Faculty and Visiting Faculty

 

Dawnie walton

Assistant Professor, Creative Writing
Dawnie Walton is the author of The Final Revival of Opal & Nev, winner of the 2022 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and the Audie Award for Fiction. Her debut novel was also longlisted for the 2022 Women’s Prize for Fiction, and named one of the best books of 2021 by The Washington Post, NPR, Esquire, and former U.S. President Barack Obama. She is the cofounder and editorial director of Ursa Story Company, an audio production venture celebrating underrepresented voices, and co-hosts its podcast dedicated to the art of short fiction. Formerly an editor at Essence and Entertainment Weekly, she lives in Brooklyn with her husband and daughter.

FACULTY INTERVIEW:

What genre(s) do you write in?

I am primarily a fiction writer. I am a novelist, but I’ve written short stories as well. I have dabbled in personal essays, but fiction is my main jam.

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

For me, it's when the characters start to feel very real. That's when the obsession hits. When I'm watching something on TV or seeing something on the streets and I know immediately how my character would react in that situation. When they reach the point where they're living and breathing and very prominent in my head. When I start to think about them all of the time. That's the exciting thing for me. 

I also think there's no greater joy than when you're having a really good writing day and you write something that makes yourself laugh. For me, that isn’t always a ha-ha funny thing, but just something that is very true and very recognizable to me. I love that excitement as well.

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

There’s a lot of contemporary writers whose work I always like. One of them is Tayari Jones. She is very interested in complex and nuanced morality, especially in the context of Black people in America. My interests lie there, too. Her novel, An American Marriage, is both character-driven and has a high concept premise that makes the reader think about who's right and who's wrong and what they might do in a similar situation. I really enjoyed that.  

I also admire the work of Curtis Sittenfeld. She plays a lot with history in a way that I find fun. Her novels Rodham and American Wife both do that. I also like to take inspiration from history or real people and dream into that, so I really enjoy that from Sittenfeld. 

I love books that promote a lot of chatter– literary books that get people talking. I aspire to live on that border between the literary and the juicy mess.

What literary magazine would you reccomend to your students?

 As a Southerner, I will say Oxford American. It was my first literary magazine publication, and it’s always filled with such beautiful and rich writing about the American South. There’s good non-fiction, good interviews, good fiction, and good poetry. They have it all.

What is your writing process?

The starting spark for me is usually a character in a particularly provocative situation. I sit with that spark for a very, very, very, very long time. Usually what comes to me next is an opening scene. It usually will not stay as the opening scene because you can't know the beginning until you know the end, but the process starts there. I don't outline, but I do think a couple of beats ahead. 

I am a pantser. I write very slowly and let my characters drive the story. Unfortunately, it ends up taking me a really long time to work through a novel in that way. But I'm much happier with the final result. It feels more organic and more exciting, for me, to be making discoveries along the way.

A weird quirk of mine is that I can only write in a linear way. So that also takes me longer.

Before I started writing fiction, I was a journalistic editor. My editor’s brain is on right next to my writer's brain, and so I'm constantly thinking about structure and the final product and how the pieces fit together. I can never leave a mess. I don’t recommend that self-editing, but it’s part of my process so I have learned to embrace it. People should embrace the things that work for them.

How do you generate ideas?

There are topics that writers are obsessed with, those things that you can see come up and up and up in all their work. An emotion I write about a lot is disappointment, especially when other people let you down in a way that feels like a betrayal.

But the thing that throws the match on that often comes from consuming other media. My first novel idea was sparked by a documentary called 20 Feet from Stardom. My new novel was sparked by my grappling with events in the news.

I am striving to start conversations not just among lots of people, but also inside of my own head. Again, that usually starts by thinking about characters in a highly specific situation which, during the drafting process, gets bigger and more complicated.

How do you manage when you get stuck?

I think sometimes it is the computer that is making me crazy, because I know I’m not getting it right and I’m just highlighting and cutting and pasting. It becomes an endless frustrating loop. So I'll grab a pen and a notebook and, if I can, go for a long walk.

Inspiration or perspiration?

Definitely perspiration. I've been trying to write fiction since I was 8 years old, 9 years old. But it really wasn't until I made a very conscious decision to devote my life to writing that anything happened. Someone can have all the brilliant ideas in the world, but if they don’t commit themselves to the work then the work doesn’t get written.

I have slowly learned that we are all telling variations on the same story, so I don't know if there's any idea that is so spectacularly, uniquely brilliant. It’s all in the execution that you do, the revision work that you do. All that is perspiration.

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

I always thought one job I would like to do is edit movie trailers. Movie trailers are so brilliant; they promise so much and get me so excited to see things, even if the final film is not very good. There's magic there. It would use both my editor brain and my artist brain.

Do you have a writing tip for emerging writers?

It’s important to not only follow your obsession, but also believe wholeheartedly in the obsession and that other people will be similarly obsessed. It takes years to write a novel and years to get it published. The only thing that's gonna get you through those years is your love of the project and your obsession with who and what you're writing about. That is the only thing.