Jonathan Safran Foer to lecture in David Lawrence

Jonathan…Jonathan Safran Foer Tonight at 7:30 p.m. Sponsored by Hillel Jewish University Center David Lawrence Hall, Room 121 Free with Pitt ID

Sometimes our greatest achievements are the ones we never plan for.

Such could be said for popular novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, who will be speaking to Pitt students tonight at 7:30 in David Lawrence Hall.

Had the Princeton grad never been curious enough about his family’s past to visit Ukraine in 1997 and never studied with literary heavyweight Joyce Carol Oates, the world might have been calling him “Dr. Foer” instead of “The New York Times best-selling author.”

Funny how life works out like that.

“I wasn’t the greatest student in the world,” said Foer about his days in college. “I wasn’t overly ambitious. I kind of thought I might be a doctor, but really I was just an aimless, dumb person.”

Foer majored in philosophy at Princeton but had no inclinations as to his plans for after graduation. “If anything, I got very good at knowing who I wasn’t,” he said. “‘Writer’ came about as much by a process of elimination than anything.”

It was the combination of a few classes under Oates’ influence and his personally motivated trip to Ukraine that started to recalibrate Foer’s directional compass.

“[Oates] was a real mentor,” Foer explained. “She teaches because she likes turning people into writers, and that’s what she did with me, took somebody who had no intention of being a writer and changed his mind.”

The creative end to Foer’s trip to Ukraine was the critically successful “Everything is Illuminated” in 2002. The novel earned him a National Jewish Book Award and a Guardian First Book Award among vast critical praise. His second novel, “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” garnered much the same attention in 2005.

Yet despite achieving more success with his first two novels than some writers receive in their entire careers, Foer doesn’t feel as accommodated to his craft as one would think.

“I feel lost and overwhelmed every time [I write],” he said. “I’ve never ever felt comfortable with my writing.”

He adds that he doesn’t really keep anything at the forefront of his mind when working on a novel.

“I don’t go into writing with ideas,” he added. “I come out with ideas. In a way, the writing process is the process of discovery. You find out what you’ve been thinking all along.”

Yet for as little as Foer champions his own writing, he’s supremely assured in the power of his artistic medium, and he’s not worried about books’ place among recreational activities in an ever-increasing visual society.

“Books have to compete with many things, and there will be new things [to compete with],” he said, “but books don’t need to be more popular than anything else. What I hope is that there’s always a place for them. I know what they can do.”

“I hope I have a son, and I hope that my son reads,” he added. “I hope that he gets all of the pleasure, engagement and stimulation that books can provide.”