Charles Baxter and the Cure for Insomnia

In the National Book Award finalist novel Feast of Love, an insomniac and semi-retired professor of philosophy named Charlie Baxter spends his nights roaming the streets of his hometown. In a Random House interview, the author of the book admits that the character who shares his name and is a writer also shares his insomnia, but "...at the bottom of the stairs in his house is a mirror that I don't own, an imaginary mirror, and everyone he meets or talks to is imaginary. 'Charlie Baxter' suffers from 'identity lapses,' as every novelist does." The book was adapted for the big screen in 2007, starring Morgan Freeman in the role of Charlie.

Charles Baxter, the author of Feast of Love, was born in Minneapolis and graduated from Macalester College, in Saint Paul. After completing graduate work in English at the State University of New York at Buffalo, he taught for several years at Wayne State University in Detroit. In 1989, he moved to the Department of English at the University of Michigan--Ann Arbor and its MFA program. He now teaches at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of 4 novels, 4 collections of short stories, 3 collections of poems, a collection of essays on fiction and is the editor of other works.

He originally wrote mostly poetry, but two years after completing his doctorate, Baxter experienced a crisis with his poetry prose. In an interview with Ploughshares, he describes it as: “I spent an entire summer trying to write poetry, and failing at it. It was as if the knowledge of how to do it had somehow left me, and I found myself ill-equipped to write. I was becoming more interested in sequences, characters, and characterizations, the rickrack of detail surrounding people.”

He turned to fiction writing instead, but even there, the words didn't work out. When talking about his first books, he says,“They were very abstract, these novels, very schematic, in some sense like bad postmodernism,” he says. “Nothing in them felt particularly real, although I didn’t realize that at the time. You rarely do when you’re working. I thought they were great. I was utterly baffled by the indifference or loathing with which people read them.”

Several years later and many, many rejections and bad reviews, Charles Baxter is a successful award winning novelist, poet, essayist, and short story writer. In an interview with Barnes&Noble he advices writers who are still waiting to be discovered: "Don't quit. Don't quit. Don't quit. Don't quit."

And how does Charles Baxter sleep these days? Very well according to what he told Ploughshares: “I’ve found the best cure for insomnia,” he says, “is thinking there isn’t anywhere I’d rather be than in bed. And my other cure is one that I first heard from Stanley Elkin, which is to imagine and then to start reading an endlessly large memorandum from some functionary in the English department.”

Don't miss hearing Charles Baxter read from his new novel The Soul Thief at the Bing Crosby Theater on Friday April 17 at 7.30 pm. (Tickets through Tickets West $10 general.)

For a preview, read Charles Baxter discussing the novel with Publishers Weekly.