Now and then, authors have banner years.

Nicholas Delbanco is in the midst of one after having had two books published in the last year: a memoir titled Still Life at Eighty and a hefty volume of collected short stories, Reprise: The Collected Stories of Nicholas Delbanco, containing two previously published collections and a new one. Still Life at Eighty debuted last fall, and Reprise came out this spring.

Delbanco is the Robert Frost Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan, where he directed the MFA program in creative writing and the Hopwood Awards. He lived in Ann Arbor and taught at U-M for 30 years, after which he returned to the East Coast, where he began his career.  

In Still Life at Eighty: A Memoir, Delbanco writes with the clarity of distance, realities of age, and optimism of a well-lived life. The book, as he writes, is “not … a standard memoir or full-fledged autobiography.” In fact, the term “still life” serves as an accurate description with some liberties as the author looks around at the places, things, and people that form the tableau of his life. Delbanco expands on what the volume covers within it:  

Certain themes recur. It’s clear, or so I hope, that art and family and travel have mattered much to me; it’s clear as well that houses and colleagues and incremental age and marital devotion are matters that absorb me, and have done for years. Therefore, what I’ve tried to do is link the personal and public, the specific and general, in ways that reflect upon and refract each other; the most recent of these efforts is not, I trust, the last.

Delbanco begins the memoir on his 80th birthday and goes on to map out the seven houses that he has owned and then shares anecdotes about his literary connections. As he wraps up with reflections on art and age, he concludes with an “Envoi” in which he tells the reader, “The composition of this book has taken one full year. I am now eighty-one.” He has published more than 30 books and, as the following interview shows, continues to compose.

Reprise represents the three collections of Delbanco’s short stories: About My Table (1983), The Writers’ Trade (1990), and Reprise and Other Stories (2025). Delbanco writes in the author’s note that he rereleased three of his novels as one volume previously and decided to do the same with his short stories. But the previously published stories were not changed, unlike how his novels had been edited to fit together. Reprise clocks in at 572 pages of 29 stories.

The short stories contain characters who realize something is not as they thought it was, and those who wish that they had taken another path. In the story “The Writers’ Trade,” Mark Fusco listens to his editor: “The bumblebee, he said, is by all scientific measure too slow and fat to fly. Cheerfully ignorant of this, however, and to the dismay of scientists, the bumblebee just flies. Winterton flapped his arms. He drank. You’ve got to learn, he said, to be like that bumblebee flying: just go ahead and buzz.” As an author, Delbanco knows his trade so well that he can fictionalize it.

Delbanco and I corresponded by email and talked about his years in Ann Arbor, both of his new books, and what he is writing next.

Q: You were in Ann Arbor this spring for a reading shortly after Reprise was published. How was visiting the place where you previously lived?
A: I retired from U-M roughly a decade ago, and we sold our home there a few years back—moving east. But we’ve retained our fondness for and good friends in Ann Arbor, so my wife Elena and I return with some regularity. When I first arrived in 1985, we had bookstores like Borders and Shaman Drum where I would give readings from recently published titles; now it’s Literati, but the feeling is the same.

Q: Since you retired from directing the MFA program and Hopwood Awards at the University of Michigan 10 years ago in 2015, what do you miss about the work?
A: I don’t miss the administrative duties or committee meetings, but I still miss the chance to share a classroom with students to whom words matter, and who take reading and writing seriously. For the 30 years I taught at U-M, to witness and help to enable this was a continual gift.

Q: Let’s start with your memoir, Still Life at Eighty, which has been out longer. Tell us how you selected the phrase “still life” to describe this book.
A: Well, if not a pun, it’s a double entendre. I meant, obviously, that I was still alive at 80 and able and willing to write about it. But there’s also a good deal about pictorial representation in the book, and I meant to evoke the term “still life” as used in visual art.

Q: At the end of Still Life at Eighty, you reveal that you wrote this book in a year. Earlier in the book, you write about revision: “One of the yields of revision is the chance to make a line as perfect as its creator can manage. In no other mode of expression do we get an equivalent chance.” What did writing this book involve? Any revision? Given that “Still Life at Eighty follows no strict chronological order,” did you write it from front to back or take another approach?
A: I didn’t mean to suggest that the book took me precisely 365 days to produce, and there was a deal of revision involved. The distance between “vision” and “revision” is a wide one, often. Perhaps my major organizing principle was the notion of “still life” I refer to above as spatial arrangement; the memoir doesn’t start with my birth, or my parents and their history, nor does it end with my (metaphorical) death. In other words, it’s not written “front to back” but tries to evoke the more or less associative principles of memory—revisiting topics and scenes.

Q: A stretch of Still Life at Eighty reports and reflects on the books you have published, and you state, “I can remember telling people, when my first book appeared, that I knew I’d be writing ten years thence but had no idea of the subject or form; I had embarked on a profession but did not know where it would lead. That it would lead to further publication was, however, my near-certainty; such confidence today might be ill-advised.” That was what you told people after one book, and it was true. What was it like to consider all 30 books retrospectively?
A: A bit of an astonishment, in truth. It made me understand, in a way one doesn’t on a day-to-day basis, that the arc of a career is long. If, that is, one’s fortunate enough to have a long career. I’ve written two nonfiction books at least in part about the subject: Lastingness: The Art of Old Age (2011) and The Art of Youth: Crane, Carrington, Gershwin, and the Nature of First Acts (2013). In those books, I tried to consider (in terms of other artists) both what it means to start out and to keep on keeping on; this new volume—and the passage you cite—was a way of considering the topic in personal terms.

Q: Still Life at Eighty contains pictures. Have you put photographs in one of your books before? How did you choose these photos?
A: In the two books referenced above, I included photographs of my several subjects—from Pablo Casals to Georgia O’Keeffe, William Butler Yeats to Stephen Crane, Dora Carrington to George Gershwin, etc.—but in this book, I mined the personal vein. So these photos came from family albums, and the problem was which images to leave out, not which ones to include.

Q: Let’s turn to Reprise: The Collected Stories of Nicholas Delbanco, in which all three volumes of your short stories appear in one book. Do you think your stories evolved over time? How so?
A: I’m struck, in fact, by how little they evolved in terms of voice. A writer’s work is more similar to his or her own other work than that of anyone else; we leave our fingerprints all over every page. The first two volumes were arranged thematically. About My Table, as the title implies, deals with domestic matters—and the nine stories there included focus less on the professional world than in what happens, or fails to happen, at home. By conscious contrast, The Writers’ Trade—again with nine stories—focuses on the professional life; the titular story describes a young writer at the time of his first book’s publication, and the last one, “Everything,” describes an old, honored, half-demented one. Those books appeared in 1983 and 1990, respectively, and when I reread them, I decided to leave well enough alone. And I think of them as paired texts. My characters lived in a world without cellphones or computers, and it was tempting to “update” them, but I let the pages stand.  

The third component of the volume, Reprise, contains more recent stories. To some degree, they’re more experimental (two are near-novellas, two are written over the shoulder of women, one deploys the first person, etc.). But—again, as the title suggests—there’s repetition here; what interested the young pup compels the old dog too.

Q: The section that is Reprise and Other Stories begins with the story “Aubade” that weaves in the fairy tale of “Hansel and Gretel” and concludes, “The children in this fairy tale do not, however, live happily ever after.” Why not? How do you as the author know?
A: I know because, as the story’s author, I chose not to write “The children in this fairy tale live happily ever after.” Such a line and attitude would have been equally possible, I suppose—though no one ever does “live happily ever after,” and the first formulation rings true. The bulk of that brief piece about young lovers deals with their shared encounter with an old woman and the prospect of old age. An author may not be omniscient (“How do you as author know?”) but he/she/they is omnipotent within their chosen word-world. What I wrote is what I know.

Q: The titular story of the second section, “The Writers’ Trade,” includes the writing guidance to the main character, Mark Fusco: “‘Make a catalogue,’ his writing teacher had advised. ‘Make it on three-by-five cards. Know everything you can. Tell yourself the person despises lima beans.’ ” Is this writing advice you have given, and in what context?
A: I first heard this advice, though not verbatim, from one of my own teachers in college—the poet and playwright William Alfred, whom I admired greatly then and still revere. Last heard more than 60 years ago, his words remain in my head. And for the half century that I myself worked in a classroom, I tried to be useful in much the same way—not using three-by-five cards or focusing on lima beans, but repeating Henry James’s advice (which he used when describing George Eliot) that the writer should “Try to be one of those on whom nothing is lost.” Which seems as good an instruction as any to offer by way of advice.

Q: In the story, “Traction,” the characters live in a renovated barn, which you have also done and write about in Still Life at Eighty. How may short stories parallel life? In what ways does life inform fiction?
A: “Traction” was written quite close to the bone. Elena and I have two daughters, and the younger of our two—though she’s completely healed—was born with the hip dysplasia in that tale described. And I was necessarily elsewhere, teaching in Iowa City, and trying to return to our “renovated barn” in Vermont in time for the corrective operation. There was a major snowstorm, as the story shows. So, in order to protect my wife from over-personal revelation, I gave my character a characteristic that anyone who knows Elena knows she doesn’t have. She never drank more than two glasses of wine, and hasn’t touched alcohol in years, but I gave my story’s wife a major drinking problem—a passion for Jack Daniels, Ezra Brooks, George Dickel, and each bottle of bourbon at hand. This was, I deluded myself, a way of gaining distance for the story and therefore protecting her. Further, I made my tale’s protagonist a lawyer, not a writer, and felt that I’d successfully separated—as your question suggests—the couple’s life from fiction.

But for years thereafter, at parties, if my wife asked for a glass of white wine, the host or hostess would look concerned, asking me in private if they should enable a drunk. And it made Elena furious to be seen as dipsomaniacal when she was stone-cold sober. So the issue is a complicated one. If you are (as I mostly am) committed to the mode of realism in prose, when should you be inventive, and how can you keep your short stories from “parallel life”? Every writer of fiction has to grapple with this, just as every writer of a memoir needs to confront the accuracy of remembered fact.  

I don’t think there’s a general rule, or if there is, I haven’t found it, so we tend to operate on a case-by-case basis. The story’s original title was “The Fixed Foot,” which referenced the poem by John Donne, “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning,” where he tells his wife not to worry, though he travels far from home. “Traction” was in part an homage to that great poet and poem, and I think that’s quite often one of the ways we distinguish between imagined and lived life. “The fixed foot” and our daughter’s hip have no obvious connection, but the interaction between them helped me to imagine the tale.  

Let me close with an answer to your final question: “What is next for you?” I’m at work on two separate fictions—one a contemporary novel, one historical. My last two books were, as you note, written in separate modes: one is a memoir, one a collection of short stories. So the novel seems a kind of change of pace, a return to my first chosen form. And the two voices—contemporary, historical—keep me alert to intonation. A fancy way of saying, I’m happy to stay sitting at the desk.  

Martha Stuit is a former reporter and current librarian.