Paul Harding on Writing, Teaching, Mentors, and Music

Paul Harding has had the kind of trajectory you read about in novels.

After graduating from college, he recorded and toured as the drummer in Cold Water Flat, the band he formed with his UMass Amherst classmates. During a break from touring, he took a summer writing class – his first – with Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Marilynne Robinson, who put him on to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he earned his MFA.

Following a raft of rejections, he published his debut novel, which won him his own Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2010. Tinkers is a slim tale of fathers, love, death, and time that NPR called a “perfect debut novel,” and a “masterpiece around the truism that all of us, even surrounded by family, die alone.” Harding followed Tinkers with Enon (2013) and This Other Eden (2023), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and a finalist for a National Book Award, among other accolades.

Last year, Harding, who had previously taught at Stony Brook, joined Emerson’s Writing, Literature and Publishing department as Distinguished Professor, teaching fiction workshops and courses in Shakespeare and the Old Testament. Emerson Today spoke with him about writing, teaching, success, and failure. The interview has been edited for length.

Why come to Emerson?

Well, growing up in Boston and aspiring to be a writer for many years before I even became a writer, Emerson was just… it was in the water. [M]y sister-in-law went to Emerson, I had millions of friends who went to Emerson. … There were piles of Ploughshares everywhere growing up. It was just so iconic and just so cool.

Your debut novel won the Pulitzer. What was that like? Was there a lot of pressure afterwards? Were you shocked?

All the above? A year or two after the book won, I finally crossed paths with the woman who was the head of the jury for Fiction prize that year. She used to be the editor of The New York Times Sunday Book Review, and I just said, ‘I’m going around the world and I’m just saying it’s [like] winning the lottery,’ and she said, ‘That’s exactly what it is.’ Every year [judges] read 300 different books. Somebody has a bad reaction to breakfast or a long morning, [and] your book gets tossed out the window. So, you just want to be equal to it. … [T]he two reactions you can’t have to winning a Pulitzer: You can’t act like you deserve it. You can’t act like you don’t deserve it.

After a while, when people would say, ‘Do you feel a lot of pressure to follow up?’ Of course I do. But then I would say, ‘If my biggest problem in life right now is figuring out how to follow up my Pulitzer Prize… then life’s not so bad.’ You work up your chops being a musician, and you get to where the pressure that you put on yourself is at least equal to, but usually greater than, the pressure that you feel from the outside world.

So many people cite your evocative descriptions. Is that something that you intentionally work hard at when you’re writing, or do you chalk it up to just having really great powers of observation?

[O]ne of the things that I’m obsessed about with teaching writing is making a lot of what writing is into very concrete, very literal skills that people can work on, so it is democratic. … The power of observation is not something you were just born with, it is actually a very deliberate skill that you can practice. I talk about developing the ability to sustain the best attention that you can for as long as you can.

And it’s a description of experience because you’re writing through character. What is it like for this character, starting with what does it smell like, look like, taste, feel like? If you’re just writing about the landscape, you end up lapsing into … ornamental writing. [T]here’s no such thing as just the landscape that exists outside of a character’s experience of the landscape, of being in the landscape when they’re going through whatever they’re going through. So it becomes, to use a favorite word that I got from my [mentor] Marilynne Robinson, the interior and the exterior become ‘co-extensive,’ so that the landscape is always just an extension of the character and the character’s perception of it and experience of it.

Going back to your days as a drummer, do you think having a sense of rhythm musically helps in writing?

Absolutely. A lot of writers I know love music. A lot of painters I know love dance. I think that you get, it might be called kind of synesthesia in a way, but to me it’s also [that] the impulse to create all comes from the same place.

As a drummer, you can slow things down, you can speed them up, you can cut them in half, you can double them. And so that’s what I think of as pacing and narrative and that sort of thing. And I often know how many beats are in a sentence before I know what it actually literally means. So yeah, they’re absolutely integrated.

Your first writing teacher was Marilynne Robinson. What’s something that she imparted to you that you still carry with you, and is there anything that you then give to your students?

Well, that’s one of the things that’s amazing about teaching writing. I’ll [say] to my students, ‘This, that, and the other thing,’ and then I’ll talk to Marilynne or my other wonderful teacher, Elizabeth McCracken, and I’ll sit in on one of their classes, and they’ll be saying exactly what I [told my students], and I realize, ‘Oh my god, you told me that!’ And it is this kind of public domain teaching, this kind of thing that you pass on. It’s kind of a legacy.

With all my books – Eden, say – it is full of Shakespeare, it’s full of Melville, it’s full of Moses, it’s full of Marilynne Robinson and Faulkner and Emily Dickinson and Toni Morrison. So part of it is all these people teach you things, and you learn how to take the different elements from them and do your own thing with it. I love the idea of that. You can [teach] the traditions and the influences and the best books, but then they do something that’s their own with those. All the elements are familiar, but then the way that they’re refracted through this other artist’s mind is kind of where art comes from, I think.

I mean, I couldn’t even begin to enumerate what Marilynne taught me, but part of it is … never using acculturated or received language to describe anything. [W]e think in these kind of prefabricated phrases because you have to get up, you have to tie your shoes, you have to drive the car to work. But when you slow down and you start paying attention to the language and composition, you realize that a lot of what we think of as thinking is not thought, it’s just rote, and you just can’t use rote language.

Have you ever gotten quite a ways into a novel and then abandoned it?

Yeah. Or direction. The first novel I tried to write, I worked on for a year before graduate school and then worked on it for two years. I was in graduate school and literally the day I left, I woke up and just looked at it from … a slightly more sophisticated, slightly better angle, and the whole thing collapsed. [I] realized it could never be a good novel because I didn’t know what a novel was when I started writing it, so it failed at the level of its conception. It was all top down. 

[O]ne of the things I’ve been on and on about lately with teaching is just what we often call ‘revision’ is what properly should be called ‘writing.’ We’ve all been in workshops … where if you’re reading the first draft …. what you’re reading is the author starting to tell themselves what the story will be, and then revision is the actual story resolving out of that more expository version.

Last question, trick question. What novel do you wish you had written?

Oh my God, there’s so many novels. I mean, the big one is always Moby Dick, but I feel like at this point, that’s cliche. The person I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is Edward P. Jones, because I read those stories in All Aunt Hagar’s Children – some of the sentences, they don’t even seem like a person could have written them. They just seem like they’re revelations of truth. I just think, ‘Holy shit.’

I think one of the most powerful effects that you can have on your reader if you’re working really well is the sense of recognition. When you read something and you just go, ‘Holy crap, that’s totally true, and I’ve never seen anybody put it in words before.’ It’s not like, ‘Oh, somebody just taught me something intellectually.’ It’s just like you see it, and it’s been there all along, [but] nobody brought my attention to it.

That’s what a lot of good teaching is, too. You say something to a young writer and they go, ‘Oh, absolutely.’ It’s self-evident once it’s pointed out to you.