An Interview with Larry Woiwode on “Words for Readers and Writers”

Larry Woiwode is an American original, a national treasure, a man of letters. His first novel, What I’m Going to Do, I Think (1969) was awarded the William Faulkner Foundation Award for the “best first novel of 1969. His next book, Beyond the Bedroom Wall, sold over a million copies and was a finalist for  the National Book Award and the Book Critics Circle Award. He became a believer during the writing of this novel, and eventually embraced the Reformed understanding of the Christian faith.

In this fascinating new interview with Books & Culture editor John Wilson asks Woiwode about his new book, Words for Readers and Writers: Spirit-Pooled Dialogues, a collection of 21 essays that he especially hopes will instruct and encourage young writers.

You can read online the introduction, table of contents, and two of the essays (“Using Words, a Continual Spiritual Exercise” and “Getting Words Plain Right to Publish”).

“Few writers can match Larry Woiwode for craft and care. Sentence by beautiful sentence he traces the lineaments of thought, feeling, and experience. He inhabits the roles that life has given him, as writer and critic, father and husband, and Christian, with a constant difficult grace. I admire his writing deeply; it is always gratifying to be in its presence.”

—Alan Jacobs, Clyde S. Kilby Professor of English, Wheaton College

“A book on craft, yes, but more a book on living, Larry Woiwode’s Words for Readers and Writers in my library sits between Flannery O’Connor’s Mystery & Manners and John Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist. Not since O’Connor has a writer put the reader in such comfortable and uncomfortable places at the same time.”

—G. W. Hawkes, Professor of English, co-director of Creative Writing, Lycoming College; author, Spies in the Blue Smoke and Playing out of the Deep Woods

“The word ‘words’ and the name ‘Woiwode’ are only similar sounding but are practically synonymous. Who better to parse the subject of words than Larry Woiwode, one of our country’s ultimate wordsmiths?”

—John L. Moore, author, The Breaking of Ezra Riley, Take the Reins, and Bitter Roots

“I knew that I was in for a treat the moment I looked at the table of contents, which reads like a tempting menu of topics. When I started to read the essays I was captivated by the energy of Woiwode’s mind and even more by how widely read and broadly informed he is. To read this book is to receive a liberal education. I believe that this is one of Woiwode’s best books.”

—Leland Ryken, Professor of English, Wheaton College

“In Words for Readers and Writers, Larry Woiwode—one of our most compelling and important contemporary voices—illuminates his life and his experience as a writer-of-faith, as a writer within whom and within whose works a profound Christian belief resides. In these essays and interviews, Woiwode takes us into his interior life, offering artful meditations on the holy acts of reading and writing. Woiwode explores what it means to be a writer-in-Christ, to celebrate the durability and holiness of language, to work at that place where the imagination and the soul intersect and flower. We should listen earnestly to what Woiwode has to say.”

—Gregory L. Morris, Professor of American Literature, Penn State Erie; author, A World of Order and Light and Talking Up a Storm

“Why do you write? Where does it come from? What sort of life is it, anyway? We badger our writers with those questions certain that living that close to fire must surely have taught them something. Woiwode has been asked those questions many times, over the years, and this volume collects a vigorous, various set of answers. While settings and interlocutors shift, Woiwode’s core insight, quietly returned to, remains always the same. What is writing but faith expressing itself through love?—giving yourself over to that first stab of insight, spending yourself prodigiously for others, certain that the one who calls you has already given you all things. One can learn much here about reading and writing, but one can learn even more what it means to believe.”

—Thomas Gardner, Alumni Distinguished Professor of English, Virginia Tech; author, John in the Company of Poets: The Gospel in Literary Imagination