Dan's Papers - July 27, 2007 - Robert Reeves

In a community overflowing with airs and one-upmanship, Robert Reeves' humility is reassuring. His talent as a writer, skill as a professor and his ability to nurture artistic and emotional growth has offered Reeves enough success to warrant some arrogance, but it just isn't there. With his accomplishments as an author and his current position as the Founding Director of the Creative Writing MFA Program at Stony Brook Southampton and Director of the Southampton Writers Conference, Reeves' full contribution to the field of American literature is fully underway.

Hints of his southern accent are a nod to Reeves' Alabama childhood, but the past 40 years in the northeast, first Boston then NYC and the Hamptons, have helped to shape his vocal inflections as much as it has the rest of his life. After all, leaving Birmingham was the first step toward his career as a writer.

In his senior year of high school, more jock than bookworm, Reeves' coach/guidance counselor called Reeves into his office and delicately inquired about Robert's desires for higher education. "Reeves, you piece of s#!t. You got an F-ing plan or not?" Reeves did not have a plan. His coach mentioned something about a Harvard recruiter who had come and gone and suggested Reeves look into the school. "Applying to Harvard would have seemed as exotic as applying to the Sorbonne." Nonetheless, he applied to Harvard and only Harvard. He was accepted -- an impressive feat for someone who had recycled the same essay on The Old Man and the Sea for his sophomore, junior and senior year English classes.

Setting foot on the foreign soil of Harvard in 1969, Reeves saw himself as an outsider. A Southerner and the first in his family to attend college, he spoke little in class. But it was in that first year that the notion of becoming a writer arose. Humanities 6, a class under the tutelage of Reuben Brown, challenged students to write the results of close readings of an individual poem each week. The terse prose style developed in that class and the realization that writing could be "fun" spurred Reeves to switch majors from Government to English. Following his undergraduate degree at Harvard (summa cum laude), Reeves continued his education at Queens College in Oxford, and then returned to Harvard for his PhD in literature.

He stayed in the Crimson family, securing a position as a lecturer. "I would have been very content with a five square block area of Cambridge." Besides offering him the ability to teach, the position afforded him time to write. By the early 80s, Reeves produced his first manuscript -- and by his calculations, his best. Excerpts and chapters of The Language of Insects were published in several literary periodicals, but the overall consensus at publishing houses was that it was too literary. "I wanted to write the great Southern novel." While it was never published, The Language of Insects demonstrated Reeves' deftness with the written word and led to an offer to pen something that would appeal to a mainstream readership.

Reeves went to work. Witty, humorous and intelligent, Doubting Thomas was the result. Set mainly in Boston, the thriller follows a dissipated college English professor who becomes caught up with the mob after winning a 127 to one bet on a racehorse. The success of the novel launched his writing career.

One year later, Reeves moved to New York City. The royalties from Doubting Thomas coupled with several screenwriting jobs allowed Reeves to live as a working writer. Though happy to be writing, he became a hired gun. And suddenly, creating pieces became more mechanical. "Writing on demand and writing things I had not planned on writing became hard for me...I'd willfully cut myself off from what is really at the center of most writing -- a passionate caring about telling a particular story." In 1990, he released Peeping Thomas, the second book featuring his protagonist, Thomas Theron. Also, during the late 80s and early 90s, Reeves took visiting professorships at several universities, including Princeton. He started teaching more and writing less.

In 1992, he heard there was an opening at Southampton College. He went to the Hamptons and found an English department unlike those in other colleges -- it was fun.

What began as a part-time job started to play a larger role in his life. Southampton College also ran a small, low-key writers conference during the summer. Reeves began working at the conference as well. By 1998, he was directing it. During the last fifteen years, the once part-time professor became the cornerstone of Southampton College's MFA Program and now Stony Brook Southampton's MFA Program (the college was sold to Stony Brook last year).

The move to transform the Southampton Writers Conference from a small but important summer program to one of the most prestigious in the country began in 2000. Reeves, with the help of others, met the challenge and in seemingly no time the conference reached the prestigious platform where it now sits, alongside namedropping favorites like Breadloaf and Sewanee.

While he explains that his abilities as a teacher and his invested labor in building the MFA Program and Conference are "an elaborate, exhausting form of work avoidance" he believes that "in avoiding my own writing, I am creating an environment in which other writers can succeed and I'm contributing to the field of writing. It hardly matters who's writing the books as long as someone's writing them."

Reeves' first visit to the East End found him on Shelter Island. With the houses so close together, he was confused as to how exactly this was considered a vacation area. When he thought of second homes, he thought of lodges on acreage in Maine. The Heights of Shelter Island looked like any other town. Eventually, he came to understand. But even after he began working at Southampton College, he was hesitant to purchase a home in the Hamptons. His life and family were, for the most part, in the city. He rented for some years before finally buying a home in Hampton Bays -- a fifteen-minute commute to work.

In a difficult balancing act, Reeves splits his time equally between his family's Manhattan apartment and their home in the Hamptons. His family continues to live on the Upper West Side, spending weekends and summers out east. Besides the open space and short commute to work, another benefit of his Hampton Bays home is that it houses a woodshop. "My father was a builder and always had a workshop. Most of the lessons I've learned about writing are more connected to building furniture than reading literature. I mean, writing is building something. In a way, writing a novel is like building a table, without knowing what a table looks like. You invent a form, but the form is consistent unto itself."

Like building, writing also seems to run in the family. Reeves learned long after he realized his own desire to write that his grandfather had once published a book of aphorisms. "It was like Mark Twain. My father was always interested in ideas, but being a writer? He never thought of that as an option."

While a great deal of his time is invested into the continual improvement of Stony Brook Southampton's writing program -- teaching, establishing scholarships, searching for funding for its new literary publication The Southampton Review, Reeves still finds time to write. His latest novella, The Eulogist, about a man coming to terms with his father's death, will actually be featured in The Southampton Review alongside the works of other talented writers (esteemed professors, Pulitzer Prize winners and students). The novella is part of something larger -- maybe not the great Southern novel he aspired to write as a young man, but something literary, on his own terms. It is a return to the passionate caring about a story needing to be told.