Much like his books, Sarah Lawrence College writing professor David Hollander is infinitely interesting. He writes penetrating novels and essays. He’s on the record that the 20th century Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein is “probably my biggest hero.” He is a guitarist in a rock band and an acoustic duo. Both of us hold the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges in high regard.
I was introduced to David remotely through my wife, Deborah Goodman, who took several seasons of his classes at the Sarah Larence College Summer Seminar for Writers, in Bronxville, New York. I have enjoyed getting to know him through his books, articles, interviews, and online presentations.
Last year, I posted my interviews with two American University (my alma mater) writing professors/authors, Melissa Scholes Young, and David Keplinger. I consider my new interview with David Hollander to be part of this unofficial series, exploring the day-to-day work lives of professors known to be generous mentors, who also publish highly creative literary output.
Hollander is author, most recently, of the novel Anthropica, published in 2020, during the early months of the pandemic. In his August 27, 2020 interview with Deborah Kalb about the book, he said, “What I really want is to cast a spell. I want Anthropica to feel inexhaustible, for it to wrap back on itself like a Möbius strip so that it can never truly be “finished.”
I’m grateful to David (who is also on my ’69 Educators List,’) for answering my questions about his teaching and writing; and how those activities fit together.
Given everything from political changes to the pandemic, to the influence of generative AI, do your undergraduate and graduate students have different mindsets and professional expectations from students in earlier decades?
When I first started teaching, my students, especially my graduate students, were probably less anxious about publishing right this second than they are today. The traditional route back then was to work really hard on your craft during graduate school, knowing that publication might not come for some time after. The entire paradigm—the search for an agent through a methodical research/querying process, the glacial process of print submissions—required literal years of patience. But today, ubiquitous digital publication-venues give students the chance to publish early and often. It seems to me that the “vertical” endeavor to publish something big, in a deep-seeming way, has ceded to a “horizontal” endeavor to publish small and frequently, anywhere and everywhere. This isn’t a complaint, by the way, just an observation.
I don’t think it has anything to do with AI or with the pandemic or with political changes; those things have also affected the writing landscape, both inside and outside the university, but in ways that are complex and harder for someone of my limited intelligence to break down. For instance: my students today are, by and large, more socially responsible, and more aware of how the work they read (and write) might reinforce harmful stereotypes. The difficult conditions of their early years, and the scariness of the world they currently move through, have surely helped forge their sensitive and hyper-aware sensibilities.
How do the various parts of your teaching and writing fit together so that you pay attention to current projects and commitments, but also consider and work on future-related efforts?
My teaching work at Sarah Lawrence College is so labor intensive that it seems I am either teaching or writing. Rarely both. This is a reality that I’ve tried to graciously accept; I love teaching and don’t want to color my sense of duty toward my students with resentment. But so my writing gets done mostly in the summer months, or on brief vacations from the college.
I do, however, think about writing a lot, even during busy teaching semesters, and I make a lot of notes for myself about projects that I hope to be able to work on eventually. I recently had my first-ever sabbatical, and I probably wrote more in that four-month period than I have in the preceding five years (I drafted a novel from start to finish). The only reason I was able to produce at that pace is that I had been planning and thinking for years about what the project might look like, how it might behave. So I guess there’s this ongoing dance between the present me (Teacher David) and the future me (Writer David) that only proceeds gracefully if both Davids agree to be willing partners.
In 2021, LitHub published your candid, detailed, (and brave) essay, “How I (Barely) Survived the Abject Failure of My Much Hyped Debut Novel.” What reactions did you receive from the essay, especially from fellow authors, colleagues in education, and people in the publishing industry?
Thank you for saying my essay was brave. I thought so, too, and I was thus mystified by the number of readers who attacked me online, saying I was just another privileged and tone-deaf white guy. I learned from those reactions that the minute you make yourself vulnerable, people will attack. I invite your readers to check the piece out for themselves and decide what kind of a human I am.
But that certainly wasn’t the only reaction; there were many, many positive responses from artists of all stripes who’d experienced their own more-than-fair share of failure and who felt emboldened to say, “me too.” You know, 99% of published books are doomed to obscurity, and so there are countless writers who were professionally doomed by their first novel’s bad sales figures. I think I struck a chord mostly with the people in my own demographic: middle-aged, past the life-era in which it might be possible to make a big splash as an artist, and trying to humbly accept a quieter reality. Honestly, the essay’s publication was in many ways my first real acceptance of the fact that I am becoming an older writer (and an older person), and that certain doors are closed forever, even as others seem to materialize from nothing, offering salvation.