Author Andrea Barrett '74 says that she does not know
how to talk without telling stories, so in a lecture in
the Nott Memorial on Sept. 29, Barrett did what she does
best — she told stories.
Barrett, the 1996 winner of the National Book Award
for fiction for her collection Ship Fever and Other
Stories, presented ideas about arctic exploration
stemming from research for her new book.
Using the metaphor of the stories of northern
explorers she encountered in her research, Barrett
addressed our human explorations as writers, artists,
scientists, scholars, and students. Barrett juxtaposed
several arctic expeditions with differing goals but
similar successes, suggesting that the adventures we take
on, whatever they might be, sometimes are very different
in scope but equally important in what they accomplish.
She contrasted the “long dark middle” of two
arctic journeys she had studied — the Imperial
Austro-Hungarian North Pole expedition and the Norwegian
explorer Nansen's expedition into the Arctic.
While the Austro-Hungarians strove to discover a
northeast passage, their ship drifted northwest and
eventually crumbled, caught in the current of ice. Yet
Nansen's ship was built to float above the ice, and
carried its crew toward their goal of discovering a
northwest passage until they too abandoned their ship.
Still, both crews achieved successes — though not the
successes they had expected. “In my writing I
sometimes join one crew, sometimes the other,”
Barrett said. When writing Ship Fever, she felt as if she
were drifting in the right direction, yet when writing
The Middle Kingdom, the current brought her in an
entirely different direction. “One journey was more
painful than the other, but both brought me home,”
she said. When beginning the creative process, Barrett
explained, “two poles, two approaches hang in the
air.” Yet the approach we choose is not important.
“Perhaps what's important is the way we integrate
what is in our head and what is in the world,” she
said. “What is important is that we commit ourselves
to the journey and do all that we can to prepare
ourselves for it.
“Writing, like drifting through the ice in search
of land, is like exploration,” she explained.
Whatever perspective one might take, it will yield
something, for even failure may yield good things in the
end. The morning after her lecture, she joined students
in Assistant Professor of English Hugh Jenkins's freshman
honors program class to chat about writing. While the
students might have expected to hear tips about
succeeding as a writer, Barrett had a different message.
The focus of the conversation became the difficulties
of writing. Barrett reaffirmed their belief that writing
is hard work, explaining that she wrote for ten years
before her first story was published. Barrett doesn't
write because of the perks that come with being a
published author; she writes because she loves it.
“I rewrite again and again and again until I am so
sick of it that I don't like any part of it,” she
said. “You reach the point of sickening
exhaustion.” Barrett says that she is never happier
than when she is writing, and she encouraged the students
to “find pleasure in writing papers and in thinking;
find pleasure in making something beautiful out of what's
in your head.”
And her secret to success? “Most of writing is
patience; willfulness is useful. I have a modest gift as
a writer, but I am very stubborn and I work hard.”