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| author | Ben Winston | 2022-01-20 19:09:35 -0500 |
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| committer | Ben Winston | 2022-01-20 19:09:35 -0500 |
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| tree | feda7f2969b7eb4c1d007e4137275769a2d83f95 /vibrant-margins | |
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diff --git a/vibrant-margins/charmed-particles/index.html b/vibrant-margins/charmed-particles/index.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d3d212d --- /dev/null +++ b/vibrant-margins/charmed-particles/index.html @@ -0,0 +1,61 @@ +<!DOCTYPE html> +<html> +<head> + <link href='/css/styles.css' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'> + <title>Charmed Particles by Chrissy Kolaya - Ben Winston</title> + <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=utf8" /> +</head> +<body> +<div id="content"> +<h4><a href="/">cd ~</a> / <a href="/vibrant-margins">Vibrant Margins</a></h4> +<br/><br/> +<h2 id="like-combing-through-tangled-hair">“Like combing through tangled hair”</h2> +<p>An interview with Chrissy Kolaya, author of <a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781938103179" target="_blank"><em>Charmed Particles</em></a></p> +<p>In mid-November, on a blustery Saturday afternoon, Chrissy and I spoke about her novel <em>Charmed Particles</em>. We talked over Skype about the Superconducting Super Collider (which plays a central role in the novel), linear vs. nonlinear writing, capturing the experience of a character who’s heritage is different than one’s own, and more. Below is the transcription of our conversation, edited and condensed for clarity.</p> +<p>~</p> +<p><strong>Can you tell us a bit about the research process for <em>Charmed Particles</em>?</strong></p> +<p>I started by reading some books about the history of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermilab" target="_blank">Fermilab</a>, which is the facility that’s the inspiration for the lab in the novel. <a href="http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780226346243" target="_blank">One book in particular</a> was co-written by a woman named Adrienne Kolb who, as it turns out, is one of the archivists for Fermilab.</p> +<p>So, at one point in the process, I applied for a grant through the <a href="https://www.jeromefdn.org/" target="_blank">Jerome Foundation</a> called the Travel and Study Grant, which is for writers from Minnesota or New York who are working on a project that requires travel and research. My pitch to them was that I wanted to write this book, so I wanted to go to Fermilab to explore their archives and interview some of the theoretical physicists who had been there during the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider" target="_blank">Superconducting Super Collider</a> controversy back in the late 1980s. I lucked into getting the grant, and part of the funding covered a trip there.</p> +<p>On the same trip, I got to visit one of those “living history” facilities that Heritage Village is modeled after, a place called <a href="http://napersettlement.org/" target="_blank">Naper Settlement</a>. One of my friends from high school works there, and she gave me a really interesting behind-the-scenes tour. Both Naper Settlement and Fermilab are close to the town where my family moved just before I started high school – my parents still live there. So it was kind of like coming home, but coming home to do research on this place I had lived for many years, which was both strange and fascinating.</p> +<p><strong>How did you become interested in the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC)?</strong></p> +<p>For me, it came out of a real life experience. My family moved every four years when I was growing up, and when I was just starting high school we moved to a Chicago suburb. I was fourteen, and unlike the other moves – where you just get drug along and you’re like “Okay, this is where I live now” – I was more curious about this place intellectually.</p> +<p>I have this really strong memory of one of my first days at my new high school. Picture me: a gawky fourteen-year-old, nervous to start school, don’t have any friends. I walk in, and there are all these protesters inside and outside the school with signs and tee-shirts saying “No SSC!” and shouting at each other. I remember being like, “What is this about? Why are they protesting?” I had no idea. I don’t know if my parents even knew – I assume they had heard something about it while buying a house in the area, but I had no idea what was going on. I found out later that it was one of the public forums being held to discuss the possibility of the SSC being built in this community.</p> +<p>So I had this memory, and when I went to Fermilab to do the research I was digging around in the archives, and Adrienne – the archivist, who took me under her wing in the kindest, most generous way – she hands me this old sign announcing that the public hearing would be held at Waubonsie Valley High School, and I was like “Oh my gosh, that’s what that was!” It was like going back in time.</p> +<p>One of the interesting things about writing this book has been that, for many of my contemporaries who had lived in the area all their lives, this whole controversy hardly registered with them at all. I kept thinking, why did this stick in my head so much? I think partially it was me trying to make sense of a new place, and this was one of the first impressions I had, which tend to stick in a particularly sticky way. It was also interesting for me because it was one of the only times I’d experienced adults being so publicly angry with one another. You hear about protests, or you watch them on TV, or read about them, but seeing one was a really different experience.</p> +<p><strong>Was that your first day of school?</strong></p> +<p>I went back and read the transcripts, and I think it was sometime in October. Another interesting thing is the public hearing was being held in our high school theater, and I was a theater geek growing up. So this was a space – I’d spend hours and hours and hours in this space and now it was being used for this thing.</p> +<p><strong>Sarala, who’s one of the novel’s most compelling protagonists, starts the story with her first days as an immigrant in the United States. What was it like looking at the US through her eyes? How difficult was it to capture the discovery she’s going through on paper?</strong></p> +<p>This is the work of writing that I’ve been thinking the most about lately. The opportunity it gives us to peer through the eyes of characters who may be very different from us and to experience the world from their POV – like the old saying about walking a mile in someone else’s shoes. It’s also a big responsibility and easy to get wrong. For this section, I drew on family and friends who’d shared their own first-days-in-a-new-country experiences. I read a lot. And I thought about moments when I’d experienced a similar sense of getting my bearings in a new place.</p> +<p>I felt like there was a big possibility of getting it wrong. This question gets at something that’s really important to think about, which is permission to write about characters who are different than ourselves, and how we do that in a way that doesn’t feel exploitative but renders them as fully developed characters on the page. It was something I was nervous about, but I was also so curious about what the United States would look like through her eyes. And because I came to know her, and love her, and care about her as a person, I felt comfortable slipping in there. But it’s something I always wonder – did I get that right? I’ll never know for sure, but I hope I did.</p> +<p><strong>This topic is particularly interesting given recent current events: this character comes to the US as an immigrant and is just so taken by everything – it’s scary but it’s also really, really exciting for her. Do you think if you were writing this novel in light of current events you may have conceived of Sarala differently?</strong></p> +<p>Certainly, we’re watching many of our Muslim friends, our friends of color, our immigrant friends, and we’re seeing how fearful they feel – and reasonably so, given the results of our election. [Editor’s note: This interview was conducted in mid-November, before these concerns became policy]. I think no matter what, Sarala was a character living in the 1970s and 80s, so her experiences reflect that era. But it raises an interesting question: what would Sarala’s life be like today? People have asked me “Will you revisit these characters? What are Lily and Meena doing?” and my answer had always been “Oh, I don’t know, nothing is really speaking to me right now.” But it does make me curious to think about what Sarala’s daily life would be like now, or what it will be like.</p> +<p><strong>With a wide cast of interesting characters crossing paths, it’s hard not to compare them to the particles being studied in this story. How did the concept of the particle accelerator influence the form of the novel?</strong></p> +<p>What’s happening in a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle_accelerator" target="_blank">particle accelerator</a> is that sub-atomic particles are being deliberately crashed into one another so that scientists can see what sorts of other particles, energy, and forces emerge out of that collision. It’s a great metaphor for life, in which we each go out into the world, and with each person we encounter, these interactions send us off in interesting directions, perhaps creating something positive, perhaps something negative, perhaps something new.</p> +<p>In thinking about the form of the novel, I suppose the place where that most clearly manifested was in the decision to write from the third person POV with close interior access to each of the six main characters. I wanted readers to have the chance to look at these events through many different sets of eyes.</p> +<p>I guess I wanted to have empathy for both sides of the argument in writing this. I’ve been talking to my students a lot about the importance of empathy, and its connection to why we write and what we can do with our writing. As an academic, it would have been really easy for me to come down of the side of, “This is crazy! Of course you should build this thing! These people are thoughtless yokels!” But then we don’t get a chance to understand other points of view, we don’t get a chance to have a conversation in hopes of coming closer together.</p> +<p>And gosh, as we’re talking about this, how are we not thinking about our current political situation? It feels like that’s what’s happened – we have these two sides that are just not conversing and not being empathetic to one another. I’m guilty of it myself. I see myself ready to write off people who don’t share my politics, and I think one of the great challenges of being human is not giving in to that.</p> +<p><strong>I don’t know if it was a fully-formed thought at the beginning, but at the end when Randolph and Abhijat become friends, it’s this dramatic shift – not in their inner character, but in a rebalancing of their priorities – and it seemed to me like this shift came out of the collision of characters and of people in the novel.</strong></p> +<p>I Skyped with a book club recently, and I was talking with them about how hard the end of this book was to write – especially for these two characters. They undergo some dramatic changes of priorities, and I worried about how it could feel too neatly wrapped up in a bow, too easy and clean of a transition. I don’t know how successful I was. I do know I thought an awful lot about how to avoid that, but I did feel like it was important – maybe not important, but <em>right</em> – that this is where these characters were headed.</p> +<p>This sounds artsy-fartsy, but I find myself thinking and talking about these characters in the same way I would about my friends. Like, “Oh, so-and-so would never do that, that’s just not who he is.” There’s a level of certainty I bring to these characters because I’ve been living with them for so long. But then there’s the craft issue: even if that does feel like what the character would do, how do you pull it off as a writer without it feeling hokey? I’ll never know whether it worked or it grates on people’s nerves, and I don’t know whether that’s a thing people will ever feel comfortable telling me directly.</p> +<p><strong>Can you describe your writing process in three words?</strong></p> +<p>I totally cheated and used hyphens. My words are: Non-Linear, Sometimes-Impossible-Feeling, Sometimes-an-Absolute-Joy.</p> +<p>So, Non-Linear. When I think about how to write a novel like this, I always imagine that if I were a smarter person I would write in a really linear way: I’d have the whole novel in my head, and then I would come to work and sit down and be like, “Welp, today’s job is blahblahblah,” and type that out, then move to the next thing and the next. I wish I wrote like that, but I don’t. I write all over the place, so everything’s a mess for a good long time. I’m teaching an advanced fiction writing class right now, and I was talking to my students about this because we’d Skyped with another author who writes in a really linear way, and I was saying “That’s totally a reasonable way to write, I wish I wrote like that, but it’s not the end of the world if you don’t.” I was telling them how if I brought in the new book I’m working on and showed them, they’d cart me off to the loony bin. It doesn’t make any sense right now – it’s little snippets all over – and hopefully it’s going to come together, but who knows? I feel like my life would be easier if I were a linear writer.</p> +<p>This connects to Sometimes-Impossible-Feeling: what’s fun about writing in a nonlinear way is that you can go where your engagement takes you. If you’re interested in thinking about a particular character that day, you can noodle around with them, or jump over here, and that can be freeing and fun and creative. I remember talking to my husband while I was working on this novel, and I kept telling him that what I was doing was like combing through tangled hair: I had this mush of mangled stuff, and I had to go through and make sense of it. This part of it can feel difficult and impossible.</p> +<p>But then you get those moments where you get to think about something you’re obsessed with, and you get to go down that rabbit hole. This new book I’m writing is about <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptozoology" target="_blank">cryptozoology</a> – the study of mythical or imaginary animals. So last night I got to lay in bed and read this weird book about <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bigfoot" target="_blank">Bigfoot</a>. And that’s the joyful part of it, the part when you’re like “This is super weird and interesting!” and you get to just geek out.</p> +<p><strong>If you could meet one of the characters from <em>Charmed Particles</em>, who would it be and why?</strong></p> +<p>I would definitely love to meet Sarala – I feel like she’s the character I’d most like to be friends with. But I can’t pretend I wouldn’t like to go out for a beer with Randolph. It’d be one of those nights out where you don’t have to say anything, you just kick back and take it all in. I would also love to know what happens to adult Lily and adult Meena – I don’t know if I want to hang out with them, but I kinda want to hear what they’re up to. I feel like it’d be something really interesting and impressive.</p> +<p><strong>Writers can be superstitious about their process. Do you have any superstitions around your writing?</strong></p> +<p>None at all. Time is at such a premium; superstition feels like an impossible luxury. Maybe when my kids are grown and I’m retired and have tons of time on my hands, then I’ll develop some superstitions. But for right now, I’m a “plop down and get to work any time I can find a spare minute” writer.</p> +<p>But I do like hearing about them. In my intro to creative writing class, we start the semester by talking about traditions you have in place or specific spots you need to write in, and it’s interesting because so many of my students are fixated on these things. I was probably more like that when I had more time on my hands. Right now, if I waited for a special, perfect moment…</p> +<p>I do wish I was able to have more of a stable routine. I think of my year as very connected to the academic calendar. During the academic year, I’m barely writing at all. All of that is happening over the summer or at a break time. What I can do during the academic year is revision – sometimes – and what you might call the “business of writing,” like sending work out. But it’s really hard to find those little snippets of time during the academic year.</p> +<p><strong>I think about that a lot. With a day job it’s hard – sometimes you get time off, or you have miraculous energy when you come home at the end of the day to put a couple hours into it, but a lot of times you’re beat, or you have a lot of other prep to do, and you just can’t do it.</strong></p> +<p>Exactly. I end up walking around for nine months out of the year feeling like a total phony. I’m telling my students “you need to write every day” and thinking “please God, don’t ask me if I write every day!”</p> +<p><strong>Is there a novel or an author you love that you feel hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves?</strong></p> +<p>I want to put in a good word for a few fantastic projects that are all at different stages of that long, hard process of coming into the world—the parts of the process where writers can often use a reminder of the worth of those projects and encouragement to keep going. So here are a few projects I’m excited about:</p> +<p><a href="http://www.indiebound.org/book/9781681340364" target="_blank"><em>The Bride Price</em> by Mai Neng Moua</a> (<a href="http://www.mnhs.org/mnhspress" target="_blank">Minnesota Historical Society Press</a>, March 2017): I got to read excerpts of this project years ago as part of the <a href="https://www.loft.org/" target="_blank">Loft Literary Center’s</a> fantastic Mentor Series program and it’s great. The book’s about Mai Neng’s own marriage and her conflicted feelings about Hmong cultural traditions surrounding marriage. It’s a fantastic glimpse into what it’s like to straddle two very different cultures, for Mai Neng as a Hmong American, but something that’s resonant for many of us as a nation of immigrants.</p> +<p>Fiction writer <a href="http://www.donnatrump.org/" target="_blank">Donna Trump</a>, whose fantastic novel <em>Portage</em> is being shopped around to publishers. It takes place in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundary_Waters" target="_blank">Minnesota’s Boundary Waters</a> and tells the story of a woman who’s been given a donated heart. I can’t wait until this book finds a good publishing home and makes its way to readers.</p> +<p>I’m also excited about Margie Newman’s memoir in progress, <em>The Thing is to Always Be Ready</em>, about growing up as the daughter of a Holocaust Survivor and the way that experience resonates through generations.</p> +<p>With the exception of Mai Neng’s book, none of these are coming any time soon. I thought about this question in terms of, when did I most need someone to be like “Chin up! Keep up the good fight!” And it was really in those periods where you’re unsure if it’s worth continuing to work on. [While working on <em>Charmed Particles</em>,] there were many moments along the way where I thought, “This is never going to happen. This won’t be a thing.” So I’m thinking about those writers right now who are in that moment, and wanted to give them a little thumbs up.</p> +</div> +</body> +</html> diff --git a/vibrant-margins/country-life/index.html b/vibrant-margins/country-life/index.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c3c92ab --- /dev/null +++ b/vibrant-margins/country-life/index.html @@ -0,0 +1,34 @@ +<!DOCTYPE html> +<html> +<head> + <link href='/css/styles.css' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'> + <title>Country Life by Ken Edwards - Ben Winston</title> + <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=utf8" /> +</head> +<body> +<div id="content"> +<h4><a href="/">cd ~</a> / <a href="/vibrant-margins">Vibrant Margins</a></h4> +<br/><br/> +<h2 id="and-indeed-my-prose-is-steeped-in-poetry">“And indeed my prose is steeped in poetry”</h2> +<p>An interview with Ken Edwards, author of <a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781910061244" target="_blank"><em>Country Life</em></a></p> +<p>While on holiday in Zambia, Ken was kind enough to muse on some questions I had about his ninth book, <em>Country Life</em>. I was curious about his thoughts on the relationship between poetry and prose, the philosophies of the novel’s characters, his lifelong relationship with music, and more. Below are Ken’s answers, which we exchanged via email.</p> +<p>~</p> +<p><strong>You’re a musician in real life, and two of the novel’s main characters are (albeit very different) musicians. How did your musical history inform theirs?</strong></p> +<p>I describe myself as a part-time musician. I have had a lot of involvement over the years in contemporary music of various kinds, and I currently play bass guitar in two <a href="http://www.the-moors.com/" target="_blank">local bands</a> <a href="http://www.afritnebula.com/" target="_blank">in Hastings</a> that I co-founded with my wife, Elaine, who is my musical inspiration. She’s a brilliant flautist and sax player, and pretty good on the keyboards too. The two characters you mention are not based specifically on any real-life musicians, but inevitably my intimate relationship with music-making informs what I imagine they do. Actually, I’d quite like to write an album for Nightmare! Also, it’s important to say that music is at the heart of my prose style: rhythm, pacing, dynamics, sound, silence. I have learnt a lot as a writer from great musicians.</p> +<p><strong>In addition to other works of prose, you’ve published several volumes of poetry. Do you prefer one over the other? How has your poetry influenced your prose writing, and vice versa?</strong></p> +<p>Very good question. I started out, back in the 1970s, as a writer of short stories, and I had some success getting them published. There was interest from an editor at a mainstream publisher in London, who wanted to see a novel from me. They were looking for the next <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_McEwan" target="_blank">Ian McEwan</a> or <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Amis" target="_blank">Martin Amis</a>. But I couldn’t write a novel. And I’d also become disillusioned with the literary world, and found what “experimental” poets were doing in Britain and the USA at this time so much more exciting. Also, they gave me a peer group, which I didn’t have as a prose writer. And so I started making poems and entered the world of small press publishing. But I never quite stopped writing prose, and indeed self-published my first novel, [<em>Futures</em>][http://www.realitystreet.co.uk/ken-edwards.php], in 1998. Fast-forward a few decades, and the poems ceased, but the prose started flourishing again. And indeed my prose is steeped in poetry. I have learnt so much from poets. Actually, “prose” and “poetry” are not a real binary pair. There is verse (an old-fashioned sounding word) and there is prose. Poetry is something else.</p> +<p><strong>You’ve been the publisher/editor of a small press, <a href="http://www.realitystreet.co.uk/" target="_blank">Reality Street</a>, for over 20 years, and have published several of your own works there. Why did you seek out a different publisher for <em>Country Life</em>?</strong></p> +<p>Reality Street was not primarily intended to be a vehicle for my own writing. I founded it in 1993 with my friend the poet <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendy_Mulford" target="_blank">Wendy Mulford</a>, primarily to publish poets we both liked. Since the turn of the century I have run it on my own, although it has recently ceased to publish new titles. The works of mine I’ve published under its imprint have been ones I was unable to place elsewhere. I’ve already mentioned the novel <em>Futures</em>, which was “nearly published” twice, before I became fed up with waiting and issued it as a Reality Street title. The book of short prose that became <em>Down With Beauty</em> was seemingly unmarketable to most publishers, and there was a certain satisfaction in doing it exactly as I wanted. The same applied to the poem sequence <em>eight + six</em>. But even today, when it is more feasible and more socially acceptable for authors to self-publish, I think there is an important sense of validation in persuading an external publisher to take on a book. I am very grateful to <a href="http://www.unthankbooks.com/" target="_blank">Unthank Books</a> for giving me this opportunity, and look forward to working with them again if I can.</p> +<p><strong>Tarquin’s philosophical rants are both fascinating and fully-realized. What kind of research did you have to do to bring them to life?</strong></p> +<p>Tarquin is an amalgam of several people I have known (as well as embodying some of what I think of as the least attractive traits of mine!). He is ferociously intelligent, but also excessively opinionated, and self-serving while pretending not to be. His philosophical outlook is informed by my own reading and half-understanding of heavyweight political philosophy. In the email exchanges between members of the imaginary Neo-Marxist Party, I am afraid I parodied the discourse in some real email discussion groups I have encountered.</p> +<p><strong>Describe your writing process in three words.</strong></p> +<p>Write, revise, write. And if I had three more words: revise again, write.</p> +<p><strong>If you could meet one of the characters from <em>Country Life</em>, who would it be and why?</strong></p> +<p>Impossible question. As I hinted before, the characters in <em>Country Life</em> sometimes contain echoes of parts of myself, particularly Dennis, who has some of my characteristics at that age (early 20s). If I met him, I’d say: Don’t be so fucking stupid!</p> +<p><strong>Writers can be superstitious about their process – do you have any superstitions around your writing?</strong></p> +<p>I’m not superstitious, but I find set procedures very helpful. I’m naturally a lazy bugger, and would just slop around and avoid writing if left to my own devices. So I plan ahead, and set my computer to remind me on certain days with a message popping up at 9am: “Write!” And if I really don’t feel like it, the rule is: just write one sentence. Or even: amend one already-written sentence. That fulfills the brief. But inevitably, one sentence leads to another…</p> +<p><strong>Is there a novel or author you love that you feel hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves?</strong></p> +<p>Another impossible question. I think there are wonderful American novelists, such as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_Sorrentino" target="_blank">Gilbert Sorrentino</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Woolf" target="_blank">Douglas Woolf</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Djuna_Barnes" target="_blank">Djuna Barnes</a>, who are almost unknown in the UK. And the late <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_Brooke-Rose" target="_blank">Christine Brooke-Rose</a> was a terrific British writer (inevitably exiled to France) also almost unknown in my country. But I could go on and on…</p> +</div> +</body> +</html> diff --git a/vibrant-margins/index.html b/vibrant-margins/index.html index 6e2fff3..4d77dae 100644 --- a/vibrant-margins/index.html +++ b/vibrant-margins/index.html @@ -26,7 +26,17 @@ I found the interviews with authors particularly enlightening, and have linked t </p> <p> <ul> -<li><a href="salamanders"><strong>Salamanders of the Silk Road</strong> by Christopher Smith</a><br/></li> +<li><a href="salamanders"><strong>Salamanders of the Silk Road</strong> by Christopher Smith</a></li> +<li><a href="charmed-particles"><strong>Charmed Particles</strong> by Chrissy Kolaya</a></li> +<li><a href="country-life"><strong>Country Life</strong> by Ken Edwards</a></li> +<li><strong>The Underground</strong> by Hamid Ismailov<ul> + <li><a href="underground-author">author interview</a></li> + <li><a href="underground-translator">translator interview</a></li></ul> +<li><a href="waveland"><strong>Waveland</strong> by Simone Zelitch</a></li> +<li><a href="mr-boardwalk"><strong>Mr. Boardwalk</strong> by Louis Greenstein</a></li> +<li><a href="summer-under-water"><strong>The Summer She Was Under Water</strong> by Jen Michalski</a></li> +<li><a href="lower-quarter"><strong>The Lower Quarter</strong> by Elise Blackwell</a></li> +<li><a href="small-lights"><strong>Under the Small Lights</strong> by John Cotter</a></li> </ul> </p> </div> diff --git a/vibrant-margins/lower-quarter/index.html b/vibrant-margins/lower-quarter/index.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a7df5e6 --- /dev/null +++ b/vibrant-margins/lower-quarter/index.html @@ -0,0 +1,34 @@ +<!DOCTYPE html> +<html> +<head> + <link href='/css/styles.css' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'> + <title>The Lower Quarter by Elise Blackwell - Ben Winston</title> + <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=utf8" /> +</head> +<body> +<div id="content"> +<h4><a href="/">cd ~</a> / <a href="/vibrant-margins">Vibrant Margins</a></h4> +<br/><br/> +<h2 id="do-we-know-ourselves-better-than-other-people">“Do we know ourselves better than other people?”</h2> +<p>An interview with Elise Blackwell, author of <a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781609531195" target="_blank"><em>The Lower Quarter</em></a></p> +<p>Elise was kind enough to answer some of my questions about <em>The Lower Quarter</em> — about New Orleans, building suspense, multiple points of view, and more. Her answers are below, which we exchanged via email.</p> +<p>~</p> +<p><strong>Can you tell us a bit about your research process for this novel?</strong></p> +<p>I didn’t yet realize that I was researching this novel, but its central idea and images were born while I was on tour for my second novel, <a href="http://www.indiebound.org/book/9781932961515" target="_blank"><em>The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish</em></a>, which is set against the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Mississippi_Flood_of_1927" target="_blank">Great Flood of 1927</a> and was drafted before but published after Hurricane Katrina. That tour started in Biloxi and Ocean Springs, followed by New Orleans. And after those few days I knew that I would write a novel set in immediate post-Katrina New Orleans, that one of the characters would be an artist from the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and that there would be a murder in the <a href="http://www.lerichelieuhotel.com/" target="_blank">Hotel Richelieu in the Lower Quarter</a>—in the room I was given. While working on different novel, one about classical musicians, I started to research art conservation and to observe the post-Katrina timeline, including through several more trips. I already knew New Orleans well (I’m from southern Louisiana), but I didn’t know all the human microclimates in what is in many ways a city of neighborhoods. I also conducted some book and internet research on the occupations and preoccupations of the four main characters.</p> +<p><strong>The stories in the novel are tightly coupled with the setting; the city of New Orleans feels almost like another main character. While crafting the novel, did you always have the city in a prominent role? How did the setting influence the plot (or the characters) and vice versa?</strong></p> +<p>New Orleans is my favorite U.S. city as well as the place where I exhale and feel at home in the world the moment I step out of Louis Armstrong Airport and into the humidity. <em>The Lower Quarter</em> is a novel is very much about the city’s particular response to a complex tragedy—the specific ways that the city is and isn’t resilient, the ways it changed in the years following the storm. Those real events shape the plot in some obvious ways, including police failure to give high priority to a murder investigation. Marion’s choice to live in the Bywater represents a historical moment in the city, the beginning of a migration of young, creative people to one of the few neighborhoods that didn’t flood and the resulting gentrification of that neighborhood. The city also influences the characters, albeit in different ways. Clay’s peculiar degeneracy has a strong New Orleans flavor to me, while Johanna represents a much brighter manifestation of the city’s power to shape a life. New Orleans is the place that allowed her to start over when she needed to, to define her own life. Marion is a more recent arrival and Eli is a visitor, so they offer two versions of the city’s effect on newcomers, which is often unusually strong relative to other U.S. cities.</p> +<p><strong>The novel is told linearly through four points of view. However, because these characters interact with each other in the story, there are scenes that have a limited view of a main character (because it’s told through the lens of another main character). How difficult was it to capture these characters in both capacities?</strong></p> +<p>The point-of-view structure drove me batty during some of the drafting. I had a full sense of each person’s story and wanted to include all of their perspectives, even at the risk of jostling readers to jump from consciousness to consciousness. There were many moments of struggle in deciding which perspective to use for certain scenes involving more than one of the four—including a couple of sex scenes. At other times, though, the choice came naturally. I also wanted to explore the ways that the people are sometimes wrong not only about each other but about themselves. Do we know ourselves better than other people, or do we have more confining blinders when we look into our own hearts and minds?</p> +<p><strong><em>The Lower Quarter</em> is, in many ways, Joanna’s story — she seems to be the common link between most of the characters. How did the other three voices help you in telling her story? How did it affect (negatively or positively) the suspense surrounding the various mysteries at the heart of the novel?</strong></p> +<p>Johanna is an incredibly private person who lives in her work both mentally and physically. She also has a magnetic beauty that she is not fully aware of, so it felt essential to show her effect on others, to watch other characters try to read and influence her. One thing I did worry about was withholding information from the reader, which of course is the nature of suspense (ask <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patricia_Highsmith" target="_blank">Patricia Highsmith</a>) yet something I believe has to be done according to certain rules and traditions that grow out of respect for the reader. So often the real revelations—even in straight mysteries—are more about the why than the what or the how, and the why is often something a character (like a living person) doesn’t understand herself.</p> +<p><strong>Describe your writing process in three words.</strong></p> +<p>Thinking through words.</p> +<p><strong>If you could meet one of the characters from your novel, who would it be and why?</strong></p> +<p>Oh, that’s a hard question! I want to say Clay because he’s the most mysterious, but he terrifies me. I feel like I’ve met Marion, or young women a lot like her. So I’m going to go with Johanna or Eli… Johanna, because she is the most complex and probably the smartest of the four. I’m also fascinated by the work she does and what it means to her.</p> +<p><strong>Writers can be superstitious about their process — do you have any superstitions around your writing?</strong></p> +<p>I do have a few rituals. Kinds of music I will listen to and kinds I won’t. I write on lined paper with a mechanical pencil, with coffee, to start the day, and compose on the computer most of the rest of the time. But these aren’t superstitions, and if they are disrupted because I’m traveling I can usually still work. So the answer is no, though I would never let anyone read a first draft of anything I write.</p> +<p><strong>Is there a novel or author you love that you feel hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves?</strong></p> +<p><a href="http://www.indiebound.org/book/9781609530020" target="_blank">David Bajo’s <em>Panopticon</em></a> is the first one to come to mind, but I’m probably not allowed to say that because we share an actual house as well as a publishing house. <a href="http://www.lydiamillet.net/" target="_blank">Lydia Millet</a> also comes to mind. I continue to think that <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Ondaatje" target="_blank">Michael Ondaatje</a>, <a href="http://www.tejucole.com/" target="_blank">Teju Cole</a>, and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Norman" target="_blank">Howard Norman</a> are underrated. As far a single underrated novel, everyone mentions <a href="http://www.indiebound.org/book/9781590171998" target="_blank">John William’s <em>Stoner</em></a>, but I’m a bigger fan of Butcher’s Crossing. I worry that <a href="http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780375701962" target="_blank"><em>The Moviegoer</em></a>—a great New Orleans novel—will get lost in time and that too many people think of “<a href="http://www.art-bin.com/art/or_weltypostoff.html" target="_blank">Why I Live at the P.O.</a>” when they think of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudora_Welty" target="_blank">Eudora Welty</a> instead of her much lusher and more complex work.</p> +</div> +</body> +</html> diff --git a/vibrant-margins/mr-boardwalk/index.html b/vibrant-margins/mr-boardwalk/index.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d2e20b5 --- /dev/null +++ b/vibrant-margins/mr-boardwalk/index.html @@ -0,0 +1,63 @@ +<!DOCTYPE html> +<html> +<head> + <link href='/css/styles.css' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'> + <title>Mr. Boardwalk by Louis Greenstein - Ben Winston</title> + <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=utf8" /> +</head> +<body> +<div id="content"> +<h4><a href="/">cd ~</a> / <a href="/vibrant-margins">Vibrant Margins</a></h4> +<br/><br/> +<h2 id="i-feel-like-im-working-on-myself">“I feel like I’m working on myself”</h2> +<p>An interview with Louis Greenstein, author of <a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780978863678" target="_blank"><em>Mr. Boardwalk</em></a></p> +<p>Louis and I met in the fall at his local coffee shop in West Philadelphia. We chatted and laughed over coffee, discussing Atlantic City, isolation versus collaboration in the writing process, the difficulty of capturing an aging character, drunkenly calling literary icons, and much more. Below is the transcription of our conversation, edited and condensed for clarity.</p> +<p>~</p> +<p><strong>Your rendition of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_City%2C_New_Jersey" target="_blank">Atlantic City</a> is very realistic in the novel. What is your personal relationship with Atlantic City?</strong></p> +<p>So, first off, the Atlantic City in the novel is a fictional Atlantic City. There are some big concessions, the main one being, there were never buskers on the boardwalk in the sixties and seventies. That was completely fictional.</p> +<p>But I do have a connection to Atlantic City, although not as intense as the character in the novel. My dad was a pretzel baker among other things, and we had a few pretzel bakeries. In 1963 we went to Atlantic City for the summer; in the mornings, my father rented bicycles, and then in the evenings we moved all the bikes and turned the space into a shooting gallery. I was a mascot for the lifeguards too — I turned seven that summer. It was a great experience.</p> +<p>After that, I wasn’t back for the summer again until 1975, when we had another pretzel bakery. Part of the novel is based on that summer. Atlantic City had gone downhill culturally, and they were arranging for the citywide gambling referendum (the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambling_in_New_Jersey#Expansion_of_gambling" target="_blank">statewide had failed the year before</a>) which promised some big change. Of course, a bunch of us were saying, <em>This doesn’t make a lot of sense. This will only make casino owners rich.</em> But I pretty much lived on the boardwalk that summer. I ran the pretzel bakery and stayed in a little room behind it.</p> +<p>Also, I just love the Jersey shore. People say it’s visceral — you can smell it, even taste it. It’s a place that’s really close to me.</p> +<p><strong>The story follows Jason as he matures from childhood through adolescence, and it’s a slow, even-paced maturation. How difficult was it to capture the character as he matured?</strong></p> +<p>It was really challenging. Sometimes I’m in his head as a thirty-nine year old, but sometimes I’m just kinda in his head. I would attribute that success to feedback from my writer’s group. One particular note I got from several people was something like: <em>Look, he’s eight here, and here’s the voice inside his head, and now he’s eleven and it’s a different voice!</em> It was really a function of going back and looking at each phase. Once I figured out what I had to do, the job was mechanical: <em>Okay, I’m eleven, how does an eleven-year-old see stuff?</em></p> +<p>I also try to keep in mind something I learned both as a parent, and from being married to an educator: on any given day, any eleven-year-old could sound like they’re six, or sound like they’re twenty. I tried to remind myself to see things through the character’s eyes.</p> +<p><strong>According to the bio on the back of the book, you’ve also written television scripts and stage plays. How is your process for writing a novel different than writing in other forms?</strong></p> +<p>Two things. One, you’re alone when you’re writing a novel, and two, it takes a fuck of a long time. If you’re writing a story or an article, it can go quick, but a novel takes years.</p> +<p>Working on this most recent play — a one-woman show called <a href="http://www.thelauranyroproject.com/" target="_blank"><em>One Child Born: the Music of Laura Nyro</em></a> — the writing was so much fun. I wrote it with my great friend <a href="http://www.kateferber.com/" target="_blank">Kate Ferber</a>, so I got to collaborate with someone I really like. We did it side by side as well, bouncing stuff off each other, and since Kate performs the show too. It’s written for her. So if there was a disagreement we’d argue it out a little bit, but I’d always defer to her. That made the creative process pretty smooth.</p> +<p>With a novel, you’re just sitting in a room. I share my progress with my writer’s group — they’ve seen one draft of the current novel I’m working on — and it’s exciting and rewarding to get feedback. But for most of it you’re just alone.</p> +<p><strong>It must be interesting working directly with someone you have a creative history with — who’s also the person who’s bringing the character to life on stage — where the back-and-forth process is immediate. Do you feel the process of the writer’s group providing feedback is similar?</strong></p> +<p>It’s different because it doesn’t feel collaborative. When I’m working on a script, there’s collaboration. The way I look at it, I’m just bringing my stuff to the table, and I want to hear what they have. In that room I don’t have a big ego; I want to do something that works. I hope this makes me an easy collaborator to work with!</p> +<p>With the writer’s group, there’s seven other members right now. If one of them has an opinion I don’t agree with, and nobody else mentions it, I think, <em>That’s just the way he’s feeling, that’s cool,</em> and I can choose not to acknowledge that note. I feel like my writer’s group is more editorial than collaborative.</p> +<p><strong>I was reading the acknowledgements in the book, and you mention that a version of <em>Mr. Boardwalk</em> was published online in ’97/’98. How is that version different than the one that made it to print?</strong></p> +<p>I could have just as easily given it a different title and it would have been a different book. Even people who read it — all nine of them — would have seen a lot in common, but would have seen it as a different novel.</p> +<p>Looking back now at my own way of working and my own sensibilities, I didn’t have as much life experience when I wrote the early version. My kids were little at the time; now they’re grown, so I’ve had a lot more life experience. There are more layers of meaning in this version.</p> +<p>I didn’t intend it, but the first version was more like a YA novel, whereas this is more literary fiction. It’s deeper, there’s more there, it’s more nuanced. And the character wasn’t originally presented as an adult.</p> +<p><strong>You mentioned nine readers of that first version. Friends or family members? Or just people you met online?</strong></p> +<p>One of them was a stranger, a woman who lives in the UK. We became pen pals, and we’ve been corresponding ever since.</p> +<p>My wife read it. Everyone in my writer’s group read it. This was in the early days of online; there weren’t forums. I guess I met the guy who published it online through Dreamforge, an early literary journal. He published some of my reviews, and a couple short stories or poems or something, and then he said <em>Oh, send me your novel.</em> It was actually the publisher of the final version, Doug Gordon, who reminded me about this early version. I wouldn’t say I forgot about it, but it seemed like a different book.</p> +<p><strong>Could you describe your writing process in three words?</strong></p> +<p>I’ve thought a lot about this, so here goes: Gush, Flow, Drip.</p> +<p>I’m good at first drafts. I spend as much time as I need — months — making a lot of notes, making outlines, figuring out who the characters are and what they want. Sometimes I write resumes for characters and then build them up. I spend a lot of time thinking about it; sometimes I even get stoned before I go to sleep so my mind can wander.</p> +<p>After six months of thinking, I’m ready to write the first draft. And I’m a disciplined guy: I sit down five days a week and I write. At least a thousand words a day, sometimes twelve-or fifteen-hundred. I bang that sucker out. With the current novel I’m working on, I decided to write the first draft in fountain pen, and one of the wonderful things about that is it’s really hard to go back. <em>What was the name of that coffee shop?</em> Well, when you’re writing the first draft, it doesn’t fucking matter! Don’t look back! After four months of writing, there’s the first draft — that’s the gush.</p> +<p>I try to set aside two or three hours in the morning to work on my creative stuff before I go and do client work, but throughout the day I’ll go back periodically and I’ll edit: for style, the economy of words, the feel of the language. Fixing stuff — which, since I’m an editor, is something I’m good at and I believe in.</p> +<p>Then, I show it to my writers group. With the current piece I’m working on, they’re really positive about it, and they’ve given me a lot of little stuff to work on. They’ve also given me a couple major things — not huge structural problems, but character development problems. This is the drip part. It’s really hard to get up in the morning and sit down with this monster staring at me, going <em>Okay, come on. Change me. Fix me.</em> It’s really hard, but the craft calls for it.</p> +<p>I think that’s the difference between an amateur, OK novel, and something that really shines. You have to go back and you have to fix the character development that isn’t working. It’s really hard because I’m up against my own craziness, and I’m pushing the boundaries of my own understanding of people: motives, behaviors, drivers, everything. As I go back and do the hard work of crafting this character, I feel like I’m working on myself. It’s rewarding, but it’s really hard and really slow.</p> +<p><strong>If you could meet one of the characters from <em>Mr. Boardwalk</em>, who would it be and why?</strong></p> +<p>It would be the rabbi that <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar_and_Bat_Mitzvah" target="_blank">Bar Mitzvah’d</a> Jason, because he’s compassionate. He sees the world in a fundamentally different way than I do, and yet I think we’re similar. Like, I’m an atheist — I think it’s all horseshit — but he’s not. He’s trying to find answers, and he’s looking at scripture and he’s not saying it’s horseshit; he’s saying, <em>No, wait, these are good lessons.</em> I love that he’s selfless. I think he’s a guy that really, genuinely thinks about other people. I wish I were more like him. A lot of people in that novel have an agenda — they have something to hide — but he’s a pretty righteous guy. One more reason is, many of the other characters are based on people I know. He’s not. I just made him up.</p> +<p><strong>Writers can be superstitious about their writing process. Do you have any superstitions in your process?</strong></p> +<p>Superstitious? I’m not even a <em>little</em>-stitious.</p> +<p>I thought about this, and I really wanted to say, <em>No, I’m not a superstitious person.</em> And then I lit the candle I always light before I write…<em>Ohhh, wait a second.</em> So, I protect that. I don’t call it “superstitious,” I call it a “ritual.” I almost always have a candle burning when I’m writing; it confers a sense of peacefulness. I really think that’s as close as I get to being superstitious.</p> +<p><strong>I really don’t know if I like the word “superstitions” to describe these things. They’re really just familiarities that put you in a place you need to be.</strong></p> +<p>When I think of “superstition,” I think of <em>Step on a crack, break your mother’s back.</em> Or <em>Don’t walk under a ladder.</em> Those are superstitions. But when I think about it, ritual behavior is mostly based on them. Like, what would happen if I didn’t light a candle before I wrote? Well, nothing, because sometimes I forget. But the moment I remember…</p> +<p><strong>You mentioned that you’re writing your most recent novel out longhand in fountain pen. Is that usually part of your process, or do you compose on the computer?</strong></p> +<p>Usually I make a lot of notes longhand, and I outline longhand, and then I start writing on the computer. But I was on a panel with <a href="http://www.gregoryfrost.com/" target="_blank">Greg Frost</a> who said he writes with pen. I thought it sounded like a cool idea. Then I remembered, this guy I went to high school with <a href="https://www.facebook.com/Shaw-Pens-158523740845200/" target="_blank">makes fountain pens</a>. Aesthetically, I fell in love with it. I don’t want to be superstitious and say <em>From now on, that’s how I’m going to write,</em> but I love doing it.</p> +<p><strong>Is there any novel or author you really love or admire that you feel hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves?</strong></p> +<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fielding_Dawson" target="_blank">Fielding Dawson</a>. I guess I would call him a “close Beat”. He was from the Black Mountain School in North Carolina, and he was a painter, an illustrator, a short story writer, a novelist, and a poet. A beautiful guy. When I was an undergraduate at Temple in 1975, I brought him to campus. I called him and told him I was a fan. He was the first writer I met — I was the kid who met him at the train station, I got to show him around the school, and he was so sweet. We stayed in touch for a little bit.</p> +<p>The beauty of his work is, it’s stream-of-consciousness but very well tended. So it isn’t like reading James Joyce; it’s accessible. He wrote about dreams. He wrote a tiny little story about a pretty girl who rode by on a bicycle while <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustav_Mahler" target="_blank">Mahler was playing</a>. Something I’ve taken from him and from a lot of other writers — <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Roth" target="_blank">Philip Roth, notably</a> — is using my emotional life and my history and my experiences, but making shit up too. I’m gonna use what I can from my life when it makes sense on the page; I’m going to be brave about it and put it out there. He did that. I was in my late teens and early twenties when I was first reading him, and it really made a strong impression on me.</p> +<p>I got turned on to Dawson and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Bukowski" target="_blank">Charles Bukowski</a> at the same time. I called Bukowski one time — I was nineteen and I was drunk, and I thought <em>Hey, what could go wrong?</em></p> +<p><strong>Did he pick up?</strong></p> +<p>Yes, and he cursed me out a little bit. I sat there grinning the whole time. “I really love your work —” “Fuck you!” He was not happy. It was like three in the morning in Philadelphia, so it must have been around midnight where he was.</p> +<p>So I got into the two of them at around the same time, which opened a door for me on small presses, and writing in a way that’s maybe not mainstream, really putting yourself out there.</p> +</div> +</body> +</html> diff --git a/vibrant-margins/small-lights/index.html b/vibrant-margins/small-lights/index.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..758bfef --- /dev/null +++ b/vibrant-margins/small-lights/index.html @@ -0,0 +1,45 @@ +<!DOCTYPE html> +<html> +<head> + <link href='/css/styles.css' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'> + <title>Under the Small Lights by John Cotter - Ben Winston</title> + <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=utf8" /> +</head> +<body> +<div id="content"> +<h4><a href="/">cd ~</a> / <a href="/vibrant-margins">Vibrant Margins</a></h4> +<br/><br/> +<h2 id="hand-over-hand-out-of-the-unconscious">“Hand-over-hand out of the unconscious”</h2> +<p>An interview with John Cotter, author of <a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781450700917" target="_blank"><em>Under the Small Lights</em></a></p> +<p>Over a couple nights of emails and instant messages, John was kind enough to answer some of my questions about his novel. We spoke about book lengths, gravitating back to familiar poets, writing about writers, and much more. Our conversation is below, condensed and lightly edited for clarity.</p> +<p>~</p> +<p><strong>Your career has spanned many genres — essay, poetry, critiques, comics, and fiction (of course). How does the process or experience of writing and publishing a novel compare to other forms?</strong></p> +<p>Writing a novel is trickier because you’re pulling it hand-over-hand out of the unconscious. You take more risks, or at least I do. It’s more fragile. Sometimes you never really have a handle on one character, and it’s a key character, so that’s the ballgame. Then again, nothing made me feel as good as finishing that first one has. I’m writing a nonfiction book now, but by this time next year I expect to be writing fiction again. There’s another novel I want to write.</p> +<p><strong>Do you have a favorite to write or read?</strong></p> +<p>I try to vary my reading diet as much as possible. When I was younger I read shelves of poetry, <a href="https://electricliterature.com/my-summer-of-slam-poetry-tom-waits-and-what-stays-with-you-79def7844b63" target="_blank">spent all night at poetry readings</a>—I showered to a cassette tape of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._B._Yeats" target="_blank">Yeats</a> outloud. But when I quit writing in the genre my reading there dropped off precipitously. Or maybe it was the other way around. No I have a bad habit of going back to the same poets again and again rather than looking for new voices.</p> +<p>I’ve always read essays and always will, particularly criticism (I was weaned on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gore_Vidal" target="_blank">Gore Vidal</a>’s essays on microfiche at the <a href="http://www.otislibrarynorwich.org/" target="_blank">Otis Library</a>—I don’t write anything like him but that’s to my detriment).</p> +<p>As I look to my coffee table now, there’s a stack of four books: two non-fiction (one on the way brains hear music, one on fanatical religiosity), a book of short stories (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Gaitskill" target="_blank">Mary Gaitskill</a>’s <a href="https://indiebound.org/book/9780307275875" target="_blank"><em>Don’t Cry</em></a>) and a novel (<a href="http://boullosa.webfactional.com/en/" target="_blank">Carmen Boullosa</a>’s <a href="https://indiebound.org/book/9781941920008" target="_blank"><em>Texas: The Great Theft</em></a>). Add a poetry collection every once in awhile (<a href="https://indiebound.org/book/9780983297048" target="_blank"><em>Twelve Stations</em></a> by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomasz_R%C3%B3%C5%BCycki" target="_blank">Tomasz Różycki</a> was the last one I loved) and that’s pretty representative of my diet.</p> +<p><strong>Jack, the narrator, seems to think (or wish) he was a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beat_Generation" target="_blank">Beat writer</a>. Indeed, the protagonists all have a Beat-like quality to them: young, heavy-drinking, seize-the-moment artist-types. How did those works influence <em>Under the Small Lights</em>, if at all?</strong></p> +<p>As a kid, the beat writers—but <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_S._Burroughs" target="_blank">William Burroughs</a> particularly—were my bridge into a whole world, and with <em>Under the Small Lights</em> I wound up trying to bottle some of that energy, probably because I wasn’t living it any longer. I knew there was some gorgeous illusion I’d lost by growing out of that stuff, and that just reading the Beats themselves couldn’t give it back to me.</p> +<p>These days <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Ginsberg" target="_blank">Allen Ginsberg</a> is the only one I can still read without going green in the face. Parts of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_Lunch" target="_blank"><em>Naked Lunch</em></a> are still striking or funny, but you have to enjoy them the way you do <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Houellebecq" target="_blank">Houellebecq</a> or <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingsley_Amis" target="_blank">either</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Amis" target="_blank">Amis</a>: amusement absent endorsement.</p> +<p><strong>In writing courses, two bits of advice I’ve heard are “Write what you know” and “<em>Don’t</em> write what you know” (from different profs, of course). Since you share a profession with a couple of characters from the novel, what are your thoughts on these bits of advice?</strong></p> +<p>Writer characters make good narrators: they’re like emotionally sensitive detectives. To the larger question, everything a writer writes is something she knows about—the only twist is that sometimes she knows it by writing it.</p> +<p><strong>I love the length of this book — long enough to savor, but short enough to stay focused on the story. Was your intention for this story always a “novella”? Or did it go through other iterations, longer or shorter?</strong></p> +<p>I love <a href="http://www.orgs.miamioh.edu/mupress/" target="_blank">Miami University Press</a>’s series but I admit that I’m not crazy about the word “novella.” <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherine_Anne_Porter" target="_blank">Katherine Anne Porter</a> put it well enough for me when she said she wasn’t interested in that descriptor because “we have four that cover every division: short stories, long stories, short novels, novels.” I think that’s right. I always thought of <em>Small Lights</em> as a short novel and I still do. There was too much I wanted to explore to do it in a brief story, and I didn’t even consider writing a massive doorstop about a bunch of 20-year-olds. I’m not <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Gaddis" target="_blank">William Gaddis</a>, nor was meant to be.</p> +<p><strong>Describe your writing process in three words.</strong></p> +<p>Find the music.</p> +<p><strong>Could you expand on that?</strong></p> +<p>I pay way too much attention to prose rhythms when I write. If I change a word at the end of a sentence, I usually have to change one at the beginning of it too. And I look for this as a reader.</p> +<p>I don’t mean to look for it. I don’t mean to do it! I think it’s a holdover from my handful of years writing poetry, something about cadence.</p> +<p>What’s strange about that is I can’t write poetry anymore. I never became convinced by my own lyric “I” and that became a problem after a while. When I try to write a poem now it feels like a lie.</p> +<p><strong>Is the “I” in your prose is another character? Or does it feel more authentically <em>you?</em></strong></p> +<p>Fiction feels most honest, because I’m a natural actor, “do the voices” in conversation, etc. When I write nonfiction I sort of have to settle on an “I” character to tell it, but it’s easier than in poetry, yeah.</p> +<p><strong>If you could meet one of the characters from your novel, who would it be and why?</strong></p> +<p>Star, because she’d call me out. I drift toward pretentiousness unless there’s someone there to constantly check me, so I’ve always tried to surround myself with grounded people. I dread most entering a room full of pretentious people with no one to regulate them. The things that happen in rooms like that … I always leave needing a shower.</p> +<p><strong>Writers can be superstitious about their process — do you have any superstitions around your writing?</strong></p> +<p>For over a decade I felt like I did my best work in white text on a blue background but I don’t seem to need that anymore. Now I tend to have this idea that I have to be alone to write, but best is being alone in a crowd. I think Denver’s <a href="http://bardocoffee.com/" target="_blank">Bardo Coffee House</a> on South Broadway is basically magic.</p> +<p><strong>Is there a novel or author you love that you feel hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves?</strong></p> +<p>Yes, most of them, because the marketplace is winner-take- all. Hype begets big-outlet reviews begets awards begets readers repeat cycle. Mark Wallace’s <a href="http://www.spdbooks.org/Products/9781935402053/the-quarry-and-the-lot.aspx" target="_blank"><em>The Quarry and the Lot</em></a> is as good as it is neglected—I’m excited to read his new one, <a href="https://indiebound.org/book/9781943899036" target="_blank"><em>Crab</em></a>. I never heard of the essayist <a href="http://www.howardmansfield.com/" target="_blank">Howard Mansfield</a> before this summer and that’s upsetting to me because <a href="https://indiebound.org/book/9781593761394" target="_blank"><em>Bones of the Earth</em></a> is a near-perfect exercise in writing landscape. Sarah Goldstein is a revelatory poet and I hope she’s still writing. But this comes back to the root cause of such things: a few big books suck up all the oxygen in a given year. Literally no one is going to be talking about <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Saunders" target="_blank">George Saunders</a>’ <a href="https://indiebound.org/book/9780812995343" target="_blank"><em>Lincoln in the Bardo</em></a> five years from now, no one; but it was George Saunders’ first novel and so it got all the pampering. I want <a href="http://tiphanieyanique.com/" target="_blank">Tiphanie Yanique</a> and <a href="http://www.carolyncooke.com/" target="_blank">Carolyn Cooke</a> to have more of that. Lastly, one that’s found some readers, which is wonderful, <a href="https://vanessaveselka.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">Vanessa Veselka</a>’s <a href="https://indiebound.org/book/9781935869054" target="_blank"><em>Zazen</em></a>, is the best novel I’ve read in the last five years.</p> +</div> +</body> +</html> diff --git a/vibrant-margins/summer-under-water/index.html b/vibrant-margins/summer-under-water/index.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..cef42bc --- /dev/null +++ b/vibrant-margins/summer-under-water/index.html @@ -0,0 +1,34 @@ +<!DOCTYPE html> +<html> +<head> + <link href='/css/styles.css' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'> + <title>The Summer She Was Under Water by Jen Michalski - Ben Winston</title> + <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=utf8" /> +</head> +<body> +<div id="content"> +<h4><a href="/">cd ~</a> / <a href="/vibrant-margins">Vibrant Margins</a></h4> +<br/><br/> +<h2 id="writing-is-constantly-about-love-and-loss">“Writing is constantly about love and loss”</h2> +<p>An interview with Jen Michalski, author of <a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781938466687" target="_blank"><em>The Summer She Was Under Water</em></a></p> +<p>Jen was kind enough to answer some questions I had related to some themes in her latest novel — specifically, an artist’s fiction versus their reality, impatience in writing, the nature of human relationships, and more. Below are Jen’s answers, which we exchanged via email.</p> +<p>~</p> +<p><strong>The “present tense” story in this novel takes place at the Susquehanna River and the image of water appears throughout, which can be read both literally and metaphorically. What drew you to using this as a central image in the novel?</strong></p> +<p>When I was in college my roommate’s family had a cabin there (her family built it the same way the Pinskis did in the book—floating lumber down the river on raft, in the days before roads were built), and we used to go up a couple of times a year. It was very isolated, and beautiful, and it’s remained vividly with me through the years. I always wanted to use it in a novel, and I found that its isolation would be a perfect powder keg if people who were estranged from each other had to spend any amount of time there.</p> +<p><strong>Sam Pinski, the main character, has strained relationships with most of the novel’s other characters; however, each relationship is strained differently. How difficult was it to create this multi-faceted character and make her believable?</strong></p> +<p>It wasn’t too hard! I think, at some point in our lives, we’ve experienced strained relationships with our loved ones. And I am familiar with the dynamic of the blue collar family. My twin brother and I, third-generation Polish Americans, were the first in our family to go to college. So it’s often felt like I live in two worlds at times. But I think, while you might grow apart from friends with whom you don’t have much in common any more, you’re always connected to your family, for better or worse. They’re a lot like slinkys; you are all growing at different rates, apart and together, and the spring stretches and contracts continuously, but they’re always connected.</p> +<p>The hardest part was that, although there are many people in my family like Sam’s parents and her brother, I didn’t want Sam to be me, so I had to be very aware of what I thought were my reactions to Sam’s family as opposed to hers. And I felt it was more important to make Sam flawed. To not necessarily make her likeable, or a martyr, but real. Someone who clearly loves her family but wouldn’t actively choose to spend time with them, were they not related by blood. And she never quite reaches the closure or growth she needs in the novel, even, but you get a sense that she’s sort of headed in that direction. It’s a lifelong process for everyone, and I didn’t think Sam should be any different.</p> +<p><strong>Though the characters, settings, and events in any novel are fictional (or fictionalized), readers occasionally assume they have some basis in the author’s reality. Because of this misconception, did you have any reservations about centering the story around Sam and Steve’s taboo relationship?</strong></p> +<p>I had a many reservations that waxed and waned over the course of the year before publication—even a month before publication, I remember wondering whether it was too late to pull the book. But then I’d go back and read the story, and I was happy with how it was written. I thought it was a good story. And that was more important to me than what people thought. Ironically, I didn’t consciously set out to write this story. In the first draft, Sam gets cold feet about getting married to her boyfriend, Michael, because she begins to develop feelings for her friend, Eve. I put it aside initially because it felt tired, a standard coming-out novel. In the years between, I wrote a magical realist novella, <em>A Water Moon</em>, about a man who finds himself pregnant. The pregnancy is actually symbolic of some heavy truths he must carry to term. Although the structure, subject, and language were so completely different from Summer, somehow, the two projects felt connected to me. I slept on it, and when I woke up I realized I was still working on Summer the entire time. The pregnant man was Steve, Sam’s brother. And Steve was telling me what Sam couldn’t, was perhaps too ashamed, too confused to tell me: Sam wasn’t having cold feet because she was a repressed lesbian but because of something more dark, confusing, and painful. It was only coming to Summer from a different perspective that I was able to get away from its convention, from its predictable storyline, from what I was comfortable with happening.</p> +<p>I try not to judge what I write, either when I’m writing it or after it’s written. I tend to sort of trust the process. I write a lot from dreams and intuition, and I feel like what needs to come out on the page does, and the decision I make consciously are the editing ones.</p> +<p><strong>The story is told over the course of four days, with all past events being told through flashback or within the context of the “present”. How did this structure help you tell the story more effectively?</strong></p> +<p>I figured I couldn’t have the Pinskis together for more than a few days without them killing each other, but I also didn’t want the powder keg to blow up halfway through the novel. So it seemed like a good idea to weave the two stories together, the surrealist one and the real one, along with a few flashbacks, so that both stories come to a head at once. And sometimes the flashbacks will mirror the present, or comment on them, ie, the flashback of Sam having dinner with Michael’s family is sandwiched next to the first time Michael has dinner with Sam’s family, to show the stark differences. It’s actually the first novel I wrote (I wrote <em>The Tide King</em>, my first published novel, after this one), so I feel like my idea of how to structure a novel may be different now than it was then. I can’t even say I’d structure it the same way if I wrote it again, now, in my forties. But that is the magic and wonder of writing.</p> +<p><strong>Describe your writing process in three words.</strong></p> +<p><em>When I can.</em> My life is pretty stuffed to the seams, so I don’t really have a set writing schedule or ritual. A lot of stuff just percolates in the back of my head, or sometimes I’ll be up half the night in bed (I’m a terrible insomniac) thinking about what needs to happen next in the story or novel in which I’m working. And then, in the hour here or the weekend afternoon there I have free, I’ll sit down and flush all that stuff out of my head. I write with the fear that it may be another week (or more) before I can sit down and write again, so it’s pretty feverish when it happens.</p> +<p><strong>If you could meet one of the characters from any of your novels, who would it be and why?</strong></p> +<p>This is a great question! I’m going to restrict it to published work. I think I’d like to meet Ela from <em>The Tide King</em>, the immortal girl who’s been nine years old for over two hundred years. I’m sure she’d be a wealth of knowledge, and experience. And sadness. Now that I’m at mid-life, and my parents are dead, I catch myself wondering, since I don’t have children, what’s left out there. I can’t imagine having to live two centuries, trying to find meaning not only in the day to day, but also in the scope of it.</p> +<p><strong>Writers can be superstitious about their process — do you have any superstitions around your writing?</strong></p> +<p>I’m not terribly superstitious, but I wish I was more patient. I write like I’m going to die next week, and my legacy needs to be wrapped up immediately. I want to take more time, with the current novel I’m working on, and do another revision. And then another. Really get everything right. Of course (and maybe this is where superstition comes in), every draft I undertake turns up being wildly different than the last, with sometimes only the characters and setting the same. I mean, we’re always growing; it makes sense that our novels are actually always in progress, too. We just have to consciously decide to end them and move on to the next thing. Which is hard. It’s always a terrible breakup and mourning process to me. Writing is constantly about love and loss for me.</p> +</div> +</body> +</html> diff --git a/vibrant-margins/underground-author/index.html b/vibrant-margins/underground-author/index.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6546a25 --- /dev/null +++ b/vibrant-margins/underground-author/index.html @@ -0,0 +1,56 @@ +<!DOCTYPE html> +<html> +<head> + <link href='/css/styles.css' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'> + <title>The Underground by Hamid Ismailov - Ben Winston</title> + <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=utf8" /> +</head> +<body> +<div id="content"> +<h4><a href="/">cd ~</a> / <a href="/vibrant-margins">Vibrant Margins</a></h4> +<br/><br/> +<h2 id="what-they-live-in-fact-is-their-literature">“What they live, in fact, is their literature”</h2> +<p>An interview with Hamid Ismailov, author of <a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781632060440" target="_blank"><em>The Underground</em></a></p> +<p>On a beautiful day in Indian Summer, I was fortunate enough to speak with Hamid Ismailov about his recent novel, <em>The Underground</em>. We chatted over Skype about subversiveness in literature, the difficulties of translation, the incredible connection an author can feel to a character, and more. Below is the transcription of our conversation, edited and condensed for clarity.</p> +<p>~</p> +<p><strong>There are many references to famous Russian writers in <em>The Underground</em> – Mbobo is nicknamed <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Pushkin" target="_blank">Pushkin</a>, the title itself <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notes_from_Underground" target="_blank">calls back to Dostoevsky</a>, etc. What influence have the great Russian writers had on your life and your writing?</strong></p> +<p><em>The Underground</em> as a novel is, in a way, a love song for Moscow. Living in Moscow, you can’t be free of Moscow, and like St. Petersburg it’s a center of Russian culture and literature – especially literature. Everywhere you look has some reflection of this-and-that writer; on the right you can see the house where <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Tolstoy" target="_blank">Tolstoy</a> lived, on the left you can see where Dostoevsky used to stay, here <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Gogol" target="_blank">Gogol</a>, there Pushkin, and so on and so forth. It’s full of literature, both classic and contemporary, and you can’t be free of it.</p> +<p>Generally, Russians treat their life like literature as well. Some nations have the privilege of inventing religions or inhabiting them – Arabs are the owners of Islam, in a way, as Jews are of Judaism, and so on. Russians were left to the orthodoxy of Christianity, but they haven’t adopted it the way the English did with Anglicanism or the Germans did with Protestantism. What they live, in fact, is their literature. It plays the role of the religion, and is the <em>raison d’etre</em> for Russians. Any person living in Moscow, whether he wants to or not, is taken into this space.</p> +<p><strong>What drew you to telling Mbobo’s story through the subway stations?</strong></p> +<p>While writing this story, I was thinking to myself it should very much be a Russian book, but something completely different to the Russian tradition and Russian literature. One of the things I discovered while writing <em>The Underground</em> was the “underworld” is not present in Russian literature at all. Is it because of where Russia is situated geographically, places without caves or cavities? I don’t know. But generally, what Russian people and Russian literature does explore is the world under water – <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sadko" target="_blank">with Sadko</a>, for example, or in <a href="http://zeluna.net/russian-fairy-tale.html" target="_blank">Russian fairy tales</a>, they go under water rather than under the Earth. But my case was a wonderful example of an “underworld”. The metro served as a great metaphor, and it was something new to the concept of Russian literature.</p> +<p><strong>Your work is currently banned in your home country of Uzbekistan. How does that make you feel? Are you hoping to see the ban lifted someday?</strong></p> +<p>As a matter of fact, President Karimov, who ran the country for the last twenty seven years, died recently, and new authorities came to power in Uzbekistan. Generally, I’m sure they’ll be continuing the same policies, but somehow I hope they will change and my work will be allowed in the country. But even if it’s not officially allowed in the country, in the age of the internet it’s impossible to sustain censorship. I can put my work on the net and people, whether they’re in Uzbekistan or abroad, they can read it. So this ban doesn’t make any sense.</p> +<p>[Editor’s note: Hamid informed me that on March 1, 2017, he was denied access to Uzbekistan and was deported from Tashkent airport. He summed up the incident: “So it seems that the new authorities follow the same suite as the late President Karimov.”]</p> +<p><strong>But it does indicate that you’re writing something that someone might consider dangerous. Is there any sort of pride associated with that, knowing that your work is touching on something important?</strong></p> +<p>I’m not a political writer or a political satirist. I’m not writing pamphlets or manifestos against the authorities in Uzbekistan. But the more I think about it, the more I understand the subversive nature of my work. When you’re writing about the realities in Uzbekistan, you’re breaking lots of lies and ideologies which the authorities have been passing off as the truth. You’re putting a mirror in front of them and saying, <em>Look, your reality isn’t what the authorities are saying it is. It’s completely different.</em> In that sense, all my writing is subversive, I think. As <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Sinyavsky" target="_blank">Andrei Sinyavsky</a> famously said, “My differences with the regime of Uzbekistan are aesthetic ones and stylistic ones, rather than political and ideological ones.”</p> +<p><strong>You speak English very well (obviously!). What was it like to see your words translated by someone else? Have you ever considered translating your works yourself?</strong></p> +<p>It’s a very difficult question. Last night I wrote an email to a friend of mine who lives in Moscow, to whom I sent my Uzbek short story – he’s an Uzbek himself – asking him to translate it into Russian. And he says to me, “You are considered to be one of the leading Russian novelists, why don’t you translate it yourself?” Though I’ve translated lots of other works from language to language, it’s impossible to translate my own. I’ve tried many times and it just doesn’t work for me.</p> +<p>The difficulty is, the material comes to you in a certain language and you write it out that way. Then, when you start to translate it, it’s like giving birth to an already born child. You can’t put him back into the womb to give birth to him once again. It’s better to write something completely different, something fresh and new, rather than try to translate yourself. Here’s another metaphor: it’s as if, for example, you were born Christian, and you brought up all your children Christian, and then one day you decide to become a Buddhist. You can’t then convert your children to Buddhism; you have to allow them to choose for themselves. In my case, that’s the opportunity I give to another translator, another missionary.</p> +<p><strong>Not all writers who have their works translated necessarily speak the target language. Since you do, was there any back-and-forth between you and the translator on how the “new child” was turning out?</strong></p> +<p>Never ever. I spent nearly twenty years translating pieces from language to language, so I understand it’s hellish work. Ultimately, I gave up with the translation because languages, for me, are completely different worlds which are ultimately untranslatable.</p> +<p>I’ll dare to say I know Russian and Uzbek to the ultimate extent, so I know how incredibly different they are. What you can express in Russian you can express in Uzbek as well, but in a completely different manner or form. So, since I know the difficulties of this art, I never interfere. I help my translators if I can, for example by explaining things or clarifying things, but I never interfere. I give them <em>carte blanche</em>. Sometimes it works against me, sometimes it works for me, but nonetheless I give them all the credit, because they are bearing this child, and they are giving birth to this child.</p> +<p>The reference point for a translated book is completely different. For example, my works are compared with Uzbek authors, whereas an English translation will be compared to Shakespeare, to Chaucer, to T.S. Eliot. It’s a completely different context; therefore, it’s ultimately their child, the translator’s child. I know of cases where Russian writers, especially, were interfering and trying to recreate a sort-of Russian version that just doesn’t work in English. Instead, I give my child away, saying “Adopt it, it’s your child.”</p> +<p><strong>How many languages do you speak?</strong></p> +<p>It’s a difficult question, because <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkic_languages" target="_blank">Turkic languages are very similar to each other</a>. You can count 28 or 27 Turkic languages. So, knowing Uzbek, you can understand and you can communicate in many of them. If you say that language is a tool for communication, I can communicate in many, many languages. If you say that language is a tool of grammar, then I’ve got five or six languages where I’m pretty sure I follow the grammar.</p> +<p><strong>Describe your writing process in three words.</strong></p> +<p>Season, Discipline, and Story.</p> +<p>I’ve got seasons of writing. In my youth, I used to write poetry, and the urge to write poetry used to start early in the Spring. With prose, it’s the other way around. My season starts with the clock change, when we go into long nights starting in October, and it lasts until April.</p> +<p>The second word is discipline. I write every night. I don’t put an objective in pages, but I write whatever I can. Sometimes it’s a paragraph, sometimes it’s three pages, it depends. Nonetheless, I’m writing in a very disciplined manner.</p> +<p>Then, I have to have a story to write, which I’m preparing with all the time left. For example, in the summertime (and it’s constant) I have five or six stories in my head, which I’m developing and thinking through, and when the season comes I sit down and write them.</p> +<p><strong>If you could meet one of the characters from <em>The Underground</em> in real life, who would it be and why?</strong></p> +<p>I’ll tell you a secret. I wrote this novel in Russian, and when I finished it I felt very strange, as if I lost my love. My love was Moscow, the mother of Mbobo. I fell in love with her. I don’t know why, because she’s not the nicest character: she drinks, she’s a lady of strange morals, but I fell in love with her. I even admitted to my wife my in-a-way “intellectual cheating”, and my wife took it very seriously as well. I was deeply missing this character for half a year, maybe. I was in love with her.</p> +<p><strong>Do you often find yourself connecting so strongly to the characters in your novels?</strong></p> +<p>Not always, but yes, many times. Generally, when I think of a story to tell, it’s always some impulse. Maybe you fell in love with a picture, or you meet someone, and there is something in this human being that attracts you. And it’s not always a sympathetic attraction; it could be a hatred as well. It happened with one of the characters from one of my latest novels. Initially I hated her, I hated this lady, and the impulse was to express my hatred. But little by little, by writing her story, I developed an attachment to her. Though I hated her, I started to understand and love her, in a strange way. It’s a very complicated process, but unless you are developing this attachment, everything is sort-of pulp fiction, and it’s not worth writing.</p> +<p><strong>Writers can be superstitious about their process. Do you have any superstitions around your writing?</strong></p> +<p>Not about my writing, though I love to keep the same habits. Usually I write on grid paper with a fountain pen, not with modern pens. That may be my only – not superstition but habit, I think. In my childhood, I wanted to become a football player, and Uzbeks have a superstition that when you sneeze, you make a wish. Even now, I catch myself saying “I’ll be playing <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pel%C3%A9" target="_blank">better than Pelé</a>” when I sneeze. That’s my only superstition.</p> +<p><strong>So you draft longhand with pen and ink. At what point do you convert those drafts to a digital document?</strong></p> +<p>When it’s finished. Usually, I type it myself – and by typing I’m adding, I’m editing, I’m doing this-and-that – but then I leave it alone for awhile before looking through it again. If I have the opportunity (which is rare), I’ll give the manuscript to other people to type it into a word processor. Then, while reading their version, I’ll edit. My handwriting is very particular. Though it’s beautiful, it’s difficult to read, so usually I type it myself.</p> +<p><strong>Is there a novel or an author you really love or admire that you feel hasn’t gotten the type of attention it deserves?</strong></p> +<p>There are many. If you’re asking me about Uzbek literature, there is a writer called <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdulla_Qodiriy" target="_blank">Abdulla Qodiriy</a>, and I know that one American translator just translated one of his iconic writings. My latest novel, <em>The Devil’s Dance</em> (forthcoming from <a href="http://www.tiltedaxispress.com/books/" target="_blank">Tilted Axis Press</a>), is about him and about his work. He was a victim of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge" target="_blank">the Stalinian purges</a>, and he’s a wonderful writer.</p> +<p>If you’re asking about English writing, I love everything starting from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Sterne" target="_blank">Laurence Sterne</a> all the way to the present – I’m quite an ardent reader of modern literature as well.</p> +<p>If you’re asking about Russian literature, one of the still-unrecognized names is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Platonov" target="_blank">Andrei Platonov</a>. Robert Chandler <a href="http://www.readysteadybook.com/Article.aspx?page=robertchandler" target="_blank">translates him quite a lot</a>, but he hasn’t yet gotten his due recognition. He is one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.</p> +<p>By the way, in English literature, every time they award the Nobel prize I’m thinking of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyce_Carol_Oates" target="_blank">Joyce Carol Oates</a>. I was reading her as a mad person when I was young and every year when they’re awarding the Nobel prize I’m supporting her.</p> +<p><strong>Thank you for your time, and thank you for writing <em>The Underground!</em></strong></p> +</div> +</body> +</html> diff --git a/vibrant-margins/underground-translator/index.html b/vibrant-margins/underground-translator/index.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..166e722 --- /dev/null +++ b/vibrant-margins/underground-translator/index.html @@ -0,0 +1,65 @@ +<!DOCTYPE html> +<html> +<head> + <link href='/css/styles.css' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'> + <title>The Underground by Hamid Ismailov - Ben Winston</title> + <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=utf8" /> +</head> +<body> +<div id="content"> +<h4><a href="/">cd ~</a> / <a href="/vibrant-margins">Vibrant Margins</a></h4> +<br/><br/> +<h2 id="let-the-voice-come-through-you">“Let the voice come through you”</h2> +<p>An interview with Carol Ermakova, translator of <a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781632060440" target="_blank"><em>The Underground</em></a></p> +<p>On a sunny April afternoon, I was fortunate enough to speak with Carol about <em>The Underground</em>, a novel she translated from the Russian. We spoke over Skype about living in Russia, keeping the “foreign-ness” in translated literature, the importance of taking a break when you need one, and more. Below is the transcription of our conversation, edited and condensed for clarity.</p> +<p>~</p> +<p><strong>Can you briefly describe your process as a translator?</strong></p> +<p>I’m going to focus on translating literature, because that’s what I mainly do, and the process for translating business stuff is slightly different.</p> +<p>So, for literature, obviously the first thing is to read the book. Usually I get sent the book as a file, and I print it out and bring it to a nice coffee shop where I can sit with the stack of pages and read it through. As I’m reading it I have a pen in hand, and sometimes a phrase springs to mind in English that would be a perfect (or possible) translation. I jot these down in the margins as I’m going along. But generally, when I’m first reading it through I’m not thinking about translating it, or how it will sound in English. I’m just getting to grips with the characters and the plot. I do pay attention to any stylistic devices the author is using, though – things like puns, onomatopoeia, or extended metaphors, especially if these are recurring. An image a particular character is associated with, or a color related to an emotion. Of course, I also make a mental note of any themes running through the book.</p> +<p>So that’s the first stage of translating: actually reading and getting to know the book and its characters. Then I go to the computer and actually translate the thing, and it’s like slashing through the jungle. You’re literally just clearing a path through the text. At this stage I have lots of either-or translations, and I highlight them in light blue. Once I’ve gone through the whole of the book, there’s all these passages still highlighted, and I go back and fine tune it, hone it down.</p> +<p>One thing I love about Russian literature is it’s so easy to go off on a tangent. Some mention of some other literary figure in the book, some artist or some place I don’t recognize – and now that we have Google at our disposal you can just Google it, and it’s like going down the rabbit hole. You can spend the whole afternoon just exploring something new. That’s the fun part.</p> +<p>At some stage, I read it through in parallel with my husband, who is Russian: he’ll read the Russian in front of him while I read the English out loud. It’s very good to read a book out loud. You realize more where you’re stumbling. If the sentences don’t flow, then you’ve messed up, and you wouldn’t necessarily notice that unless you’re reading it out loud. Also, when you’re translating, it’s quite easy to skip a sentence (or a paragraph), get tired and leave a bit out, or misunderstand something. So it’s always good to have someone to check it with in tandem.</p> +<p>And then, of course, I liaise with the author. All the work I’ve done so far has been with living authors who (mostly) speak English, which is nice, so I can bounce phrases backwards and forwards with them.</p> +<p><strong>Do you find yourself often reaching out to the original authors and bouncing phrases, or is it more rare that you’re seeking their input?</strong></p> +<p>It depends partly on the author. Some authors don’t want to get involved in the process. Hamid has been a translator himself, so he understands.</p> +<p>I’ve just finished translating a book by <a href="http://readrussia.org/writers/writer/elena-chizhova" target="_blank">Elena Chizhova</a>, who was a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Booker_Prize" target="_blank">Russian Booker prize</a> winner a few years ago. There was one point in the text she mentioned “radio voices”, and I thought she could be making a reference that Russians would pick up on to the <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-russia-rfe-idUSKBN15N13Y" target="_blank">“Voice of America” radio program</a>. So for something like that, I might consider putting a footnote in. Hamid has a very particular style; his Russian can be quite unorthodox. He likes to play with sounds and metaphors, and occasionally the sentences can get too long and you can get a bit lost off. So it’s best to go back to him and say, <em>Do you mind if I chop this? Or break this into two sentences?</em> But it really depends on the author.</p> +<p><strong>Mbobo’s voice is so beautiful and distinctive. How difficult was it to capture his voice in another language?</strong></p> +<p>I was thinking about this question because a couple of other people have mentioned Mbobo’s voice, but to be honest it wasn’t something I found myself struggling with. I think it’s probably because Mbobo has such a distinctive voice, you basically just sit back and let him do the talking in English as well. When you’re a translator, especially with a character who’s so strong and so specific, you almost have to develop a friendship with the character, and feel them as a living being. Then you just let the voice come through you.</p> +<p>Perhaps one of the reasons why it wasn’t too hard to translate Mbobo’s voice is because I was living in Russia at the time when Mbobo was growing up, so I experienced a lot of what he went through. Okay, I wasn’t a child at the time. But, for example, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Soviet_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat_attempt" target="_blank">when the putsch happened</a>, he was drinking tea with his uncle. He’s aware these things are happening but he’s just drinking tea. And it was exactly the same for me. I was aware that something was happening – I was in St. Petersburg, not in Moscow – but life carried on as normal even though this momentous event was happening outside. From that point of view I could empathize with him very much.</p> +<p>One of the things that was really difficult in translating <em>The Underground</em> was all the different literary genres included in the book. You have Uncle Gleb telling stories, you have Mbobo telling stories, you have references to poetry here there and everywhere, and that was not so easy. In fact, in the original, each chapter started with a poem written by Mbobo. That was almost a nightmare to translate. I was just looking through the book earlier on and it looks like they capped it at two or three lines, but in the original the poems were much longer and really quite obscure. I’m not a poet myself, and I don’t like translating poetry because it’s just too difficult. So, I think they did very well in editing that out, while leaving a few lines which encapsulate the feel of the chapter.</p> +<p><strong>How long did you live in Russia for?</strong></p> +<p>I went first as a student in 1991, and then I stayed all that summer. I met a lovely Russian girl who fixed me up with a visa – she made me an official invitation – and basically I stayed in a squat in the middle of St. Petersburg. It was really quite crazy.</p> +<p>At the time, it wasn’t very easy for Westerners to be there. There weren’t very many and usually they were still quite chaperoned. When I’d gone out as a student with some other girls from university we’d been kept on a very short leash, and I felt that I really hadn’t got to know the country or the people or the language at all. So, I went back home, earned a bit of money, and then basically spent three months in the summer living like a Russian. When I graduated I went back for about a year and a half, where I worked mainly as an English teacher in a school just outside St. Petersburg.</p> +<p>I also lived in Moscow for a couple of years around 2002, and it was actually just when I’d come back from Moscow that I started translating Hamid’s book. There was one point when I was translating a passage: Mbobo is going for a walk with Uncle Gleb back from the post office, I believe, and I was reading and translating it and suddenly I was absolutely there. I recognized exactly where it was. I’d been there. And it was just like the description: you round the corner and there’s the post office. That brought a huge smile. That was great.</p> +<p><strong>You’ve already touched on this a little bit, but do you consider yourself a literal translator or an idiomatic translator?</strong></p> +<p>I wouldn’t have thought anyone could be 100% either idiomatic or literal. There’s a huge range. It depends on what you’re translating; obviously, if you’re translating a legal document, you’ve got to be much more literal. But for literature, it has to be closer to the idiomatic.</p> +<p>Having said that, in the interview Hamid gave, he mentioned he sees languages as two completely different systems. And I think when you’re working as a translator, you also have to be aware of the emotive content behind the words. So, for example, a table – it’s a noun, it’s a thing, and yet everyone’s going to have their own idea of it. For some people if you say “table” they’ll imagine a big, long dining table; other people it will be their office; for others, it might be a table out on the patio. So when you’re translating, you have to be aware of the associations people are going to have with words, especially with a culture as different as Russia’s.</p> +<p>The other thing I try not to do is make it too natural. If you transpose everything to an English or American setting – if you try to make it as palatable as possible to the target audience – I think you’re doing the reader a disservice. It’s a foreign book. You’re reading foreign literature, and one of the joys of foreign literature is it’s going to open your mind and introduce you to something new.</p> +<p>So, if, as the translator I’ve made it seem too “normal” – too much like home – then that edge is gone. Some people would disagree with me. Some people would say you need to make the reader feel completely at home – like it’s lukewarm, it’s skin temperature. But I disagree.</p> +<p>Idioms are a good example. If you have the English phrase “call a spade a spade”, and there’s a logical Russian equivalent, of course you could use the Russian equivalent. Or rather, the other way around: if there’s a Russian set phrase, we could use the English equivalent, but then we would lose that foreign-ness. I think sometimes it’s good to leave a little prickle in the language. Hopefully then the reader will be a bit curious to know more about the culture, or maybe even want to read it in the original language. It’s a fine line. Obviously, you don’t want to alienate the reader, they have to be able to visualize and feel what’s happening in the story – but with that slight little edge, perhaps.</p> +<p>That brings me to one point, actually. Obviously, I’m British, so I translated <em>Mbobo</em> [Ed. This is the original title of <em>The Underground</em>] into British English. But ultimately it was published by an American publisher, and that’s when the editing process began. I wasn’t involved much at all – right at the beginning, there was a manuscript sent to both myself and Hamid with a few questions in the margin, but that was about it.</p> +<p>So I was really quite surprised when I got a copy of the book and discovered it had been, to my mind, rather crassly Americanized — maybe just because, being British, it jars so much when “mummy” has become “mommy”. In fact, at the book launch, someone came up and said that to me. They said, <em>Did you do that or was it Americanized? How did you translate it originally?</em></p> +<p><strong>Interesting. So, when you translated it, was the original thought that it would be published by a British press for a British audience?</strong></p> +<p>Well, originally, it was translated with three other of Hamid’s works with a grant from the <a href="http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/" target="_blank">British Arts Council</a>. So <em>Mbobo</em> was translated, perhaps a little unusually, without a publisher in mind. It wasn’t commissioned, if you like. Though I think that’s partly why it’s taken so long to come out. It’s been sort of “in the womb”: Mbobo was waiting to be born.</p> +<p><strong>What drew you translating <em>The Underground</em>?</strong></p> +<p>Actually, it was the first commercial literary translation I did, and the first novel I translated.</p> +<p>I’d been working as an English teacher abroad for many years, and this was basically a career change. I did a masters in translating and interpreting at Bath University. At the end of that course, you do an extended translation, and you can choose anything – I remember one of the German students decided to translate a manual about bread. It wasn’t a literature specific course, but my supervisor was very keen on literature. I am, too – my original degree was in Russian and German language and literature, so it was natural for me to go back to literature – and I translated some short stories by contemporary women writers in Russia.</p> +<p>As I was in the final stages of my translation there was a conference at St. Andrews attended by Robert Chandler the translator – <a href="http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780099466130" target="_blank">he translated another of Hamid’s novels, <em>The Railway</em></a>. We got talking, go to know each other a little bit, and I said “Would you be happy to read my translations?” He agreed, and was quite impressed by them, so when Hamid was looking for a translator for these four pieces Robert suggested me.</p> +<p>So, that’s how it happened. Hamid and Robert approached me, and obviously I was delighted. As I mentioned earlier, as I’d been living in Russia during that period and had just come back from Moscow, it was really nice for me. It was like going back home.</p> +<p>It was a pleasure to translate, even though, of course, there are some very hard facts. Mbobo doesn’t have an easy life: all the violence, the tensions, the turmoil. It’s not a happy-clappy romantic novel by any means.</p> +<p><strong>You mentioned you studied both Russian and German language and literature. How many languages have you translated?</strong></p> +<p>It’s mainly Russian – mainly contemporary literature, though I have done some commercial stuff. I have worked for the United Nations <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Meteorological_Organization" target="_blank">in the WMO</a>. I translated a social anthropology book about Nepal from Italian to English,. I’ve also done a little bit of French. I haven’t actually translated any German, officially, though German was certainly my major language. I studied Russian absolutely by chance, on a fluke. I had no intention of studying languages, and no intention of learning Russian.</p> +<p><strong>Describe your writing process in three words.</strong></p> +<p>The first three words that come to mind, off the top of my head, are Reading, Thinking, and Coffee.</p> +<p>If you’re working on a novel you’ve got a lot of freeway. You’re not working to tight deadlines. I work freelance from home, and I live in a beautiful cottage in the countryside, so I often go out for walks, and that clears my head. But working from home there’s a constant distraction: making cups of tea, or putting the laundry out, all kinds of distractions. So I find I work best really late at night. In fact, with the novel I just finished, one of the most productive polishing sessions was just a few nights ago from eleven o’clock until one o’clock in the morning. So, sometimes it’s that quiet time that’s very good.</p> +<p><strong>If you could meet one of the characters from <em>The Underground</em>, who would it be and why?</strong></p> +<p>I think it would have to be Mbobo himself, because he has a mischievous streak, you know? I would like to travel with him on some of the underground passages and have a chat with him. I can just imagine myself with him when he’s quite small, hand in hand, going through the metro, him telling me how he’s feeling about different events in his life and the different places we pass.</p> +<p><strong>A lot of writers can be superstitious about their writing process. Do you have any superstitions around your writing process?</strong></p> +<p>No, I don’t think so.</p> +<p>What I tend to do is, when I have a mental block, I just stop. I tend not to push myself because it’s counter productive. You could force yourself to do six pages a day or whatever, but at the end, if you’re just counting pages you end up writing rubbish. Nobody’s gonna read it. It’s much better to go for a long walk, have a bath, watch a movie, watch a comedy, and start again later. So, no superstitions, but I take a break when I need one.</p> +<p><strong>Is there a novel, an author, or translation that hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves?</strong></p> +<p>I tend to work in quite a vacuum, actually. Although, having said that, there is one story that I liked very very much, back in the days when I was doing my extended dissertation when I was a student. It’s called “The Butterfly Collection” by <a href="https://www.proza.ru/avtor/alissa" target="_blank">Alisa Ponikarovskaya</a>, and it’s too long to be a short story but it’s a great piece. I contacted the author via her website but I never heard back from her.</p> +<p>In general, there’s quite a lot of surrealism/magical realism around in Russian literature, a long tradition of the bizarre, of overlapping everyday reality with a subconscious world – a way to escape from the harsh political realities, the need to express yourself by squeezing through the censorship bars, so to speak. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Gogol" target="_blank">Gogol</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Bulgakov" target="_blank">Bulgakov</a> are well known examples, but maybe lesser known are <a href="http://www.shortstoryproject.com/writers/mikhail-zoshchenko/" target="_blank">Zoschenko’s short stories</a> (which are very funny!).</p> +</div> +</body> +</html> diff --git a/vibrant-margins/waveland/index.html b/vibrant-margins/waveland/index.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..719d109 --- /dev/null +++ b/vibrant-margins/waveland/index.html @@ -0,0 +1,53 @@ +<!DOCTYPE html> +<html> +<head> + <link href='/css/styles.css' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'> + <title>Waveland by Simone Zelitch - Ben Winston</title> + <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=utf8" /> +</head> +<body> +<div id="content"> +<h4><a href="/">cd ~</a> / <a href="/vibrant-margins">Vibrant Margins</a></h4> +<br/><br/> +<h2 id="a-path-right-in-front-of-my-feet">“A path right in front of my feet”</h2> +<p>An interview with Simone Zelitch, author of <a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780989312585" target="_blank"><em>Waveland</em></a></p> +<p>On a sunny autumn afternoon, I met Simone at a quiet cafe in northwest Philadelphia. Over bagels and coffee, we chatted about the rich history of the Civil Rights Movement, the experience of being an outsider, using real stories to influence fictional ones, and much more. Below is the transcription of our conversation, edited and condensed for clarity.</p> +<p>~</p> +<p><strong>What inspired you to write about <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_Summer" target="_blank">Freedom Summer</a>?</strong></p> +<p>Well, I consider myself a history nerd. In particular, I find myself drawn to movements that have enormous possibility are are undermined, sometimes by outside forces, sometimes by internal contradictions. I’ve written about a medieval peasant revolt, about a rebellion against Moses in the wilderness, and also about Zionism. In the case of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_Civil_Rights_Movement_(1954%E2%80%931968)" target="_blank">Civil Rights Movement</a>, I found myself drawn to the summer when the young black organizers of the Mississippi Movement invited close to a thousand white students to come down for a few months to register voters and teach in Freedom Schools. The presence of those privileged, undeniably brave, but sometimes arrogant, outsiders led to unforeseen and complicated consequences.</p> +<p>I understand the dynamics of entering a situation as an outsider. I teach at Community College of Philadelphia, where the students are primarily working-class and African American. Along those same lines, I spent two years in the Peace Corps in Hungary — again, coming into culturally alien circumstances as an outsider.</p> +<p>As I began to do some research into the Civil Rights Movement, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_Nonviolent_Coordinating_Committee" target="_blank">specifically SNCC</a>, I started reading about “wade-ins”. I read about <a href="http://www.floridamemory.com/blog/2013/06/25/st-augustine-wade-in-demonstrations-june-25-1964/" target="_blank">one that took place at a beach in St. Augustine</a>, and for whatever reason, from that image I got Beth Fine leaping into the pool in Chester, Pennsylvania. My books sometimes begin with an idea, they sometimes begin with an image, they sometimes begin with a first line — this book began very clearly began with this image of someone jumping into water and, as was the case with Beth Fine, she didn’t know how to swim.</p> +<p>So that was the origin of this particular piece. It led me to a lot of research, and I love research. To me, research and writing are completely entangled with each other. Finding out, for example, that the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee had someone who was in charge of cars — someone with lists of cars that all had nicknames. Or discovering how the SNCC office in Mississippi actually worked. Also, reading memoirs of the people in the movement was important to me — memoirs of major African American figures, as well as those of white women. It ended up creating a framework for the story.</p> +<p><strong>You mentioned you love history and doing research. Can you tell us more about your research process?</strong></p> +<p>Absolutely. I think this is pretty typical, but I like to begin by reading a lot of secondary source material. A great book that generated some of my ideas is <a href="http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780449004395" target="_blank">David Haberstam’s <em>The Children</em></a>, which is essentially about young people in the movement. Pretty quickly, I fixated on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee which, compared to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Christian_Leadership_Conference" target="_blank">Dr. King and his movement</a>, had younger people, was more radical, and thought in a transformative way about society. I started reading books specific to SNCC, and then memoirs.</p> +<p>I was lucky enough to have the resources to travel through Mississippi, which was an incredibly important trip to me. Among other things, there’s a Jewish character in the book, and he’s based on someone I met, a shopkeeper in Greenwood. I changed his name but he’s very recognizably himself, trying to negotiate between being an outsider among Christian Whites, and also feeling inherent racism towards Blacks (who, of course, were his customers). I found the ambiguity really fascinating, and I wouldn’t have known about it if I hadn’t gone to Mississippi.</p> +<p>Because I had done the research in advance, and because I knew to look for certain sites, I felt like Mississippi was a place where heroes lived. I could think about it’s history of segregation and racism, but I was fixated on, for example, where was <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_Summer#Freedom_Houses" target="_blank">the Freedom House</a> in a particular town? Where was the place where the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deacons_for_Defense_and_Justice" target="_blank">Deacons for Defense</a>, holding their guns, would stand guard? I visited Waveland, Mississippi, which gives the book its name. I got to see the grounds <a href="http://www.crmvet.org/docs/waveland.htm" target="_blank">where the conference took place</a>, where people were trying to shape the future of SNCC.</p> +<p>I also got to do archival research, which is a third level of research where you’re actually looking at documents — like notes from meetings, or a sketch someone did of the structure of SNCC. The archives were spectacular, and really helped the novel.</p> +<p><strong>There’s been several recent films which take place around this time period — most prominently <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1020072/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1" target="_blank"><em>Selma</em></a> and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3791216/?ref_=nv_sr_1" target="_blank"><em>All The Way</em></a> — and focus mainly on Dr. King. The SNCC characters in these films are perceived as more “hot-headed”, maybe, than their counterparts in Dr. King’s circle. Do you agree with this portrayal?</strong></p> +<p>I have to say, I have a bone to pick with <em>Selma</em>. It makes <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Forman" target="_blank">James Forman</a> look infantile. At least in <em>All The Way</em> — which I saw as both <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_Way_(play)" target="_blank">a stage play</a> and an HBO production — SNCC is taken seriously.</p> +<p>In Atlantic City, SNCC challenged the Democrats, who were segregated. They brought delegates to the convention under the integrated <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_Freedom_Democratic_Party" target="_blank">Freedom Democratic Party</a>. Johnson was afraid he’d lose the south, so he got Hubert Humphrey to basically scuttle it. Everyone was assuming SNCC would take some sort of compromise, but they didn’t. I thought that was fairly clear in <em>All The Way</em>, and that the SNCC characters were portrayed fairly. In particular you see Martin Luther King himself (or at least Hubert Humphrey) confronted by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fannie_Lou_Hamer" target="_blank">Fannie Lou Hamer</a>. And that was pretty true to it.</p> +<p>In terms of Selma, I actually wrote a blog piece about it called <a href="https://simonezelitch.com/2015/01/28/the-trouble-with-selma/" target="_blank">“The Trouble With <em>Selma</em>”</a>, which I’ll attempt to summarize. SNCC was anti-leadership. They disliked the whole idea of doing what Martin Luther King says, not taking into account the grassroots — King is going to come, but then he’s going to leave. Having an infrastructure on the ground, that’s what SNCC was all about.</p> +<p><strong>Having a White protagonist at the heart of a novel about Civil Rights is a very interesting and different view. What does this perspective bring to the Civil Rights discussion?</strong></p> +<p>It’s not that different, interestingly enough.</p> +<p>One thing I feel somewhat queasy about is the idea of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_savior_narrative_in_film" target="_blank">the “White Savior” narrative</a>. We see it in a book like <a href="http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780425232200" target="_blank"><em>The Help</em></a> — and I like to see Waveland as a sort-of anti-Help. There are several different frameworks for this. One of them is: the Black people serve as redemptive forces for the White people, who save the day. Another is: the <a href="http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WhiteMansBurden" target="_blank">White people educate the Black people</a>, so together they save the day. I really don’t want <em>Waveland</em> to be either of those.</p> +<p>Beth Fine actually is profoundly changed by her experience in Mississippi. I’d like to think that part of what she learns is her own humanity, but I also think that, eventually, she loses a degree of self-consciousness. She knows she has privilege, but she’s able to use that privilege in reasonable ways without feeling all weird and squirrelly about it. For example, when she first comes to Mississippi as part of the Mississippi Summer Project, she feels self-conscious about having an aunt who can help, or about having money — she doesn’t want to acknowledge it. She can’t stand people calling her Miss Beth, which they would all the time. Later, as she matures and gets more firm in herself, she regularly seeks help wherever she can find it. She starts to actually feel natural and easy with people in Mississippi.</p> +<p>I also have to say, I am White, and I’ve been in experiences where I’ve had to figure out my way, and negotiate my own sense of guilt and acknowledgement of privilege. This is something I know about emotionally. There are chapters from the point of view of African Americans in my book, though. That’s something that I feel fine that I did, but to some extent was risky for me to do.</p> +<p><strong>Both this novel, <em>Waveland</em>, and your most recent novel, <a href="http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780765382962" target="_blank"><em>Judenstaat</em></a>, have important events or locations in history that are a launch point for the characters and the story. What are the benefits and challenges of using real events and locations while building the world of the novel versus creating something from scratch?</strong></p> +<p>I don’t know if anybody ever creates something completely from scratch. I have published five novels, and to a great extent, in every single one of them, I stole my stories. I see history as a really rich framework for worldbuilding. I think having a historical timeline, then figuring out how my characters interact with it, is a great benefit when it comes to actually plotting the novel.</p> +<p>In some ways, <em>Judenstaat</em> — which is an alternative history, where a Jewish state is set in Germany instead of Palestine in 1948 — was the trickiest along those lines. Some readers have been frustrated by this, because I’m taking actual historical events and changing them. If the readers don’t know the actual historical events, they’re like <em>What’s real and what’s not?</em> With <em>Waveland</em>, aside from the town of Melody and the characters (which I invented), the events are real and the time frames are real. It gave me a structure.</p> +<p><strong>Describe your writing process in three words.</strong></p> +<p>Flashlight Dark Path.</p> +<p>I do a lot of fumbling around, a lot of false starts. When things are going well, it’s as though whatever is driving me is lighting a path right in front of my feet, and that’s how I find my way. <a href="http://qwillery.blogspot.com/2016/06/interview-with-simone-zelitch.html" target="_blank">I was asked by The Qwillery</a>, are you a plotter, a pantser, or a hybrid? I’m definitely a classic pantser — I do it by the seat of my pants. I sometimes get to the point where I step back and plot. But the advantage of having a historical framework is that the path and the checkpoints are there.</p> +<p><strong>If you could meet one of the characters from <em>Waveland</em> in real life, who would it be and why?</strong></p> +<p>I love Larry Walsh, but I’m not sure Larry is the one I’d want to meet. I’m going to choose Freddie, who is someone relatively obscure. I think I’m too close to Beth to need to meet her, and Larry I feel like I know. I would like to know what it was like for Freddie to live through this time, to see these characters and interact with them, and how she was changed by it. So, in some ways, who I’d like to speak to is not a primary character, but rather someone who was affected by all the other characters. I think I’d be scared to meet Beth. She is my roundest character.</p> +<p><strong>Do you find as you write more novels, your characters become more “real”?</strong></p> +<p>It’s novel by novel. Very often, the most real character in any book of mine is not a central character but someone who interacts with a central character. Each of my books is very different: they have clear, unifying themes, but take place in very different places and often have very different feels.</p> +<p>I think I’ve become more ambitious as time has gone on. <em>Judenstaat</em> is definitely my most ambitious book. But I think the characters all belong to the world they’re in, and are developed — I hope — in context to that world.</p> +<p><strong>Do you have any superstitions around your writing process?</strong></p> +<p>Yes, and I think most people do. I don’t like to talk about works in progress — I think that’s a very common one. I like to keep drafts and then re-type those drafts, rather than revise on the drafts themselves. When I was working on <em>Judenstaat</em>, I was in colonies a lot, and I had a certain coffee mug I always drank from. It had a picture of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four" target="_blank">George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four</a> on it, which was a big influence on that novel. I found it helpful to drink from that coffee mug. I’m a big believer in habit, too. A big thing: walks. Walks in the morning before you write, if you can manage them.</p> +<p><strong>Is there a novel or an author that you feel hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves?</strong></p> +<p>I recently read something by Jerome Gold, who runs <a href="http://blackheronpress.com/" target="_blank">Black Heron Press</a>, that I was really impressed by: a memoir of working in a juvenile prison. He’s been doing extraordinary work for years. <a href="http://www.terrybisson.com/" target="_blank">Terry Bisson</a> is quite wonderful as well.</p> +<p>One guiding spirit for <em>Waveland</em> I want to call out is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Baldwin" target="_blank">James Baldwin</a>. I read and thought a lot about what he had to say about the movement. He’s phenomenal.</p> +</div> +</body> +</html> |