11/05/2024
By Katharine Webster

Elizabeth Strout, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton books, doesn’t waste words.

Yet, everything she said in a campus conversation with author and English Prof. Andre Dubus III spoke volumes to the writing students in attendance, many of whom had submitted questions in advance. Her advice: Listen to ordinary people, think of your reader and persevere in your writing.

“I’m just so interested in ordinary people – but they’re not ordinary. Nobody’s ordinary,” she told an audience of more than 250 students, faculty, staff and community members. “The stories that people have are extraordinary.”

Image by Edward Brennen

That message resonated for Nick Rossi, a senior majoring in digital media and minoring in English who has taken creative writing classes with Dubus and Prof. Maureen Stanton, a creative nonfiction author.

“The most valuable thing I took away … was Elizabeth’s comments about how there’s value in ordinary people and ordinary things,” Rossi said. “Everyone has a story, and although we might be considered common, none of us are. We’ve all been through things and have something to share.”

Strout’s appearance on Oct. 30 was the latest in the Writers on Campus series organized by the English Department’s creative writing faculty. Stanton said that the events, which often include classroom conversations, give students, “especially our aspiring writers who may be part of the next generation of literary voices, the opportunity to engage with a diverse group of memoirists, poets and fiction writers.”

“They speak directly to students about their writing lives and their artistic processes,” Stanton said. “We hear over and over from our students how inspiring these presentations are to them.”

Many attendees lined up afterward so that Strout, who won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for “Olive Kitteridge” and whose books routinely top the bestseller lists, could sign copies of her newest work, “Tell Me Everything.”

“Tell Me Everything” brings together Strout’s two best-known characters, Olive Kitteridge, also the subject of “Olive, Again,” and Lucy Barton, who features in four previous books. Other characters from Strout’s earlier works also return.

Image by Edward Brennen

Olive Kitteridge, a crusty, retired schoolteacher living in the fictional seaside town of Crosby, Maine, materialized two decades ago while Strout was in the kitchen, either loading or unloading the dishwasher, she said.

“I had a very strong sense of this presence,” Strout said. “I heard her say to herself, ‘It’s high time everybody left.’ And I thought, ‘Oh wow, let’s get that down.’”

Lucy Barton, a successful writer who had a difficult childhood in the Midwest, came to Strout as an interior voice – one that required Strout to write in the first person for the first time, she said.

“Lucy’s voice came to me like a fine gold thread coming from above, and I thought, ‘If I can catch hold of that thread, that voice, then I can do her credit,’” she said. “Lucy allows me to look at really quiet parts of me.”

Lucy, Olive and other recurring characters speak to her so often that they have come to feel like relatives, she said to laughter. Another constant presence in Strout’s writing studio is the reader. 

“I’m always writing for a reader,” she said. “The reader is patient, but not super-patient, and interested, but not desperately interested, and so it’s my job as I write to give this reader something that is worth the reader’s while.”

She also knows that she needs to give the reader a break from emotionally intense scenes and characters by shifting to descriptions of landscape and weather or changing to a less demanding scene, she said.  

Image by Edward Brennen

“Every reader will bring their own story to my book, and so in that sense it becomes a different book for every reader, as it should,” she said. “As I’ve developed my craft more, I’m conscious of leaving more space for the reader to do that.” 

Asked about her writing habits, Strout said, “I just sit down and do it. It’s my job.” 

“I don’t really get writer’s block; I just write badly,” she said. “But I did learn … early on, if I could get a scene with what I call a good heartbeat, I could call it a good day’s work.”

To get that heartbeat, Strout said, she uses whatever emotion or preoccupation is “tugging me at that time” to bring life to her writing. 

Strout said she never plans out a book in advance. Instead, she lets her characters drive her writing of scenes, and then combines the scenes into a group of interconnected short stories or a novel.

Image by Edward Brennen

Many people have congratulated Strout on her “overnight success,” she said. But she began writing at age 4 and didn’t publish her first work of fiction, “Amy and Isabelle,” until she was 43.

Strout had finished the manuscript and spent two years trying to find someone – anyone – to help her get it published, to no avail. Then a friend suggested that she contact a former editor at The New Yorker who “had been rejecting my stories very kindly for many years” and had just moved to Random House. She did, and he called her up and told her to send over her manuscript.

After reading it, the editor told her they’d have to find her an agent. Within a week, she had five lunches with five different agents. Now, she has sold more than 5 million books. “Olive Kitteridge” was also made into an HBO miniseries that won eight Emmy awards.

Her parting advice to students: “If you really know that you’re a writer, then don’t stop.”

Dubus, who invited Strout to campus, met her in 1999 while they were on book tours, often to the same cities, organized by the publicists at Penguin Random House. 

“We were on the same flights together and got to know each other, and we’ve been friends ever since,” Dubus said after the event.