About Christopher Tilghman: A Profile

In 1990, Christopher Tilghman published his first book, a collection called
In a Father's Place. It was an auspicious debut, the stories lavishly pfaised for their narrative eloquence and emotional weight. Tilghman was featured on the cover of
The New York Times Book Review with three other writers, under the banner "New Guys on the Block," and reviewer John Casey wrote that
In a Father's Place was "a beautiful book," that each story did "the work of novels. . . with what Turgenev called 'the life-giving drop.'" For Christopher Tilghman, the acclaim was tremendously gratifying, particularly since it was so hard-won. Tilghman, who was forty-three when the collection came out, had been writing seriously for over twenty years, and until 1986, he hadn't published any of his fiction at all.

He was born in Boston and raised in Massachusetts, spending summers on a Maryland farm that his family had owned since the seventeenth century. With a father who was an executive at Houghton Mifflin, it was natural for Tilghman to become interested in books and writing from an early age. He produced typewritten chapbooks as a child, and at St. Paul's, the preparatory school, he worked on the literary magazine and wrote a 150-page novel. Inexplicably, however, he lost his zeal for writing once he got to Yale. Although he was a French literature major, he chose to focus on music. He played bass in a jazz group, and at the time, his ambition was to become a professional saxophonist. He even planned to study a fifth year at Yale for a second bachelor's degree in music, but his draft board had other ideas. They told him he would be drafted in July 1968, and to make the best arrangements he could. Tilghman opted to join the Navy's officer program, and he served three years. One night at sea in the
North Atlantic, he had an epiphany. "It was one of those defining moments," he recalls. "I was on watch, and it was cold as hell, and I was miserable. I'd been doing a lot of writing then, out of frustration and rage, mostly journal entries, and I suddenly knew that what I really wanted to do was write fiction."

When he was discharged, he and his wife moved to New Hampshire, where he worked for two years on a novel, one he regards with some embarrassment now. He was encouraged by several editors, however, and Seymour Lawrence's remarks in particular kept him going: "He told me, 'Put this aside and move on, but you're a born writer, and don't forget it.' I've always been grateful to him for that."

Tilghman spent the next ten years on his second novel, which was loosely based on his own back-to-the-land experience, for by this time he had become a survivalist, a hippie who would not pay money, hire anyone, to do anything he couldn't do himself. "I had the long hair, the full beard -- the full catastrophe," Tilghman laughs. "I cherished every moment of it." He learned to change an engine on a car and to slaughter a pig, and he worked as a carpenter and cabinetmaker, but in the end, all of his resourcefulness could not help him complete his novel, which he eventually abandoned.

"I died a thousand deaths along the way," Tilghman says. "Plenty of times I could have quit with honor." Yet, with the support of his family and his second wife, Caroline Preston, an archivist, he gave it another try, but with a different form -- the novella. He was going to write a Navy version of William Styron's
The Long March, a book he greatly admired. He finished the manuscript, and to his surprise, discovered there was no dialogue in it, just narrative. What's more, it was short, only thirty pages, hardly a novella, but he couldn't think of a thing to add. His friend Peter Balakian read the manuscript, which was entitled "Norfolk, 1969," and told him it was a short story, and to send it to
The Virginia Quarterly Review. When it was swiftly accepted by the journal, Tilghman concluded that he might be a short-story writer.

On Caroline's suggestion, he went to Bennington College's summer writing program to hone his craft in this newfound form, and worked with Alan Cheuse and George Garrett. The workshops taught him the incalculable benefit of being among a community of writers, and when he was invited later to join a new writers' group at Andre Dubus's house, he jumped at the chance. The group, which he still attends every Thursday night, proved to be the sustenance he needed, and things moved quickly from there. His story "Mary in the Mountains" appeared in the
Fiction Discoveries issue of
Ploughshares in the fall of 1988, capturing the interest of agent Maxine Groffsky, whose clients include Sue Miller, Ethan Canin, and Gish Jen. By January 1989, they signed a contract, and by April, Groffsky sold
In a Father's Place to Farrar, Straus and Giroux -- editor Jonathan Galassi read and responded to it in twenty-four hours.

Tilghman now lives in Harvard, Massachusetts, in an old Shaker meetinghouse that he and Caroline have renovated; they have three sons, ranging in age from eight years to eight months old. In the past few years, he has been published with some frequency in
The New Yorker and received fellowships from the Massachusetts Artists, Guggenheim, and Whiting foundations, but he still finds himself supplementing the family's income through free-lance corporate copywriting, which he took up on a fluke in the early Eighties. "I'm this suburban dad with all these kids. Hockey equipment is expensive," he says. The situation may change soon, as he and Groffsky are negotiating a contract to publish a novel and another collection.

For the moment, he tries to maintain a quiet, orderly life, reserving every morning for his fiction and the afternoons for his business writing. He works on several stories simultaneously, pushing through first drafts as fast as possible. He thinks many writers are inflicted with a "computer virus," tinkering with the first paragraph endlessly instead of letting go and running out the narrative thread that had initially inspired them. "As a lot of journalists say: Don't get is right, get it
done, and
then make it right." The latter stage of revision, of course, is where the real work is accomplished. It typically takes Tilghman two years to complete a short story.

Recently, because he started teaching a fiction workshop at Emerson College, and because he has been asked to participate more on panels and in conferences, Tilghman has been forced to explore and clarify his convictions about writing -- the balance of lyricism and structure, for instance. On the one hand, he tells his students that reading is the best way to improve one's prose -- progress unattainable without hearing other people's music -- but on the other hand, he concentrates in class on storytelling, which he believes is the most fundamental and important of skills, yet one that is largely neglected. "Really what engages and finally creates intensity to the whole literary process," he says, "is the drama of people putting together lives and making decisions and doing things. The problem is that too many young writers think it's simply words on a page, and it's not. There's a kind of bottleneck there, a plane of glass that needs to be shattered through, to understand that
it's on the level of people and event and consequence where literature happens."

Indeed, when Tilghman discusses the ultimate purpose of fiction, he becomes almost reverential, slipping into homiletic language: "I always knew that the stories I wanted to tell dealt with place, family, and memory, and had some sort of faith in them. I sense that the process of writing fiction begins with everything that is known, and then -- if it's successful -- reaches what is not known; you're there in the unknown to serve the mysteries of grace and creation and resurrection. Stories should widen our experience and give us a little moral grist, and narrative can operate as a kind of subcode, giving you a way of understanding the world. You read and write fiction to lend some coherence to your life."

These beliefs are strongly conveyed in Tilghman's own work. His stories might be secular on the surface, but an element of theological awe continually seeps out, spiritual continuity found in the American landscape and in people's reflections of their lives, the accumulation of events and decisions and consequences. They stand in wonder, as Christopher Tilghman does occasionally when considering his literary career, at the paths taken to where they are now.