• 
• 

Sailing with Stuart Dybek

Superstar of short stories, Stuart Dybek’s writing winds through the neighborhoods of Chicago, traveling through a lifetime and twirling through the imagination. Raised in Little Village and Pilsen, 65-year-old Dybek, author of the acclaimed I Sailed With Magellan and The Coast of Chicago, was recently chosen for a MacArthur Fellowship—the “Genius Award”—and in the same week, received the 2007 Rea Award for the Short Story. With $530,000 all but in the bank and life a little more hectic, Dybek, a distinguished writer in residence at Northwestern University, shared his thoughts on creativity.

Do you think creativity is learned, or is it innate?
It’s unmistakably innate. I think it’s also learned. We’re tool-using animals in that the use of various tools not only facilitates and frees the use of creativity, but ultimately, the border between craft and imagination disappears.

What does that mean, the border disappears?
Let’s use any number of crafts. One of the hallmarks of creative thinking is the creation of images. They can be oral images, as in music. They can be images in paintings, writing, poems [and] telling a story. Everybody has access to the most vivid imagery in their dreams, whether they’re “creative” or not. But unless finally somebody acquires the craft of getting those images outside of themselves into the world, whether it’s cave drawings or performances on the piano or saxophone or painting or writing, that aspect of creativity needs communication to complete itself. After a while, when somebody has worked at a craft for a long time and has become a master pianist or master painter, it’s hard to distinguish between that innate creative thought and the creative work that’s available to everyone else. What I’m fumbling to say [William Butler] Yeats said. There’s a great line, “How can we know the dancer from the dance?”

What are some misconceptions about creativity? 
One I’ve noticed over the years is that schools, magazines, the world in general, pay homage to creativity or to the imagination, lip service to it, but if you actually explore these institutions, they so often seem to snuff it out rather than promote it. What genius came up with the notion that kids 6 and 7 years old should sit in big, long rows and work at workbooks? I couldn’t think of anything that snuffs out creativity any faster than that. In a way, individual creativity is always at war with this kind of regimented discipline that either is necessary or seems to be necessary to the people who designed things like school systems.

What about creativity at universities?
There are so many different kinds of levels of intelligence that human beings have access to. The university, often for very good reasons, really is only interested in certain kinds of intelligence, and frequently, those are the kinds of intelligence that can be tested. Creativity expresses itself through doing and making and imagining, and it’s really hard to create a test for imagining. Frequently, what creativity is doing is going beyond the accepted answer.

How do you compare your experiences with students to your experience as a student?
I’m going to be really utterly frank in answering your question. A lot of my teaching comes not by emulating ways that I was taught but by defining myself against them. Now that does not apply to my experience at University of Iowa. I found that to be a wonderfully creative atmosphere.
Did you feel creative as a student? I felt I was a lousy student. I felt that there was something numbing, something dull, about the way I was being educated. I wasn’t confident enough or clear enough about myself. It wasn’t that I was right and everybody was wrong—it was that I was feeling a complex set of feelings. Part of what I was feeling was my own immaturity and wildness and the fact that I wasn’t studious, but what I was also feeling was that there were so many other things far more interesting outside the classroom.

Like what?
One summer, between my junior and senior year in high school, when I turned 16, I got a job in a jazz records store under the El on Wabash in downtown Chicago, called Seymour’s Jazz Records. And in all my life, I never had a more educational experience than working at that record store that summer, where I listened, as you only can when you’re 16, to music 10 hours a day, six days a week. I came out of that experience just resonating music. Music is a way of thinking, and when I went back to high  school, what was going on in the classroom seemed so dull.

I read that you use music as inspiration. How does music help you write? 
One of the things that happens with creativity [is that] we’re frequently worried about a kind of censorship. There’s a certain kind of pernicious censorship, which is the censorship each and every person imposes on themselves. It’s our inhibitions, but also social inhibitions. One of the things my students often talk about is there are a lot of subjects that they don’t want to write about because they’re scared what their peer group is going to think about them. One of the things that music does for me, when I get into that kind of semi-trance that music initiates, [is] I find that those censors open up. I can get to places faster and feel more at ease.

Like daydreaming? 
We’re conditioned not to daydream. If you call somebody a daydreamer, that’s not necessarily a positive thing. My father used to tell me I was a daydreamer, and it was really negative. It meant you weren’t practical, you’re not paying attention to the things in life you need to pay attention to. Writing and creative activity really is in fact about a kind of daydreaming, but that means on some level you have to give yourself permission to do that daydreaming.

Who have been your mentors?
All the great musicians I’ve listened to. All the great painters I’ve looked at. The fabulous photographers, the filmmakers, the writers that I stayed up as a kid with a flashlight reading when I was supposed to be sleeping.
In that sense, a lot of people who never knew they were your mentors. A hero of mine has always been Studs Terkel. When Saul Bellow was alive, he was always very kind to me. I know I got one of my earlier awards thanks to Bellow. He was a huge example for me—not one that I’ll ever live up to.

When and where do you like to write?
If I could will it, I’d like to be a morning person, somebody who gets up at 5 a.m. and writes. I’ve never been able to do it.

I read that you’d like to finish four books you’ve been writing. Is it difficult juggling different stories in your mind? 
More ideas occur to me than I could ever really finish. But you know from past experience that you’ve got to write them all down. I call those “poet’s habits” because most poets usually have more than one poem going on. But when you take those habits and put them in fiction, they’re not exactly the best habits for fiction.

Is it fascinating to look at the city today and compare it to the Chicago of your youth?
I don’t know how often I do that actually. There’s a French philosopher, [Henri] Bergson, who’s main fascination was with time, and one of the things that interested him was how many different kinds of time there are in a human being at any given moment. When you ask me about the past and present in Chicago, to me it’s all mixed up. Even though you think of the past as being over, it isn’t. It’s ongoing.

What is the greatest challenge of a writer?
To create life on the page.

Published: October 09, 2007

Alternative content