Featured Author Dr. Adam Prince Interviewed by Emily Biggs
/Writer and Professor, Dr. Adam Prince, was born and raised in Southern California; he has since lived in New York, South Korea, Arkansas, Nicaragua, Knoxville, Baltimore, and Charleston, Illinois. He received his B.A. from Vassar College, his M.F.A from the University of Arkansas, and a Ph.D. from the University of Tennessee. His award-winning fiction has appeared in The Missouri Review, The Southern Review, and Narrative Magazine, among others. In 2011, Narrative Magazine named him one of the best twenty new writers. He served as the 2012-2013 Tickner Fellow at the Gilman School, and is now the Stokes Visiting Writer at The University of South Alabama. His first book, a short story collection called The Beautiful Wishes of Ugly Men, is available from Black Lawrence Press.
On a stormy night in November, Dr. Prince and I sat down for his interview in his office, located on the second floor of the University of South Alabama’s Humanities Building in Mobile, Alabama. His office, shared with his wife Charlotte Pence, was cozy and inviting despite the unpleasant weather outside. In his carefully structured answers, he shared thoughts about his writing and his love for the work he does. Once the interview concluded, he returned to preparing for his class that he had later that evening.
Interview with Dr. Prince by Emily Biggs
Emily Biggs (EB): The Beautiful Wishes of Ugly Men was published in 2012. Are you in the process of writing something at this time?
Adam Prince (AP): I have published several short stories and poems in various journals. I should have another short story collection done soon, but I’ve also been slogging through a novel. I am doing quite a bit of screenwriting as well.
EB: The Stokes Center for Creative Writing page on the University of South Alabama website, says that you are a visiting writer; why are you considered a visiting writer?
AP- Essentially, they created the role for me when they hired my wife Charlotte Pence to run the Stokes Center for Creative Writing. I would love to have a bigger role, but there just isn’t a position open for a tenure-track creative writing professor at this time. And there’s a lot to be said for just teaching one class per semester. It allows me to devote my time and energy without getting distracted with meetings and so on.
EB- How long have you lived in Mobile?
AP- I have lived here now for about two and a half years. Before that, Charlotte and I lived in Charleston, Illinois. She worked at Eastern Illinois University, and I worked online exclusively. We moved down together for the job. Professor Nathan Poole was hired at the same time. It’s been terrific all coming in together. We have a lot of camaraderie.
EB- As a Creative Writing teacher, what do you hope that your students achieve in your classes?
AP- I want them to understand that creative writing is a craft like anything else. And as a craft, it takes practice. I think a lot of people just getting into writing think it’s magic -- that it has to do with communing with the gods or the muses or something. But writing a story is like building a house; you can’t build a house without any training or process or hard work. Once students understand that, they can decide whether they want to do the hard work or not. And hopefully they can take their ego out of it a little bit more. The whole process works better that way. If they’re in the workshop just waiting to see if the professor and other students think they’re talented, that’s between them and their ego. If you can take that out as much as possible, then class can be about learning the craft.
EB- Do you think, or would you say that your students mature through learning how to write? That they can find their style through writing?
AP- I think some writers have a style that they need to find, but I don’t think that’s true of all writers, especially these days. These days, writers work in a multitude of styles, so I don’t know if “mature” is quite it. I want them to engage in their reading and writing of fiction in a deep way, as real work, rather than belting something out the night before and hoping it goes well. I guess that’s a kind of maturity.
EB- How do you spend your time when you’re not writing or teaching? Or does writing take up a lot of your time?
AP- I write five days a week; I write in the morning as soon as I can. I sit down and I write about forty minutes. I stop to take a quick break then I write another forty minutes. That’s the amount of time I can bring focus and attention to my work. I would do more, but my schedule doesn’t permit it. I’m the visiting writer here at the University, I teach at UCLA extension, and I do freelance editing, so a lot of time is spent juggling all of those things. Also, I have a seven-year old and a very old house. I do a lot of handyman type projects around the house. Other than that, I like meeting friends for beers watching Netflix, and cooking.
EB- Has teaching influenced your writing in any way? Are there stories or ideas from students that inspire you to have ideas for other short stories?
AP- Teaching has influenced my writing only in that it’s increased my trust in the process and made me a little less neurotic about my own work. When I see a student getting distraught about having to cut a scene or getting worried about whether the story is going to work, I can tell that they don’t need to be so distraught about it. There will be another story that’ll work. If they cut a scene, they’re not going to die and the story’s probably going to be better for it. As far as ideas, it’s funny how they work. Often, people will come up to me at parties, or they’ll hear that I’m a writer and they’ll tell me their ideas for a story. A lot of the time they are great ideas for stories but being a good idea for a story is not the same as being a good idea for one of my stories. I can’t control what’s going to capture my interest. It has to connect with me in a deep way and that almost never happens when someone else tells me an idea.
EB- You said that what you write about is not necessarily about an idea that you hear, it’s something that comes to you?
AP- It can come from all different places, but so much can be done from active brainstorming. There will be plenty of times that I just sit down in front of my computer and say “I want to write a story and I don’t have any ideas.” So I just start typing a bunch of ideas. Most of them are stupid or just not interesting to me, but then I’ll stumble across one and I’ll think “yea, you know, I can do that.” Or else I’ll see a situation or hear a scrap of dialogue and something clicks in my head. I used to worry about running out of ideas or not having good enough ideas and now, the problem is that I just don’t have time to write out all of my ideas. I’m not sure why. I think it has something to do with less anxiety about writing.
EB- Are there any topics or genres that you won’t necessarily write about? Are there any that come easy to you?
AP- I’m interested in masculinity and the changing norms of what it is to be a male. I am also interested in desire and its iterations. I don’t have any real ideological problems with any genre, but it’s hard to imagine myself writing a romance novel, for instance. I don’t read them, and I’m just not interested. I’ve always liked fantasy, but I don’t know that I read quite enough of it to write a fantasy novel either. Basically, you have to follow your interests and see where it gets you.
EB- The Beautiful Wishes of Ugly Men has many different themes and content. Were there any stories individually that you had trouble writing or that took longer than others? Were there difficulties tackling any of the content?
AP- All of them. Well, not all of them but almost all of them. So, for instance, “Island of the Lost Boys” is about a guy who’s attracted to young boys. But the content wasn’t the main challenge. The challenge was that I had to figure out how to weave together three different storylines. As far as content goes, I’m interested in stuff that makes my readers squirm a little bit. I like it when I’m in difficult territory. I think it’s a fundamental characteristic of literary fiction that it challenges our assumptions and I’m not interested in writing work that keeps my readers comfortable.
That story came from someone I knew growing up, who lived in my neighborhood and was clearly a pedophile. I was friends with him as a kid, though, I didn’t realize he was a pedophile until after he had moved away. Anyway, that experience brought me close to the character; it brought me empathy to the character that I might not have had otherwise and was a big reason why I wanted to write that story. The way I see it, even people who do terrible things or have terrible desires are still human beings. They struggle with who they are just like the rest of us. I’m interested in that burden and I don’t think empathizing with a person like that, is the same thing as condoning those actions. Now, all that said, the story did take a while to publish for those reasons. There were years and years where no one wanted to publish that story, then suddenly everyone wanted to.
EB- You said above that you had trouble writing almost all of the stories within The Beautiful Wishes of Ugly Men. Could you please elaborate on what you mean?
AP- As high as my standards are for my students’, they’re ten times higher for my own work. I draft and redraft and redraft. “Island of the Lost Boys,” took years and years to write. There is not a single sentence in the finished draft that appeared in the beginning draft. The conflict isn’t the same, the characters aren’t the same, the point of view isn’t the same. The only thing that’s similar is the setting, and that it’s about a pedophile. I just came at it from a certain place that wasn’t quite where I needed to get to; the flash fiction came much more easily; those were written more in bursts. My story “A. Roollette, A. Roollette?” came quickly. Everything else I wrestled with.
EB- As a writer, is there a point when you know a piece of fiction, short story, or poem is completely finished. Is it ever really finished?
AP- That’s where feedback is helpful. Often there’s this preliminary moment or several preliminary moments where I think it’s done, then I send it to people I trust and they say, “I don’t really get this,” or “this isn’t really working.” I do that again and again, until I’m sure that it is all complete. There is kind of a different feeling when I look at something and I know it’s done, but I can’t exactly put my finger on it. It comes from a place more of certainty than of hope, but I know that’s pretty nebulous. I don’t send anything out for publication until I’m certain that it is done. I want work that I’m going to be proud of however many years down the road. There are people who disagree with me about that, who probably publish more than I do, but that’s the way I tend to see it.