Novelist joins UCI fiction team

Ron Carlson’s greatest advice to writers can be summarized in a single word: sit.

The prolific author, who was announced Thursday as a new director of UC Irvine’s master’s program in fiction, knows there are all kinds of hurdles in writing. To Carlson, though, the most successful writers aren’t always the most brilliant or the most inspired. They’re simply the ones who can stay in a chair the longest.

“It’s amazing what unseats a writer,” said Carlson, the author of four novels and multiple short story collections. “Sometimes writing, let’s be frank, it’s a lot like work. You have to push. People like writing because it’s an art and it feels like something pleasurable. It is, and the rewards are pleasurable, but it’s about work.”

For Carlson, it’s work that has paid off. His fifth novel, “Five Skies,” is due to be published this spring, and his work has appeared in Esquire, the New Yorker and other publications. He replaces Geoffrey Wolff, who headed the UCI fiction program for 11 years before retiring in June.

Carlson, who taught creative writing at Arizona State University before moving to UCI, is set to begin teaching in the spring. He will co-direct the fiction program with Michelle Latiolais, while James McMichael and Michael Ryan head the poetry classes.

“I think he’s going to be a wonderful appointment,” said humanities dean Karen Lawrence. “He’s an excellent writer, and he did a huge amount to build the program at Arizona. It really took off under his leadership.”

A native of Utah, Carlson earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Utah, Salt Lake City. He has received the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction and the National Society of Arts and Letters Literature Award, and his short story collections “The Hotel Eden” (1997) and “At the Jim Bridger” (2002) both made the Los Angeles Times’ list of the best books of the year.

In addition to teaching graduate students, Carlson said, he hopes to lead at least one undergraduate course a year.

“I’m sort of an interfering teacher,” he explained. “I do get involved, and I think it’s that involvement that’s everything.”