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Woolf is an important writer for me, someone I read often and who forms part of my ideal of what literature can do.

Garth Greenwell

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Garth Greenwell
Age: 46
Born: 1978
Born: March 19
Novelist
Poet
Louisville
Kentucky
Read
Often
Form
Woolf
Someone
Ideal
Part
Forms
Important
Ideals
Writer
Literature

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Even though I don't sing any more, singing was my first education in the arts, and it's clear to me that my training as a musician also shaped me as a writer.
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I'm drawn to fiction that hints at nonfiction, that blurs or seems to blur the boundaries between invention and autobiography.
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I am a gay writer, absolutely. And in no way does that fact limit the reach or importance of what I write.
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My first MFA was in poetry, and it was very much part of a professional trajectory leading to life as a professor. But in my second and third years at Harvard, I realized I didn't want an academic life.
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I do think that the sense of being opposed to the present moment, that sense of the rub of history, invigorates the writing I find most exciting, and maybe precisely in being equally allegiant to an inward fineness of sensibility and an outward-facing rigor of protest or critique.
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I'm still primarily interested in observing as closely as possible the shifting weather between people. I think the master of this sort of thing, and a writer who has meant a great deal to me, is Henry James: there's a magical way that he has of turning the slightest gesture into a whole world of drama and feeling.
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I'm not sure I can articulate any principles behind the decisions about what to cut and what to keep.
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I take pleasure as a reader in books that tease with a kind of urgency of the real, even if it's only a manufactured effect.
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I realized, that the life of a musician, even of a very lucky, very successful musician, wasn't really the life I wanted: I hate travel, I hate living out of suitcases, I hate the constant anxiety of being on stage.
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I think one reason I'm drawn to expansive syntax is that arias are so often exercises in extending language as a means of intensifying feeling.
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The academy is an incredibly sheltered world, and I do think it's important for writers to get out from under that shelter, at least for a while, to see what the world looks like from outside it.
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I went back to graduate school because I wanted to avoid being a professional, to try to piece together a life that would let me avoid the tenure race and full-time teaching.
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For me, music was always a second language. I didn't have a musical background, and I started studying very late, at fourteen.
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History is never invisible, finally, though some people seem to work very hard to be willfully blind.
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I think history is only ever invisible when it abets your sense of self, your desires, your ambitions, when it carries your life along in a kind of frictionless way.
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Teaching high school was my real training as a novelist: it got me out of my head, and (at least a little) out of books, and invested me in the lives of others and the world around me.
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My life has had a lot of fits and starts: before I studied literature at all I was a musician, and began undergrad as a conservatory student. I started studying literature in my third year of college, when I took a poetry course with James Longenbach that was pretty extraordinary. It changed my life.
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When I took my first poetry class, I felt that I could understand the relationships between words and the formal qualities of language in a way I would never understand music.
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I often say that Bernhard, W.G. Sebald, and Javier Marías are my stylistic holy trinity, prose writers who amaze me with their notation of consciousness and voice.
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I realized that there was an intellectual content in music, a kind of thinking, that I would never be able to hear.
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