Orient Express

Award winning author Anthony Doerr visited campus last week to read from his latest book, Memory Wall. Granta magazine named him one of the 21 Best Young American Novelists, and in addition to being included in the anthology Best American Short Stories Doerr’s work has also won him a Guggenheim Fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, and the 2010 Story Prize, among others. As an undergraduate at Bowdoin, Doerr majored in history and wrote a column for The Orient, and we followed up with him about his time at the College and the literary life. 

Did you always know you wanted to be a writer? If not, when did you start to realize that writing could be a potential career path?  

I always wanted to be a writer, yes, from the time I was seven or eight, and my mother read me the Chronicles of Narnia.  I was amazed that such complete and absorbing worlds could be created with nothing more than black marks on a white page.  As to when I thought it could be a career path…?  That goal was a lot more remote for me.  I had no examples in my immediate experience of folks who had lived childhoods like mine and then grown up to become novelists.  So it wasn’t until long after Bowdoin, and I had published a few books on a major press, that I began to believe that maybe I could sustain writing as a daily existence.   

What about Bowdoin most informed your decision to become an author? 

The openness of Bowdoin’s academic world dazzled me.  At Bowdoin I took Russian and Latin American Studies and nutrition and astronomy.  I took film and architecture and biology and constitutional law.  But at the end of my sophomore year, I was forced to declare a major, but even that seemed unfairly restrictive to me.  Everything, I was learning, got more interesting and more complicated the more I learned about it, not just economics or organic chemistry but even donuts, even maple trees, even the way carpets were made.  It was as if the more I learned, the more I learned how little I knew.  The great thing about being a fiction writer is that you can use your curiosity about various subjects and turn it into your job, and the great thing about Bowdoin was that it never said, “No,” to us as students; it never said, “That’s outside your chosen area of specialization.”  Instead it said, “Isn’t the world amazing?  Go learn more about it.” 

What was it like being in a fraternity?  

I’m not sure what stories still persist about Bowdoin fraternities nowadays, but they were strong and powerful institutions back in the early 1990s when I was a student.  They were co-ed, remember, and though they were places to have parties, they were also places to play wiffle ball, study, laugh, grow, and learn.  I think primarily they were central to our lives at Bowdoin because we ate all of our meals in them.  Even members who didn’t live at the house were there two or three times a day to eat, so meals became a regular way to see friends, study, invite professors for dinner, celebrate birthdays, etc.  I made lots of friendships with independents and folks in other houses, but the friendships we made within our house are friendships that have lasted twenty years.  I met the woman who was to become my wife in our fraternity!

What did you do after graduating, and how did you decide to do it?  

I traveled to Alaska with three other friends from Bowdoin and we got jobs at a salmon processing plant.  We went for the money, and because it sounded like an adventure.  Within about three days there, I quickly lost any romantic notions I had about physical labor.  But we stuck it out. 

In addition to your fiction, you also write non-fiction pieces for a wide variety of newspapers and magazines. How does your style change, if at all, from one genre to another? 

Oh, I agonize over pieces as small as an 800-word book reviews as much as I do over full-length novels.  Every time I write something I want to reward the reader who has been generous enough to spend some time with my work.  So the least I can do is be as careful and as generous as possible with their attention, and make every sentence as strong as I can.

What advice would you give to Bowdoin students trying to make it as writers or journalists? 

Read, read, read, read, read.

You’ve received a lot of critical acclaim for your work in the form of grants, prizes, and fellowships. Is there any one award that meant the most to you, and why? 

Every prize, no matter how large or small, means a great deal to me.  Writing, hour by hour, is a very lonely and arduous process, so to know that your work has reached strangers, folks you could never otherwise meet, and to learn that they have found some merit in what you have made—that’s hugely rewarding.