Book Value

Writers often have existential questions about themselves and why they write.

Are writers born of internal inspiration or does some external spark motivate authors to write the poetry and prose that so compels them?

Jayne Anne Phillips (English, ’74) writes about what she knows best — her home state of West Virginia — but the recent Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winner feels that being a writer is complicated. She can explain.

“I suppose I started calling myself a writer when my first book, Black Tickets, was published (she was 26), but as a young writer, I wondered about making that claim," Phillips said. “Artists of all genres can be prone to ‘imposter syndrome’ — if you’ve published a book in the last six months, you’re a writer; if you’re working on a book that remains a mystery to you, you may not want to claim to be a writer. It wasn't until later in my career that this question ended for me.”

Phillips, a self-described voracious reader, said she evolved from being a bookworm to writing books, but started out writing poetry. Her process is thoughtful — and lengthy. Night Watch, the novel for which she won the Pulitzer, took almost eight years of writing and research.

A Pulitzer Prize reinforces the fact that the time she took with her latest work was worth it, and she said she is honored to receive the award that almost certainly defines her as a writer. The path to the prize that puts her on par with West Virginia native Pearl S. Buck opened up for her in Morgantown. Although she’s from a college town, the Buckhannon native, along with several close friends, chose West Virginia University after high school.

English professor Winston Fuller and Judith Stitzel, founder of the WVU Women’s Studies Program, were her early mentors, and in those spaces, she received motivation and support. Now called Women’s and Gender Studies, the program continues to offer that space of acceptance and support.

“I think the writer is an interior being and there is a need for encouragement and insight from others. I definitely received that at WVU during my college years,” Phillips said.

In the mid-1970s college students around the country were pushing for a future they couldn’t quite see through the fog of the Vietnam war, racial tensions, the women’s movement and political uncertainty. Those circumstances, particularly the war, played a role in Phillips’ evolution as both an adult and a writer.

“Vietnam made a huge impact on me, even before I came to WVU, and of course, the war was in everyone’s living room; it influenced everything,” she said. West Virginia suffered the highest death rate in the nation during that war, which lasted 20 years, and it came closer to Phillips than just her television. A close friend’s brother and other friends were killed in Vietnam, and Phillips said the women’s movement was linked to resistance to the war. “We were the generation that grew up with the necessity of resisting.”

Stitzel was just beginning the Women’s Studies Program when Phillips was in Morgantown. Phillips said her college experience helped open her eyes to the world at large, with all its wonders and its broken places. She describes students in the ’70s being “drenched in awareness of the outside world because it looked like our future was being taken away from us. I believe everyone felt they had to fight for ourselves and our communities.”

She can draw comparisons and similarities to that fragile time and today, noting that in both eras, the complexity and heartbreak of political events were and are felt by students on college campuses. As a participant then and an observer now, Phillips feels that students should have a voice in how the complexities can be resolved to prevent more heartbreak.

“Machine Dreams,” a New York Times 12 Best Books of the Year in 1984, is about the aftermath of Vietnam in North Central West Virginia; it connects a family’s struggles to stay together in the face of tragedy with the nation’s own internal conflict.

“Night Watch” also chronicles a post-war time in West Virginia, and partially takes place in the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum. The man whose job as Night Watch is to stand watch in the darkness is one of several characters in the novel who strive to protect others. The theme extends throughout the book and into the lives of characters who, having lived through the Civil War, comprise the unsung, nameless memory of a massively traumatic event.

Phillips said the novel establishes the underlying strength and resilience of people who endure separations, journeys and hardships, but who persist in order to protect the people they love.

“They love their families, and their sense of what is humane. Civil life and community are an extension of our relationships to one another,” Phillips said. “I think the idea of Night Watch has something to do with all of us — the idea of trying to protect the humanity in all of us,” she said.

“I hope Night Watch invites readers to feel that.” It’s important to Phillips to dispel the idea that the asylum was a “horror show,” during the Civil War era. “Because physician Thomas Story Kirkbride imported the European model of ‘moral treatment,’ which called for treating the mentally ill humanely,” she said, “the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum became a refuge from about 1860 through the 1880s. It was an inverted reality, in which the outside world was brutally dangerous, while ‘moral treatment’ within the asylum allowed healing and hope.” Phillips is keenly aware that the fracture of post-Civil War America echoes through the last century-and-a-half, and that Night Watch, which concerns building a community in a not-often talked about place, may encourage readers to begin rebuilding those ties again.