Visiting Voices: In a Writer’s Place
 Summer visits to Maryland’s Eastern Shore shaped Christopher Tilghman’s perceptions of the world, and imprinted his voice as a writer.
For a storyteller, Christopher Tilghman puts a lot of emphasis on non-verbal communication. That might strike an odd note at first, but, as his readers have come to understand, Christopher Tilghman’s stories resonate on an emotionally intuitive level. When words fail to convey his character’s feelings, Tilghman gives us something more. Beneath the story’s surface is a deeper meaning that lies between the lines. It is more than rhythm and cadence. It’s beyond language. What holds the story together, Tilghman says, is the emotional structure, a composition not unlike that of music.
Tilghman grew up in a house full of writers and wrote his first novel at age 15, during one of his annual summer visits to the family farm in Centreville on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Years later, Tilghman would weave the memories of those Maryland summers into his fiction. The sound of tulip leaves rustling in the wind, a great blue heron startled into flight, “the long buttery Chesapeake summer mov[ing] through plantings, through the flowering of the soybean plants toward the tasseling of the corn”—these images embue his stories with the power of place.
Tilghman answered the pull of the Shore again this October—as the guest of the “Journeys Home” lecture series sponsored by Washington College’s Center for the Environment and Society. He talked about the importance of place, particularly the Chesapeake Bay region, to his work. With his first collection of stories, In a Father’s Place, Tilghman established himself as a writer who steeped his stories in local tradition, family history and natural landscape.
Tilghman’s characters may suffer emotional disconnection with one another, but they feel profoundly the pull of the past. There springs the underlying tension—because as evocative as family and history and tradition are, they can also be as strained as conversation among distant relatives, as inert as the wind on Chester River at dead calm, and as stifling as a heat wave in August. Eastern Shore families expect certain things of you: in my house, as in most I suspect, it is Thanksgivings with white potato pie, and the uncle who yearns to leave before dessert.
Perhaps Tilghman has always been a writer, just as his psychological sensibilities were woven early from strands of marsh grass on the Eastern Shore. As a student at Yale University, however, Tilghman was consumed not with writing, but with music. He studied music theory and composition. He played bass fiddle and saxophone with a jazz ensemble. It was then that he discovered the connection between music and literature.
 “If you think about stories,” he says, “they are a sequence of emotions generated in the reader. That’s really what music is: compositions eliciting emotional understanding. You can structure stories with the same emotional states. If my students are too cold, too smart, too intellectual [in their writing], I have them think non-verbally.”
The key to the emotional undercurrent in Tilghman’s fiction is landscape. “ ‘Place’ is where a lot of history and emotion reside,” he explains. “For me as a writer of fiction, discovering the power of place was a real breakthrough in my work. When I first realized that I could write these stories, with this place so deeply lodged inside me, it was amazing. People respond to ‘placedness.’”
As a writer, Tilghman himself responded not to his native Massachusetts, but to the Eastern Shore. “New England was never interesting to me,” he says, “perhaps because the place itself has not been important to the people who live there. If you look at these Eastern Shore landscapes, there is not much there on the surface. It’s flat and featureless. If this is about place, we have to look deeper, at how people respond emotionally to these landscapes.”
Tilghman speaks much as he writes: languidly, generously, carefully, of family, history and place, as well as of responsibility, security and spirituality. With an acclaimed novel and two well-received collections of short stories to his credit, the 55-year-old writer has recently joined the ranks of academe. This summer he, his wife, Carolyn, and three sons moved to Charlottesville where he is a professor of English teaching creative writing at the University of Virginia. There, in the heady company of some of today’s brightest stars of American fiction and poetry, he finds himself—if not at home, then certainly where he wants to be.
For him, the move became one of spiritual and creative release. Tilghman is invigorated by the creative atmosphere in which he finds himself now. He is writing furiously and prodigiously, as he has never done before. His next book project, a novel tentatively called True Fragments, is nearly complete. “At this rate I could write a book a year,” he says.
This strikes another seemingly odd note, since his days now are filled with lectures, workshops and meetings. Where does he find the energy to juggle teaching and writing? In his earlier struggle for balance between his creative work and paying the bills, Tilghman maintained a strict discipline that permitted him to devote his early morning hours to his creative writing. Since making a life change in August, he is still finding his way into a new routine and a new balance between his own writing and the demands of teaching and mentoring promising young writers toward thesis completion and publication.
“I hadn’t taught much until the 1990s,” Tilghman explains. “I had been doing all manner of other things, including a lot of freelance writing—magazine stories, annual reports, brochures, I’ve done it all. I had been out in the cold for 35 years. At 55, I felt it was time to find a more substantial teaching career.”
A long-standing relationship with UVA blossomed into a full-time academic appointment in UVA’s MFA program. One of the oldest MFA programs in the country, UVA’s program accepts just seven students in fiction each year. Another five are anointed for the study of poetry. Tilghman is the full-time fiction professor on a rotating writing faculty that includes Ann Beattie, Douglas Day, Rita Dove, Deborah Eisenberg, George Garrett, Gregory Orr and Charles Wright.
“I’m so relieved to have something resembling security,” he says. “I know it’s going to help my writing. In fact, it already has. I always felt my work could have been better if I weren’t so dependent on fulfilling book contracts and meeting deadlines. My focus in my writing now is on going a little deeper, delving into the unknown a bit more. That’s what I tell my students to strive for. Writing has to matter. Just writing pretty sentences isn’t enough. I tell them to write uglier, but more truthful stuff.”
If the stories in his latest collection, The Way People Run, seem dark and brooding, Tilghman blames it on a personal mid-life crisis. “I’ve been incredibly lucky in my life and with my family,” he says, “but at the time I was in my 40s and early 50s, and I was working through some personal issues.
The title story came out of some depressed thinking about America as well as my own questioning. My new novel is much brighter and more redemptive. I take those six men from The Way People Run and roll them up into one character.”
Tilghman has emerged on the other side of 55 a liberated man, ready to take up anew the challenge of his art, and to help some younger writers along their own paths of self-discovery. As American fiction writers continue to grapple with modern alienation as their big theme, Tilghman’s work suggests we should reexamine ourselves in our search for understanding of purpose, in the search for direction and connection and meaning. His, like all good fiction, is the search for transcendence.
“Fiction writers share a commonality of experience,” Tilghman says. “What is different for each of us is the process—how we relate to ourselves, how we understand our own history, how we answer the question ‘who is that person in the mirror?’ Literature is really about that moment of discovery, that moment of astonishment. It has to go to a higher plane—to some political, spiritual or emotional place that’s non-verbal. All the arts are approaching this point through different avenues. Made-up stories about made-up people seem to get us there sometimes.”
Marcia C. Landskroener, senior writer at WC, answered the call of her native Eastern Shore.
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