"Meet the Teacher" offers a quick introduction to The Porch's Teaching Writers. Today we welcome Andrew Steiner, who was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan. In 2022 he received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. In his mid-20s he left a career in nonprofit development to work on a small vegetable farm, providing the setting for his first novel, Let This Remain, represented by The Wylie Agency. His short fiction has been published in Narrative, Epoch, Grain, and other outlets. He currently teaches creative writing at Juniata College in Pennsylvania. For The Porch, in summer 2024, he's teaching "The Art of the Shock: Stories That Go Too Far," and "Ordinary Grace: Writing Familial Love." both single session classes, on June 19 and 25, respectively.—Ed.

‍

Tell us about a book you've recently read and enjoyed. 

The Pilgrim Hawk: A Love Story by Glenway Wescott. A short novel set in France in the 1920s. It’s about marriage, domesticity, and falconry. Full of incredible lines and insights into human and animal nature. Here’s Wescott describing a hawk’s hunger: “Falconers believe that hunger must be worse for falcons than for other birds and animals … It maddens them, with a soreness in every feather; an unrelievable itching in their awful feet; a bloody lump in their throats.”

‍

What’s one craft book or essay you return to again and again?‍

"My Vocation" by the Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg. She charts the development of her writing life from childhood into maturity. It’s intense, ecstatic, and completely unsparing. It challenges and moves me every time I read it. This is Ginzburg after writing her first real short story: “It seemed to me that I had discovered how people in books should be—funny and at the same time sad.”

‍

What is your favorite writing rule to break?

I was once warned about the perils of quoting song lyrics in your writing. Apparently record companies like to charge writers for the privilege. But I can’t help it. I can better understand my characters if I know what they’re reading, watching, and listening to and sometimes there’s no way around quoting a little of that material directly.

‍

I love seeing a student discover something new—a new capacity in themselves or a writer with whom they feel a kinship. My goal is to create the conditions in which students can have those kinds of realizations about themselves. It feels like witnessing magic when it happens.

‍

Music while writing: Y/N? 

While writing, no. But as indicated, music feeds my imaginative life. I’m always trying to get the energy of music into my work. A story I’m currently working on is soundtracked in my head by The Melvins and Protomartyr (a band out of my home state of Michigan; Joe Casey is a masterful lyricist).

While working on my first novel, I heard Bob Dylan’s song “I Threw It All Away” from Nashville Skyline and suddenly I was hearing it through my main character’s ears. After that, something essential about his personality finally made sense to me. Whenever I hear that song now, I think about that coffee-stained cassette case rattling around in the center console of his truck.

‍

What do you love most about teaching writing?

I love seeing a student discover something new—a new capacity in themselves or a writer with whom they feel a kinship. My goal is to create the conditions in which students can have those kinds of realizations about themselves. It feels like witnessing magic when it happens.

‍

While working on my first novel, I heard Bob Dylan’s song “I Threw It All Away” from Nashville Skyline and suddenly I was hearing it through my main character’s ears. After that, something essential about his personality finally made sense to me.

‍

Tell us why you pitched "The Art of the Shock." 

Thinking about the stories that have left the deepest marks on me, I realized many of them culminated in some kind of shocking moment. (Think of the final scene in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” – or the climax of Michael Cunningham’s “White Angel,” which is perhaps my favorite short story.) These moments always seem to risk “going too far”—offending good taste, being too outrageous, or straining the reader’s credulity. But if you get it right, the reader will never forget that experience. High risk, high reward. So how can we do it well? How can we shock or surprise our readers in a way that’s earned, that doesn’t feel like a gimmick? I have a few theories, but I don’t have the answers! It’ll be exciting to see what the class brings to the discussion.

‍

Share something that has inspired your creativity lately, other than a book.  

Backpacking always helps me clear my head. A few weeks ago I spent several days on the Black Forest Trail in Lycoming County, Pennsylvania. Sun on the ridges, fog in the valleys, sleeping next to streams. Phone on airplane mode. In the middle of one long, difficult day I came across this handsome guy, below, on the trail. A reminder that the world is strange and beautiful and mysterious.

—

‍

Andrew Steiner's website.

‍

‍

‍

‍