"Christians think that art is only good if it repeats the story they already know."

An Interview by Andy Patton with poet and professor Scott Cairns

Editor’s Note: This interview was originally published on Andy Patton’s Substack, the Darkling Psalter.

An Interview With Scott Cairns

When I think of the most impactful conversations I have had, the one hour I spent talking about art and poetry with poet and professor Scott Cairns several years ago stands at the top of the list.

I can see now that some of my most cherished ideas about art and poetry—the importance of tradition, the necessity of discovery, the power of perseverance in the work, the fact that the writing life is just another way to live a normal life—were planted in me like seeds during this conversation. I want to share it now in hopes that Scott’s ideas will benefit you as much as they have me.

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Andy: How do you create your work? How do you live the writing life?

Scott: Just keep reading. The writing life is primarily a reading life, so you just keep reading. The writing life is healthy so long as you keep reading. As soon as you stop reading and imagine that you are on your own, you are pretty much done. Even if you keep turning out books. The funny thing about those books is that they will sound a lot like the books that came before, and that’s because you are running out of gas.

I think that is the only way to survive is to have a really vital engagement with the books that precede you. Literature is really a conversation and when you are a writer you have to understand that you are now taking up your part of the conversation. You don’t walk up on a group of your friends and just start yammering, you listen for a while and find out what we are talking about and then you weigh in. That is how literary study is. You engage the conversation and find out what we are talking about, how we are talking about it, what are the ways that we might talk about it. You won’t be eclipsed by the tradition, and you won’t be stuck in a solipsistic, isolated sense of your own self-worth, which you will be if you don’t engage that tradition.