The Harvard Extension School Newsletter            Spring 2005

Four writers find truth in fiction

Every Monday evening, writer and instructor Joan Leegant explores the creative process with her CREA E-50 Intermediate Fiction Writing students, encouraging them to contemplate the elements of a good short story or gripping novel. While discussing issues of character, plot, and truth in fiction, her students draw on a wealth of life experience. "The class has an unusually large number of students with advanced degrees," she says. In fact, the class roster includes a psychiatrist, a Harvard Medical School researcher and instructor, two lawyers, a consultant for the MBTA, a development officer, a human resources officer, a journalist, and a graphic artist. "All of them seem quite driven to write fiction despite having invested significantly in other fields," she says. "The Extension School is a real godsend for people like this." Here, four students share their new love for fiction writing and its relationship to their "day jobs."

Dealmaker to dreammaker

Before becoming a fledgling fiction writer, Lauren Norton was a corporate attorney for 20 years, one who rose to partner and a seven-figure income in a white-glove firm in downtown Boston. After graduating from Harvard College with a degree in fine arts and working as a paralegal in a large firm in Baltimore, Norton decided to take her analytical and communication skills to law school and on to a career in business law. "I worked on billion-dollar transactions, buying and selling companies, including Simmons Mattress, Harry Winston, and Riddell Sports," she says. "Almost all the deals on which I worked were centered in New York, and I worked with the very best in the field."

But something was missing. Norton realized her greatest accomplishment during these years was making money. She had little time to pursue other interests, and she wondered how her own voice would sound were she not hired to speak for clients every day. "I felt that I had a lot to say and no way to express it," she says.

After reflection, Norton resigned her partnership and enrolled in a beginning fiction writing class at Harvard Extension. She began carrying a notebook everywhere, jotting down observations wherever she went. She began to avoid the passive voice. "In business, no one ever does anything to anyone else. Things are and things happen." The second challenge was to curb the analysis. "Writing with more of a gestalt and more of a dreamlike effect is a challenge and a goal. And, being new at something when I have been an expert, and an experienced expert for a long time, has been a transition."

In only five months, Norton has written ten short stories, submitted one for publication, and prepared three others for submission. "I haven't published, but I also haven't been rejected yet!" says Norton. "I am committed to being a writer, but right now I'm 'just writing.'"

Bihar to Boston

Dr. Jaya Kumar was born in Bihar, the poorest state in India, and grew up in Bombay, New Delhi, Singapore, and Indonesia. "When I was barely five, my father took away my picture book and gave me my first Enid Blyton," she says. "I could not stop reading fiction after that. What also helped at the time was that my school in Singapore made us write one or two book reviews a week. I was still five years old!"

But Kumar is multitalented, and science won out in her quest for a satisfying career. A lecturer on biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology at Harvard Medical School, during the day she dons a lab coat, conducts research, and teaches medical students. Over the years, however, literature has exercised its influence. "Reading fiction was my first love," says Kumar. "Wanting to write it was always at the back of my mind. Unfortunately, after high school I never had the time to do any real writing, other than a paragraph or two."

Kumar took her first writing class at Harvard Extension last fall. "It was the best thing I could have done for myself," she says. She began carving out an hour in the morning and, on good days, another hour in the evening for writing. Her first teacher, Julie Anne McNary, encouraged her to observe the world with special care. "I really do look at the world differently now," she says. "But more than that, I see fiction as an opportunity to 'take the lid off' of people and situations--to look beyond the surface and imagine what is going on inside. Scientific writing entails the succinct and precise presentation of findings. Fiction writing, on the other hand, demands making things up. To me these opposing forces provide the perfect balance."

The psychiatrist

Dr. Glenn Skwerer has practiced psychiatry since 1993, treating adolescents, adults, and geriatric patients in hospitals and outpatient clinics and in private practice. But lately he's been nurturing the storyteller within. "Over the past few years I've written two film scripts for fun," he says. "I only started writing proper fiction, in complete sentences and paragraphs, during the past few months."

How do his two worlds intersect? "Psychiatric diagnosis does rely more heavily on observation than most other specialties in medicine," Skwerer says. "It's not clear to me, though, that the actual practice of psychiatry exercises whatever muscle in the brain is involved in writing fiction. Likewise, psychiatrists probably hear more stories and more intimate detail than other doctors, but I think anyone who contemplates his own life, listens to his friends, and reads would come up with just as much raw material. I can't think of too many psychiatrists writing good fiction. I can think of a few who write bad fiction."

Since psychiatrists are accustomed to analysis and introspection, it's little surprise when Skwerer quotes Richard Yates, one of his favorite authors: "The facts of fiction are rarely autobiographical, but the emotions are always autobiographical." In writing, Skwerer doesn't attempt to screen out his own experiences. To him, the interior life is of the greatest interest in a work of fiction. This belief is related to his disappointment in the direction of psychiatry in recent years. "The interior life has been all but washed out of professional psychiatry," he says. "Today psychiatry consists of dispensing pills. The interior life, like the psychiatric specialty, has been marginalized."

Thus, for Skwerer, the truth lies in fiction, and the great writers who inhabit and create this realm--Yates and Graham Greene among them--are the heroes of literature who fight the good fight, a rearguard action in a coarsening culture.

The journalist

Natasha ("Tasha") Hunter, assistant editor of the University employee publication The Resource, grew up in a mill town in rural Maine but soon discovered that she had a talent for languages and an urge to see the world. During college she made her first of three trips to Russia to work in a children's home and visit St. Petersburg.

"Even though I was a Russian and comparative literature major, I expected Russia to be another world from the one I had known," she says. But she discovered it was filled with the same mundane details of human existence--human dramas, relationships, and struggles. Hunter would return to eastern Europe to write of the experience of Bosnian Muslims in the wake of 9/11--research funded by the German Marshall Fund and published as one of 20 articles she wrote as a reporter for The American Prospect.

As Hunter pursued journalism, she also indulged her love of reading and writing fiction. "I've been interested in fiction since I was in junior high school, probably, and have 20 years of various attempts (largely failed) shoved in various drawers to show for it." But the two kinds of writing remain distinct in her mind. "Journalism is very focused on facts--you don't get to make anything up. You report on things in the world, and you rely on your observation, on data, and on what other people tell you. Fiction is reporting on things in your head, which means there's a lot more room for 'because I said so.' There are still issues of fact and accuracy, since you want to be a credible narrator, but there's a lot more play, in both senses of the word: flexibility and fun."

Like her classmates, Hunter praises her teacher, Leegant, for challenging each student to make a commitment. "I have carried a notepad around since I was 13, but now I have the motivation to transform those notes into coherent narratives." Fiction, Leegant's class is finding, is truth, built on the facts and feelings of daily life, with memory, dreams, and free invention thrown in.

Introduction to Fiction Writing is offered during both the fall and spring semesters.

-- Christopher Queen