“The dirt you’re getting dirty in.”

John Casey interviewed by Chelsea T. Hicks

When I started reading “Dogma and Anti-dogma,” the first of the essays in John Casey’s Beyond the First Draft: The Art of Fiction, a feeling the narrator describes as being lost in the woods or caught in a vortex overtook me. I was sitting on a dusty concrete patio in central San Francisco with mosquitoes biting at my legs and I felt the need to get away. So I went on a long walk. Little did I know that “long walks” are Casey’s recommendation for unlocking the subconscious and entering the semi-trance necessary for producing art—including fiction.

After the walk, the book was different for me. It was pure trickery, an incantation of Casey’s lilting mutation of lit crit, which moves not on the military halt and stomp of academic logic but runs on, as he puts it, “low vaudeville cunning.“ The prose flows on currents from Casey’s forty years of experience getting good prose out of people; and the writing makes for a clean presentation of distilled wisdom in eloquent musings. But the trickery is in how Casey can make the reader feel while flicking his writerly wrists.

Casey confesses, “I’m rarely happily conscious of being a writer. While I’m writing, I’m self-forgetful. But I’m happily conscious of being a reader.” Well, like all readers, I’d wanted the act of writing to be equal and opposite to the feeling and force of my own reading: feverous, glowing, absorptive—gluttonous in the way books are to teenagers first falling in love with them. But on the last page, Casey acknowledges that Beyond the First Draft is a collection of essays, carefully crafted, agonized and published over a span of time that amounts to many emerging writers’ lifespans. 

That’s the truest revelation of Beyond the First Draft: though young writers yearn for the act of writing to be as breathtaking as their first read, the mature voice comes through years of patient craft, the dirty exactitude of puzzling with words.

—Chelsea T. Hicks

I. BE A GOOD DATE!

THE BELIEVER: You talked about “being yourself” in “Dogma and Anti-dogma,” and compared writing to being on a good date. Tell us, what are you like on a date, and what was your most memorable date ever?

JOHN CASEY: Let’s see. Vonnegut used to say something like, “C’mon you guys, your stories, sometimes they’re just too impactive and dense. You’ve got to be a good date!” So I thought about that for a while, and then I thought about the “write about what you know” thing and I thought, none of my friends—if I were going on a date—would ever say “Well, be...