Creative writing lecture seeks the real world in literature

Over 70 people packed into the drawing studio on the fifth floor of Dodge on Thursday to hear novelist Lydia Millet speak on “Writing at the End of the World.” Millet explored the purpose and power of literary fiction in a world in which “the debasement of language is damning our species.” The talk, part of the Creative Writing Lecture series arranged by Ben Marcus, chair of creative writing at Columbia’s School of the Arts, was both hilarious and poignant.

Millet’s talk may not have left the SoA’s incoming creative writing MFA students, who made up a good portion of the audience, with many bullet-point tips on the particulars of craft and the writer’s process. However, her suggestion that “it might be the elevation of language that can save us” served as a call to duty, more moving and personal than any tips on creating setting or developing plot.

Millet has written six novels and a collection of short stories, as well as many essays. Her third novel, “My Happy Life,” won the 2003 PEN-USA Award for Fiction, and her story collection “Love in Infant Monkeys” was a nominee for the Pulitzer Prize for Literature. These 10 stories, said her introducer, SoA student Heather Mott, are based on real interactions between famous people and animals, including one about Noam Chomsky and his gerbil.

Millet’s talk was far-ranging and philosophical, decrying the unreasonable “expectation of continuing life, a pandemic in North America … a complacency about living” that handicaps writers. Though it is convenient to be receptive to switch only when it “resembles nothing but a pile of gifts upon the floor,” Millet warned attendees to be prepared for the kind of change that has more “hurricanes, tsunamis, heat waves” than the switch to a new iPod model. In the face of such challenges, despair is unhelpful, but desperation has power.

Millet moved on to discuss the prevalence of “epiphanies” in literature—what she called the “heavily-trafficked self-improvement road” many writers take when creating characters. She pointed out that “rarely in the real world do we experience a sequence of events that lead to an epiphany or self-improvement.”

The lecture ended with a Q-and-A session in which she revealed a secret of her writing process: “I hardly ever know what I’m doing at the beginning of a book. It’s not interesting to know—I don’t structure things ahead of time.”