For our first installment of the “How and Where I Write” series, BearTracks sat down with Dr. Richard Rankin Russell, professor of English and the English Graduate Program Director. Dr. Russell’s areas of expertise include Modern and Contemporary Irish literature, though he began his graduate career studying the literature of the American South. Dr. Russell earned his PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and has been on the faculty at Baylor since 2001. He has published numerous books and articles, most recently his book Seamus Heaney: A Critical Introduction, published in 2016, but he has a new book entitled James Joyce and Samaritan Hospitality coming out in November 2022 through the University of Edinburgh Press. It was a pleasure to converse with Dr. Russell about his writing habits and wisdom; we hope you enjoy as well!
BearTracks
Where do you like to write? Your office, at home, coffee shops, outside? Where is your chosen place to write?
Dr. Richard Rankin Russell
I cannot write at coffee shops and not usually in my office. I can edit, and I’m doing edits now on a book in my office, but I have a study at home. And I write on my grandfather’s desk from the furniture store that my family had started in Paris, Tennessee where I grew up.
BT
That’s really special.
RRR
I write there, and it’s usually late at night into the early morning, just as I did as a graduate student with my dissertation, and now with kids, that’s when the house is quiet.
BT
So you’re a total-silence-when-you-write person?
RRR
Yeah, or maybe classical music in the background, but yeah.
BT
I’ve recently discovered, I think, Miles Davis is going to be my go-to writing music.
RRR
Miles is good. I’ve got on repeat a five-album series by Wynton Marsalis, just instrumental jazz; it’s really good and bluesy.
BT
Yeah, something about the rhythms just kind of keeps the energy up; it’s good. Do you still acquire lots of books as your career has progressed or has the pace slowed somewhat as you’ve gone on?
RRR
I’d say the pace has slowed somewhat. I’ve been really consciously trying to give books away lately. I’ve got a lot of books in here, except for Irish literature, which takes up close to this much at home in my study. I’ve slowed down some on book acquisition, because I think I have enough but still like to get authors I like.
BT
How do you capture your research? Are you a notecard person, a journal? Do you keep a document on the computer? How does that process work for you?
RRR
I mark sections in books in pencil and with bookmarks, and I have those piled around me. I write directly to Word documents now and edit as I go, but I definitely have scattered written notes around me in those books.
BT
Do you immediately start writing on the computer or do you do anything beginning with longhand, just to get thoughts down?
RRR
I try to do a little bit of that. Maybe on a legal pad, a little bit of flow, but I’ve also done that directly to the Word file, and then I just go. I’m kind of a spur, or jag, or streak writer. I don’t believe in the hour-a-day writing thing, because when I write, I really write, and I’ll go for four or five hours at a stretch. That’s the only way I can get anything done. That’s why I have to carve out that time at night, and that’s harder than it used to be, to stay up until one or two.
BT
I take it you’re a marginalia person?
RRR
Oh yeah, absolutely! And I do write in library books – in pencil!
BT
I told that to someone once, I also dog-ear library books, and they were appalled; it was like I had just denied the divinity of Christ or something. I see it as a gift for future readers, but maybe I have too high an opinion of myself!
RRR
Haha! Yeah, absolutely, exactly! They’ll be interested in our marginalia, I’m sure they will!
BT
Do you ever read digital books?
RRR
No. The only time I ever read them was after back surgery when [my wife] had The Hunger Games trilogy on her Kindle. And I read the whole thing. It was very odd, let me tell you.
BT
What is some good advice you’ve received on writing?
RRR
Hmmm. One piece that comes to mind comes from my dear friend Dr. Fulton, down the hall, who, when I came here, said, “I know you want to get your dissertation published but try to think several books ahead.” I was like, What? That sounds impossible. I think, if you’re in a research position, you want to get your dissertation published, and you don’t think how that book is going to connect to your whole intellectual profile, but you should. And his saying that one time, in his Fulton-esque way, helped me to think that way, and I feel like my career has had some intellectual integrity because of that, and it’s arisen organically because of that comment.
BT
Do you feel like that also took some of the pressure off of individual works in a certain way because there was that holistic viewpoint?
RRR
I think so. And it also stems for an unfortunate bad habit I have, which is whatever the written version of logorrhea is. I tend to write too much, so this book here that I’m doing revisions on, this book on Brian Friel, that was a dissertation chapter originally. And I took that and got an article or two out of it, and then, I just really loved Friel, I ended up working it into a book. So the advantage of writing too much is that then you can send signals to yourself in a given project, “There needs to be work done on this!” And then you can do that work later.
The second [good piece of advice I’ve received], I had a friend in graduate school – I’ve never forgotten what she said – she said, “Think about you’re writing to an intelligent but ignorant child.” Ignorant, you know in the best sense of the word, meaning not knowing the field, but intelligent. So that’s been helpful to me to think about audience in that sense.
BT
What do you think your best piece of written work so far, or perhaps the piece of work you’re most proud of?
RRR
That’s a good question. I really like this book, the Seamus Heaney Region’s book, that won the Cleanth Brooks-Robert Penn Warren prize. I really felt like I got a lot in there.
But I’m maybe most pleased with a piece a lot of people don’t know about, which was a piece in Five Points on the Emmett Till lynching in my father’s home county. So I worked up a piece that’s part memoir, part literary criticism. Long story, but these photographs [in the piece] are from a friend of mine, Maude Schuyler Clay. His body [Emmett Till’s] washed up on her family land. I got to know her when this was done. I loved doing the literary criticism with the Hughes poems and the blues, and thinking about what it was like for my dad growing up where we go now every summer, learning about this horrible thing. But then, when I got to meet Maude, I realized that her first book of photographs ended with this, which is to his [Till’s] memory, and then, fairly early on as we talked, I realized that my grandmother was her beautician, her mom’s beautician, and her grandmother’s beautician. My grandmother ran a beauty shop in my dad’s house where he grew in the Delta. And she retired when she was 87, so she ran a beauty shop for over 60 years, so all the women in the Delta came around. So it’s not a straight academic piece, but that I think is an important for me, thinking about my family history, thinking about literature as power to remember such atrocities, but it’s hopeful too, because the Hughes poems are Christian, and there’s a lot of good things that have come out of that. So that’s been really important to me.
But I’m really excited about the Joyce and Good Samaritan book that’s coming out.
BT
Congratulations on that! I saw your email yesterday.
RRR
Thank you. That’s been important for me thinking about how literature is not some ivory tower pursuit, but it’s generative, and it can include us all as potential readers and rescuers of others.
BT
Very nicely, succinctly put. Would you name a few favorite authors from your field of study?
RRR
Oh my goodness. I’d have to put Yeats and Joyce up there near the top – and Heaney, for sure. Goodness. I love Virginia Woolf. I love George MacKay Brown. There’s so many.
BT
How about critics?
RRR
Oh. I really like Rita Felski. I really liked Denis Donoghue’s work. Those two are great. I’ve really been influenced by Helen Vendler, I think she’s one of our great living critics, and then I’d say Christopher Ricks as well. Also one of our great living critics. The biggest of all would be my own advisor, Weldon Thornton, who passed away last year on July 15th. I love that combination of rigor and close reading, but also reaching outside the text at hand.
BT
Okay, final question. And this one’s the mean one. What is a book you should have read by now but haven’t?
RRR
That’s a good question. It would have been, before this year, Dante, but I’ve read two thirds of it now. Oh goodness, there’s so many. Oh, let’s put The Aeneid. That’s a big omission on my part; everyone’s got them. People used to play that game, like, literary critics, and there’s a story that went around. Someone finally said, “Hamlet, I haven’t read Hamlet.” They laughed him out of the group.
This interview was originally published on Baylor’s Graduate School blog, BearTracks, and can be read here.