Well-regarded Phillip Lopate is fixture at Summer Writers Institute

(Reprinted from The Daily Gazette, July 24, 2007)

By Bill Buell

Don’t try to pigeonhole Phillip Lopate. Novelist, memoirist, essayist, poet and purveyor of nonfiction, Lopate is a writer, and he sees no reason to limit himself to any particular category.

“I want to do it all,” said Lopate, a writing professor at Hofstra University and a published author since 1974. “I am a person of letters, and I don’t feel the need to stick with one genre.”

As much as he relishes writing, Lopate also enjoys sharing his knowledge of the craft with others. When he’s not busy at Hofstra, he teaches summer courses at Bennington College in Vermont and works with master of fine arts graduate students at Columbia University.

He also has become something of a regular contributor at the New York State Summer Writers Institute at Skidmore College. On Friday, he will lead a panel discussion on “Thinking About Creative Nonfiction,” at 8 p.m. at Palamountain Hall’s David Auditorium.

“I like teaching and I like the psychology of it,” said Lopate. “I would develop cabin fever if I just wrote. I don’t want to be alone. I enjoy meeting people from different backgrounds, some who are very different from me, and seeing if I can help them do better work. Teaching is kind of a performance, just like writing. You get up in front of people and they expect you to say something intelligent.”

Back for more

Writers—those already published and those who aspire to see their work in print—have been listening to Lopate speak intelligently about the craft for years now. During the Summer Writers Institute at Skidmore, he is easily the most popular member of the faculty, according to Bob Boyers, who is director of the summer institute, an English professor at Skidmore and editor of Salmagundi, a quarterly journal that focuses on humanities and social sciences.

“His workshops attract a great number of people, and we could easily fill his class with three or four times the number of people that are enrolled,” said Boyers. “He’s such an effective and attractive teacher that a large proportion of people who come to study with him during the summer keep on coming back each year.”

Lopate was born in Brooklyn in 1943, graduated from Columbia University in 1964, and immediately set about to write the great American novel. It didn’t quite happen.

“I was fresh out of college, I was just married, and I took all of our wedding gifts, cashed them in and moved to Spain,” remembered Lopate. “I wrote the great American unpublished novel. It was just too juvenile. I was learning on the job.”

Lopate spent some time ghostwriting and working with children in an antipoverty program, and also went back to school, getting a doctorate from the Union Graduate School in 1979.

“In those days, there was this whole ethos thing about getting out in the world and learning a trade,” said Lopate. “There also weren’t that many writing schools, and by the time I wanted to get my Ph.D., I decided it was easier to get it using some life experience.”

In 1975, Lopate’s book, Being with Children, about his experiences working in schools, was published by Doubleday, and in 1981 his personal essay, Bachelorhood, was published by Little, Brown. He continued to write and began teaching creative writing at Fordham University. He was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts grants and two New York Foundation for the Arts grants. Being with Children and Bachelorhood each won prizes, and his book of essays entitled Portrait of My Body was a finalist for the PEN Award.

The Art of the Personal Essay, published by Doubleday-Anchor in 1994, helped Lopate establish the reputation as one of the best memoirists in the field at a time when the genre seemed to be exploding.

“The fact that there’s a human being behind every book is very appealing,” said Lopate, “and it’s interesting and very personal to make a connection with someone’s life story. All the daytime talk shows like ‘Oprah’ have emphasized that there are stages in a person’s life. So I think the popularity of the memoir is feeding into that. I don’t see anything wrong with it. It’s a very venerable literary genre. It’s been around a long time, because people are always trying to make sense of their lives.”

Lopate finds himself looking forward to his summer visit to Skidmore for a variety of reasons, including opportunities to play tennis and make an occasional trip to Saratoga Race Course. Mostly, however, it’s for the writing, and while his students may feel lucky to have him, the feeling is mutual.

“I generally get very good students up there, and many of them are people with wonderful life experiences,” said Lopate. “With the students up there, the faculty, and Bob and Peg Boyer running the program, it makes us all feel pretty terrific. They bring in great visiting writers so you feel like you’re as close to the center of the writing universe as you can be. It’s always a great experience for me.”

Summer tradition

The monthlong program is run under the joint auspices of Skidmore College and the New York State Writers Institute, formed by Pulitzer Prize-winning author William Kennedy in 1984. The summer institute at Skidmore was created three years later.

“We realized from the get-go that the whole idea of a summer program was very valuable,” said Kennedy, who is working on another novel as well as a play. “We’ve had some wonderful teachers right from the start, and Phillip is a notable teacher and a wonderful essayist who’s been coming for years now. He’s a very valuable part of what is a star-studded program.”

Like Lopate, Kennedy enjoys the experience of being around other writers and sharing ideas.

“There is a great camaraderie among the writers, and I feel it’s very helpful to me and something I certainly profit from,” said Kennedy, who won his Pulitzer in 1978 for his novel Ironweed. “We’re all still in a learning process, and there are obviously other great writing programs around the country, but the opportunity students have to intersect with the writers we bring together here is I think unparalleled.”

As much as Lopate enjoys writing and reading, don’t be surprised if you catch him in a local movie theater. His most recent book, published last year, is American Movie Critics. “It’s an anthology of American movie critiques from the silent film period through today,” said Lopate. “I put together what I regard as the best film criticism written by Americans since the medium began. Reading is still probably a bit closer to me, but there are times when all I want to do is put down a book and go see a movie.”

Reading helps writing

For those who won’t be able to catch Lopate this summer at Skidmore, he does offer this bit of advice for aspiring writers, particularly those who may be struggling with the craft.

“I would tell people to read more,” he said. “They’ll never be lonely as long as they can read a book, and if they read 20,000 books it may reconfigure their brain. I think saturation reading is a very good technique for becoming a better writer.”

©2007 The Daily Gazette