A Conversation with Jane Smiley

• Main Author: Agee, Jonis
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln 2001
• Subjects: Other International and Area Studies; Greenland; Dickens; Pulitzer; greenlander*
• Online Access: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly/2180; https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/greatplainsquarterly/article/3180/viewcontent/Agee___Smiley.pdf

JANE SMILEY: LOCATION AND A GEOGRAPHER OF LOVE In her essay on place, Eudora Welty points out that "Henry James once said there isn't any difference between 'the English novel' and 'the American novel,' since there are only two kinds of novels at all: the good and the bad." Then Welty responds to him stating that for good novels "fiction is all bound up in the local. The internal reason for that is surely that feelings are bound up in place . The truth is, fiction depends for its life on place. Location is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of 'What happened? Who's here? Whose coming?'-and that is the heart's field."! In fact, the novelist shares the real estate agent's mantra: location, location, location. Novelist Jane Smiley writes with great authority of people whose lives are so profoundly connected to place that they must ultimately yield to their heart's purposes. Thus place is an agency of personal revelation. As the author of A Thousand Acres, in fact, Smiley has been credited with laying the major foundation piece for the Renaissance, the flowering, in the literature of the North American heartland that has occurred over the past fifteen years. Jane Smiley is the author of over ten major works of fiction, including her celebrated first novel Barn Blind, The Age of Grief, The Greenlanders, Ordinary Love and Good Will, A Thousand Acres, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992, Moo, The All-True Travels and Adventures of Liddie Newton, and Horse Heaven. She has also written essays for magazines such as Vogue, The New Yorker, Practical Horseman, Harper's, The New York Times Magazine and The New York Times travel section, US News, Victoria, Mirabella, Allure, The Nation, and many others. She has written on politics, farming, horse training, child-rearing, literature, impulse buying, Barbie, marriage, Monica Lewinsky, and even the trials and tribulations of getting dressed. She is a Vassar graduate and holds an M.F.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. She taught at Iowa State University ...