Emily Barton is the author of two novels: Brookland, recently published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, and The Testament of Yves Gundron, which was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a San Francisco Chronicle Book of the month. She won the 2003 Bard Fiction Prize and currently holds a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation and an artist’s grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Brooklyn.

Aaron Hamburger: A casual observer looking at your bio might see a fairly direct and simple path to literary success. B.A. at Harvard, M.F.A. at Iowa, two books from FSG, a Guggenheim and other prizes. Of course, few writers have it that easy. Could you talk a little about the struggles you faced early on in your career and what you had to go through before selling the first novel?

Emily Barton: A path often looks clear in hindsight, but while you’re trying to find it, it can look more like virgin forest that you have to hack your way through with a machete; and sometimes it turns out that the only tool you have on hand is a spoon. Another way to say this is that my résumé doesn’t show that I applied to a number of grad programs and only got into one.

I have been lucky in my publishing history; no doubt about that. But most writers face the same kinds of challenges in writing a first book. It’s hard to make enough money to live while having enough time and energy to write; and the whole time you’re writing your first novel, you have nothing to prove that you actually know what you’re doing and aren’t some kook with a crypto-inano pet project. And every other day you’re disabled by worrying that you are just such a kook and that nothing will ever come of the work.

AH: What did you learn from the experience of writing and publishing The Testament of Yves Gundron?

EB: Probably the most important lesson I learned was not to read negative reviews of my own work. It’s enough to know that an unfavorable review is out there; there’s no need to read it, feel hurt by it, and cultivate long-term animosity toward the reviewer. I’ve also, since then, become better at not Googling myself.

AH: What were some of the challenges you faced going from your first novel to your second?

EB: Some of the difficulty with writing a first book, as I was saying earlier, is how hard it is to prove to yourself and others that you know what you’re doing. On the flip side, you have complete freedom to do whatever you want, because no one has any expectations of you. With my second book, by contrast, I felt that I had the solid foundation of having written and published a novel—aunts and random strangers believed me when I told them I was writing a new one. Yet the sense that others (my editors, a vaguely imagined reading public) had expectations for my second book kept me from writing it for a long time, despite that the only person with expectations was myself.

Also, for all their thematic similarities, The Testament of Yves Gundron and Brookland are different kinds of books, differently told and organized. I was shocked, horrified, and thrilled to discover that having figured out one way to tell a story was no guarantee of my ability to unearth another one.

I sometimes wonder if the transition from a first book to a second one is easier or harder if they’re in different forms, such as a collection of stories and a novel. Did you find that transition challenging?

AH: After I finished my story collection, I actually ended up writing my first novel by accident. I was supposed to be writing two paired novellas. The first one, however, just kept expanding into a novel, so that was the one I stuck with. Since then, I’ve fallen in love with the novel form. I like having the space and time to get to know my characters really deeply.

Brookland is the story of Prue Winship, an eighteenth-century woman who owns a gin distillery and attempts to build a bridge linking Brooklyn and Manhattan. What are the connections between these two endeavors? (In other words, why not just have the book be about either Prue building the bridge or Prue trying to run the distillery?)

EB: I wanted her to be able to both dream of a bridge and attempt to build it. In our world, of course, that would be impossible, given how specialized engineering has become. No amateur (in the true sense) could hope to acquire that much knowledge. But in the eighteenth century, the scope of world knowledge was smaller than it is today. An intelligent person with a lively interest in a field could learn enough about it to make meaningful contributions, or even to advance it. This was also an Enlightenment state of mind, given the idea of mankind’s perfectability and that sort of thing.

So I wanted Prue to have enough understanding (and to have done enough work on her own) to learn the engineering without too much of a stretch. The distillery—part machine, part architecture, part alchemy—seemed an obvious choice. And there was a gin distillery at the foot of Joralemon Street, in actual history, so imagining its parameters seemed sensible.

An alternative answer involves my being kind of a DIY person. I learned to paint by doing the interior of my dad’s last house with a friend; and I just returned my dad’s orbital sander, which I’d borrowed for some projects around the house. I rewired a lamp last winter. I just learned to run a letterpress so that I can set type and help a friend who’s a more experienced printer run off my wedding invitations. I’m also the kind of knitter who’ll jump in and make a lace sweater or something with complicated cables. So in various ways, I think a lot about machines, materials, and systems; all of which made Prue’s obsessions easier for me to write about.

AH: The story is structured as a series of letters from Prue to her daughter Recompense, though the narrative dips in and out of actual letters in English of the period and relatively straightforward prose. How did you decide how much of the narrative to relate in Prue's own language and how much in a more modern vernacular? Were you worried about putting off contemporary audiences with period speak?

EB: There was an early first-person draft that featured a hybrid of modern and eighteenth-century orthography of my own devising; that draft didn’t work so well. The book needed to be told in the third person, but when I put it all there, it didn’t seem right to lose the idiosyncratic spelling of the period. So I searched for a way to allow Prue her own voice, the authentic voice of an eighteenth-century autodidact, and for the story to still get told as straightforwardly as possible.

There was some back and forth in the process of editing the eighteenth-century spelling, which my agent and my editor thought might be off-putting for readers. My answer to this was to regularize the spelling almost completely. Then, each time I got the novel back (for final edit, copyedit, first- and second-pass pages) I’d think it wanted a little more period flavor, and I’d go back in there and add a k after a c or form the past tense of a verb with an apostrophe d. No one minded the gradual change, and by the time I was done, I think we all agreed that things were as they should be.

I did try to keep the third-person sections true to Prue’s voice and understanding of the world. To my knowledge there aren’t any words in Brookland that wouldn’t have been in use by 1822, the time at which she’s writing the letters.

AH: You've clearly done your homework in terms of the research necessary to reconstruct the period authentically (or at least, I'll have to take your word for it, since I'm not a historian!). How did you decide how much detail to put in and how much to leave out? Were there any fascinating bits of research you wish you could have put in?

EB: Thanks for your confidence! Like—can I presume to say “all?” perhaps “many”—fiction writers, I’m a bit of a fibber; so while almost everything in the book is based on documented fact, much of it is also subject to interpretation.

As a rule of thumb, I’d say that when a writer is fascinated with something, she writes about it well, and readers will follow her pretty much anywhere. So I guess that’s one good way to determine how much is enough. I didn’t ultimately feel like I had to leave any of the good tidbits out.

AH: I think you’re safe in supposing that a good majority of fiction writers are professional fibbers.

Were there any actual attempts to build a bridge between Manhattan and Brooklyn before the Brooklyn Bridge. How much are the plans for the bridge in the book based on plans from the period? Did anything ever actually get built?

EB: Though there weren’t any attempts before the Brooklyn Bridge, many solutions were proposed. The bridge Prue builds is based both visually and engineering-wise on the one I’ve included as Brookland’s frontispiece: Thomas Pope’s Flying Pendant Lever Bridge of 1811. Pope proposed this for New York City in his Treatise on Bridge Architecture, which is a compendium of world bridges up till that time, in addition to giving detailed plans for the lever bridge. His engineering was incorrect, but charmingly and persuasively argued, so I had good material to draw on.

AH: The critic James Wood, writing about historical fiction, has said, "The historical novel may nowadays be merely science-fiction facing backwards, with the same crudities of detail... detail is converted from the accidental into the determined, and the book may become stagy, and essentially unliterary. It may also become essentially unhistorical, for if a great deal of time is being wasted on the confirmation of the past, then history is being confirmed in its crudest particulars, rather than challenged or even explored." According to Wood, contemporary historical writers oblige their characters and narrators to mention details of time and place that are not true to scene or character but are necessary to explain the time period to a contemporary reader. So as in science fiction, when you hear a character named Zizzyballubah say, "Turn on the radiohydroatomic converter with a gamma ray, okay?", in historical fiction, you hear a character say, "Hey, did you happen to see that great new talking picture The Jazz Singer?" (Paradoxically, these kind of details, in Wood's view, are unhistorical because, for example, no one in 1927 would have said a sentence like the one above.) Do you agree with Wood's assessment of the contemporary historical novelist's dilemma? Why or why not? How do you deal with this problem?

EB: I think Wood is an insightful critic, and I do agree with his assessment of at least some historical fiction. Take Caleb Carr for an example: when you’re reading him, the most important thing on any given page is the carriage someone rides in (is it a barouche or a phaeton?) or the particulars of some twee antique fabric. Some people seem to write historical fiction because they like hoop skirts. I find this kind of writing stultifying.

For my own part, I mainly try not to worry about the particulars of fabric or to romanticize candlelight (which is dim and smoky) or horses (who shit in the road). In Brookland, I tried to give enough detail to provide the flavor of a specific time and place, but no more detail than that. I tried to hew to the sentence structure and thought patterns of the period, to allow Prue to see and interpret things as an eighteenth-century person would, without the psychological language we have today. We’d say her mother is depressed, but all Prue knows is that the woman is sick with melancholy. That kind of thing.

AH: What surprised you while working on this book?

EB: I think I was a little surprised by how much I loved writing the distillery, by how important its rhythms and smells turned out to be for the book as a whole. And Pearl’s spelling and abbreviation came out of the blue.

AH: How has the experience of Brookland's publication been for you? Any unexpected reactions to the book?

EB: The response has been favorable, and I’ve been grateful not just for the number of strong reviews but for the fact that so many of them have been so weighty. The greatest pleasure has been hearing from relatives, neighbors, and friends who report that they’ve felt transported by the book; it’s worth doing this job for that.

AH: Do you have a writing routine? What is your usual process like?

EB: Does anyone ever tell the truth in answering this question? I never believe what people say.

I think the most truthful answer I could give is that when I’m actively working on writing or editing a draft, I tend to work a long day—seven to twelve hours—with breaks to eat or stretch or whatever else wants doing. Right now, while I’m researching a new project, the days are much more variable.

AH: I will now give you a chance to rhapsodize about books you really love. (This is the part of the interview when I ask, "So who are some of your favorite writers who've influenced your work, classic and/or contemporary?")

EB: Well, of classic authors, the obvious choices are George Eliot, Tolstoy, and Jane Austen; and you can’t beat Benjamin Franklin for energetic prose. I’d also put Italo Calvino, Julio Cortàzar, Flann O’Brien, and Thomas Bernhard on the classic list, though their works are less than a hundred years old. Of contemporary writers, Pynchon has been a gargantuan influence (on me and on everyone, I suppose); and I’d also cite Amy Hempel and Deborah Eisenberg, for showing that it’s possible to leave out more than you put in. Other contemporary writers I like to read? Jim Crace, who I think may write better sentences than anyone living; Richard Powers, Michael Chabon, Chris Adrian, Pat Barker, Marilynne Robinson, J. M. Coetzee, T Cooper, Philip Pullman. Overall I guess I’m a pretty catholic reader; there isn’t one kind of book or writer I like to read. (For example, the above is all fiction, but I read a lot of non-fiction as well.)

AH: I understand that you're a yoga instructor. Can you talk a bit about what that's like? Is it a good part-time avocation for people who need to support the very expensive hobby of a writing career? Does it feed your work in any way?

EB: I enjoy teaching yoga for all kinds of reasons. For one thing, when you’re writing, it can take months or even years until you figure out if you’ve been making sense.
When you’re teaching a yoga class, the moment you say something confusing or unclear, people stop; it’s pleasant that the feedback loop is so short. Teaching yoga also seems like a pretty clean way to earn a living: people arrive feeling wound up and unhappy, and they leave feeling a little better. I think this is a good feature in a job.

I sometimes joke that my writing supports my yoga habit or that my yoga supports my writing habit, but the truth is, neither is especially lucrative. They are, however, what I like to do, which counts for something.

AH: You live in Brooklyn, in fact, in the same spot where Prue Winship lives in your novel. What do you love about Brooklyn?

EB: I love so many things about Brooklyn. The Heights is beautiful, and we have the big sky over the river. I love living in a place that has so much history. My neighbors are friendly, not to mention literate; most of my friends live somewhere in the borough; and much of my family is close by. We have good restaurants, a great organic market, BAM, Sunny’s Bar, Bookcourt, and meerkats and sea lions at the zoo. What else could a person want?

AH: What advice do you have for emerging writers?

EB: Mostly I encourage them to read widely, with open minds. I think that’s the best education a writer can acquire. Many creative writing students seem to feel like reading is beneath them—like they don’t need to know what’s come before, or how it worked, because their chief interest is in expressing themselves, whatever that means—and this can show as a deficit in their work. I encourage young writers not to worry too much about publication or about fancy graduate programs; people work at different speeds and in different ways, but it seems to me that things eventually work out for almost all of the people who have both a spark of talent and the discipline to grow it into a fire. I also encourage emerging writers to work hard but to cultivate a sense of humor. Given how difficult writing can be, the ability to laugh about it is vitally important.

I’d be curious what kind of advice you give your students? People go about it in so many different ways . . .

AH: Why do so many aspiring writers want to write and not to read, to "express themselves” more than they want to go about the business of writing?

I tell my students to read as well, but I also advise them to try to make their writing a regular habit, if not daily, 5 times a weekly. For me, it's the kind of thing that isn't helped by sporadic commitment. 3 hours once a week isn't as valuable as 30 minutes every day. Because you need time and to experience the way you change and your POV changes during different days of the week, when the muse is calling, and days when the muse remains stubbornly absent too.

AH: So what are you working on next?

EB: I’m doing research for a new novel, but I’m superstitious about talking about it.

Visit Emily Barton's Web site.
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Aaron Hamburger is the author of the short-story collection The View from Stalin’s Head, for which he was awarded the Rome Prize by The American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was awarded a fellowship from the Edward F. Albee Foundation and won first prize in the David Dornstein Memorial Creative Writing Contest for Young Adult Writers. His writing has appeared in The Village Voice, Out, Nerve, and Time Out New York. He teaches writing at Columbia University and lives in New York City. His latest book, the novel Faith for Beginners, was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. Visit Aaron's Web site.