Joyce Carol Oates discusses Frost, fame and Twitter

Luckily for Atlanta, Oates takes a much more gracious approach when it comes to speaking engagements. The notoriously prolific writer launches her latest release with a keynote address at the AJC Decatur Book Festival, sharing the stage with her Atlanta-based biographer.

“I’m really just coming because Greg Johnson’s involved,” Oates joked in a telephone interview. Her admiration for Johnson, though, is no joking matter. The author and professor at Kennesaw State University has published three books about Oates, beginning with 1998’s authorized biography, “Invisible Writer.”

“In the beginning, [Johnson] was a young graduate student who had written about me,” said Oates, “but as the years went by, I started reading his fiction, which is really quite excellent.”

Considering her mind-blowing productivity, it’s difficult to imagine Oates finding time to read anyone’s fiction other than her own. At age 76, she’s achieved an unmatched level of literary virtuosity: more than 70 published books, including novels, story collections, poetry, plays, criticism and nonfiction works.

Her first story collection, “By the North Gate,” appeared in 1963, the year Robert Frost died. Oates said she never had a chance to meet the revered poet, though she heard him read when she was an undergrad at Syracuse University. “But you know,” she said, “you never meet these people, really. You only meet a kind of impersonation.”

The divide between an artist’s public persona and their private life underscores the central questions of “Lovely, Dark, Deep.” In the story, 77-year-old Frost oscillates between flirtation and frustration while being interviewed by a mysterious young poet.

A minor kerfuffle erupted last fall after the story’s publication in Harper’s, with some scholars and Frost’s relatives denouncing her portrayal of the poet as a sexist, lascivious racist. Oates said she’s wanted to write about Frost for years; she sees the story as sympathetic toward him.

“Much of the commentary in the story is really about his poetry and about how special it is, how strange it is,” she said. “And about how strange he was. He had a role that he played in public of this old New England poet, but he was really quite different, a very dark person. … There was almost a Shakespearean complexity with his personality, which I wanted to explore.”

Although the 10 envelope-pushing stories in the new collection tend to run long (the final piece, “Patricide,” tops out at 85 pages), Oates has lately proven herself as a master craftsman of much shorter works — including those under 140 characters. Her lively and thought-provoking Twitter feed runs an unpredictable gamut, ranging from philosophical musings (“Without language, we could not ‘abstract’ from any experience,” she tweeted recently. “Thus, we would always be local, parochial, & time-locked. Zen epiphany?”) to more playful topics (“All cats find offensive the idiotic query—‘Cat got your tongue?’ Fact is, the cat absolutely does not want your tongue.”)

Oates bristled slightly when asked if Twitter gets in the way of her writing.

“It’s not much of a distraction for me,” she said. “I’m not on Facebook. Maybe Facebook is more social and Twitter is more verbal. The people I follow on Twitter are literary or they’re political.”

Another line of questioning that doesn’t pique her interest are inquiries into her writing process. She allowed that her method involves taking extensive notes in longhand. When writing, she finds it helpful to have an outline nearby, even a “pretty messy” one.

“I don’t think the way in which people write is that important,” she said. “People always ask questions about it. But I don’t think it matters if Faulkner was writing by hand or on a typewriter.”

In 2011, Oates published “A Widow’s Story,” a memoir about the unexpected death of Raymond Smith, her husband of 46 years. She’s now finishing up another memoir, this time covering her years growing up on a small farm in western New York. The book tracks her parents’ lives, she said, and ends with their deaths. “It’s mostly about being a young girl, being interested in writing in high school.”

Her recent concentration on confessional nonfiction — coupled with her active social media presence — may suggest a personality that relishes the spotlight. In conversation, however, Oates comes across as deferential and polite, a sought-after speaker who sees herself as more of a spectator than starring act.

“Some people have very defined personalities,” she said. “They have strong opinions, and they talk with confidence about their opinions. I tend to be a person who listens to other people talking. My opinions are usually not very strong. I can follow different sides of an issue and be almost sympathetic.”

Regarding her legacy, Oates believes that most successful writers only have one or two books that later generations will remember. Her 1969 novel, “Them,” seems to be the title she’s most associated with, she said, along with 1996’s “We Were the Mulvaneys,” an Oprah Book Club selection.

But as with questions of the writing process, Oates is fast to admit she’s not that interested in the business of selling books. Her real work requires staying focused on the storytelling itself. The role of the writer calls for “giving a voice to people who may not have voices,” she said, “and looking for the story in something which takes place between people, not on one side or the other. The story is a phenomenon that happens between people, among people.”