Robin Hemley lectured on "Turning Life into Fiction" to SYSU students

Source: School of Foreign Languages
Written by: Nazli İnal
Edited by: Wang Dongmei

On March 21, 2016,  the School of Foreign Languages at Sun Yat-sen University hosted Robin Hemley, who has published eleven books of short stories, memoirs, as well as books on the craft of fiction and nonfiction. Hemley’s lecture was titled after his 1994 book Turning Life into Fiction, and attracted an unprecedented crowd consisting of undergraduate and graduate students in English, translators, and many faculty members. 

Hemley started his lecture by sharing humorous stories about writing short stories that had characters based on his friends and family members and how those stories were received. “You can’t know how people will read themselves, and what will they like or get angry about,” Hemley said, and emphasized the importance of writing a good story by transforming what really happened. He suggested that the writer could ask “what if?” and reimagine the event. “Something that really happened can make a bad story,” he said, “make it believable within the context of the story.” As Hemley approached the writing of a story from the point of view of both the writer and the reader, his audience was able to appreciate the complex relationship between the reader and literature, and also the more challenging relationship between the creator and the text. 

Hemley broke his lecture to read a very short story he has written based on his sister, and followed his reading with what most writers of fiction shy away from, telling his audience what was taken from real life and what was fabricated. His comments were personal, as the story was based on his sister with whom he had a close relationship until she passed away, and also writerly, full of the sensitive, curious, and receptive evaluation of reality that make artists artists. 

Sun Yat-sen University students impressed Hemley with their sincere and well-thought-out questions about his story, about writing, and about being a writer. The question and answer session took about half an hour, and Hemley shared tips and exercises about writing, as well as comments about being a reader and a writer. The answer to the question how does he manage to be such an unpretentious and fresh writer after all these years may be found in his final remarks of the evening: “Things intrigue me or trouble me, and I write about them to figure out what I’m thinking about.”

Robin Hemleyis the winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship and many other awards. His stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, Chicago Tribune, and many literary magazines and anthologies.