Literary Birthday – 19 March – Garth Greenwell

Happy Birthday, Garth Greenwell, born 19 March 1978.

Garth Greenwell Quotes

1. Annotation is a mnemonic: to review or recall a book, you can flip through and read the underlined bits instead of rereading the whole thing. What’s more, it’s not just the book you recall: it’s your experience of the book. A book you read multiple times becomes a time capsule, or a kind of diary, a document of your life. (Garth Greenwell Substack)
2. That desire, to get something into your writing and not knowing how to do it: that’s how innovation happens; it’s how you become a better writer. (Garth Greenwell Substack)
3. I don’t think there’s any language that can get us around the fact that there’s something deeply mysterious about style. (Garth Greenwell Substack)
4. When I started teaching workshop myself, I wanted to be more concrete; I wanted to give students tools to turn their vague impressions of a writer’s style into analytical observations. This meant talking about diction and syntax and genre and tone, things that we can be precise about, and that can help writers see elements of their own style that otherwise remain opaque. And, once they can see them, they can think about manipulating them. (Garth Greenwell Substack)
5. That state of bewilderment is what compels writing for me, or at least novel writing. I think we need art because there are situations we can’t think about with our other tools for thinking. (The Yale Review)
6. People sometimes treat my fiction, which often uses material from my life, as though it were a transcription of my experience. It isn’t. It has always been clear to me that my books are, and that I want them to be, fiction; all three of them are full of invention. (The Yale Review)
7. I do think art is useful to us, but I think that usefulness is hugely mysterious—you can’t engineer it. (The Yale Review)
8. As a reader, I love lots of different kinds of books. I love books that are richly and vividly imaginative. But as a writer, this invention that speeds a plot along a horizontal axis doesn’t interest me so much as the vertical axis of a moment suspended in time. (Friction Lit)
9. Poetry is still a big part of my life, but not as a writer. I haven’t written poetry in five or six years. Prose opens doors, writerly interior doors in a way that poetry doesn’t for me. My experience of writing prose is much more an experience of discovery and surprise than writing poetry was, though I’m not sure why. (Friction Lit)
10. We make many choices as we make art, some of them agonising, but we don’t get to choose what moves us, what we feel compelled to make. (The Paris Review)

Garth Greenwell is an award-winning American novelist, literary critic, and educator. He is the author of the novels What Belongs to You (2016), which won the British Book Award for Debut of the Year; Cleanness (2020); and Small Rain (2024), which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and the novella Mitko (2011). Mitko, won the Miami University Press Novella Prize and was a finalist for the Edmund White Award as well as the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Debut Fiction. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of the Vursell Award for exceptional prose style from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. Follow him on Instagram.

Source for image: Garth Greenwell’s Website

by Amanda Patterson

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