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"I never saw further than the end of a scene": Garth Greenwell, Julie Buntin and Gabe Habash on Writing
This month on WMFA, a podcast where writers talk writing
I started WMFA to talk with other writers about writing: to hear, in the middle of what can be such a lonely endeavor, what someone else is thinking about their work. Every conversation has left me energized in different ways: ideas, inspirations, perspectives. Sometimes these gifts are new, fresh approaches that blow dust off an old problem or tired pattern of thought; sometimes they’re familiar, and then the familiarity itself is a salve, a reminder that the worries, fears and doubts that plague one writer usually plague the rest of us, too.
Here’s a sneak peek at what you’ll hear from this month’s guests. Visit
“It’s pretty mysterious to me, I don’t fully understand. When I went to Bulgaria, I finished a manuscript of poems and put it away and thought I would not write for a while, that I would let the will fill back up. It was a surprise to me when I started hearing sentences that I knew were not broken into lines.
Bulgaria was key to it, and the peculiar relationship you have to your own language in a place where you’re speaking another language. But I also think it was a process that began years earlier when I began to work as a high school teacher. Going from the solitude of academic work to being thrust into this intricate relationship with 70 adolescents. I became really interested in their lives, which means I became really interested in their stories. High school teaching shifted me from a more purely lyrical or abstract way of approaching literature to a more narrative way of approaching literature, and a real interest in other people’s lives.
“The book really begins with place, Bulgaria and the bathrooms beneath the National Palace of Culture where the novel begins—which is a real place in Sofia, Sofia’s most notorious cruising place, where gay men have sex with one another. I was fascinated by that place, I was fascinated by the people I met there, I was fascinated by the ways in which the codes of cruising in Bulgaria in 2009 or 2010 were the same as the codes of cruising I learned in public parks in Kentucky in the 1990s. As I got to know people in this community and this cruising place, I was fascinated by the ways in which their stories reminded me of the stories of the first gay men I met in Kentucky.”
“I did not see very far ahead as I was writing the book. I wrote it sentence by sentence, I never saw further than the end of a scene. Really, I was thinking of it as writing sentences. I felt like I was just feeling my forward sentence by sentence, really in the dark.”
“The first year I taught high school, I didn’t write a word. And I remember at the end of that second semester just being like, whoa: If I don’t do something, I’m never gonna write again. I found that I was too exhausted after teaching, so it was the only possibility. And it did mean making some sacrifices. I was really committing to teaching and I was really committed to keeping those two hours, and that was all I had room for.”
The opening page has—it’s not the actual opening, but the original opening was his line that’s now in the third or fourth paragraph on the first paragraph about internal age. That was the first thing I thought of. He says, ‘I believe in wrestling, I believe in the United States and I am a motherfucking astronaut.’ That was maybe one of the first things.”
Courtney Balestier's writing has appeared in The New Yorker online, Lucky Peach, the New York Times, Oxford American, New York, and Wired. She has been anthologized in Cornbread Nation 7: The Best of Southern Food Writing and nominated for a James Beard Foundation Journalism Award and a Pushcart Prize. She is a writing editorial board member of Looking at Appalachia. A native West Virginian, she is at work on a novel about identity, class and the Appalachian "Hillbilly Highway" migration to Detroit, where she is currently based. She also hosts the writing podcast WMFA.
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