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Author Canin imagines his own life stories

Stewart Oksenhorn

Some years ago, when Ethan Canin was starting out as a writer, he got caught up in the mainstream fashion of the day – lightning-quick short stories, written in the present tense, in the tradition of Raymond Carver and Ernest Hemingway. He quickly found that such writing was not for him.

“I got tired of stories that took place in an hour, with 10 pages of dialogue and one passable moment,” said Canin. “That was the hip thing to do. It was like a snapshot: Nothing happened, nothing will happen.

“When I was a student, John Irving gave a writing workshop and told us, the present tense slows things down. The past tense implies action, and the possibility of a future. Writing in the present tense makes things static.”



So Canin began writing stories with a broader sweep of time, place and action. His second novel, 1998’s “For Kings and Planets,” followed a pair of college students – one, a reckless descendant of Manhattan intellectuals, the other, a hayseed from a Midwestern farm – from the first day of college and on into their professional lives. “Carry Me Across the Water,” Canin’s acclaimed 2001 novel, examines various phases in the life of septuagenarian August Kleinman: his childhood escape from Nazi Germany; an encounter with a Japanese soldier during World War II; and his late-in-life efforts to connect with his children and grandchildren. Even in recent shorter stories, Canin’s work is marked by the passage of time, movement from place to place and an unfolding of events.

“What interests me is the story of a life,” said the 41-year-old Canin, who will appear in an Aspen Writers’ Foundation Winter Words event on Thursday, March 6, at Paepcke Auditorium. “That’s what I read, and that’s why I write – to understand a life.




“I’m annoyed with people who say, ‘That’s a cliched story.’ That doesn’t bother me – I like cliched stories: the hooker with the heart of gold, the romantic-minded businessman. There’s no such thing as a cliched story. There’s cliched prose, but not stories.”

Canin’s output over some 15 years – two story collections, “Emperor of the Air” and “The Palace Thief,” and three novels, including his debut, “Blue River” – certainly rises above the cliched. For one, Canin doesn’t duplicate himself in tone, ideas or, especially, in characters from one book to the next, making it awfully difficult to call his work cliched. For another, Canin doesn’t believe that the story itself is the essence of writing.

“The trick to writing is to love your characters and become them,” said Canin. “If you love them, readers will sense that and become interested in them. If you like a writer, you’re falling in love with the writer’s intelligence.”

Also, Canin is of the opinion that writers naturally have a distinct tone, a way with language that is all their own. An instructor at the University of Iowa’s famed Iowa Writers Workshop for a decade, Canin has read the work of thousands of aspiring writers. He has yet to sense a duplication of style.

“It’s interesting what makes a voice,” he said. “I’ve never heard two voices that sound even remotely similar. There are linguistic tics, thought, an innate sense of rhythm. Everybody has a voice.”

Canin might have added that each writer has a different well of experiences to draw from. But Canin is no believer in tapping one’s own personal history for subject matter. Canin has written about Japan without ever having been there and has written repeatedly from the perspective of the elderly.

“I’ve never written about my life,” he said. “I think once you start writing about your life, you can’t start imagining anything anymore. The imagination is so weak compared to the truth, what another person is saying, what actually happened.”

If Canin were interested in writing from his own life, however, he would have a compelling story to draw from. He was raised in various places around the States as his father, a violinist, moved from job to job. Eventually his family settled in San Francisco, where Canin’s father became concertmaster of the San Francisco Symphony. Canin’s early itinerary included six or seven summer visits to Aspen, where his father was a guest artist with the Aspen Music Festival.

Entering Stanford University, Canin was dead set on an education in the sciences. “I was an engineering student and I thought anybody in the arts was there because he couldn’t do science, anybody in the arts is soft-minded,” said Canin, whose mother was an art teacher. Even his father – who, at 80, is currently concertmaster of the Los Angeles Opera – questioned Canin’s new course of study: “When I moved into the arts, he said, ‘What are you doing?'”

What happened is that Canin encountered a literary intelligence that made perfect sense to him, that of John Cheever. Canin read the massive collection “The Stories of John Cheever” and took an abrupt turn.

“It changed my life,” he said. “Something about the rhythm and his sensibility struck me. So I took a creative writing class, switched to an English major, and headed down this foolish path.”

The path may not seem foolish to an outsider, considering the London Daily Telegraph praised “Carry Me Across the Water” as “the most wise and beautiful novel of 2001.” But there have plenty of bumps along the way; even now, Canin says that writing is difficult, success uncertain.

Canin was nearly thrown from writing for good on his first day as a student at the Iowa Writers Workshop. The fledgling writer was asked to submit a short story; Canin obliged by writing one overnight. On the first day of class, Canin was seated on a stage next to John Irving, who held four short stories by incoming students. Irving announced that two of the stories were publishable, two were not, and that he would start by reading the two publishable ones. With that, Irving picked up Canin’s story – and placed it at the bottom of the pile.

Canin says that was not the crushing blow, but it didn’t help. He coasted through the Iowa Writers Workshop doing almost no writing. He played softball, worked at a bookstore and for a magazine, and wrote two stories in two years. “You didn’t have to write at all back then,” marvels Canin, who would become a faculty member at Iowa in 1998.

Canin then did what most any discouraged writer would do and enrolled in medical school. “I thought, what the fuck have I done? I threw away a promising engineering career. With my tail between my legs, I went to medical school.” It wasn’t exactly tail between legs, though, as Canin entered medical school at Harvard. “They loved the fact that I was a writer,” said Canin.

Without the pressure of being in a writers’ program, Canin’s writing took off. In his first six months of medical school, he wrote all the stories that would become his first book, “Emperor of the Air,” published in 1987, his third year of med school. Canin explains his sudden productivity this way: “Because I wasn’t supposed to be writing. A secret education works that way.”

Canin’s years in med school ended up stretching over a decade, as he took time to publish a book and travel in South America. When he took a residency in internal medicine at the University of California at San Francisco, he realized, again, that maybe the arts wasn’t such a bad idea.

“I made a mistake,” he said. “I got a residency to have a two-months-on, two-months-off schedule. Residency was so grueling, it was impossible to come back after two months off. It was like doing a jail term in two-month pieces and having to come back to it after two months off.”

Fortunately, the writing thing seems to be paying off. Canin is dismissive about his first novel, “Blue River,” which he wrote in South America, but his last three books – “The Palace Thief,” “For Kings and Planets” and “Carry Me Across the Water” – have all earned high praise.

Still, Canin, currently working on another collection of stories, doesn’t seem to consider himself established as a writer. “You’re just throwing a handful of rocks and hoping one lands in a puddle,” said Canin about his approach to each successive book. “You can’t decide what you’re going to write – it’s hard enough just casting about.”

Canin has finally found an easy sidelight career that balances out the difficulties of writing books. Canin’s story “The Palace Thief” was made into the 2002 film “The Emperor’s Club,” starring Kevin Kline. Canin didn’t write the screenplay to “The Emperor’s Club,” but he was on the set often. That led to a deal for Canin to turn another one of his stories, “Batorsag and Szerelem,” into a screenplay, which he is currently working on.

“It’s so fucking easy. I can’t believe I haven’t done this before. It’s a joke,” said Canin, whose upcoming Winter Words event will include a talk about the process of turning a story into a film, as well as a screening of “The Emperor’s Club.” “If I’m writing a novel set in the South Pacific, I have to laboriously write 25 pages to set the scene. Writing a screenplay, you just write: ‘Somewhere in the South Pacific.’ I can’t believe people get paid so much to do it.”

But Canin doesn’t see his future in the movies. “I’d rather write a novella from scratch,” he said. “I could write a screenplay for money. But if you’re going to do that kind of work, you might as well write a book.”

Stewart Oksenhorn’s e-mail address is stewart@aspentimes.com