Fulbright Chronicles, Volume 3, Number 3 (2025)
Author
Katherine Arnoldi
The Questions that Matter Most. Reading, Writing and the Exercise of Freedom by Jane Smiley who was a Fulbright Scholar to Iceland in 1976.
Smiley instructed her students not to judge or praise their own work or the work of others, but instead, to ask questions.
In the introduction to The Questions that Matter Most: Reading, Writing and the Exercise of Freedom, Pulitzer Prize winning author Jane Smiley tells us that, while teaching writing at University of California Riverside, she instructed her students not to judge or praise their own work or the work of others, but instead, to ask questions. Some of their questions revolved around how setting affects the main characters, which inspired the students to look more closely at their own lives. Similarly, the questions that Smiley asks in this essay collection also invite introspection, both from Smiley herself, and the reader.
The first essay, “My Absent Father,” explains how she came to have a life that is an exercise in freedom, and it opened my eyes about my own past in a way I had never considered. While I tend to label my upbringing as one of “neglect,” Smiley showed me another way of looking at my early life: as one full of inquiry, exploration and freedom, not lack. Smiley looks back at her parents’ distraction as a chance to think “my own thoughts and to come up with my own ideas.” She writes:
"A girl who is overlooked has a good chance of not learning what it is she is supposed to do... from the outside, my work and my life look daring, but I am not a daring person. I am just a person who was never taught what not to try" (26).
So, it is no wonder that she soon found herself in a Marxist commune talking about ideas all night, working in factories, hitchhiking across the United States, backpacking in Europe, living in a cabin in the woods, and writing novels.
In “Iceland Made Me,” first published in the Fulbright Chronicles, Vol. 1, Smiley attributes becoming a writer to her 1976-7 Fulbright experience. She tells us that sometime during the long, dark, winter nights, she started writing a novel about her grandparents’ farm in Idaho, except that the characters would be stuck in a snowstorm in a treeless Icelandic environment. Even after coming home to Iowa, she knew her writing, whatever it would be, would have “a deep Nordic tinge, let’s say a combination of wind and sky and snow and grass, of making the best of isolation and hard work, tragedy, luck and magic” (37).
In “Can Mothers Think,” echoing Virginia Woolf’s famous A Room of One’s Own, Smiley names childless women writers such as George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, and Emily Dickinson, but also—encouragingly to those of us who are mothers (Smiley has four children)—offers a much longer list of those who were mothers and who even wrote about mothering, including Toni Morrison, Francine Prose, Alice Walker, Louise Erdrich, Sharon Olds, Maxine Hong Kingston, Grace Paley, among others (unfortunately omitting the great Tillie Olsen and her story, “I Stand Here Ironing” in Tell Me a Riddle).
In “I Am your Prudent Amy,” she admits she prefers Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women’s character Amy over Jo because Amy, like Smiley, benefited from neglect, has “focus, desire, determination and resistance” and is the more feminist, the more modern, able to look around at the environment she is in and forge her own way (111).
Smiley also questions the honored place of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn in our national literature, noting its failures, especially the moral failure of the characters who do not address the problems and predicament of Jim. Smiley suggests Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe as more worthy.
In her imagined rewriting of the famous finale of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Gregor escapes to a new, exciting life as a bug as he navigates the cobblestones, escaping his old family. Smiley poses the question raised in Willa Cather’s My Antonia as simply, should I stay or should I go?
However, essays about Dickens as an editor, Nancy Mitford and George MacDonald Fraser seem to extol rather than ask questions. In “History vs. Historical Fiction,” Smiley makes a strong argument for the veracity of historical fiction, in that it allows the reader to experience what it may have been like to live in a particular time, or at least to question the truthfulness of so-called non-fiction history, citing both as constructs.
Smiley says that novels not only offer us a subjective view of life, a basic tenant of modernity, but also offer a vehicle for learning in which the reader absorbs empathy and agency. She returns to the theme of freedom in her final essay. Novels, Smiley asserts, let us see inside the mind of the writer. Reading, she maintains, is an act of connectivity, of humanity, of liberty because we have choices in what we read. Finally, reading is an exercise in questioning, exploration, creativity, close examination and the joyful love of the intellectual life.
Colleen Kinder, ed. Letters to a Stranger: Essays to the Ones Who Haunt Us. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books. 333 pages. $19.95.
Biography
Katherine Arnoldi, Ph.D., creative writing Fulbright Fellow to Paraguay (2008-9), received two New York Foundation for the Arts Awards (Fiction/Drawing), the De Jur Award, and the TransAtlantic Fiction Award. She’s the author of the graphic novel, The Amazing True Story of a Teenage Single Mom (Hyperion, 1998), nominated for a Will Eisner, won two American Library Association awards and was named a Top Ten Book of the Year by Entertainment Weekly, as well as All Things Are Labor, Stories, (U. Mass Press, 2007), which was a Juniper Prize winner. She is currently a lecturer at Mercy College, New York, teaching fiction and poetry. She can be contacted at Karnoldi2100@gmail.com.