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By the time he picked up the phone at 10:30 a.m. last week, Roger Rosenblatt’s Friday morning was already 6-and-a-half hours old.
He had learned to wake up before the sun if he wanted to get any writing done, a habit that stuck after living with his young, rambunctious grandchildren for seven years.
It was a practice born of an intensely emotional era—one of sorrow, pain, anger, love and growth—when he moved to Bethesda, Maryland, to live with his son-in-law after his daughter, Amy, died suddenly at age 38. It is a time he explored in “Making Toast,” one of his 18 books, among them national bestsellers and a Robert F. Kennedy Book Prize winner.
He knew he wanted to write from age 12, the author explained, and 10 years later, he would be teaching freshman English at Harvard.
“When I was 22, I didn’t know a rat’s ass about anything. I don’t even know why I was a teacher,” he said. “I honestly think I’ve learned how to teach effectively in the last 10, 15 years. The better I got as a writer, and more successful, the better I got as a teacher. First of all, I knew something and I could teach it. And second, I could be a lot less selfish.
“I don’t think of myself, or my writing, or ‘Gee, I hope this class is over soon so I can get back to my book,’” he continued. “I think of the students, and that has unquestionably made me a better teacher. I want them to write better at the end of every class I teach. It’s that simple.”
Over the course of five two-and-a-half-hour sessions in July, Mr. Rosenblatt will teach a master class, Imagine What You Know: Five Ways of Looking at Writing, as part of Stony Brook Southampton’s 41st annual Writers Conference. The groundbreaking class, which debuted last year, combines traditional lecturing with multimedia and talkbacks—a fresh syllabus for Mr. Rosenblatt, he said.
“I kind of blundered into it and started teaching it by the seat of my pants,” he admitted. “This year is a little more calculated. I taught workshops for years and years, but I said, ‘I’m tired of it,’ and I wanted to do something different.”
He laughed, and added, “For one thing, it allows me to show off, which is really super. I love music and movies, and I show them as part of the lecture. I play songs and, if they’re lucky, I sing along with them.”
Then, he’ll talk with a fellow writer—this year’s roster includes Mark Doty, Martín Espada and Lauren Groff, among others—followed by a writing exercise at the end of class. Each session focuses on one subject: imagination, consequence, originality, invisibilities and inspiration.
“Let’s say we’re talking about inspiration,” Mr. Rosenblatt said. “First, I’ll explain to them that as they write, the more they write, they will find some other hand is guiding what they do. All writers feel this. Where did that idea come from? Where did that sentence come from? You’re never conscious of why you’re doing it. So you teach them that this inspiration is real. It just comes from a product of a lot of work. The more you work at it, the greater chance you’ll have inspiration—not just sitting there numb.”
Each lesson is an abstraction, or an effort to teach people how to think, see and feel as a writer, as opposed to teaching them how to write.
“Nobody’s really doing anything like this, where you can be thinking about writing in this kind of way with this caliber of people,” said Susan Merrell, the director of the Southampton Writers Conference. “This is usually something that only people who have gone through a rigorous admission process have access to, which is not the case here. It’s quite something. Roger has a very smart way of opening people up. His readings are wonderful and whatever he says is true. He’s really charming and he’s so funny.”
Mr. Rosenblatt grew up in a “small neighborhood” in Manhattan called Gramercy Park during “an era when writers were really important,” he said. It was famously home to Herman Melville, Stephen Crane, Edith Wharton and Nathanael West, he noted.
“You could feel the presence of writers,” he said. “I felt the power of the story when I was read to as a child, and then reading stories myself. All of that combined fortified my wishes to become a writer.”
As a young boy, he would vacation with his family at the Tucker Mill Inn—the original grounds of what is now Stony Brook Southampton.
“It’s as if I have not progressed at all, which is probably true,” he deadpanned. “It was a lovely inn for families and a very quiet place—too quiet for kids, but I still liked it. We rented the windmill one summer. Another summer, Tennessee Williams was in it. I used to watch him as a child. He was so gracious and so nice to everybody. As a kid, you just appreciated him. I knew he was famous and I knew he was a writer, and that was enough for me.
“So yes. I, literally, have not progressed an inch since I was a child.”
Despite the familiar locale and decades of experience, Mr. Rosenblatt said he still finds he gets nervous before he teaches.
“I’m always a little scared. I was scared last year and I’m scared this year, too,” he said. “It’s just part of the newness. In fact, when I talk in public, I never write it out, only key notes. It’s a kind of high-wire act.”
Last year, his class size hovered between 60 and 85 students, who ranged from amateur writers to the likes of Joy Behar and Alan Alda, the latter of whom will join Mr. Rosenblatt for his first writer talkback.
This year, he said he’s expecting close to 100 students.
“And that practically fills the room,” he said, “so that would be very nice.”
Roger Rosenblatt will teach a master class during the 41st annual Southampton Writers Conference from Wednesday, July 6, to Friday, July 15, at Stony Brook Southampton. For more information about the class, as well as the conference’s additional offerings, visit stonybrook.edu/southampton/mfa/summer.
on Jun 27, 2016