Essaying Sam Pickering:An Interview Mel Livatino (bio) Sam Pickering may well be the most famous American writer no one has ever heard of. As nearly everyone in the scribbling community knows, he was the model for the English teacher John Keating (played by Robin Williams) in the 1989 movie Dead Poets Society. But his books, like those of all familiar essayists, fall far short of bestseller-dom. And there have been a lot of them—twenty-two to date, with a twenty-third due later this year and another in the spring. Three of those books have been academic works, mostly in the area of children's literature. Nineteen have been collections of familiar and travel essays. One is a collection of essays about teaching, Letters to a Teacher. In 2004 an omnibus selection of his essays appeared, The Best of Pickering. His most recent book is A Comfortable Boy, a memoir that ends when he is in eighth grade and a member of the safety patrol. In press is Journeys, a collection of personal essays. He has thus far published more than 250 familiar essays and fifty-five academic essays in scores of the best journals in America. Three of those essays were selected for Robert Atwan's Best American Essays annual series (1987, 2005, 2006), and scores more were named Notable Essays of the Year. [End Page 33] Pickering was born (1941) and raised in Nashville, Tennessee, and often writes about the small Tennessee town of Carthage, the home of his ancestors, which figures as both a real and a fictional place in his essays. His essays are sometimes about teaching, sometimes about "roaming." Wood, field, library, and classroom are his favorite haunts. Beneath place, however, Pickering's concern is always with the human comedy, which, in aphoristic and witty bursts, he penetrates to the core. His writing always comes at the world from unexpected angles no other writer occupies. Pickering was educated at the University of the South (BA, 1963), Cambridge University (MA, 1965), and Princeton (PhD, 1970). He taught at Dartmouth from 1970 to 1978 and has taught at the University of Connecticut since 1978. Livatino: Your main form of writing is the essay. In my experience almost nobody knows what an essay is, including a fair number of English teachers. They think it's something they were forced to write in freshman English classes or they think it's a magazine article or an editorial commentary. How do you define and describe the essay? Pickering: A decade ago a reviewer in the Hartford Courant wrote that readers should not fret about defining my ponderings but simply call them "Pickerings." For me a No Trespassing sign is an invitation to explore. As hedgerows surrounding fields are green with life, so I meander outside fences, poking at this and that, not concerned about genre. I don't mind being called an essayist because classifying eases understanding. Imagine a publisher advertising a book written by "Edward's Daddy," "The Man Who Mows the Grass and Walks the Dogs," or "An Ancient Who Shuffles Six Miles a Day and Calls It Running." Annie Dillard once wrote that "what you see is what you get." What I see and hear, what I stumble across and what stumbles across me, are what I write about. After class this morning, a student described another student, saying, "She's really nice. She lives near me, and she eats lots of beets." Two weeks ago my daughter Eliza said, "Daddy, you are the only old person I have ever really known." The next day I started a piece [End Page 34] entitled "Boring," my take on Eliza's remark being that I was tedious beyond endurance. Two days later, when reducing the rich chaos of life into useful declarative sentences made me weary, I ambled into the kitchen. Vicki was cooking dinner. "I'm tired of writing," I said. "And I thought I would come in and visit a while. Is that all right with you?" "Marginally," Vicki replied, the single word enough to start an "essay." In the 1960s when I was in graduate school, buddies dubbed me "King Bee." Would that...
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Jan 1, 2024
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