By Bennett Scott (A24) | October 24, 2025

Salvatore Scibona (SF97) has published two novels: The End (2008) and The Volunteer (2019). This interviewer enjoyed them both. The conversation that led to this manuscript took place over Zoom, the interviewer and subject alternating who could more frequently pull a leg to his chest while sitting due upright. 

BS: What relationship does the St. John’s Program—primarily an education in reading—have to the act of writing fiction?

SS: St. John’s encourages a young person to go far more slowly over a text than is natural for most readers. Think of the way freshman math starts with definitions in Euclid. “A point is that which has no part.” A mysterious thing to say. It’s a choice, and it could be said in a different way; it’s not said in a different way, and why is that? Because Program books are so battle-tested by time, the language they use tends to bear very, very, very close observation.

If you’re reading Kant, say, during junior year, you can bet he has read all the stuff that you’ve been reading for the last two or three years. By having a conversation with the books that preceded him, you can come to his work with a much sharper ear for the overtones, so to speak, that it evokes. The conceptual resonances. It’s something like putting the pedal down on a piano. The overtones are available to you. When the pedal is up, you’re only going to hear that one note. But if you’ve got the pedal down, it’s possible for the book to resonate in strange ways not otherwise available to you.

That slow, patient scrutiny of language itself is excellent preparation for writing a book.

BS: Did you have any particularly formative moments as a writer during your time at St. John’s?

SS: One moment that’s stayed with me happened after reading Virginia Woolf’s The Waves during my senior preceptorial. A glimmer, a kind of revelation, that it might be possible for a person to be without being an “I.” Reading Hume had prepared me a little bit for this possibility, but it hadn’t hit home. Woolf made me feel as if I had burst through to a new reality that I had never been able to touch with my mind. I still don’t know quite what it would mean—to be conscious without needing to be a self. I’m scared of going back to that book. I have a photo of Woolf over my desk. She stares down at me every day. I haven’t read The Waves again in 20 years. It’s still probably the most intense reading experience of my life.

BS: I wanted to ask you, first and foremost, about a phenomenon that I find quite interesting, which is that St. John’s is not really a fiction writing school. There are no direct outlets for it; no one is taking creative writing classes. But it seems to me like nearly every Johnnie I’ve talked to wants to write in some capacity. I was kind of curious about how St. John’s pushed you toward writing fiction.

SS: I suppose it’s for the same reason people who listen to a lot of piano music will eventually want to play the piano. Really, there’s no education in skimming at St. John’s. There’s something like the opposite of that. You learn that you can always look a little bit closer or sit for just a little bit longer with some very mysterious thing. It’s a natural progression, then, a desire for deeper intimacy with the book as form, an extension of close reading, to want to write a book.

BS: Do you think this desire and intimacy with language can make a person a better writer?

SS: When I got to grad school, I’d never taken a college-level writing class, but in my first class at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, I felt this tremendous sense of arrival. I hadn’t realized how thoroughly St. John’s had prepared me for what I was going to do. I thought I would be studying the novel as a form, the novel as art, a repository of feeling, the deepest abstractions.

The focus of Frank Conroy, who was the head of the program at that time and was my first workshop teacher, was something much more concrete and practical: meaning, sense, and clarity at the level of the sentence. Those are the things that he hammered all the time. It was so hard to be clear that you would do well just to throw yourself completely at trying to write one sentence that was meaningful, sensible, and as clear as you could make it before you move on to the next.

BS: Do you think St. John’s is particularly a writerly education?

SS: People from my class went into a lot of different fields after St. John’s. One went into quantum physics. Another into the science of the eye. Another into beekeeping. Another is a district court judge. One is a minister. One is a priest. One teaches junior high school English. A number are in business. That says to me that this quite unified curriculum is also so varied that it’s going to plink off each individual person’s mind in a distinct way. Having spent those four years reading only what the Program demands, you are free after senior year to study more deeply the things that all the prescribed reading excited in you.

In my case, I was hungry for contemporary American fiction, that is, art in my mother tongue. Little of what you read at St. John’s is in your own idiom as a contemporary American. Even Lincoln—who writes in perfect, clear, plain, beautiful English—is not quite writing in our English. I had an appetite for books written in the language I use on the street. So that’s what I started reading; that’s what I started writing.

BS: What do you take to be the role of this type of contemporary American fiction, particularly within our culture?

SS: I think that there’s a cultural deprecation nowadays of the imagination as an authority. The physical world is the real authority, right? Objectivity is the real authority, and that's what we mean when we say that something is scientific, or what we hope to mean by that, right? But in previous ages, the fruits of imagination were held in higher esteem than they are now. If a person merely thought something up, there's something less real about it, according to modern thinking.

The novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson has written a lot about this, the unfortunate deprecation of the human because it is human. One example of this is that from time to time in American literary circles, you get these fevers when people start insisting that only certain people with certain kinds of experience are allowed to write certain kinds of stories. Shakespeare never left Britain. How dare he write about anybody in Verona?

I’m interested in the sovereignty of imagination. Like nature, imagination is its own source of authority that deserves our respect. Imagination doesn’t need to be in a wrestling match with science. It has an authority all its own.

Salvatore Scibona, a novelist and MFA graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, is the director of the New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. Scibona is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, an O. Henry Award, and a Whiting Award. His first novel, The End, was a finalist for the National Book Award. He received the Mildred & Harold Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts in Letters in 2021 for his second novel, The Volunteer.

Bennett Scott is an alumni interviewer for the Gadfly.

This article first appeared in The Gadfly, St. John’s College’s student newspaper. It has been lightly edited for style and clarity.