James Collins
Biography
James Collins
I was born in Manhattan and lived there all my life, except for going away to school, until a few years ago, when I moved with my family to rural Virginia. I loved growing up in New York, not so much because of anything specific that I did, but because I just loved being there. I liked the streets, the buildings, the people. I still love it for the same reasons: when I go back, which is often, I enjoy being there because I enjoy being there, and the things I do --- going to museums and hearing music --- are less important (although they are important).
I wanted to be a writer for as long as I can remember, and I wrote my first collection of poems in a small blue spiral notebook when, I think, I was seven. In school my strengths were subjects like English and History and I wrote for literary magazines and so on. In college, though, I had a difficult time in general and was able to write almost nothing. When I graduated, I hadn't established a record that would lead to a literary career (or any career), and there were practical reasons for me to try working on Wall St., so I did. I thought to myself that it would be easier to go from that to writing and that the experience would be helpful if I did ever make the change.
In due course it became clear that I was unlikely to make much of a mark in the world if finance, and a friend helped me get a job as an editorial assistant at a publishing house (Little, Brown, of all places), where I worked briefly. I was mortifyingly older than the other assistants, but I felt much more at home in this setting than I had previously. Then, after writing a piece for it, I was hired at Spy magazine, where I wrote and edited a great deal, and so felt as if I was catching up on years' worth of lost experience. After Spy I worked at Time for several years, editing the arts and foreign news sections and writing on various subjects.
My wife grew up in Virginia and had always wanted to move back there and live in an old house with lots of land. Also, we had two young daughters and my wife had a hard time imagining what it would be like to raise them in the city. So, after a good deal of reasoned and mutually respectful discussion, we bought an old house with some land in Virginia. I left Time and started to write a few things for The New Yorker and we moved. We live in a very beautiful area, and while I don't have much experience with nature, I do appreciate it. Every day, while driving or taking a walk, I see something that astonishes me: wild roses by the road, a tree silhouetted against the yellow evening sky. I sometimes think that, as a city boy, I enjoy it all more than people who grew up in the country. I like the friends I have made here very much; I've had dogs for the first time in my life; it has been good to live outside of New York and see life from a different perspective; contrary to what many people seem to expect, I am never bored; and I am surrounded by natural beauty, so the move has been a success. (But I still think that New York is the only place one earth that really matters.)
My favorite websites are not particularly "webby." I have read The New York Times every day of my life since I was ten and one of the things that makes it possible to live in the country is that I can read it online. I read other papers online, too; Slate and poets.org are the only true websites that I visit regularly, although I do use Wikipedia and google things several times a day.
The book that has probably been more important to me than any other is a paperback copy of The Viking Portable James Joyce. I got it in eleventh grade and it is at this moment sitting on my desk. In the last few months I have made two acquisitions that are thrilling and engrossing and make me speechless with awe: the complete stories of Chekhov and the Arkangel complete Shakespeare on CD. All the performances in the Shakespeare recordings are incredibly good and it is a revelation to hear the words spoken rather than to merely read them, and the set allows you to hear plays like Timon of Athens or Henry VI pts. 1-3 that you would never be able to see performed.
James Collins
