C O N V E R S A T I O N to trade it. I am a kept man; my wife, who earns a living teaching secondary education, keeps me and allows me to write, despite my poor financial contribution to the cause. That would be a hard thing to give up to be anybody else. There are so many writers I wish I wrote as well as. I wish my work had the precision of Hemingway, I wish it had the insights of Faulkner, because Faulkner had the ability to work inside the mind and outside the mind both. But somebody like Larry Brown, or Pete Dexter, or Ken Haruf, who are also great influences of mine, tell
stories completely outside the minds of their characters, and yet you know their characters’ minds through what they do and say because of the precision of the language these authors employ and because of their characters’ reactions to the stimuli around them. That, too, is something I aspire to. The beauty of simple language in something like Ken Haruf’s Plainsong, National Book Award nominee— wow! He addresses very difficult issues, and yet there is a humaneness to his work that’s really quite astonishing. I have to say I aspire to write more like they do.
Mikel Vause (Ph.D., Bowling Green University) is a Professor of English at Weber State University and the Director of Environmental Studies. He is the author of numerous articles, short stories and books, and the co-director of Weber State University’s National Undergraduate Literature Conference. He is also the author of four collections of poems: I Knew It would Come to This, At the Edge of Things, Looking for the Old Crown, and The Scent of Juniper: Poems of the Himalayas.
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