“Meet the Teacher” offers a quick introduction to The Porch’s Teaching Writers. Today we welcome David James Poissant, who is teaching Buying the Flowers Yourself: Tips and Tricks for ıeginning, Building, and Revising Your Novel or Short Story for us this fall. Poissant teaches in the MFA program at the University of Central Florida and is the author of Lake Life, a novel, and The Heaven of Animals, a short story collection.

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

I got a good bit of reading done over the summer. I've been on a pandemic novel kick, and two reads that have stuck with me are The Vulnerables, by Sigrid Nunez and Touch, by Olaf Olafsson, both set during the Covid-19 pandemic. I'm a longtime fan of Tove Jansson's Moomin books, all of which I read to my twin daughters when they were younger. This summer I finally read one of Jansson’s adult novels, The Summer Book, reissued in 2008 by NYRB Classics. It's the sad, gorgeous, episodic story of a grandmother and granddaughter set over the course of a summer on an island in the Gulf of Finland. We forget that children know and feel and grieve more than we think, and this novel captures that fact, and childhood, beautifully. Other books that brightened my summer include Paula Fox's Desperate Characters, Hiroko Oyamada's The Factory, and Max Porter's Shy.

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

Probably my all-time favorite craft book is John Dufresne’s The Lie That Tells a Truth. I learned a lot about writing from that book when I first started out. I still turn to it from time to time. Dufresne has a good-natured, warm voice that keeps me coming back. He’s the pedagogical opposite of John Gardner. Dufresne never talks down to the aspiring writer.

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What is your favorite writing rule to break?

I like to challenge any rule that dictates that characters be relatable or likable. Those adjectives aren’t even allowed in my classroom.

I like to challenge any rule that dictates that characters be relatable or likable. Those adjectives aren’t even allowed in my classroom.

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Music while writing: Y/N?

I love music, but I find writing awfully difficult to do while enjoying music. When I write, I mainline airplane noise audio. The white noise keeps me “locked in,” as my teenage daughters would say.

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What do you love most about teaching writing?

My favorite part of teaching writing is teaching the art of close reading. I don’t think that most beginning writers have been taught to read like writers. Learning to read like a writer, to my mind, is the first step to learning to, well, write like a writer. You have to learn to identify craft elements on the page before you begin importing them into your work. My favorite story to use as a craft model is Bret Anthony Johnston’s story “Caiman.” It’s only three pages, but I can spend ninety minutes on it, easy.

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My favorite part of teaching writing is teaching the art of close reading. I don’t think that most beginning writers have been taught to read like writers.

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Tell us why you pitched this class.

I love the work of Virginia Woolf, and any opportunity to introduce readers to her work is an opportunity I’ll take. I think that the opening to Mrs. Dalloway is a perfect opening to a novel and the ideal illustration of multiple craft elements working in tandem. From just a few pages of that novel, you can learn pretty much everything there is to learn about storytelling in terms of structure and work at the sentence level!

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

My twin daughters are fifteen, and their Gen Z lingo overtakes our dinner table on a nightly basis. And I welcome this. I love words, and I am truly inspired by language’s ability to grow and expand and make room for neologisms and retooled expressions. I love to repeat their words back to them and watch them cringe. Last week, they were going on about something being so Ohio. I reminded my daughters that they were born in the state of Ohio, which sent them shrieking to their bedrooms. I’m sure, soon enough, some kindhearted teen will wander into the pages of my next book, shaking her head and muttering something about skibidi Ohio rizz.

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