Friday from the Archives: “an artist’s artist, y’all: weird, unique, and oh so smart and talented”: An Interview with Leah Hampton by Christy Alexander Hallberg with photography by Bayard Wootten in NCLR 2022
Have you already submitted your original unpublished short fiction story for this year’s Doris Betts Fiction Prize Contest, sponsored by North Carolina Writers’ Network? Enter by October 31 and your work may be read by final judge, acclaimed author and teacher Leah Hampton.
Hampton won the Betts contest back in 2012. In 2022, Senior Associate Editor Christy Alexander Hallberg interviewed Hampton for our “Writers Who Teach/Teachers Who Write” special feature. The interview contains humor, pathos, writing and publishing insights, and so much more. Particular to those who may be starting is this, Hallberg’s question about learning and teaching the practice of writing:
CAH: As a follow-up to my previous question about MFA programs, do you think one can really be taught to write, or is it ultimately an exercise in self-isolation with pen and paper and text and laser-sharp focus and practice, practice, practice and, well, innate talent and a lot of luck?
LH: I do think people can be taught to write, but I think we oversimplify what being taught to write means. It’s about observational skills. It’s about grammar, and when I say grammar, I mean like big G – learning
a little linguistics, wrestling with a foreign language, diagramming sentences – complex Grammar and also neurological stuff with Chomskian grammar and how our brain processes and acquires language. You have to understand those things. There’s also learning about the agency of the self and understanding your own lexicon and your own frame of reference in the world, being able to distance yourself from that frame of reference in order to self-critique.
Genetically, we’re all storytellers. That’s what separates us from other species on the planet. And you go back seventy-five, a hundred thousand years, and we’re making paintings on the walls of caves because we’re genetically predisposed for communal storytelling and the sharing of experience. That’s what we do. We dream. I think it was Langston Hughes who said we need stories so much that we tell ourselves stories in our sleep. We all have it.
The teaching is creating a complicated pathway for people to express that, and that expression can take many forms. But I do think it can be taught. I’m not always confident that we understand what that teaching process really looks like or that we cover all the bases that are necessary. There’s really a dominant way of teaching in the humanities, which is to operate as if your students are going to intuit whatever they need to cognitively be able to do what you do. If you’re a literature professor or you’re a creative writer, we say read
this book and think about it and write this type of paper, and what that does is going back to this question of privilege. (I don’t know if you’ve figured this out yet, but I’m a raging Marxist.)
This is why you see so few people of color in the Big Five publishing industry: because it assumes similar ways of processing the world. What I try to do – and what I wish more people did – is pull back the curtain and be much more transparent about mentoring the cognition of their students. When you look
at this scene from a play, what are you thinking about? What words do you notice? These are the words I noticed. These are the visual images that came to my mind. And it’s not that you’re telling everybody, this is how you have to think, but it’s helping people learn to ask themselves, how do I think, and how do I process language, and how do I see the world, and what do I find interesting? Asking ourselves these questions is not encouraged enough. We just assume that if you read enough good poems and talk about why they’re good enough times that somehow your brain will intuit how then to make a good poem.
Read the entire interview on ProQuest and pick up a 2022 issue today!
