Why I live in Fresno
By Steve Yarbrough / Special to DiscoverIn February of 1988, when I got a call asking me to interview for a job in the creative writing program at Fresno State, I could not have found Fresno on a map. If pressed, I would probably have placed it somewhere north of San Francisco, maybe in Napa Valley. My ignorance of the city and its surroundings was almost total. Having grown up in a cotton-producing region — the Mississippi Delta — I nevertheless had no idea that Central Valley cotton growers were partly responsible for the demise of King Cotton as the Delta’s principal crop.
Though a former football player and a lifelong fan of the game, I had never heard of Jim Sweeney, or Kevin, either; as far as I was concerned, the only football that mattered was played in the SEC. I was a baseball fan, too, but I didn’t know Tom Seaver was from Fresno, and while I loved westerns and happened to think "The Wild Bunch" was just about the greatest one ever filmed, I would not have made the connection between Sam Peckinpah, who directed that movie, and the place I’d just gotten a call from.
I did, however, know one thing about Fresno, and given the fact that I was a struggling writer, it made the city and the job enormously appealing to me. Fresno was where my favorite poet, Philip Levine, lived and wrote. And Fresno State was where he taught. If they were good enough for him, I figured, they’d be good enough for me.
Nineteen years later, I’m still here. When I am asked why a novelist from the South, who still writes almost exclusively about that region, would stay in Fresno — and I face that question fairly often, just as I’m asked almost daily, "What country are you from?" ("Mississippi," I usually reply) — I’m likely to come up with a facetious answer. "For the climate," I might say. Or "Because I really dislike sidewalks." But the truth is that what keeps me here is Fresno’s vibrant writing community, which I feel privileged to be part of.
You could live here, of course, and never know that such a community exists. Even though many of us have major publishers like Knopf, Random House, Simon and Schuster, Doubleday and Houghton Mifflin, and though our work is available in numerous foreign countries, the local chain stores are often out of our books; you are much more likely to see them reviewed in the New York Times, USA Today, the Washington Post or, for that matter, the London Times than in the local media. Yet there’s a strong argument to be made that Fresno is one of America’s great literary centers.
The city, after all, has been home to two Pulitzer Prize winners — Levine and William Saroyan — as well as such poets as Peter Everwine, Gary Soto, C.G. Hanzlicek, Roberta Spear, Jean Janzen, Juan Felipe Herrera, and my current colleagues in Fresno State’s creative writing program, Corrinne Clegg Hales and Timothy Skeen. And while literary types all over the country bandy about terms like "the Fresno school of poetry," the writing community also includes no small number of prose writers: there’s David Borofka, whose first book, "Hints of His Mortality," won the Iowa Short Fiction award, arguably the most prestigious short story prize in the country; Lillian Faderman, the author of 11 books, including her ground-breaking study "Surpassing the Love of Men"; and my colleagues Steven Church ("The Guinness Book of Me"), John Hales ("Shooting Polaris"), David Anthony Durham ("Pride of Carthage"), and Alex Espinoza ("Still Water Saints").
That most, if not quite all, of these writers have either studied or taught at Fresno State says something wonderful about the university where I work. It has always been a school that gave people opportunities when other institutions might not have.
I’m a great case in point. I had not published my first book when the university hired me, and in academia a novelist without a book under his or her belt is the equivalent of a mechanic without a tool chest. Nevertheless, Levine, Hanzlicek, Everwine and their colleagues took a chance on me, and as a result I’ve written all seven of my published books while living in Fresno.
I teach at a university whose president and provost are both first-generation college students, just like I was and as so many of our own students are. I love this about Fresno State. The campus doesn’t necessarily impress the eye — our buildings are not covered with ivy, and in fact there are still quite a few temporary structures around — but a good education is available for those who are willing to work for it. So it's no wonder that writers like Larry Levis, David St. John, Shirley Anne Williams and Daniel Chacon got their start there.
The university, it seems to me, is a microcosm of the larger community it serves. Fresno has offered opportunity to people who came from different corners of the world, seeking something they couldn’t find at home. Our community is a melting pot, in which people of vastly different backgrounds, with different cultural traditions, come together in an often uneasy mix. But it’s this very uneasiness that makes Fresno unique and that accounts, I suspect, for its extraordinary literary output: the creation of great art depends on the kind of cross-fertilization that results when different traditions compete with one another. Fresno and the Valley are rife with that kind of competition, and I see it as a good thing, as something that enriches our lives, as well as the arts.
Whereas I grew up in a world that was black and white and everyone sounded alike, my daughters' environment was always multi-colored and multi-lingual. Their childhood friends came from other parts of the U.S., from Mexico, Central and South America, from Africa, Europe and Asia. They brought bits and pieces of other worlds with them. On the night Philip Levine retired from his job as a professor at Fresno State, I heard him say that he was often asked if, having grown up in Detroit and lived in various cities around the country — New York, Boston, Iowa City, Palo Alto — he considered himself a Fresnan. His reply — "I am a man who lives and writes in Fresno and calls it home" could well be my own.