Down to Earth: Learning Writing from Scott Russell Sanders

Written by Shanan Glandz
12/6/2007Share this story on Facebook!

Have you ever wanted to meet your favorite author and ask him, “How did you do it?” Thanks to the Distinguished Visiting Writers Series, directed by writing professor Katharyn Howd Machan and sponsored by Ithaca College’s writing department, I got to do just that and more when author and teacher Scott Russell Sanders visited IC for a week-long seminar series open to qualified writing students.

Although Sanders is not “famous” by the standards of best-sellers, his name was quite familiar to me. As a writing major I have taken several introductory courses that deal with Sanders’ writing, particularly his essays “Under the Influence” and “Buckeye.”

Sanders grew up in the Midwest, and much of his writing is influenced by the love of nature he cultivated as a boy exploring the lands around his home. “If you write about nature it’s hard to take yourself seriously,” he said. “We’re so brief, we’re so small, we’re so fragile, and natural processes are so enormous, they’re so ancient, they’re so powerful, that you’re not in danger of confusing yourself with the universe if you write about nature.”

This humility was the hallmark of the time Sanders spent with the dozen or so students in the essay-writing master class of which I was a part.

In my blog that week, I wrote, “I first spied Scott standing awkwardly near the front of the room talking with Katharyn Machan, and I stole glances at him as I moved to my seat. I don't know what I expected, but I wasn't thunderstruck by the ‘Look! Someone famous’ sensation.” Sanders, though tall, is a soft-spoken man in his early 60s. He’s got a commanding nose and quite scholarly eyebrows, but he’s neither arrogant nor outwardly aware of much of his fame at all.

Scott addressed this humility in his talk titled “Honoring the Ordinary.” He said, “The words humble, homely, and humility all derive from the root meaning dirt, earth, soil. The same root gave us the word humans. A reasonable translation of Homo sapiens would be ‘dirt able to know’ or ‘wise dirt,’”

This low-key approach made him accessible in class. Evan Perriello ’08, a writing and English double major, further clarified Sanders’s teaching methods: “He took a very practical approach to writing the personal essay, distinguishing its stylistic capabilities from those of fiction. As a fiction writer, this really helped me realize the types of shifts that need to take place in crafting a realistic but compelling story.”

In addition to his latest nonfiction work, A Private History of Awe, Sanders has written more than 19 books of both fiction and nonfiction. He has taught at Indiana University since 1971 and now holds the honored title of distinguished professor of English. He has received many grants, fellowships, and awards, including the Marshall Scholarship, which allowed him to get his Ph.D. at Cambridge University, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation.

I had all this weighty knowledge behind me as I walked into the conference room where the master class would be held, and seeing Sanders for the first time was an encouraging lesson in reality. He spoke with a broad and graceful vocabulary but one from which his audience could build and work.

Sanders truly does practice what he preaches. I was impressed by how he has truly absorbed the meaning of enjoying and always remaining in awe of the things around him. Indeed, the subjects of A Private History of Awe are about the simple things that make life worth living. “The wind, rain, sunshine refracted through glass on a windowsill, the voice of a child waking up from a nap, the smell of bread, the feel of a loved one’s heartbeat against your chest; these may be commonplace, but they are splendid,” he said.

What advice does Scott give for young writers? He told us, “The simplest advice is: think about something that interests you outside yourself. Flannery O’Connor once remarked in a letter, ‘I don’t think you should write anything as long as a novel about anything that is not of the greatest concern to you and anybody else.’”