Q&A: Roger Rosenblatt Brings a Two-Year Experiment in Civil Discourse to a Close

In January, Write America will close out a two-year run of weekly virtual conversations involving writers, with a goal of replacing the national divide following the “malevolent mischief” of the 2020 election with more unifying discussions with both established and up-and-coming writers.

Roger Rosenblatt, until recently a longtime Quogue resident — he’s full-time in Manhattan now — acknowledges the chasm that opened up, and that his “tribe” of wordsmiths likely didn’t bridge the gap with a focus on literature and art.

“Virginia Woolf wrote of the shocks of the world making her a writer because she wanted to explain the shocks,” Rosenblatt, 82, said in a note sent around announcing the end of the project, which began in February 2021. “We all do it, or we try — attempting to find connections in chaos, and the useful in everything, perhaps especially in evil and destruction.

“With Woolf, we believe that the world is a work of art, and we are parts of the work: ‘We are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.’”

Recently retired from teaching in the Stony Brook Southampton MFA in Creative Writing program, Rosenblatt — a columnist, journalist, writer and editor, himself one of America’s great men of letters — invited a long list of writers to share readings and conversations in a virtual weekly gathering. A total of more than 90 episodes resulted, with writers ranging from former U.S. poet laureates Rita Dove and Billy Collins to Al Gore, Norman Lear, Garry Trudeau, Alan Alda, Amy Hempel, Natalie Diaz, Francine Prose, Paul Auster and Russell Banks. They will be cataloged and will be available to view online via YouTube.

Rosenblatt sat down recently for a conversation, appropriately, via Zoom, to discuss the close of the project, its goals and whether it succeeded.

Q: So, for people who might not be familiar, Write America was a project that you undertook, basically, to use writing and arts to try to bridge the gap — well, it’s more like a chasm, in this country, right? That was the mission?

Yeah, absolutely. I looked through my stuff, on this huge amount of paper that I have on Write America since we started. And I found the first letter that I wrote. I’ll just read you the first paragraph, and that’ll give you the sense of it:

“Dear friends, what would you think of creating an organization of writers (allowing for that contradiction in terms), the aim of which would be to work for national stability, unity and inspiration under the democratic principles that Trump and his cohorts attempted to destroy? … And from what one saw in the demonstrations on the very day of Biden’s election, the country seems to be in for a rough time of noise and clashes. So I was wondering if we writers might consider making a little noise of our own, more like a joyful noise, celebrating the best aspects of American life and shooting down the worst.”

And that was the first paragraph. This was after I called a half-dozen writers who I thought I would test it on and see if they liked it. And all of them did like it very much. And then I sent out this letter, and immediately we had 30, then 60. And now we have 140.

Q: Wow, that’s amazing.

And the thing I love, it’s all races, all ages, all the genres. It’s been a very nice mix. And the great pleasure for me, and believe me, this has nothing to do with — I did nothing to create this. The great pleasure is watching the camaraderie among the writers. Most of them never met each other before they appeared on Write America. And they appreciate each other’s work, and they talk about it, and they do all the things that a demonstration of the humanizing aspects of writing are supposed to do.

And so, Write America, I doubt that we did very much in terms of practical consequences. But we created a very nice mood among the people who saw us. And there were a lot of people who saw us.

Q: I know in the note that you just sent out this week, you said: “One sighs realizing that we probably did very little. But we did something, simply by doing what we do.” Do you think ultimately it’s succeeded? And how do you even measure success with a project like this?

That’s really the intelligent question. I have no idea. I do know that, since writers deal with the immeasurable anyway, there’s no way, no reason to expect that we’d be able to measure the effects of something like this.

However, the sheer joy of watching each show — and they have audiences of anywhere between 60 and 200 listening at a time — and the comments that people are making, and the comments that people write in, etcetera, indicate that for this group of interested people — say, it’s, in total, 1,000 — for this group, they were made to feel better about such issues as justice and decency and common sense, and all the things that we were trying to promote.

Q: You had some very big names, Billy Collins and Gary Trudeau and Alan Alda and Russell Banks, but you also had some young and up-and-coming writers, right? That was part of the idea was to get a diversity of voices.

Yeah, exactly. And also to give young writers a sense that they’re part of the same world, and just at the younger end of it. So I wanted to make that a call of encouragement. And one of the things I did deliberately is, I tried to appear very little in the series. I appeared more than I wanted to, because people wanted to just talk to me at a certain point. But I stayed out of it most of the time.

When I went in, I went with students, with former students. And the last one that’s going to happen, on January 31, I’m doing with a former student, Lora Tucker [of Sag Harbor], who is not exactly that young, but she’s just starting out. She’s a wonderful writer.

… And Lora’s just as good as can be. But she’s perfect for me to talk with at the end, because, as I said, she’s at the beginning of this life, and she takes to it with all the enthusiasm and talent of the other young writers. And it’s where I would like to leave it.

I suppose I could have talked with Francine Prose and the really wonderful writers there, but I chose to speak with Lora, because I figured that’s where we ought to end: on a note of promise.

Q: You just retired recently from teaching, and that’s been a big part of your career, working with young writers. You had said something in an interview we did with you not long ago, that you feel like student writing over the years is always improving. I was really struck by that, because that’s kind of counterintuitive. It feels like there are so many challenges to young people today, having so many distractions and otherwise. The fact that they are coming out as good writers is almost counterintuitive, and it’s really reassuring.

It’s absolutely reassuring to me, and to folks like you and me, it’s a thrill. These people have no anticipation of anything. They’re not going to business school — they don’t get a business degree. They’re not going to law or medical school — they don’t get those professional degrees. Nothing declares them as a writer when they leave, except their own gifts. And what do they do? They just keep working at it, working at it, working at it.

I’m in touch with, I don’t know, say 20, 25 students, whom I had formerly, all the time, giving me news of their lives or sending me something they wrote or something to indicate that none of this enthusiasm has waned at all.

And I’m in awe of them. They have no expectations except those that are built on the hope of their own talent. And, in most instances, the talent is there. They will make it — it’ll just take a while.

Q: In the diversity of voices that you brought to the project, did you think about political diversity as well? If it’s about bridging the gaps, do you have a requirement to give the other side a chance to talk?

I do. I have the requirement, but not the manpower. I did not … my own personal life is so boringly liberal that I don’t know a lot of conservatives. But I do know a few and did ask people to take other points of view.

But the thing is that when you get down to the business of writing, politics is almost beside the point. “PBS NewsHour” did a feature on us, and Jeff Brown asked me just that question. And I said, “Well, you’re right — we are preaching to the choir most of the time. But you can’t tell me that a conservative responds differently to ‘King Lear’ than a liberal. When you have beautiful works of literature that mean a great deal to people, politics is set aside.” So on that basis, the idea of equal time or equal representation kind of fades away. And every once in a while you get somebody to disagree, somebody would disagree with something. But the talk was never political, almost never political.

Q: The conversations don’t seem to have been focused on politics. They’re focused on common ground, right?

And the wonder — the wonder these people found in each other. I can’t tell you the pleasure I got watching these conversations, knowing that the people had not known each other.

By the way, I came off looking like a genius. And people would say, God, how did he know that that combination would work? Of course, I did not! It was purely a crap shoot based on the hope that good writers and good people would produce something worthwhile, and they always did. And to me, I would sit back and watch this stuff and say, “My goodness, that was great!” To watch them discover something interesting in each other and something beautiful in many cases in each other — just wonderful.

Q: I feel like so much comes out of just having conversations. We’ve got to stop having them on social media and start having them face to face — it’s crucial to do. And on Zoom, it’s not as great as having them face to face, but it’s at least a facsimile.

Well, it is interesting, in a way you’re defining or redefining what a conversation means. Which is you watch two people actually discovering something in each other when they talk, … it’s certainly not like an interview, and it’s not a presentation that somebody makes. You have to pay attention to the person you’re listening to. That alone is a democratic activity. You have to pay attention to the person who is talking, and then you ask that that person pay attention to you when it’s your turn. Those are the things that Write America did.

Q: It’s funny, because social media is the epitome of where the person you’re talking to isn’t listening to you, they’re just waiting for their turn to talk.

Yeah, exactly. That’s perfect. Just right. I mean, that’s why Write America turned into such a pleasure. We are each other’s harvest. That’s the line from Gwendolyn Brooks … it’s a beautiful epigraph. And she said, in a sense, we are each other. And that was the whole purpose of the enterprise.

Q: What are some moments from those 90 episodes that really sort of gave you chills, or someone said something that really stuck with you as you bring this enterprise to a close?

Natalie Diaz, I don’t know if you know her. She won the Pulitzer, I think, last year. A brilliant poet. But more than that, her background: She is an American Indian and has Spanish in her background. But I love her because I used to play basketball myself. She was on the American women’s basketball team that won the national championship.

Every time I talked to her, I said, “You know, Natalie, if you weren’t so afraid to go one-on-one with me, people might think more of you.” (Laughs.)

Alice McDermott is as just as good as they get. Not only was Alice wonderful in her reading, but she would call me and make suggestions of how we could expand our work, and other people who might do the same.

Nick Flynn was wonderful. Francine Prose, wonderful. Joyce Maynard was wonderful.

… And, again, I hardly knew any of these people. I mean, let’s say of the 140, I knew, know, 20. And then the rest all were recommendations of people, further recommendations of people. … And just to see the abilities of these folks was breathtaking.

Q: It sounds like it was fun for you, too, an opportunity to meet some of these folks and engage with them, but also just, sort of, almost as an audience member.

You’re so right — I was the audience member. I never, I didn’t miss a show. And the thing was, because it was virtual, and, in a way, it simulated what the writing life is: Writers write something, send it out into outer space and hope somebody picks it up. We’ve lived virtually all our lives. So this, in a way, we were playing to our strength by this show.

Q: So let me ask you the tough question then. I think it’s arguable that words played a big role in getting us into this time when our country is so passionately and deeply divided. Do you think words alone play a role in delivering us out of that?

No, but it’s a very astute question. Yes, I do think language can get us out of the mess that others get us into. It’s the question of who’s using the language and for what purposes.

I mean, if you parse Trump’s speeches, he’d qualify a moron. The simplicity of what he’s saying has the simplicity of all tyrannical people. They have very simple messages, and they drive them home, and they say them again and again — “Make America Great Again” and that nonsense.

But if you have a wonderful writer, like Russell Banks, talking, or anybody else … and here it’s the antithesis of simplicity. It’s the seeking of complexity and the desire, instead of pushing people around, to bring people together.

So a lot of the use of language has to do with motive. Trump’s motives were naked and dangerous. And Alice McDermott’s motives are perfect. Just to bring all the best of human thinking to an audience.