Fellow J. Greg Phelan on our November 2021 BookEnds alumni group author event 

I was having lunch with my mom’s three close friends from childhood. It was the first time we’d seen each other since my mom passed away, and her friends wanted to mark the occasion with a drink. I told them I couldn’t, that I had to keep my wits about me as that night I was going to interview my favorite author on Zoom. 

“Who?” they asked. When I told them, Aunt Kay, my mom’s buddy since junior high, smiled in joy and recognition. 

“Alice McDermott is my hero,” she said. “I feel like I know her, and she knows me.” 

Anybody who’s read Alice’s work knows what Aunt Kay means. (“Aunt Kay’s one of my people,” Alice said, when I told her the story.) 

I’ve been hooked on Alice McDermott’s work since Charming Billy, her 1998 National Book Award-winning novel. I felt like I knew her and she knew me, and my family, too. I don’t know of any other living writer whose work has touched me more as a reader and inspired me more as a writer, to slow down and observe the extraordinary moments of ordinary people, to seek meaning, wisdom, and truth in their stories. 

Her most recent book is her first of nonfiction, What About The Baby?, a wonderful collection of insightful essays on writing and craft based on her lectures at Sewanee Writers Conference, as well as her 23 years teaching creative writing at Johns Hopkins.

What an honor and privilege it was for me to interview her for our BookEnds Alum’s Visiting Writing Series, to ask her variations on the same question: How do you do it? Evoke such richly observed lives with such compressed, beautiful, seemingly effortless prose. Here’s what I learned. 

Alice makes the time and space to write, doing her best to keep distractions and self-doubts out of the room, so she’s alone with the words on the page. She writes badly for as long as it takes—which, she reminds us, is sheer hell—as she works and reworks sentences, keeping the faith that she’ll get where she needs to go in due time. 

The reason she has faith to keep at it is because she’s experienced moments of transcendence herself, as a reader––when, as she put it, “we read something and felt like it changed our lives, hit us in the spine, gave us a new way to look at the world. We just fall in love with a character or a setting or a situation or a voice and we recognize the value of storytelling.” That’s what keeps her going: “This endless hope; it’s not based on nothing. It’s based on what I’ve experienced as a reader.”

She reads and rereads her works-in-progress constantly, looking for patterns, connection, and meaning, like a scholar would. That’s the way she finds the form of the story. “Constantly going back and seeing, ‘Well now, I know this, what do I make of that?’ is part of the pleasure, but also part of understanding the consequence and the logical movement of a story through time.”

Her emphasis on rereading led to my big epiphany, which seems obvious when you hear it out loud: We should bring the same high expectations we bring to reading books to reading our own works-in-progress.  

Indeed Alice advocates reading our own work with the same level of concentration, curiosity, and expectation as the books we love––all the while reminding ourselves, no matter how impatient we are to get it done, that unless we feel the same excitement and sense of discovery reading our own prose as we hope to feel as a reader, we still have work to do. 

“Language is the only tool the writer has,” she writes. 

So how does she do it?

Block out time to write, putting distractions and self-doubts out of the room. Have faith the work is worthwhile, knowing what you have experienced as a reader. 

Read widely and deeply, bringing the same curiosity and high expectations to your own work-in-progress as you do to any book. 

That’s it, really. Why make it any more complicated?

Alice McDermott shows and inspires us to understand that, simply, there’s pleasure to be had in the work, for us and our readers. That this pleasure is reason enough to keep going.

Greg Phelan was a BookEnds fellow in 2018-2019 and has an MFA in creative writing from Bennington College. His articles, reviews, and essays have been published in The New York Times, The Millions, and America magazine. He co-founded a writing center, Project Write Now, where he is an instructor and the board chair. He is currently finishing a coming-of-age novel set in the summer of 1964.