued—next
page
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