![]() ![]() In fact, his fiction reminds me less of other writers than of Harvey Pekar’s long-running comic American Splendor. As a subject, it seems not to interest him. Almost none of Dixon’s short stories or novels take place in or have roots in the academy. ![]() It’s worth noting that, in spite of his tenure, he’s emphatically not a writer of “campus fiction,” as is David Lodge. In Salon, Roger Gathman described Dixon’s style as “ writing that has come out in its undershirt.”ĭixon’s prose reminds me of no one else’s, it’s surprisingly difficult to emulate (I‘ve tried), and it’s hard to tell how much he has directly influenced the prose of subsequent writers, despite his being a creative writing professor at Johns Hopkins for over three decades. In fact, he achieves emotional power by using an excess of ideas, structures, reworked phrases, and sentences that seem to be still being revised as they appear on the page. Though his prose shares the simple diction and spare physical description of Ann Beattie and Raymond Carver, Dixon is no minimalist. Stephen Dixon is one of the few American writers whose work feels truly sui generis. “I got a letter from George Plimpton saying, ‘not only are you not a novelist, but you’re probably not a short-story writer, either.’ That’s the exact quote.” ![]()
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