It’s not often a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and screenwriter levels with high school kids.
On Monday, author and former Pittsburgh resident Michael Chabon — whose works include “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh” and “Wonder Boys” — spoke to the hearts and minds of Woodland Hills High School juniors.
“It never gets any easier to go into a high school after you graduated,” Chabon told a crowd of a few dozen juniors in the Woodland Hills media center. “I didn’t study for the test. … Having to think about this all comes rushing back to me.”
Chabon spent the morning at the Churchill school telling stories, signing books and posing for pictures as part of a student Q&A session through Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures and the Woodland Hills Interaction Series. (Chabon spoke Monday night at Carnegie Music Hall in the Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures “Ten Evenings” series.)
At Woodland Hills, he pulled back the curtain on his inspirations and imparted wisdom from his earliest days in Pittsburgh. As a 12-year-old in the early 1970s, he began taking in Squirrel Hill on holidays and breaks with his younger brother following their parents’ divorce, when his father moved to Pittsburgh.
“We would be on our own and we would use the bus and just go to a place, to Kennywood, to the zoo, to the museums, to different parts of town. That’s a good way to get to know a place, by bus,” said Chabon. “And so Pittsburgh seeped in and I absorbed a lot.”
On Monday, his words were like a mission to give back to a city that shaped him.
“The main thing to me is, it’s not magic and a writer is not a wizard. It’s not a secret, mystical thing,” said Chabon. “I think writers have a tendency to mystify the process and talk about inner voices and following their muse and all this stuff — mystifying language that can make [writing] feel impossible, can make it feel like, ‘Well, I’m not a magical person, so what chances do I have to do that?’
“The reality is that the writer was terrified the whole time they were writing it, that they were messing it up, that they didn’t know what they’re doing most of the time, that the writer started over again and over again and wasn’t getting it right, that there’s struggle and there’s work involved.
“All of those things — it’s important to me to be honest and to present what I do as something that anyone can do.”
A Pitt professor’s inspiration
Chabon attained an English degree at Pitt while working at Atlantic Books and Jay’s Book Stall, well-known Oakland bookstores of their era. During the session, he honed in on a mentor at Pitt who directly inspired his second novel, “Wonder Boys” — which was read and dissected by Woodland Hills students in the previous weeks — and helped shape the career that followed.
Pittsburgh is “such a culturally rich, fascinating, historically interesting, physically interesting place — so striking in so many ways — that it was just pure luck for me,” said Chabon.
During his college days, the author studied under Chuck Kinder, a professor and director of writing at Pitt. Kinder died in 2019 after teaching for more than three decades at the university.
To Chabon, he was a “wonderful teacher.” Moreover, he was the inspiration for the main character in “Wonder Boys,” Grady Tripp.
Chabon’s debut novel, “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh,” was published in 1988 to much acclaim. He then found himself in way over his head on his next project, “Fountain City” — an unfinished work that now lives only on the author’s hard drive.
“I effectively wasted five years of my life writing this other novel. I wrote many drafts — eight or nine drafts of this. It was a big book with a lot of stuff in it. It was more than I could handle,” said Chabon. “I wouldn’t admit that to myself.
“By the time it’s the second or third Thanksgiving dinner that you’re sitting down with all these cousins and relatives and family, and they say, ‘How’s it going? What are you doing?’ You say, I’m working on this book. ‘Is that the same book you were working on two years ago, three years ago, four years ago?’ It’s embarrassing. It’s humiliating.”
At that time, Chabon said, he started to dwell on Kinder. He remembered that his teacher was always at work on a massive manuscript, after earlier successes.
In his hour of desperation, Chabon recalled a 1982 barbecue at Kinder’s house. (Kinder and his wife were famous for holding large and frequent parties, inviting students and literati.) The teacher had invited him down to his study, where one solitary light shone down on a writing desk and a tall pile of papers.
“If you ever saw ‘2001: A Space Odyssey,’ you know the black monolith? This was the white paper version of that,” recalled Chabon. “Chuck said, ‘It defeats me daily.’
“I started thinking, ‘Oh my god, I’m turning into Chuck Kinder. … I didn’t want that to happen to me.”
Chabon framed the realization: Don’t be afraid to change your plans … and when all else fails, write what you know.
“I put that book aside and I started to write something different. And I didn’t know what it was going to be, I just took a chance,” said Chabon of refocusing his efforts on a simpler story, set in Pittsburgh. “It was instinctual.”
Seven months after he’d dwelled on that memory — and with his agent none the wiser — the first draft of “Wonder Boys” was born.
Its plot centers on a cantankerous Pittsburgh professor who balances working on his all-important massive manuscript with copious personal-life drama and shepherding young writers.
“I thought, I’m just gonna sneak out of ‘Fountain City’ and just try this other thing. And I started to write about this guy that was, in many ways, based on Chuck Kinder — to prove to myself that I wasn’t Chuck.”
Hard truths
When “Wonder Boys” was published in 1995, Chabon hadn’t seen Kinder for almost 10 years. He had told his former teacher nothing of the book.
“There were some scandalous things he had gotten up to … [things] that I thought were kind of an open secret. It was not. It was a closed secret,” said Chabon. Some of those elements made their way into the novel.
Kinder’s feelings remained a mystery until 2000, when Chabon heard from writing students at Pitt.
They told him that Kinder assigns “Wonder Boys” to his class — and tells everyone it’s him. “They’re like, ‘He is so proud of it,’ ” Chabon said. “When you meet Chuck, they said, five minutes go by before he tells you that he was the model for the character of Grady Tripp.
“That was a big relief to me because I hadn’t wanted to hurt his feelings. I was just trying to write my way out of the trap of that book I was stuck in. I didn’t stop to think for a second what the consequences might be to Chuck or anybody else.”
Chabon would eventually reunite with him.
Every time they met, “Chuck would tell me, ‘Michael, you made me a star. I’m famous because of you. I’m the Sasquatch of American literature,’ ” remembered Chabon. “So he liked it; he was happy.”
Kinder’s “Honeymooners: A Cautionary Tale,” that long-awaited magnum opus, was published in 2001.
Chabon noted that his father found the paternal characters in his fiction hitting too close to home. That led to Chabon relaying another lesson:
“If you’re going to write and you’re going to write fiction, inevitably, you’re going to be basing characters on people you know. You’re going to be drawing on your real life, your real experience. That can be very scary,” he said. “It can be scary when you think about, what are they going to say when they see this?
“And you can’t worry about that. It’s too bad.
“You have to go for it. I would always say to my dad whenever he would complain to me, which was fairly often, was that’s what you get for having a writer for a child.”
‘The next Michael Chabon’
They were the kind of sentiments Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures executive director Sony Ton-Aime, a native of Haiti familiar with the power of opportunity, had hoped for.
“Before I even came to the city, I learned about Pittsburgh through ‘The Mysteries of Pittsburgh’ and ‘Wonder Boys,’ ” said Ton-Aime. “That actually played a big role in me coming to Pittsburgh because I wanted to be in this vibrant city, literary city, described in these books.
”I am seeing myself in the students. I think there will be at least one student here who will recognize in themselves, ‘I always wanted to be a writer and here is someone who is real.’
“The next Michael Chabon is sitting right here with the students, I believe that. For them to be able to see their future selves in Michael Chabon is the best opportunity that we can offer as an organization.”
Chabon held students’ attention intently for the better part of an hour.
“I thought it was interesting how his characters in the book came from his real-life experiences in college, and how he just made the book out of them … seeing how [he was] thinking in the moment, where [he was] in his life,” said 16-year-old Jamar Turner. “The opportunity was amazing to meet him after reading his book for awhile. I was happy to meet him and see how it came together.”
“It’s a great way to get a one-on-one conversation with [authors], even if you aren’t asking questions, to get to hear and take what they have to say and learn about the work they’ve put in,” added Aniya Watson, 17.
Over 11 seasons, the Interaction series has hosted seven Pulitzer winners, said library media specialist Kevin McGuire and instructional technology specialist Jason Coleman, who co-founded the program.
“This is the most important thing that I do,” said McGuire. “This is my vocation — connecting young people with people like Michael Chabon and other people who have these influences and these thoughts and ideas.”