Today we’d like to introduce you to Eric Giroux.
Every artist has a unique story. Can you briefly walk us through yours?
Like many writers, I had a parent who read and encouraged me to read. In 1982, my mother took me to Waldenbooks at the Billerica Mall and bought me a copy of THE EMERALD CITY OF OZ, the utopian sixth book of the Oz series. I fell in love with both the book and its matriarchal heroine Queen Ozma of Oz, and decided to write fiction.
While a Harvard undergrad, I completed fiction-writing workshops with Jill McCorkle and Robert Cohen, sublime writers, teachers, and human beings. I did a one-month residency at the Millay Colony for the Arts just after college, but I was too young! I wrote well that month but also wasted many hours facing down wild turkeys on long walks down the dirt road and driving aimlessly around greater Austerlitz, New York, blasting the terrible Oasis album BE HERE NOW. Next I worked part-time as a “bellhop” at the Tower of Terror at Walt Disney World while continuing to write my novel and living off my brother’s largesse. The plan was simple and doomed from inception: That year I would succeed as a novelist and thereby evade law school. One year is all it takes, right?
At the end of law school, debt-laden, but also eager to learn how to be a good lawyer, I turned down an MFA admission to litigate for Earthjustice, clerk for a federal judge, and practice law at a couple of firms. All those years— including several joyful stints teaching American history, literature, and law—I kept reading, broadly and deeply, and refining my prose through the thousands of pages that I wrote as a lawyer. I also published pieces of commentary on odd topics that interested me, including immigration law, Abraham Lincoln, and Epictetus. I got my own laptop a few years ago and immediately started writing my first novel, RING ON, DELI. I finished a second draft last summer, workshopped part of it at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference (thanks Lauren Groff!), revised it a bunch more, and it’s done. Time to start the next one!
Please tell us about your art. What do you do / make / create? How? Why? What’s the message or inspiration, what do you hope people take away from it? What should we know about your artwork?
I write comic literary fiction with a political bent. RING ON, DELI, for example, was inspired in part by the Market Basket supermarket protests that swept through these parts in 2014, and I play off of that to build a moral and political fable about sticking together for the common good (or not). That sounds pretty heavy, but at its heart RING ON, DELI is a personal story. It centers on a supermarket-deli guy, his talented but troubled kid brother, and their fraught fraternal love. When I write I am keen to heed Saul Bellow’s counsel that the purpose of literature is to entertain and instruct, typically in that order. Making readers laugh or care or feel something is at least as important to me as getting any big fat message or question across.
How or where can people see your work? How can people support your work?
Follow me on Facebook and Instagram. People curious about my novel—agents, publishers, hostile eccentrics—can e-mail me for a sample.
Do you have any advice for other artists? Any lessons you wished you learned earlier?Stick with it. Tobias Wolff said in an interview once that unlike in almost any other area of life time is on your side with this, and that’s probably as true for other art forms as it is for fiction writing. As for lessons learned, at times I wish I had seized more light and space for my writing when I was younger. But on the other hand my experiences as a lawyer and teacher have enriched and shaped both my fiction and me in important ways. If I had gone the MFA or Brooklyn route, I’d probably have missed out on some of that.
Contact Info:
- Email: eric@theericgiroux.com
- Instagram: @theericgiroux
- Facebook: Eric Giroux
Image Credit:
Artist photo/painting: Jasmine Chen.
Pericles’ Funeral Oration: Philipp Foltz (1852) (public domain)
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