'It's done when Margot says it's done'
Author Livesey nurses books - her own and others' - to publication
CAMBRIDGE - Visit the fiction table of a bookstore, and you'll find Margot Livesey hidden in the leaves - not only the leaves of her own books but in those of writers she has helped.
In addition to her own novels, including "The House on Fortune Street," just published, she has influenced countless novels and stories. Though none of her seven books of fiction has been a blockbuster, her reputation as a book-doctor is secure.
In recent decades, teaching has become a new side of being a writer, but few are as influential or well traveled as Livesey. Since 1983, she has worked with hundreds of writers at colleges including Tufts, Carnegie Mellon, Warren Wilson, Cleveland State, Boston University, University of California at Irvine, Emerson, Bennington, Williams, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Brandeis, and Bowdoin - as well as in workshops at noncollege writing conferences such as Bread Loaf (Vermont), Kenyon Review (Ohio), and Sewanee (Tennessee).
"I hear all the time what an amazing workshop leader she is," said novelist Andrea Barrett of North Adams, who has known and exchanged drafts with Livesey for decades. "She asks the question that makes a student think about that next step, which is always a great step. 'I wonder what would happen if . . .' or 'Do you suppose so-and-so might. . .?' " So much does she value Livesey's reading, said Barrett, that "for me, it's done when Margot says it's done."
During an interview at the home she shares with her husband, painter Eric Garnick, Livesey was soft-spoken, warm, droll, and as polite as a butler. So unflamboyant is her manner that one might not easily imagine her as a powerful teacher. Nor, in the beginning, did she.
Born in Scotland, she grew up as an only child with her stepmother and father, who was a math and geography teacher at Glenalmond College, a rural boarding school near Perth. It was a cool and stiff household. "I was always told that a good child is seen and not heard," said Livesey, 54, "so of course, reading was one of the few activities that fulfilled that criterion. By the time I was a teenager, I had become quite distant from my father, to the extent that when we had something to say to one another, we would write letters."
After graduating from the University of York in 1974, she traveled for a year with her boyfriend and wrote what she calls "a very bad novel." Her boyfriend had a teaching job in Canada, and in the mid-1970s she began to spend time in both London and Toronto, eking out a living with waitressing and other unskilled jobs. She quit a job packing incense in a Hare Krishna factory because she refused to chant on her lunch hour. By the early 1980s she had published several short stories in Canadian literary magazines. "A dear friend happened to be teaching at Tufts," she said, "and told me that there was this thing called creative writing that was taught in North American universities, and that I might qualify to teach it."
She took the Tufts job in the fall of 1983, and it changed her life. "I had vowed when I left university that I would never enter a classroom again," she said. "But when I did, I discovered to my surprise that I liked it. I found that I was more interested in asking people their opinion about Virginia Woolf than about how they wanted their steaks cooked - there aren't that many answers to that question."
In 1986, her short-story collection "Learning By Heart" was published, and she was able to get a better job at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. She left Carnegie Mellon in 1990 and, still keeping her Cambridge apartment, began her peripatetic teaching life. Eventually she became an American citizen. In 1996 she was appointed distinguished writer-in-residence at Emerson, yet she still teaches elsewhere; she's at Bowdoin College in Maine this semester.
She learned to protect her writing time. Her first novel, "Homework," was published in 1990, followed by "Criminals" (1996), "The Missing World" (2000), "Eva Moves the Furniture" (2001), "Banishing Verona" (2004), and now "The House on Fortune Street." Her writing is silky and undecorated, and her plots often turn on unexpected moral dilemmas.
"She writes such dazzlingly beautiful sentences, witty and deft, savage in a light way - like someone with a fine rapier who walks past, and you don't know that your cheek has been laid open," said Barrett. One reviewer referred to her "predilection for the narrative ambush." In "Criminals," a banker on a business trip finds a baby in a public toilet and impulsively brings the child to his unstable sister, who conspires to keep the little girl. In "The House on Fortune Street," full of quiet suspense, the tragic fate of a young woman is unrolled through the points of view of three other people in her life.
Some literati disparage college creative-writing programs, suspecting they cultivate imitation and remove writers from the school of real life. After all, the great masters, from Leo Tolstoy and Jane Austen to Mark Twain and F. Scott Fitzgerald, didn't need degrees in writing. Livesey does not deny the mystery of exceptional genius: "I have to say I am baffled by this. I go to the British Library and look at the manuscript of [Austen's] 'Pride and Prejudice,' in all its magnificence, and I think, 'How did she do it?' "
Even so, in her own early experience with nonacademic writing workshops, "I was staggered to discover how much I hadn't known about fiction after years of reading and studying. I see my students learning in a few months what it took me years to learn. You wouldn't just watch someone ice skating on television and say, 'I think I'll go off and take part in the Olympics,' " she said, "or go to Carnegie Hall and say, 'I think I'll just play that concerto.' Because we come to reading and writing so much earlier, we are reluctant to think of it as an art form in quite the same way."
In speaking of Livesey's teaching model, her former students often cite her responses to their ambitions and struggles as much as their writing. Novelist Lan Samantha Chang worked with Livesey at the Iowa Writer's Workshop in 1993 and is herself now director of the workshop. In an e-mail, she called Livesey "extraordinarily smart, tactful, and strategic about all aspects of writing and the writing life. It's been 15 years, but I still call her whenever I feel stymied as a writer, teacher, and administrator."
At the University of California at Irvine, Livesey helped novelist Alice Sebold with a manuscript which in 2002 became "The Lovely Bones," one of the biggest bestsellers of the decade. "She has this quiet style - she listens," Sebold said by phone from San Francisco. "She gave me time in a way that other visiting teachers never did."
David Wroblewski of Denver, whose first novel, "The Story of Edgar Sawtelle," will be published in June, worked on the book with Livesey in 1996 at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina. For years afterward, she continued to help him. "It has taken me since 1996 to finish," he said. "I have called her on occasion to ask her advice - 'Am I done yet?' She has this generosity of spirit. Teaching is not a gig for her; it seems integrated into her writing life." 