Joyce Carol Oates is the author of numerous novels, short-story collections, essays, plays and books for children. I recently spoke with the 71-year-old writer about her experience writing about her hometown of Lockport, New York, in “Going Home Again,” which appears in the March issue of Smithsonian.
How much had you thought about “home” and what it meant to you prior to this assignment?
Probably more than most people. Because I’m a novelist, a writer of fiction, I probably do think of these things fairly often, fairly consistently. I have stories and novels that are set in my hometown area, and childhood memories are written about. We tend to write about what we know. There’s always a feeling of nostalgia.
I evoke the canal. Sometimes I call the city by different names. I’ve called it Strykersville and Port Oriskany. Sometimes I mix it together with Buffalo. I really write about this part of New York State all the time, so it’s not such an extraordinary leap for me to be writing about it.
I have a novel called Little Bird of Heaven, which came out a few months ago, and that’s set in an area like Lockport. It’s the same kind of upstate New York scene. I situate it in the Adirondacks.
Do you think your idea of “home” would be different if you had stayed in one place for a lifetime?
Oh, I’m sure. That would be true with anyone. If you stay in your home place, you don’t really notice things changing.
Can you talk a little bit about your writing process and how you approached this assignment?
I write in longhand. When I went to Lockport, which I did in October, I took a lot of notes describing it. I was driven around the city by a relative. I just sort of took notes on everything that I did. I looked at a map of the city. I described things. The canal. I looked at my old school. I just drove around the streets. What I wrote about is real. I didn’t invent anything.
What events, places or people did this assignment bring back to mind that you hadn’t thought about in awhile?
Many of my middle school classmates. Because so much time has gone by, of course, people have passed away. Some of my relatives have died. We’re talking about decades here, so people have lived and died, people whom I was close to. My grandmother died quite a while ago. I still have relatives who remember her and older relatives who remember me as a child.
I had a whole list of my middle school classmates, a whole long list of them. But that didn’t really seem relative to put that in. They’re just names of strangers. Nobody would know who they were.
In the essay, you said you found yourself naming names when you were giving your presentation in Lockport this past October.
Yeah. I think whenever we think of our hometowns we tend to think of very specific people, with whom you rode on the school bus, who was your next door neighbor you were playing with, who your girlfriend was. It’s always something very specific. John Updike has that in his fiction. He mentions names of people who meant a lot to him. They don’t mean anything to other people though, so it’s hard to evoke it.
What surprises you about the Lockport of today, compared to the Lockport of your childhood or of your memory?
I think what is surprising is that so much is the same. Elsewhere in the United States, there are many things that are changing. In the part of New Jersey where I live, which is quite affluent, near Princeton, [there are] many, many changes all the time.
At the end of the essay, you say that the question, “Do you think that you would be the writer you are today if you’d had a middle-class or wealthy background?” asked by an audience member during your presentation, didn’t seem very Lockportian to you. Why is that?
I've never considered Lockport a place where theoretical, philosophical, or intellectual ideas were much discussed—but maybe I've been mistaken. It was a very welcome surprise.
What do you like about the Princeton area, where you live now?
Princeton University is where I teach, so naturally, it’s sensible for me to be here. It’s a rural, suburban area where I live, about four miles outside Princeton. I can look out my window and see part of a lake, lots of trees. We live on three acres of land. It’s very peaceful here. I can get a lot of work done. And Princeton University is one of the great universities of the world, with a wonderful library and extremely wonderful colleagues and friends who live here. The intellectuals, fellow writers and poets in the area are very concentrated. It’s a wonderful community.
I’ve been here since 1978. I hope to stay here the rest of my life. My husband teaches at the university, as I do, so we’re very settled here. We have a new house. We just moved in. He’s my second husband. My first husband died in February 2008, and I remarried in March 2009. We just have a complete life here.
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Comments (13)
i wonder if ms. oates and other syracuse grads are as haunted by the experience as i am.
Posted by eric lind on March 22,2011 | 01:50 PM
Out of all of the articles I have read the magazine, I have enjoyed yours the most. The reason being: I have not been back to my home (Johnstown,PA) since 1967. I have see pictures of the changes made and so on from using the net, but too go back there would be a dream. One that will never happen. I am disabled, and home bound in Knoxville, TN.
I have lived all over the US, but no place is like home. I miss the smells, the sights (the old movie theaters), places to eat, and the people, "my people" as I call them. I have spent most of my life trying to get back home, only to end up disabled in 92, just when I was getting my chance, that of teaching engineering at the university of Pittsburgh, thus being back home in PA. Living in the east TN is a living hell to me, due to the people and there ways. So far from what I am use to. The worse night mare I have is after dreaming that I am back home, only to get awake living here. The way you wrote your article, was so very perfect to my own feelings.
Sincerely your
Prof. Jake Trexel
Posted by Prof. Jake Trexel on March 24,2010 | 04:22 PM
My first encounter with Joyce Carol Oates came from the shelves of the now discontinued Chatautauqua County Library Bookmobile. The traveling librarian, also an alumni of Syracuse University, saved it for me. Joyce became my favorite author. Reading her descriptions of familiar events, names and places in western New York, Syracuse University, Michigan and Canada is like leafing through family photo albums. I heard her speak at Brockport SUNY graduation in 1982 and at Chautauqua Institution in 2008. The Smithsonian interview reminded me of an earlier one appearing in the BUFFAL NEWS several years ago when she taught a summer school writing course. Her father attended the class and their responses were interesting and revealing. Especially his reply to the question, "How does it feel to be the father of a literary genius?
Posted by FRANK DELLA POSTA, Gowanda,NY on March 20,2010 | 08:22 PM
Having been a high school classmate of Joyce's--in Williamsville, New York, "one of the wealthiest suburbs of the Buffalo metropolitan area"--I can't help but wonder why she never mentions that part of her growing up. Or should I accept that __Broke Heart Blues__ in which she writes of Willowsville High and uses the names of many, many of her classmates as the only acknowledgment she is willing to make of that time of her life?
Posted by Donna Maroni on March 10,2010 | 09:35 AM
Although I mostly grew up in Brooklyn, New York, Ms.Oates' comments about childhood in the 50's evoked many memories for me, especially around the importance of libraries and reading. I still remember rushing to the library the day after I was promoted to the ninth grade to get my Adult library card and be allowed in the "grown-up" section.
Rosanne Levitt
New York City
Posted by Rosanne Levitt on March 9,2010 | 05:09 PM
Your Lockport childhood could have been my Skaneateles childhood. The love of the library, the movies, the amazing freedom that I had as a child to wander and wonder on my own.
Nancy Arthur Hoskins
Author, Artist, Teacher
Posted by Nancy Arthur Hoskins on March 9,2010 | 02:39 PM
I grew up in Lockport NY..My mother's father..George Bush was..her cousin..although I did not know my grandfather..
..grandmother Captola..left him I guess) for my Mr. Glassford..my mom said call him John.. .my real granddad...was a gentle kind man...and my mother and aunt's real father was a cousin to Ms. Oates..I wish we could meet her..especially my girl and I since we have a real strong literature calling..her book is a great recovery ..to Lockport when I walked the streets of Lockport in wee hours of the mornings..in very cold weather..delivering the Courier Express, the Union Sun and Journal, and the Niagara Gazette..we know every street, every family and our library..where we got our first books..she knew Lockport ..she knew every nic and corner I love her books
Posted by Suzanne Resseguie on March 3,2010 | 02:18 AM
The article "Going Home Again" in the March 2010 Smithsonian is absolutely fabulous..... Ms. Oates' life and mine have a great many parallels: I am 72 and grew up on an Upstate NY farm. It was a small, subsistence operation where I had chores. They were real responsibilities and I, too, enjoyed the time alone (bringing in the animals for milking in the evening) when I could THINK. I also went for the first few grades to a one room schoolhouse. It was situated across the country road from our farm. There was no Kindergarten and so I began with first grade, but unlike Ms. Oates, I stayed until the 8th grade; there was no choice. I did ride a school bus from 1951 to 1954, going to Schoharie High School, a 45-min ride on the bus. My choice was that school rather than the one I was supposed to go to because it was a better school. There I was intoduced for the first time to A LIBRARY!!! My folks had read to me and I had a few children's books but I never knew that there was such a thing. The short of it was that I went to library school not far from Lockport, in Geneseo, which is a really hot school now (even though the library school no longer exists. It still lives in the hearts of its graduates.
Thank you, Ms. Oates for a fabulous article.
Sincerely, Dotty Deimel
Posted by Dotty Deimel on February 25,2010 | 01:15 PM
I mistakenly approached her article of Home as if I would hear a different voice. As if she would write in a different, colder style.
I was wrong.
Once again, Oates writes like no other. Her ability to write fiction as if it actually happened and to write this article as if it was one of her short stories, is special.
I very much enjoy reading everything she writes.
Thank you,
Edward Bianchi
Posted by Edward Bianchi on February 24,2010 | 03:32 PM
Lockport has remained the city of my childhood as well. Although my memories reside in the decades of the 60's and 70's, much of what Oates describes wanders through my mind. My sister and I would ride the bus to the city from Newfane for our dance lessons. We were greeted by our grandparents who would give us a ride to our lesson. We were both under 10 at the time and riding alone.....unheard of in this day and age. Later, when we moved to the city, we would spend countless hours at the skating rink on Willow Street or riding our bikes to Joe's Market on Locust St. for that handful of penny candy or a loaf of bread. The canal was always the "path to somewhere", always appearing from time to time as we crossed its many bridges on our way from place to place. It was "just there", and then gone in the winter only to leave a huge open graveyard for old shopping carts, pieces of metal runis, and of course the shining rubble from VandeMark Chemical! While I now live about an hour away, I still return to the city weekly. It is changing...slowly, but much of what remains is like the rock that forms the canal, people who are steadfast in their beliefs, letting the waters of time flow through with little effect.
Posted by GG on February 23,2010 | 01:37 PM
"I've never considered Lockport a place where theoretical, philosophical, or intellectual ideas were much discussed—but maybe I've been mistaken." -- JCO
Yes, Ms. Oates. You have been mistaken.
Posted by TB on February 22,2010 | 08:55 PM
Joyce's comment that she made "I've never considered Lockport a place where theoretical, philosophical, or intellectual ideas were much discussed—but maybe I've been mistaken. It was a very welcome surprise." was taken by the Lockportian as a slap in the face.
When I was a high school student in Lockport in the 1980's, I belonged to an Interfaith youth group that studied current events, discussed social problems & went places to find out all we could about what was going on in the world. We did fundraisers all year to pay for our trips. We went to NYC to study "Guns & Butter" the the Iran/Contra issue, Washington DC to study the Cold War arms race & Boston to study the emerging computer revolution. Maybe Joyce should have spent more time in Lockport over the years so she can see people from there are everything she thinks we are not.
This quote from Aharon Appelfeld sums up what I feel: The writer in western civilization has become not a voice of his tribe, but of his individuality. This is a very narrow minded situation.
Fitting of Ms. Oates?
Posted by Gina Menz on February 22,2010 | 08:02 PM
I would like to know the answers that she gave to the two questions asked by the audience in Lockport in the penultimate paragraph of her article. I am also from Lockport and graduated from Syracuse University the same year she did, but did not know her. DF
Posted by Dudley Few on February 20,2010 | 06:12 PM