Peter Bailey, English
Interviewed by Kendra Stasko
Kendra: What kind of writing do you ask your students to do?
Bailey: If I teach a First-Year Program which I've done for nine years, that's different. But in my fiction writing courses, it's all fiction writing. It tends to be more in the direction of formal rather than informal.
K: What are your expectations of a paper/writer?
B: Part of it is to interest me or interest the reader. If the writer is having a good time doing what she's doing, it's going to work. If not, it's going to be obvious and therefore it's going to be as hard for me to get through it as it was hard for the writer to write it. That's the most important thing to me is getting people writing things that they really want to write. If the writer is engaged, the reader will get engaged. I really get excited when he/she is writing a story that they really get excited about. That's wonderful. That's what the point is.
K: Do you believe in a specific writing process? Do you have a specific writing process you go through?
B: Yes, and actually in 310 one of my requirements is you have to write one hour a day five days a week. The idea is to get your mind trained to the idea of "OK, this is writing time. OK, I've got to produce writing stuff." It's like when we exercise before playing hockey: you're telling your body that you're getting ready for this exertion, and it seems to me your mind can work the same way. That's the only thing I've got because I believe we all work differently. They can free write but they're not supposed to write some other paper during that period. It's about writing fiction or just free writing, and writing down private things that they would never show anybody. So I impose that on students; some of them don't really like it that much, but that's the only process I know. You work differently than I do. Everybody works differently.
K: Would you say that you're a multi-drafter or a single drafter?
B: Endless revision. Writing is nothing for me but revision.
K: Could you tell me about a typical assignment you would assign? What's your favorite assignment to give out?
B: I'm not sure. The tight plot I've been doing for a very long time, and I guess I'm becoming convinced--I've talked to a couple of more students about it this week--that they really think it was a good thing to do, that it really forced them to go in a direction that have never gone before. So creating a Twilight Zone plot would definitely be one of them. I guess my answer to that would be you would have to look over the whole course because the assignments are supposed to be moving your mind in different ways. They start from different assumptions and you have to do different things. It's the variety to me that is important. Any one by itself, yeah, you hope it's good. You hope it helps people develop certain tendencies but it's only the aggregate, it's only the way they bounce off each other. It's more about the intersections and juxtapositions, because any assignment by itself is never going to do much. It's the whole semester.