The thing that's always puzzled me about the Writing Seminars graduate program (and every writers' workshop in the country, for that matter) is this: Do they actually produce great writers? Rest assured that the med school trains bright students to be successful doctors. Peabody hands out doctorates to some of the greatest soloists and orchestra-players in the world. But how many Chekhovs come out M.F.A. programs? Is the next generation of Hemingways teaching IFP, or are they somewhere in Europe, sipping absinthe and watching bullfights?
Well, the Hopkins department has some monstrous talent, for sure, but for Tristan Davies, Senior Lecturer in the Writing Seminars, cracking the literary market isn't really the point. "If writing well, if teaching people to write well -- if those are transferrable skills, then I feel like it's my job to teach them," he says.
Fortunately, being a teacher has worked out well for Professor Davies, whose first collection of stories, Cake, will be published later this month by the JHU Press. Teaching has provided him with the opportunity to immerse himself in the craft of fiction-writing. "[Writing and teaching] are separate to a degree," he says, "but as a teacher I have to constantly be thinking about the right way of doing things. It's great because when I'm not writing, I have an excuse to always be thinking about writing."
And so after reading Cake, one must immediately hope that Davies' skills are transferrable, because if so, then the next generation of Hopkins writers will be the cream of the crop. The book is innovative, engaging, and paints vividly the images of daily life that would, in the words of an another, be without color.
Cake is a compilation of stories that were written between 1997 and the last few days of a publishing deadline. Many of the stories are nontraditional in form. "Personals" is without any form of recognizable narrative: it is told in the lines of personal ads in a newspaper. "Talent Show" is sort of a Sliding Doors look at the many possible ways one high school girl's life could turn out, with each new paragraph reinventing the main character and beginning with the line, "She hates herself ... "
The scope of Cake's styles is so broad that each story is in itself a template. The result is that no single form comes through as a signature style; rather, Cake is a testament to Davies's versatility. "[My style] is constantly changing," he says. "Something I've always encouraged in my Forms of Fiction classes is to work in lesser-known formative genres, and I've come to practice what I preach. There's more than one way to write a story and there needn't be a signature."
Davies doesn't seem to be content to simply write a good story, though. "Everyone's desire is to make a lasting impression on expanding the boundaries of what we know as fiction. I think [fiction] is a viable form of communication, not just a form of entertainment." And with the praise that his debut has already garnered, a lasting impression is the last thing Davies should be worried about. In his jacket-cover praise, fellow Hopkins professor Stephen Dixon drops such lofty names as John Cheever, Evelyn Waugh, and F. Scott Fitzgerald as points of comparison.
"I think what Steve meant about the Cheever reverence was that I have a lot of stories here -- like "Snowflakes" for instance -- that are about young couples with children who have a knowledge of fine wines, going to various dinner parties ... " In many of the stories that are set in Baltimore, Davies invents an upper-crust neighborhood called "Cricket Hill" which brings to mind Cheever's "Shady Hill" of New York City.
Imagined or real, the settings of Davies' stories are as important and as real as the characters that live in them. Places where he has lived, namely San Francisco and Baltimore, provide the backdrop for most of the tales, and Davies' powerful sense of place shapes each storyline and gives grounding to the less traditional pieces. It's not surprising, however, because a good sense of place comes from singular experiences, and Davies has no shortage.
After graduating from Brown, Davies spent four days enrolled in the San Francisco St. film studies program. "I was conceived in San Francisco, and I had a bizarre romantic notion that moving there would be a fit. At the time, San Francisco was supposed to be the alternative L.A.," but the experience didn't measure up to his expectations. "The film program was run by these two old guys who looked like a couple of failed porn directors, and the class was made up of nine extraordinarily good-looking women and me. One of them was even a Raiders cheerleader." He knew it was time to check out, he says, when an instructor showed ten minutes of a 1950's educational science film before realizing that it wasn't Fritz Lang's Man on the Moon.
Davies made his way back to the East Coast, determined to go to Georgetown law school. But upon the urging of one of his undergraduate professors, he made a chance stop to interview at Hopkins. There he met Stephen Dixon, a writer whose work he had been following in the San Francisco Press. Dixon brought him to the Gilman coffee lounge, which was at the time, "a folding table and two burners, manned by a smart-ass student." Over a 25 cent cup of coffee, Dixon managed to convince Davies to scrap Georgetown and enroll at in Hopkins writers' workshop instead.
The rest is history. Since then, Davies has risen through the ranks of "Super-TA" (an actual distinction) to become an awarding winning professor and Senior Lecturer. However, he is quick to point out that his ascent to the top ranks of the department and into the hearts of his students wasn't achieved alone. He credits his colleagues for giving him inspiration and insight, particularly in the project of getting Cake off the ground.
"John Irwin made many valuable suggestions and Jean McGarry went above and beyond. We went back and forth with the stories for eight months. She is an incredible editor. And Stephen Dixon is my hero, my personal hero. I really do believe he is one of the most important writers of the 21st century."
Any slice of Cake makes it clear that years of working amongst such bright literary stars certainly can't hurt. Just pick a page at random and get clever turns of phrase and delicate constructions like, "the evening felt as fragile as fresh ice on a pond," or the mind-bending metaphor, "You: the gravistar, a hypothetical alternative to the black hole All matter drawn toward it is pinged outward. Inside is a homogenous vacuum that might contain its own matter. Indeed, our entire universe may be contained within some unimaginably large gravistar, itself part of another universe beyond our comprehension."
Up until last year, Davies organized the Writing Seminars reading series, which brings authors to campus to read from their published works. This year, however, instead of introducing the literati, Davies will be one of them. At six p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 23 in Mudd Hall, he will give a reading of his short fiction from Cake.
However, the celebrity that comes with entering the ranks of published authordom hasn't changed him much. Sure, he wears sport jackets with elbow patches on them and writes with a fountain pen, but he has always done that. He does look forward to being treated to the traditional post-reading Ketel One martini straight up, and following a recent reading in Pennsylvania, was the lucky benefactor of a B.Y.O.B Mexican food dinner at a strip mall restaurant.
These sorts of perks pale in comparison to what is the ultimate reward for any published writer: a warm hometown reception. Davies says he felt cool for the first time ever in his life after reading the glowing review of Cake in this month's issue of Baltimore magazine. The article hails him as, "possibly one of the best short story writers in contemporary literature." Well Baltimore magazine, we see your lofty praise and raise you one. Forget today, Tristan Davies is the best short story writers ever. He taught us everything we know.
Cake will be on sale in bookstores everywhere starting this week. Check out his reading later this month in Mudd Hall auditorium on Thursday Oct. 23.
