The academy is an incredibly sheltered world, and I do think it's important for writers to get out from under that shelter, at least for a while, to see what the world looks like from outside it.
Garth GreenwellI think history is only ever invisible when it abets your sense of self, your desires, your ambitions, when it carries your life along in a kind of frictionless way.
Garth GreenwellWhen I took my first poetry class, I felt that I could understand the relationships between words and the formal qualities of language in a way I would never understand music.
Garth GreenwellI realized that there was an intellectual content in music, a kind of thinking, that I would never be able to hear.
Garth GreenwellI guess I've done a lot of different kinds of performing at various times - opera singing, poetry reading, not least high school teaching - and I do enjoy it, at least sometimes. But I find it incredibly anxiety-producing and exhausting. Privacy is more congenial, and I go a little crazy if I can't spend a big chunk of every day, or almost every day, alone. Certainly I have to be alone to write.
Garth GreenwellI'm still primarily interested in observing as closely as possible the shifting weather between people. I think the master of this sort of thing, and a writer who has meant a great deal to me, is Henry James: there's a magical way that he has of turning the slightest gesture into a whole world of drama and feeling.
Garth Greenwell