R2 founder discusses career as best-selling author
Justin Cronin grew up in New England and attended Harvard University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He is the author of the New York Times best-selling The Passage trilogy, Mary and O'Neil and The Summer Guest and has been published in multiple journals. He is also the recipient of the Stephen Crane Prize, a Whiting Writers' Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts. From 2003 to 2012, Cronin was a professor of English at Rice University, where he founded R2: The Rice Review, Rice's literary magazine, in 2004. He now lives with his family in Houston and is currently hard at work on The City of Mirrors, the third and final book in The Passage trilogy. You are the founding father of R2. How has your life changed since you started the magazine? The big difference is that I don't teach anymore. I was a teacher of one kind or another for close to 30 years. I started as a high school teacher, then became a graduate teaching assistant, then a professor at three different universities. I don't know if I'll ever be back - probably I will at some point - but in the meantime, it's a great luxury just to focus on my own work and read only the things I want to read. The other change is that I have something rather like a public life. I do a lot of media, meet readers at book events and conventions, interact with thousands of people through Facebook and Twitter. Before The Passage, my life was rather small. It still is, at least in the day-to-day, and most of the writing life is very solitary. You don't write a novel with a crowd in the room. But it's been something of an adjustment for me to interact with so many people I haven't actually shared a meal with. In addition to managing R2, you were also a professor of English at Rice and taught creative writing. Was there a piece of writing advice you gave to students that you find difficult to follow yourself? Just about everything I said is hard for any writer to follow. One of the great benefits of teaching all those years was that I got the chance to remind myself of all those easily mislaid rules - simple stuff, like to remember the reader and forget about yourself. In both The Passage and The Twelve, you have a large cast. How do you manage so many characters? You manage them mostly by feel. Whose turn is it to talk? Whose storyline has been parked at the curb for a while and needs to move ahead? A book acquires its own internal rhythms, and those rhythms tell you what to do. As for where these imaginary people come from, I have no special insights to offer. What book or author has inspired you the most? How so? There are different kinds of inspiration. There's the inspiration of reading something so beautiful - a scene, a sentence, a story - that you can't imagine spending your life doing anything besides trying to duplicate it. The author that did that for me was John Cheever, whom I first read in high school. I didn't really understand the ironies of his stories, but I knew that his sentences were transportingly gorgeous. The other kind of inspiration comes from someone who models the idea of the writing life for you. I'd give the nod to George Orwell, whom I didn't read until college. He wasn't just a great prose stylist; he believed that literature was a bulwark against cruelty. This portion of an interview with Justin Cronin has been provided by R2: The Rice Review. For the complete interview, look for the 2013 edition of R2, to be released this fall.