Podcast #37: Richard Ford on Becoming a Reader and Finding a Voice

By Tracy O'Neill, Social Media Curator
November 20, 2014
Stephen A. Schwarzman Building

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The New York Public Library Podcast brings you the best of the Library's author talks, live events, and other bookish curiosities. In our most recent episode, we were lucky to be visited by Richard Ford, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, who is perhaps best known for his Frank Bascombe books.  At Books at Noon, the novelist and short story writer discussed Raymond Carver, voice in fiction, and becoming a reader.

Richard Ford

Although he has written eight novels, Richard Ford told us that he was a bit of a late bloomer when it came to reading. He explained:

"I went to high school in Jackson, Mississippi, where you could graduate in the middle of your class and never have read a book, and so really I didn't read a book until I was about eighteen... Teachers were always saying to me (you know how teachers do things), 'You need to apply yourself. You need to apply yourself.' We've all been told that. So when I got to be about eighteen, I thought, 'If I don't start applying myself, I'm going to be doomed.' And that fear of failure really was what it was that made me read. It wasn't anything high-minded."

Once Ford established himself as a writer, however, he became known for the integrity of his sentences and his voice. Of the latter, which is notoriously difficult to define, Ford said:

"I think voice is the music of the story's intelligence, that the voice of a novel, the voice of a story, is not the speaking voice of Frank Bascombe but it is something a good bit more complex. It is how a novel sounds when it is doing its most important business on you, when it is, as novels do, as poems do,. Novels lean on us. They are artifice. They are rhetorical. They are trying to effect us and change us. And that's what I hear, what I understand, when I use the word 'voice.'"

Shortly after publishing his first novel, A Piece of My Heart, Ford met the legendary minimalist writer Raymond Carver. The two became fast friends:

"I met Carver in 1977 in Dallas. Universities still had money for literary festivals, and they brought me and Ray and Ed Doctorow, who'd been my teacher, and Phil Levine, your old friend, a bunch of us down to do that thing. And Carver was there and he was not long off of the booze, and he was very shaky, and I don't mean literally shaky, but his grip on his life was very uncertain. And when he met me, it was kind of love at first sight between him and me because I wasn't a drunk and I owned a house. I was still married to my original wife, and I was solvent. And I think he looked at me, and he thought, 'These are the kinds of friends I need to have.'"

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