As one of the nation’s leading short story writers, Tobias Wolff is a man of few words, though his prose is never sparse or airy.
His pieces are closely measured, not hopelessly limited, and by the end of every story, any bit of seemingly dead air has turned solid. Wolff’s first collection, “In the Garden of the North American Martyrs” (1981), was released to critical praise, and through his career, his task has been to convert elusive situations into tangible moments.
Wolff comes to the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books for his first time this year after turning out “Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories.” The collection achieves the same goal, pulling the abstract into reality. “The Liar” follows a boy who spins tales about his mother and his origins, and “A Mature Student” recounts how one woman uses her stories to save her own life. The book combines 10 new short stories with 21 works from his previous collections, and Wolff is not afraid to take a pen to past works. The author speaks with the Daily Bruin’s John Guigayoma about writing when one is young, writing when one is older, and the moments of rewriting in between.
Daily Bruin: What do you think of an event like the Festival of Books, an event this big that is committed to literature?
Tobias Wolff: Anything that brings together this many people for books is good in my book. It’s also fun to check in on other writers. The very nature of writing is that it is a solitary act. So we take these opportunities to catch up with each other, bad-mouth the ones that aren’t there, and check on each other’s work.
DB: What motivated you to come out with a collection of short stories now?
TW: Well, I finished the collection.
DB: But how do you know it is done? Was it a really arduous task, or did it just kind of fall in your lap?
TW: Most of the time, you’re guided in these things by instinct. As you are working on something, you begin to envision the kind of shape that it will have. You instinctively follow that shape. Once you feel like you’ve fulfilled it, you’re done.
Stories don’t really fall into your lap, not in anyone’s lap that I know. They are a product of writing and rewriting, if you read a story in a book of anyone who is worth reading. Probably exactly to the extent that it looks easy and natural, it’s probably been worked on that much more.
DB: Do you work on several stories at once or just one at a time?
TW: I really concentrate my thoughts on one set of problems, one set of people, one world in miniature. I can think about other things, but I only work on one story at a time.
DB: Why did you decide to change your old stories? It seems like you are doing something that is more than simply editing, maybe even slightly reworking them.
TW: What I did was go through the old stories and change the language here and there, in most cases where I thought it seemed necessary. Almost all my changes were cuts; here and there, I would reword.
I didn’t change any of the characters, any of the narrative line, anything like that.
DB: In your introduction, you mention how you don’t see any of your works as “sacred texts.” It seems like you are trying to defend your decision to work on your other short stories.
TW: There are certainly different ways in approaching this whole thing; I know that some readers think that it’s my duty to leave alone the things that I have written. All those stories have passed through different editions and different forms: magazines, hardcover, soft cover, anthologies and then anthologies again. And each time I’ve looked at them again and made changes.
I mean, it’s been 30 years since I’ve written those first stories, and your life can change a lot in 30 years.
DB: Well I don’t really have 30 years of life to compare.
TW: Well, I guarantee when you reach 30, you’ll be a much different person than you were when you were born.
DB: Going off the idea of age, do you think you can trace the difference from your early work to your later work?
TW: That’s something that I don’t know. The best person to understand that is the reader. They’ll see differences in my work that I don’t see because I’m writing from inside, you see? These evolutions and regressions are decisions for the reader to make.
I’ve lived in many places since I wrote the first stories. At that time I was married, but I didn’t have any kids. And all these wars started in, and so much more has happened. I’ve also lost many people who were dear to me. And that all registered somewhere. Even if I don’t exactly mean it to.
DB: Then do you think that a writer can lose something as he ages, that your writing can lose a certain quality once you grow older?
TW: You can lose something. As your interest in certain things develops, your interest in other things wanes. You can lose a certain headlong quality or a recklessness. You become more attentive to detail and nuance. There is no question at all that there is a certain kind of daring and a restless kind of urge to experiment with forms when you are younger.
DB: People seem to be moving and thinking faster in today’s world, and it seems like the short story would be more pertinent to a reader now. Do you think the short story is more relevant today?
TW: I wish that were true! My God, I wish that were true, but it isn’t. Publishers are very wary of publishing short-story collections because they don’t think people are willing to read them.
Short-story writers really have to struggle for some light, for some air. There are the literary journals, and that’s where most of that work gets published. The New Yorker used to publish more stories, so did Cosmopolitan, so did Vogue, all those women’s magazines. But there has been a tremendous loss in places for short stories.
What’s surprising to me is that there are so many writers committed to that form. I’m one of them, for example. They just can’t help it.
The art of the story itself is still vital. It’s a robust art form, but it doesn’t have as many readers as it deserves.
DB: Why do you think that is?
TW: The usual kind of long comfortable novel is less demanding to read than a well-crafted short story. And I think readers like to return to the same world day after day, return back to a particular social milieu. You have to be really attentive when you read a short story. It demands a kind of attention from the reader that most novels do not.
DB: As a final question, where do you see the publishing industry going?
TW: I don’t know anything about the publishing industry. I just write. I write and send things off and hope for the best.