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Before he was a bestselling author, George Saunders was an engineer. Now, 11 books later, Saunders said he’s seen his background in geophysics in his writing, and leans into it as he writes his characters.

“I was trained as an engineer, and it’s really gotten into my writing in the sense that we can maybe foreground our actual reaction to a thing,” Saunders said. “You might have an idea about an experiment, but you have to see what the data tells you. In a story, it’s very similar.”

Saunders, who has taught in Syracuse University’s creative writing department since 1997, was the focus of Wednesday evening’s Arts and Sciences Alumni Academy webinar. Hosted by Provost Gretchen Ritter, the virtual conversation centered on Saunders’ life and career, as well as his process as a writer.

The talk started with a discussion about Saunders’ 2021 work, “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain,” which was the literary form of his MFA class about Russian literature that he teaches at SU. The book dissects the works of Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Gogol through seven essays, arriving at the ultimate message of using fiction as a moral ethical tool, Ritter said.

To Saunders, the Russian literature class and discussing its short stories allows him to explore the themes of some of life’s greatest mysteries. Compared to an American short stories class Saunders taught, he said the Russian short stories class has messages he responds better to.

“I respond to their basic credo: we’re writing and reading stories with a certain moral urgency,” he said. “We’re writing about immortality and death and love and betrayal, and all of the big things. And they wear all that stuff on their sleeves.”

Unpacking Tolstoy was another question Ritter had for Saunders — he unpacks his feelings about the writer as both a person and creative in his book. He spoke about Tolstoy as an example of how “a person is really many people,” and how an individual is made up of fragments that can be both lovely and not.

He broadened his discussion on Tolstoy into the idea of how individuals train themselves in certain activities, from art to science and more, as a way to cultivate these “fragments” into something more perfect. He said that Tolstoy is an example of an imperfect human who made beautiful statements, much like many other people.

“Any worthwhile activity, we train in those in the hope that we might flare up for a couple of minutes,” Saunders said. “That’s, to me, a more hopeful way than to say only a perfect person could create a perfect work of art.”

Outside of discussing literature and his work as a professor, Saunders also reviewed his process as a writer. He said his natural instinct when writing is to be a “Hemingway-esque realist,” but often that turns into a subversion of expectation when he sets stories in locations that lend themselves to comedy, like a theme park.

In this way, Saunders said he tells his students not to model their writing styles after great writers who have come before them, and rather to make their work live by infusing parts of themselves into it. His example of the theme park as a literary setting stemmed from when he went to Six Flags Over Texas for the first time as a kid, he said.

Even though Saunders leans toward modeling his writing after Ernest Hemingway’s, his lived experience influences his work, rooting him in a distinct literary tradition of his own, he said. Instead of imitating the style of great writers, Saunders said, he encourages his students to find what literary tradition is easiest for them to “make live.”

“I think what we’re concentrating on is getting to that first moment when you feel someone in your work that is both you and surprising you,” Saunders said. “That first moment when you crossover from a kind of studied professionalism — ‘I’m doing it right’ into ‘whoa, what am I doing? Is this right?’ But in your heart, you feel that more of you is coming on to the page than ever before.”

In broadview, Saunders’ webinar focused on the way that life experience and writing are intrinsically tied. This theme came back at the end of the night when a 50-year-old MFA student asked the closing question, prompting Saunders to give advice on how life and writing are tied.

“Your craft becomes working against your life experience in some ways, but it’s a good problem to have, because you’ve lived,” Saunders said. “What seems true to you probably is true, and what seems important and relevant to you probably is important and relevant to readers as well.”

Published on November 16, 2022 at 11:10 pm