…wherever I am, the first thing I do each day is look out, and though what I see is different, what I really see is the view that now lives inside my mind and body. Writing, I think, is about paying deep attention, and my own writing began there.
Elizabeth Barks Cox
Welcome to the thirteenth entry in our blog series, WRITING MATTERS, in which Kelley interviews some of our wonderful authors who share about their books and writing processes. This post features Elizabeth (Betsy) Cox, author of MUP books I HAVE TOLD YOU AND TOLD YOU (2013) and READING VAN GOGH (2024). Betsy has published five novels, a collection of short stories, and a book of poetry. She has won the North Carolina Fiction Award and the Lillian Smith Award for a novel, and in 2013 she was awarded the Robert Penn Warren Award for Fiction. She taught creative writing at Duke University for seventeen years and has also taught at Bennington College, Boston College, and MIT. She currently resides in Spartanburg, South Carolina.
Kelley @ MUP: Betsy, you have written several books, including novels and poetry. Can you tell us about your earlier writings?
Elizabeth Cox: In my late thirties, I decided I wanted to write. Both of my brothers were publishing books, and since I had written poems when I was a child, I thought maybe I should try my own hand at writing. I wrote some poems and had one published in The Southern Poetry Review. I began to work on my MFA at UNC-Greensboro, studying with Fred Chappell, and I published a chapbook of poetry called White Sugar Candy. During that time, I also wrote a story titled “Land of Goshen,” which Fred admired, urging me to write more. I took that story to a conference at Saranac Lake, New York, and gained some attention from Charles Simmons (who wrote for the New York Times) and novelist E. L. Doctorow. Simmons found an agent for me. The agent asked if I could write a novel. I said, “Sure,” even though I had no idea how to accomplish that! Doctorow recommended me for a stint at Yaddo to work on the novel. I was in over my head.
I came home and wondered how I would go about writing a novel, knowing I would not read a book on “How to Write a Novel,” so I took a course in the Sonata and Symphony at Duke University, learning the form of statement, development, and reiteration, listening to those reminding phrases in the sonata. Then, while listening to sonatas and symphonies I wrote my first novel, and while I did not apply anything literally, I learned about form from listening to that music.
I wrote Familiar Ground, which was reviewed well, and then I wrote my second novel, The Ragged Way People Fall Out of Love (this time I read astronomy and studied the physical patterns of the planets and stars). I wrote Night Talk, which won the Lillian Smith Award (for fiction); John Lewis won for nonfiction. I kept writing novels and publishing poems, but I was also writing stories, and I finally published a collection of stories (Bargains in the Real World) as well as a novel (The Slow Moon) with Random House. My last novel, A Question of Mercy, was published several years ago.
My book of poems (I’m proud to say) was published by Mercer University Press. As I grew older, I tried my hand at essays. This new book is a result of that attempt.
K: What drew you to the craft of writing?
EC: I was probably inspired by my brothers: Coleman Barks, who writes poetry and is best known for his translation of Rumi, and Herb Barks, who writes essays and tells wonderful stories in those essays. But the power of place (and the love of place) may have spurred the desire to write in all three of us. I grew up on a hundred-acre campus of a boys’ private school—Baylor School in Chattanooga, Tennessee—where my father was headmaster. The campus sat on a hill above the Tennessee River, surrounded by a bowl of mountains: Lookout Mountain, Signal Mountain, and Elder Mountain. Every morning when I got up, the first thing I did was to look out my window and see the river, the island across the river, the mountains, and their shadows. I could hear the waking of life on the island and the river sounds. I never got over that. Now, wherever I am, the first thing I do each day is look out, and though what I see is different, what I really see is the view that now lives inside my mind and body. Writing, I think, is about paying deep attention, and my own writing began there.
K: You taught creative writing at Duke University. How did you find the balance between encouraging young writers and offering truthful feedback? In what ways did teaching about writing improve your own?
EC: My own writing was not improved by teaching but rather by reading writers I admired: Robert Penn Warren, William Stafford, Marcel Proust, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Cormac McCarthy, Marilynne Robinson, and also psychologists, poets, and certain physicists. During that time of year when I taught, I would take notes and put down ideas, but could I not move into the space that a novel requires of me. I could work on poems or stories but not a novel. My energy went to the students, and I loved teaching, loved watching students get out of their own way and move into a way of seeing the world differently—with passion—and then to write from that place. Maybe what I really taught was not so much “craft” but a “way of seeing.” I wrote a poem about that: “I Have Told You,” which is in my book I Have Told You and Told You.
I never found the balance between teaching and writing. I was either teaching or writing, though I could make notes about a story or especially about a character.
K: Considering the title of your new book with Mercer University Press, Reading Van Gogh, Vincent Van Gogh is clearly an inspiration to you. When did you first discover his art and his story? What do you think gives him such relevance as the decades pass?
EC: Though I had been familiar with Van Gogh’s art for years—not as an art critic but just seeing what I enjoyed about his work—it was while reading his letters that I discovered a depth of compassion that astounded me and inspired me. As a young man, his deep desire to love God, as well as beauty, guided him toward the ministry. He entered seminary, but one of the first stumbling blocks was that he did not like theology—he did not like to hear “God” discussed in such a lofty intellectual manner. He flunked out of seminary pretty quickly. Still, he begged the ministers to give him a post where he could preach. He was granted a post at a church in the Borinage district of Belgium, a mining community. He was given six months there to prove himself.
Van Gogh, though, was more interested in people than in evangelical sermons. He spent much of his time caring for the families suffering from illness and fevers, and after an explosion at the mine, he spent all his time in the victims’ homes, helping to feed and bind their wounds. One night he returned to his apartment and felt ashamed of all that he had (though he always lived in poverty). He began to bring his food, his money, and his clothes to give to the mining families. He gave away his bed sheets; he gave them his chairs. Finally, he was found in the corner of one of the huts, suffering from a fever and close to death, and his father and brother brought him home. The ministers would never again allow him to become a minister, and though Van Gogh’s attitude toward “religion” was an embittered one, his love of God and the way he cared for people continued to thrive—both in his paintings and in his life. His eye for compassion lives in the portraits he painted, in the blast of a cornfield, in the hint of crows, in the beauty of a starry night. His love of beauty and his love of God are visible reminders of our own capacities.
K: Reading Van Gogh contains snapshots of your life. There is even a section of dated journal-type entries. What can you tell us about your process in creating this collection? Did you write some of the essays with the intention of forming a book, or was the book born as you looked back over your writings and recognized a theme/pattern?
EC: In the year 2000 I was reading Van Gogh’s letters, admiring his ability to see. He saw purple where there was no purple. He painted it in, and then we saw it. He experienced color more than seeing it. I wanted to see that way. Each day I read his letters and then went for what I called my “Prayer Walks,” trying to discover what prayer was, trying to experience the world more than just see it. Even though I had been praying for a long time, I felt that I did not know what prayer really was. So I hoped these journal entries—which cover walking, prayer, reading, vanity, anger, humor, greed, and an effort toward love—might help me learn something, though I didn’t know what. I wanted to be open.
I had been writing essays that focused on a spiritual life, hoping I might get a book out of that effort, but I did not think about publishing the journal entries. Those entries just seemed to become part of this book, especially since they focused on reading Van Gogh’s letters before each walk.
Also, whenever I’m writing (essays, stories, or chapters of a novel), I am not thinking about a “book” or even about “publishing”; instead, I’m more deeply focused on the subject matter at hand. I like being immersed in the subject. That is the real pleasure/reward of writing, and though I’m always grateful to be published, my real pleasure comes in writing—in living in that place of imagination where everything seems true.
K: How do you spend your days in Spartanburg?
EC: Much the same way I’ve always spent my days: rising each day to the beauty of things, reading a range of different subjects (poetry, psychology, fiction, biography, sometimes physics), seeing friends, working with the homeless population through my church, feeding my two cats, sitting on the porch in late afternoon to see the angle of the sun and hear the sounds of creatures.
K: Can you tell us about upcoming writing projects?
EC: I have several stories in various stages of completion and a novel that has stymied me and that I have stopped working on. But the book that is almost finished (and the one that has my heart) is another book of essays—based on people who have lived extraordinary lives of courage and accomplishment: Fyodor Dostoevsky, Helen Keller, Harriet Tubman, Elie Wiesel, Dorothy Day, Etty Hillesum, and others.
I do not know how I chose these people; I think they chose me! I’ve been reading books on each person, trying to choose what I want to say about their extraordinary lives. I did not know why I was writing this book until I wrote the preface, which focuses on the prisons we live in. Some prisons involve physical limitations and some are political, but some prisons we put on ourselves. These people chose not to be stifled by their prisons. This book is about that kind of choice.
© Mercer University Press 2024
Elizabeth Cox’s titles with Mercer University Press:
- I Have Told You and Told You (2013)
- Reading Van Gogh (2024)
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Kelley graduated from Mercer University in 2000 with a BA in English/Creative Writing. After twenty years as a freelance copy editor, including work for MUP, she has returned to full-time work outside the home with the good people at Mercer University Press. She loves to read and also enjoys great TV series, long walks with dachshunds Luke and Leia, and all things nerdy. Kelley is married to John, a “Double Bear” (BSE 2001 and MSE 2010), and they have two teenage daughters, a high school junior and a Mercer freshman.
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