Chris Offutt lives on a hill outside Iowa City. His driveway looks like it will be impossible to shovel during the winter, but it is otherwise a nice home, calm, the kind of place you would imagine a writer would live. There’s a 10-foot cactus that a student gave him. It fills the entire living room window. There are turtle shells on a shelf, and a huge hornet nest hanging in his office. At his dining room table sat a notebook and a draft of his next project. Offutt was in the middle of a revision.
The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop alum is a prolific and bestselling author crossing multiple genres, from crime novels in the Mick Hardin series such as Shifty’s Boys, to memoir, like his acclaimed My Father the Pornographer. Offut also wrote and produced scripts for HBO’s True Blood and Treme and Showtime’s Weeds.
In addition to his writing, Offutt has been a photographer for decades.
“I’ve been actively shooting color photography for 36 years,” he said. “I never showed the photographs to anyone until 2020 when I began putting them on Instagram.”
Scroll through his photography and you’ll find keen snapshots of American landscapes, including many of the Iowan countryside. Little Village collected some of our favorites below, along with a conversation with Offutt in which he reflects on making it work — as a traveler, author, photographer and provider.
This is the fourth time you’ve moved to Iowa in a little more than 30 years. Do you feel settled?
Well, I hope that I’m settled, finally. I’ve lived and worked all over the darn country. I love Iowa City.
Has Iowa changed a lot since you came here for the Workshop?
I came to the Workshop in 1988. School started on my birthday, actually. Before that, I’d hitchhiked through here, once. I got out of this truck at night and camped by the river and thought this is a great spot. When I woke up in the morning, it turned out I was on the lawn of the Art Building. I packed up fast and headed back to I-80.
Part of the reason I stayed after the Workshop was to have my kids here. I’d traveled a lot and worked a lot of labor jobs. The nicest people I’d met, in all my travels, were Iowans. And the idea was not so much about where to raise my kids, but that the people they turned out to be as adults would be Iowans. That’s why Rita and I stayed — so our sons would be Iowans, the best people in the country.
To answer the question, the biggest change that I saw has been since I left 12 years ago. The town has grown much bigger and the state has shifted politics, and I didn’t expect that.
You mentioned working a lot of jobs before you started to make it as a writer. Who was your best boss?
That’s a tricky question, because there’s some part of me that resents being told what to do. I had good ones and bad ones. A cook in Arizona was kind to me as a newbie dishwasher. Most of the best bosses were women.
Worst boss?
I had a number of those. I mean, I had over 50 part-time jobs. At age 20 I vowed that I would never work full-time so I could try to be what I wanted to be. I wanted to be an actor first. Then I wanted to be a painter. And then a photographer.
But the expense of all those undertakings was huge. I wound up writing after a certain point, simply because it’s the cheapest art form. People will give you a paper and pen. You don’t need to be in a specific place, and you don’t need a lot of room and you don’t need a lot of money. So, it was ideal for me.
You mentioned photography. Has photography helped your writing? Or is it an escape from writing?
First of all, I think visually. I always have. That helps my writing, because when I write, I’m imagining a room or a landscape or a vehicle, and I’m seeing the people who are there and I’m listening to them talk, and watching what they do. That’s how I write. It’s a visual approach. Transcribing what I see in my head.
I’ve written for over 40 years now. It’s a case of sitting by myself in a room for several hours a day, every day, and looking inside myself. Photography is leaving the room and looking outside myself, at the world beyond the room and the self. So, it’s not an escape from writing. It’s a balance. The inner world and the outer world.
The drawback to the combination is that they’re both very solitary. I mean, I drive around and take pictures, or I sit in a room and write. So, I don’t meet people at work. I wish I had another outlet — like bowling or darts. Or playing music. Something with other folks. Writing is lonely.
I was looking through Iowa newspaper archives, and I found this reading from 1989 that you gave at Coe College. Do you remember this?
Well, no, I don’t. [Laughs]
I was going to ask if it was your first reading.
My first reading was at Prairie Lights, with IWP [the International Writing Program] in 1988. Coe College had a magazine called The Coe Review. That was my first publication, probably around that time, in 1990 — and I was thrilled. I carried it around with me in my coat pocket, and I showed it to people, like the Hy-Vee clerk, and, of course, she couldn’t care less.
What felt more validating, that first publication or getting into the Workshop?
My first publication felt like I had accomplished something. I had no idea of the Workshop’s status in the world. When I applied, I was living in Kentucky, I was broke, too old to join the Army. Peace Corps had already said no, and I didn’t know what to do.
You’d already tried to join the Army as a teenager, is that right?
I did. So, I got rejected by the military and the Peace Corps. I’m not sure what that says. [Laughs] My wife knew about MFA programs, because she was from New York, and she said, “Why don’t you do that?” I wanted to go to art school, but there was the economics of it. So, I went to the library and got all this information on writing programs. It sounded preposterous to me. Like, Really? You can go to school to write? I sit at home and write all the time anyway.
I’d never had a writing class. The college I’d gone to didn’t have any writing courses but they had finally hired a poet with an MFA, so I went to talk to her. She said, “You may as well apply to Iowa while you’re at it. It’s supposed to be the best—but you won’t get in.”
Well, I looked into it, and it turned out that all these other schools charged 20 bucks for an application and Iowa only charged 10. So, I thought, I’ll apply. So, this idea of validation wasn’t a factor. Iowa was the first place that accepted me. And I moved here.
I have a clipping about a reading you did with Denis Johnson. Did you guys read together a lot?
A few times. Denis and I were good friends. We met here. It was right when my first book was coming out, and right before his big book, Jesus’ Son. We met at George’s and just hit it off.
So, as far as fame goes, you guys were sort of going through the same thing at the same time.
No, Denis was far ahead of me. I mean, Denis is a brilliant writer and a genius. And he was older. Jesus Son’ was, I think, his 7th book, and it just took off like a bat out of hell. I think he liked all that, but it made him a little uncomfortable at times.
I see you two in a similar light, because you both write across genre successfully. Are there similarities for you between, for example, memoir and crime noir?
I’ve never looked at writing that way. I just thought you write whatever you want, and it wasn’t until later, in the past 10 years, that people have pointed out that it was unusual to write in multiple forms. But to answer the question, no, a short story is very different from a novel. And a memoir is different from both. An essay is its own thing altogether. Screenwriting was the hardest of all, for me. But I learned how to do it. I like trying different forms.
From the outside looking in, I think one of your superpowers is a deep understanding of structure.
I wrote my first story when I was 7. I still have a copy. It’s about somebody who gets his car stolen, and then there’s a chase and then there’s a fight. There are sound effects, like in comics–biff! Bam! Whap! He goes to the police, and he lives happily ever after. All the traditional structure is there and I don’t know where I got it. Comic books and fairy tales, probably.
When I was a kid, I read constantly and structure is what got into me and what interested me, because it’s the most visible. It’s one of the formal elements of narrative that’s most overt. Other things — tone, voice, dialog, description — can vary from project to project, but without structure, it could just be stream of consciousness. I learned the most about structure from plays, reading them and writing them and performing in them.
What about revision?
I think writing is revising. The first draft is you throw everything but the kitchen sink, then the sink, all the dishes and turn the faucets on till it overflows. A first draft is hard because there’s a constant enormous pressure of invention at every moment you’re engaged in it. I don’t edit as I go, but follow every narrative impulse.
Revision is more fun because that pressure is gone. Cut the boring parts, expand the interesting parts. So, I revise a lot. My first draft is huge and sloppy. My second draft is tiny. Third draft blows up again. It’s always going through growth and regression. I do that until I’m only changing commas and conjunctions. One thing, I never revise until I have a first draft.
I think anyone can write a first draft, but revision is where, for a lot of aspiring writers, that’s where their book ends.
When I first started, the first draft was exciting as hell. It was like taking a drug. And it might be horrible when I went back and looked at it, but — at the time — I thought, I’ll just write another five or 10 pages. That was fun, but revision is the real work. It’s also what separates writers from someone who can write a first draft.
Like you said, anyone can write a first draft, and anyone can polish a first draft; I’ve read books that way in print. A really polished first draft is like a bauble, like costume jewelry instead of a gemstone. It means that nothing has really changed from where it started. Revision — I think it’s French — means to re-see. With a draft, you’ve got to write it and then find a way to look at it differently. It’s not easy, but it’s necessary.
When you’re writing or revising something, what are you reading in your free time?
When I’m writing a first draft, I try to only read books written in a style that I won’t mind if they influence me. Let me put it like this, if I’m writing a first draft, then I can’t read someone with a super distinctive style, like Cormac McCarthy, or Lorrie Moore, or even Denis Johnson. When it comes to revision, that’s when I open my palate to everything. I’ll have stacks of books saved up until I’m in a revision period.
Thoughts on MFA programs?
Literacy is under attack in the U.S. We’re losing bookstores left and right, and we’re losing readers. I believe MFA programs are keeping literature alive. They’re a chance for a young person who writes and reads to find people with that same value, because it’s an unusual trait for someone in their 20s to really love to read and write and try to do it. Writing is an act of rebellion.
When I came to Iowa, I’d never been around that many smart people who loved literature as much as I did. The great thing about MFA programs is that for two or three years, it gives somebody a chance to do nothing but read and write. You don’t get that opportunity again in life.
Do you see a future where you teach again?
I’d love to. I miss the classroom. I began teaching here in ‘88 as a T.A. and continued on and off for 25 years in different places. I’ve taught multiple genres, too. Yeah, I’d teach again. I’ve learned a few things and know how to impart them to other writers. It’s a way to repay the great teachers I had here.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
