Advice for Writers

How to Be an American Writer

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

Friday, May 15, 2026

Interview with Novelist Lynne Kaufman on The Oxford Affair

Your novel The Oxford Affair flirts with different genres: mystery, romance, comedy. Do you think of the book as falling into a genre? Is it important for a novel to have a genre?

Lynne Kaufman: I don’t think about genres when I write or when I read. When choosing a book to read, I’m drawn by the subject and the freshness and quality of thought and language. So, no, I stay away from genres. I do have favorite writers such as Rachel Cusk and Annie Ernaux. Their work is blessedly short, truthful and genre-free.

Lynne Kaufman, Novelist and Playwright

You’ve written many plays, and several novels. When you get an idea for a story, how do you know if it should be written as a work of fiction, or for the theater?

LK: I love compression, and I also like dialogue that reveals character and moves the story forward. Plays are my natural form. I find novels a slog to write, too many words, and too much description. Don’t we all know what the sky, the ocean and furniture look like? I only attempt a novel when an idea won’t leave me alone and the story moves around too much for a play or needs a lot of introspection. On two occasions, The Secret Museum and Divine Madness, I wrote a novel on the same theme as the play I had just written. I just wasn’t finished.

What made you decide to narrate the story of The Oxford Affair using a first-person narrator? Did you consider a third-person narrator, and if so, why did you prefer having a character in the plot tell the story?

LK: Writing a novel in the first person is as close to writing a play as I can get. I see every character in relationship to my protagonist and her point of view. One voice and one consciousness is about all I can handle. So no omniscient narrator for me.

In some ways, The Oxford Affair is a mystery for mystery writers. The engaging and funny main character/narrator, Susan Klein, is taking a class on the traditional mystery novel at an adult education program at Oxford University. Why did you decide to include that course in the book? Did you follow the traditional rules for writing a mystery in this book?

LK: The mystery class and its reflection in the events of the novel are plot devices. I was relieved to come up with the idea, as this is the first mystery I’ve written. I didn’t follow the traditional rules for writing a “cozy,” or a detective story with an educated main character and little violence. For example, I introduced a romance. In general, I don’t believe in following rules in writing. Or in anything else if I can avoid it. The law, yes. Rules, no.

The details about Oxford University—its personalities, customs, history, and buildings—are authentically recreated in this book. How did you manage that?

LK: For twenty-five years I directed the University of California, Berkeley’s summer program at Oxford University. I had lots of observation and participation to draw on, and then I also did research to back it up. I had the unique benefit of having worked and hung out with the faculty, the staff, and the students.

There’s a deeply felt interlude in the book where the main character leaves Oxford to deal with a family emergency back home. Why did you decide to take the plot away from its comfortable, university setting at that point in the story?

LK: I wanted to reveal the protagonist Susan in the most personal part of her life, show her vulnerability, her deep love for her daughter and mom. It also let me show how helpful her suitor Nelson was and to give her a chance to miss him. And since we had met Nelson’s ex, I wanted us to see Susan’s ex. She clearly had better taste.

The descriptions in The Oxford Affair appeal to all five senses, particularly to taste and smell. How did you weave into the action of a scene the sensory experience of the characters?

LK: As a playwright I usually don’t pay attention to sensory details unless the set is on fire, so that’s why I made Nelson a restaurateur. Food I can get into, especially English high tea and French nouvelle. I gained five pounds while writing The Oxford Affair.

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Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation: The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest:

How to Be an American Writer

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

Friday, April 17, 2026

Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus

Thomas Mann wrote his doorstopper novel Doctor Faustus late in life, long after his more widely read works of fiction, including Buddenbrooks, Death in Venice, and The Magic Mountain.

Thomas Mann, 1875–1955

It sometimes happens that a writer, toward the end of a career, attempts a massive opus that takes farther innovations that author started to explore earlier. Mann’s Doctor Faustus is that sort of book. You could also group in that category James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, or Ezra Pound’s The Cantos. Often those late-in-life bids for the magnum opus, or great work, end up more as fodder for literary critics than as a good read. Maybe that’s because the writer has gone several steps too far in developing their favorite stylistic devices and topics.

I have several reservations about Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, about the characters, the content, and the style. But it’s still a remarkable book. I’ll get to the amazing part, but first I have to kvetch a little.

The narrator of Doctor Faustus, Serenus Zeitblom, is a lifelong friend and obsessive chronicler of the novel’s main character, the classical composer Adrian Leverkühn. We have to take for granted Serenus’ description of Adrian as an “extraordinary human being,” and a great artist. But nothing in the novel makes us believe that Adrian is an extraordinary person, since his interactions with other people are puerile and condescending. Nor is the fuddy-duddy narrator Zeitblom very likeable, even if his fussiness and overly apologetic tone are at times funny. A novel where the main character is distasteful and the narrator is pedestrian—that’s a huge pill for a reader to swallow for their own good!

Mann also spends an enormous amount of time describing nonexistent musical works that Adrian composes. When Mann has Adrian speaking or writing in the archaic language he uses, the book moves along like a cart drawn by an old horse and missing a wheel.

There were times I felt that reading Doctor Faustus was a self-inflicted punishment. Nevertheless, I finished the book, tugged along by truly stunning moments that rewarded my patience, moments that are the most striking I’ve ever read by Thomas Mann.

For instance, in turns out Mann was holding out on us before Doctor Faustus. Who knew that Mann had incredible insights into love and passion? He sidestepped those topics in many of his earlier works. I love this quip by Mann in Doctor Faustus about relationships: “There are people with whom it is not easy to live; but to leave, impossible.” (All English quotes are from the Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter translation.)

And this penetrating comment about an affair between a married woman and a younger man:

“Passion is too much taken up with itself to be able to conceive that anyone would be seriously against it.” Mann trowels even deeper into that dangerous liaison, adding, “the joy, the love and suffering, did not come into their own if they remained wordless… The more secret they were, the more they required a third party, the intimate friend, the good man, to whom and with whom one could talk… ” The narrator Serenus Zeitblom becomes that confidant for the lovers.

Mann also makes some amazing statements in Doctor Faustus about music and language: “Music and speech, he insisted, belonged together, they were at bottom one, language was music, music a language; separate, one always appealed to the other, imitated the other, used the other’s tools, always the one gave itself to be understood as substitute of the other.” No one on Earth has ever said that better!

Mann’s descriptions of the natural world and the cosmos in the novel are also breathtaking. For example, he describes Adrian’s father’s love of books on nature and insects: “Clearwings were there depicted which had no scales on their wings, so they seemed delicately glassy and only shot through with a net of dark veins. One such butterfly, in transparent nudity, loving the duskiness of heavy leafage, was called Hetaera esmeralda. Hetaera had on her wings only a dark spot of violet and rose; one could see nothing else of her, and when she flew she was like a petal blown by the wind.”

Mann is quite witty on the subject of artists who embrace an outdated style and turn their backs on contemporary art. He says about these artists that they, “persuade themselves and others that the tedious has become interesting, because the interesting has begun to grow tedious.”

On a similar note, Mann writes, “For just as little as one understands the new and the young, without being at home in the traditional, just so must love for the old remain ingenuine and sterile if one shuts oneself away from the new, which with historical inevitability grows out of it.” In its own fussbudgety way, Thomas Mann had a revolutionary outlook on the arts.

My favorite chapter in Doctor Faustus doesn’t concern the principle characters in the novel, who all lack emotional appeal for me. But I loved Chapter XXXVII, where the impresario Saul Fitelberg tries in vain to persuade composer Adrian Leverkühn to abandon his retreat from the world in rural Bavaria and to move to Paris to become the darling of the salons and concert halls. Fitelberg’s half-German, half-French monologue is a hilarious satire both of the avant-garde and of its critics.

In a way, the real protagonist of Doctor Faustus is not one of the novel’s characters, but the nation of Germany. The book tells the story of that country in the twentieth century, its selling of its soul to the devil, and the terribly tragic inability up till then of German culture to find a political expression of its greatest and most humanistic triumphs.

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Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation: The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest:

How to Be an American Writer

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

Sunday, February 22, 2026

A Tribute to Dorothy Bryant

Dorothy Bryant (1930–2017) was a brilliant writer whose work deserves much more attention. She excelled both as a novelist and a playwright. My favorites of her works are the prophetic fantasy novel, The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You; her work of historical fiction, Confessions of Madame Psyche; and the play Dear Master. Dorothy’s complete works span twelve novels, seven plays, and two books of nonfiction. She explored an amazing array of genres, including historical fiction and drama, fantasy, mystery, criticism, and realistic novels set in the present day.

Dorothy Bryant

I met Dorothy in 1994 when I was working on the first English translation of Horace, a novel by George Sand. I was trying to find a voice in English that was the equivalent of Sand’s sculpted French prose. Dorothy had written the deeply moving play Dear Master, based on the correspondence between George Sand and Gustave Flaubert, where she created authentic conversations in English between those writers. I sought out Dorothy’s guidance and support. She was an incredibly kind and encouraging mentor, and a spellbinding and witty storyteller in conversation.

She was born Dorothy Mae Calvetti to an Italian-American immigrant family in San Francisco’s Mission District. Dorothy grew up in a working-class household where her father ran a small gas station and her mother was a homemaker and office worker.

Dorothy (left) with sister Rose

She attended Mission High School, where she felt she did not have the most rigorous education. She longed to enroll at the University of California, Berkeley, the leading public university on the West Coast. But Dorothy’s older sister Rose had gone there and did not finish a degree, and their parents did not want to risk a repeat. They told Dorothy they would only pay for her to attend San Francisco State College (now University). Dorothy, who loved piano, applied there and majored in music, graduating in 1950. She particularly enjoyed playing the compositions of Johann Sebastian Bach. I wonder if Dorothy’s skill in creating dialogue was shaped by the Bach of the Two-Part Inventions.

After graduating from college, Dorothy began teaching at the age of 23. She and her first husband, Lou Ungaretti, already had a son and daughter. In the late 1950s, Dorothy taught Music and English in San Francisco at Lick-Wilmerding High School, which then only admitted boys. Dorothy also led the glee club there and wrote the music and lyrics for the school plays.

Dorothy Bryant teaching at Lick-Wilmerding High School, 1950s

She went back to San Francisco State College and earned a Master’s degree in Creative Writing in 1964. Dorothy then taught at Contra Costa Community College for many years, and created that campus’ first Black history course. Dorothy was a beloved instructor. She wrote in her novel Anita, Anita, “… nothing is so intoxicating as teaching. It is the closest thing to loving… ”

Dorothy began her literary career with the novel Ella Price’s Journal, published in 1972 by a major press, Lippincott. That book was way ahead of its time in taking seriously the struggles of married women who worked in the home.

By virtue of that success, Dorothy was able to get a literary agent, who then read the manuscript of her second novel, The Comforter, later retitled The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You. But the agent flatly refused to represent her book. He told Dorothy, “I don’t want to show this to anybody because I don’t want to prejudice publishers against you.” Because of his negative reaction, Dorothy gave up on sending the book to editors. On the recommendation of her second husband, Bob Bryant, she decided to self-publish it, calling her publishing company Ata Books, after the fantasy world in the novel. The book sold out its first run within two years, and Random House approached Dorothy to reprint it. Their one caveat was that they wanted to change the title to The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You, a phrase from the book, and Dorothy agreed.

Dorothy Bryant with son John and husband Bob Bryant at John’s college graduation, 1972

A pioneering work of the fantasy genre, The Kin of Ata depicts a world where happiness is measured not by material success or status, but by how harmonious a person’s dreams are. This farseeing book has become a classic and has stayed in print for 50 years. It remains Dorothy’s best-known work.

Following that difficult experience with the agent, Dorothy elected to self-publish almost all her subsequent books. They span an incredible range of settings, subjects, and genres, from the epistolary novel Prisoners; to her mystery Killing Wonder; to Confessions of Madame Psyche, an exploration of the craze for seances that a hard-luck young woman exploits in the San Francisco of the era of the great earthquake of 1906, which won the 1987 American Book Award. To replace the role of editor, Dorothy relied on friends such as Anne Fox to critique her self-published manuscripts.

Dorothy began writing for the stage with her play Dear Master. The original 1991 production featured the stellar cast of Barbara Oliver as George Sand, and Ken Grantham as Gustave Flaubert. The play was so well received that it launched Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre, named for George Sand’s actual given name, Aurore. Dorothy’s husband Bob Bryant, a contractor, built the seating and stage for the theater in Berkeley’s historic City Club, designed by architect Julia Morgan.

Barbara Oliver as George Sand and Ken Grantham as Gustave Flaubert
in Dorothy Bryant’s Dear Master

Someone recently asked me who were some of my favorite playwrights, and I named Tom Stoppard, Jez Butterworth, and Dorothy Bryant. I included Dorothy primarily on the basis of Dear Master, because in that play she takes the static material of a written correspondence between two writers and turns it into the most moving and memorable drama about a literary friendship that explores deep questions about life.

Dorothy’s other plays also focused on historical topics, including The Trial of Cornelia Connelly. The plot revolves around the stranger-than-fiction case of a woman in the 1840s whose husband deposits her in a nunnery so he can become a priest. When the husband changes his mind a year later and tries to reclaim his wife, she refuses. The husband then goes to court to force his wife to return.

As with all of Dorothy’s historical fiction and dramas, she meticulously researched The Trial of Cornelia Connelly. She often traveled to verify sites and events in her works. For her historical romance novel Anita, Anita, based on the life of Giuseppe Garibaldi’s wife, Dorothy retraced the couple’s epic journey from Brazil to Uruguay to Italy. Neither of those historical projects brought Dorothy wealth or fame, but I greatly admire that she followed her literary passions and interests, regardless of whether they led to popular successes.

Dorothy Bryant was also no stranger to controversy in her literary career. Before feminism became fashionable, Dorothy was outspoken in her depiction of the challenges of women. She also created sympathetic working-class characters of a kind rarely seen in post-World War II U.S. fiction. Her nonfiction includes Writing a Novel, a book on the writing process; and Literary Lynching, a survey of unofficial censorship by groups of readers

Dorothy was hardly one to toe the party line. She was just as tough on hypocrisy on the left as she was on elitism on the right. In that sense, Dorothy Bryant reminds me a great deal of George Orwell. She was not afraid to call it as she saw it, no matter who might take offense. Dorothy Bryant’s willingness to disregard accepted dogmas and to aim always for the complex truth is much needed in our current intellectual landscape.

Many thanks to Dorothy Bryant’s daughter Lorri Ungaretti for providing much of the information in this blog.

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Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation: The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest: