{"id":1003,"date":"2015-02-24T15:27:30","date_gmt":"2015-02-24T15:27:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/?p=1003"},"modified":"2023-05-24T17:57:07","modified_gmt":"2023-05-24T17:57:07","slug":"levy-talks-love-and-writing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/2015\/02\/24\/levy-talks-love-and-writing\/","title":{"rendered":"Levy Talks Love and Writing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Following her remarkable reading on campus two days before Valentine\u2019s Day, Wabash visiting writer EJ Levy\u2014award-winning author of Love, In Theory<\/i>\u2014sat down with Richard Paige for a Wabash on My Mind<\/i><\/a> podcast about love, her unusual path to becoming a writer, and the difficult decision she just made to better commit to that vocation.<\/p>\n

“I just received tenure at\u00a0lovely Colorado State and have just resigned my position,” Levy tells Paige. “I just did that yesterday\u2014I will probably stay on half time.”<\/p>\n

Levy explains: “I\u2019ve been running away from the thing I\u2019ve been given to do, and the more I run away, the worse I feel.<\/p>\n

“I had thought [teaching] would\u2026 give me the fall back, make me an\u00a0\u2018official\u2019 writer. I told myself it\u2019s responsible, a way to support myself as a writer. But really what it has done is distract me. And I\u2019ve done it for long enough.<\/p>\n

“I love teaching, I love my students, I\u00a0love my\u00a0colleagues, but I don\u2019t have the liberty to wake up every morning and go to the desk and work from 9 to 1, and I need to be doing that. I\u2019m a writer first. And, as the poet Allen Shapiro said, you\u2019re a writer only when you\u00a0are writing.”<\/p>\n

Levy’s re-doubled commitment to writing is a theme throughout the interview, especially as she discusses her grad school days at Ohio State, which she attended after more than a decade as an editor and activist.<\/p>\n

“By the time I finally got to grad school, a\u00a0visiting writer came who had\u00a0anointed a lot of writers I really love, had been a judge for Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He basically said [after reading a story of mine] in the first month I was there, ‘This story is a failure, but you\u2019re the real thing.’ And suddenly it was like I could fly.<\/p>\n

“I went home from that conversation and I\u00a0could write. All of the doubt,\u00a0resistance, block\u2014all the wondering, Is what I should be writing\u2014disappeared. I wrote three books in three years and it was like learning to fly.<\/p>\n

“And I realized, how insane that I had waited half my life to go to grad school\u00a0because I was waiting for somebody else to give me permission to pursue my vocation.”<\/i><\/p>\n

Levy adds that graduate school wasn’t the only thing she put off earlier in her life.<\/p>\n

“I ‘ve taken a long time\u00a0to settle with an agent, and so in the last couple of years I\u2019ve found a wonderful agent who I adore.\u00a0I\u2019ve taken a long time to get married, and in the last couple of years I’ve gotten married, and had a baby.”<\/p>\n

“So it\u2019s almost Valentine\u2019s\u00a0Day and I\u2019m all about commitment.”<\/p>\n

Listen to the complete interview at Wabash On My Mind<\/i>.<\/i><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Following her remarkable reading on campus two days before Valentine\u2019s Day, Wabash visiting writer EJ Levy\u2014award-winning author of Love, In Theory\u2014sat down with Richard Paige for a Wabash on My Mind podcast […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":1004,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"audio","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1003","post","type-post","status-publish","format-audio","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","post_format-post-format-audio"],"w_featured_image_url":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2015\/02\/levy-ej-2-1024x682.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1003","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1003"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1003\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1007,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1003\/revisions\/1007"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1004"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1003"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}