Faculty and Visiting Faculty

 

GENEVIEVE SLY CRANE

Assistant Professor, Creative Writing

Genevieve Sly Crane is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts (B.A. English, 2010) and Stony Brook Southampton, (M.F.A. Creative Writing and Literature, 2013). Her first novel, Sorority, earned a Publisher's Weekly starred review. She is the recipient of the 2020 Whiting Award for fiction. Her 2017 story, "Endings, Bright and Ugly," was a finalist for the American Short(er) Fiction Prize. Her upcoming novel is due for publication through Simon and Schuster.

FACULTY INTERVIEW:

What genre(s) do you write in?

I’m a fiction writer. My true love is short form, but I also publish novels.

What is the thing that excites you about the act of writing?

I think the whole point of any artistic endeavor is seeking out the flow state. I could tell you it's some grand and noble thing about wanting to connect with the masses, but I don’t think I would do that without the dopamine rush of the flow state.

Do you feel like your work is in conversation with other writers or work? If so,
who/what?

There are plenty of women writers that are really grappling with their identity in this current culture, and that’s a general chorus I hope to be a part of. That said, I'm not generally thinking about the context of the other people as I write. That'll just give me the creeps. 

I'm sure that I have a sort of osmosis influence from the writers that I really love. The writers that really set me on fire when I was young were people like Zadie Smith, George Saunders, Flannery O'Connor. So, maybe I'm having a conversation with them in a more ambitious and subconscious way.

What literary magazine would you recommend to your students?

I really love F(r)iction. I also encourage students to look at weekly blog posts and those core online spaces. 100% submit to Ploughshares, but also look at places like McSweeney's Internet Tendency because it's hilarious and you might have something small that you want to submit there too. That's equally valuable, especially when the currency of hard copy literature is changing. 

Virginia Quarterly is a classic. Antioch Review is a classic. I’ve always been a big fan of One Story. I generally think students should read literary magazines voraciously and widely.

What is your writing process?

Avoid for long enough that the crippling guilt of not doing anything consume me. Then, write frantically for an entire phase. I have what I call my fallow periods, where I'm not writing as much, if at all. I am deliberately not pressuring myself. Then, I get compelled and have to start writing again. It used to feel like one year on, one year off. A lot of my writing happens between like 10 P.M. and 3 A.M., which is not great with my small children, but it has always been true for me.

How do you generate ideas?

I put blockers on my phone deliberately. I purposefully delete email off of my phone. Ideas are not going to come to me without sitting in the quiet. Long mindless drives are really great for idea generation. I love being on a train and spacing out. There's something about movement requiring very little thought that I think is helpful to the creative process.

How do you manage when you get stuck?

Sometimes you don't even really realize that you're stuck until you've started becoming a line editor instead of a generator. You have to ask: where's the resistance and why? It's not like I necessarily have to fix the ick feeling. But the bad feeling may be signaling that there’s a scene or line that isn’t doing what it needs to be doing, or isn’t serving its purpose by contributing to the larger artistic project. A lot of it is just facing that head on.

Inspiration or perspiration?

Inspiration. I'm a Libra! Inspiration is the whole point of the game, it's the flow state, the dopamine hit.  I think there is a belief, and I used to have it, that you have to suffer for your art to be really good, that there needs to be some degree of agony for it to be worthwhile. I think that sucks all the play out of it.

If you weren't a writer, what job would you have?

I had a running joke when I was in my M.F.A., that if this didn’t work out there's always real estate. Also, I worked in animal medicine for a while, or dermatology.

Do you have a writing tip for emerging writers?

You have to be bored. You have to be okay being bored. I know that's hard, but if you're turning on a podcast in the shower because you don't want to hear your own brain, that's a sign that you need to start being bored. I say this from experience. You need to give yourself time to think.