Cara Seitchek: What audience did you have in mind as you wrote the book? It seems to have been written with a female audience in mind, but it’s definitely not chick lit. Did you also hope that men will read the book, perhaps to gain insight into women?

Gwendolen Gross: I started writing The Other Mother(which was, incidentally, originally titled The Mommy Wars) in 1999, soon after my first child was born. I felt as though while there were nonfiction titles about this divide between working and Stay-at-Home (SAH) moms (though this was before mommy lit, and there wasn’t yet so much nonfiction exploration of the subject), the personal, psychological impact was even bigger than the abstract and political. The fact of motherhood changes women’s choices—influences us, via hormones, emotion, the absurd elastic stretching of time, and changes our self-perception. Not only that, but there’s the wisdom of the ages that visits in the form of judgmental ghosts and neighbors. It’s a blissful time, new motherhood, and as difficult as it is tender. Our biological purpose becomes evident, but we’re still women who have thought about our own lives and desires and friendships independent of dependants for all the years leading up to this change. The battle seemed more internal to me than external, though the snappy comments fly, and people settle into camps, people I never expected began lecturing on good and bad mothering.

I hoped (and still do) all parents (as well as all adult children of parents) would be interested—because although men’s changes via parenthood are different (not to say there aren’t SAH dads etc, but that’s a whole other story), they are also, if they are paying attention, aware of the divide. And of their partner’s changing roles. There was an extremely gratifying review in the Book-of-the-Month Club newsletter—and I’m paraphrasing here, by someone who wrote that he wasn’t a mom, nor woman, nor particularly sold on the idea of having children, but he couldn’t put the book down. I was hoping to create a suspense that kept readers engaged, while revealing through two very particular characters the current state of post-modern motherhood—as their lives detail it (and I am very much aware of mothers in different financial and social states—and have received fan mail from single moms who “got” the characters just the same).

The issues have made for fascinating book group fodder—I’ve attended many. Personal stories emerge (and sometimes surprise the other book group members), and with a little wine or chocolate, the tension becomes more of an open discussion. Also, many mother-daughter pairs have read the book together—again, fascinating fodder in their own experiences as illuminated by Thea and Amanda’s.

CS: The two points of view are well-balanced, with neither Amanda nor Thea dominating the book. How did you handle writing in two voices/two narrator’s points of view? Did you have to apportion alternate days for each narrator or were you able to write in both in the same sitting?

GG: Thank you so much! When I first started writing The Other Mother, I thought, what a terrific challenge, to have two first-person narrators, one on each side of the fence. I’m a little of both, as a mom who works but has a flexible schedule. There’s some of me in each character and much that’s entirely invented. Of course, once I started writing, and rewriting, and rewriting, I realized the challenge was substantial and entirely worthwhile. It was difficult to keep the characters individual—to give them their own voices via my own. And a great pleasure. My wise agent Jennifer Carlson, told me during one revision, “more wars, less mommies.” It helped me keep them from being too nice; a warning I always give my students. You need friction to create electricity.

I revised this novel many, many times. Sometimes I lived with just one character through an entire draft, then the other. Sometimes I looked specifically at alternating chapters to show the same time through different senses. I had many frames to view before I felt the work fit.

CS: I noticed that one of the jacket blurbs refers to your characters as desperate housewives, and the television show did leap to mind as I read the book. Were the seeds of this book planted before the series started or did it perhaps serve in some way as inspiration?

GG: I started writing The Other Motherin 1999—quite a while before Desperate Housewives! When the show came out and was a hit I thought—they’ll have to buy my book now! I think The Other Mothercould make for great TV, actually—the alternating points of view would be easier with actors and all action and dialogue (though the omniscient voice-over’s fun, too). There’s so much potential conflict even beyond the suspense and story of the novel. Plus, I think the characters would be delicious and complex to inhabit for some of the talented actors over thirty out there—so many recently minted mom-actors are juggling, too.

CS: At one point in the book, Amanda says that her new normal is juggling guilt and longing, which is a central theme to the book and the characters. Did you set out with this theme in mind or did it emerge as you wrote?

GG: New normal. It’s funny, I was recently packing away some notebooks, and looked back (my notebooks are often full of whinging and quotidian detail—getting it out of the way to get to the good stuff) and noticed that I’d written about my own new normal after our son was born—and before I started the book. I’d thought it emerged as I mined my characters for their beliefs and the tenderness, in Amanda particularly, of new motherhood.

CS: The insight into the minds of these two women is heightened because much of the story is told through narration and shown through dialogue that is their perceptions of conversation. Did this technique evolve as you wrote and you got more into their minds?

GG: Yes. I had all sorts of intellectual ideas about what I could do with two first-person narrators, but it proved more challenging than I thought. I probably wrote 400 pages that were eventually cut—or never made it into the book. When I was revising, or between particular revisions, I’d give myself the assignment (I love giving myself assignments for writing—writing is wonderful because you can continue to get better regardless of your age—unlike, say, figure skating. And all of life is eventual material to be mixed in with the flour and sugar of imagination) of writing a series of dialogues between Amanda and Thea. Many of those assignments never made it past the notebook, but they helped me hone the techniques. It was hardest to let them say—or think—what they were really thinking. I wanted to keep respecting them, but I had to make them cranky sometimes (but not too much). Or at least fallible. Though I didn’t think of Thea as all that perfect even on the outside before readers started to say so.

CS: I found Amanda’s situation to be truly heart-wrenching between her morning sickness, the destruction of her house, and the uncertainty of her job – she never seems to be able to get ahead. Did you base any of her experiences on real-life events that you experienced or witnessed?

GG: Okay, a few facts provided mortar: I had hyperemesis (I barfed incessantly) with both my pregnancies—and we moved into our house when I was pregnant with our son. When my son was an infant, a tree fell on a neighbor’s house. No one had to move out; the damage was contained to one room, but the idea of the safety of houses was very intense for me then, with a newborn. I did work in children’s publishing, but left quite a while before becoming pregnant. So I did use some real anecdotes (and I use my Franklin Day Planner to this day), only I fleshed them out to make them more interesting (I hope!).

CS: The other characters and families of Thea and Amanda seem one dimensional in comparison to the two women. Did some of the characters want to come to life more than their ultimate appearance in the book? Did you feel that you “got to know” the other characters as well as the two main ones?

GG: You have to be one of the most perceptive readers ever! I had character sketches, pages and pages of back story, and a lot more dialogue between the men, but ultimately, this was the women’s story. And in order to stay true to first-person narration, I wanted to wander around looking through their eyes only. I tend to get attached to secondary characters, to write into them more than suits the book. But I had some expert help (my agent and also my utterly fabulous editor, Sally Kim) in honing the story. And the other characters will have to wait for another book.

CS: On page 203, Caius asks Thea if she expected Amanda would join the “other side,” which I thought was a good phrase to express the tension that exists between Amanda and Thea, as well as introducing the male perspective. How did you come up with this phrase that expresses this central conflict?

GG: I think that particular line came out of a revision—maybe a middle revision among the many—where I tried writing more dialogue between Thea and Caius. While I was sometimes afraid of doing a disservice to men (I love writing male characters as well as female—my first novel, Field Guide, has a close third-person narrator (as well as two female.), ultimately it came down to the selfish first person--which we each inhabit. First person narrators are more confessional, and therefore more instantly readable—as readers, we want to be told a story, and a single person telling it from an “I” perspective is the simplest to follow. But first-person narrators can’t be too empathetic of the other characters (unless it’s a fantasy about dragon riders or something), or we won’t believe they’re reliable.

CS: Why did you choose 9/11 as a key moment with which to end the book?

GG: I was pregnant for the second time (my daughter) on 9/11. My son had just started preschool and my husband was running late for his new job—downtown—because I was too sick to drive my son to school. He was turned back at Hoboken, but there was an envelope of dead time when I didn’t know where he was. Many people in town lost people. You could see the wreckage of the towers burning as you drove down Route 17. It was all too real and too close, and I felt especially fragile, as I imagined Amanda might, during that time. Still in revisions, I wasn’t satisfied with my ending, and when I came to it again some months later, I felt as though this was an important part of suburban New Jersey history—and a turning point for many people, either because of their losses or the closeness of other people’s losses. We lived it and it changed us; it would have done the same for Amanda and Thea, who would be forced to zoom out of their intensely selfish frames for a day or two. The ashes were on our clothes, and while I worried at the time (having not read any 9/11 literature yet) that it might be a bigger statement than I intended, the real event ended the women’s story for me, gave it a finishing point that allowed for hope and change, at least in the context of the novel.

Essential Links
Gwendolen Gross's Website
Learn more about the author's writing workshop
SSN Reviews The Other Mother

Dubbed “the reigning queen of women’s adventure fiction” by Joanna Smith Rakoff in Book Magazine, Gwendolen Gross is the author of the novels Field Guide, Getting Out, and most recently, The Other Mother. She graduated from Oberlin College, received an MFA in fiction and poetry from Sarah Lawrence College, and was selected for the PEN West Emerging Writers Fellowship. In addition to her novels, Gross has published poems and stories in dozens of literary magazines, as well as essays in collections including It's A Boy: Women Writers on Raising Sons and It's A Girl: Women Writers on Raising Daughters. Gross is also an award-winning writing instructor and has led workshops at Sarah Lawrence College and the UCLA Extension online. Her guest lectures include appearances at the Fashion Institute of Technology, at Barnes and Noble's Educator's Night, and The World's Largest Writing Workshop. Gross has worked as a snake and kinkajou demonstrator, naturalist, opera singer, editor, and mom. She lives in northern New Jersey with her family.

Who is committing literary arson in Sam’s name, and why? Author Brock Clarke gets to the bottom of this literary mystery—and has readers guessing until the very end—in his brilliant and moving satirical novel, An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England

Jennifer Uhlich: To get us started I thought I'd tackle one of the big questions first: why Western Mass? On your Brock Clarke's blogblog you explain that you were born in Springfield, have relatives who went to Amherst, and then allude to a traumatic school trip to the Emily Dickinson House. But as I read your novel I kept thinking that Sam's story wouldn't have worked anywhere else, and not just because of the concentration of writers' houses in that region Perhaps you could speak a little about your relationship to the area, and how that helped shape the novel?

Brock Clarke: Well, my relationship with New England is ambivalent. In some ways I love it, a love that's part nostalgia (my parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles are all from New England and I spent my summers there--in north central Connecticut), part longing (I was born in MA, but moved when I was three to upstate New York, which I hated as a teenager and New England for me was always, in my mind, the place I should have lived), and part genuine affection (I love the modest but still rugged mountains, the starkness of the winters, the understated beauty of a place like Rhode Island, the grittiness, the scrappiness of some of the cities). On the other hand, I hate people like me, who wax nostalgic about New England, about the goddamn formerly tragic and now triumphant Red Sox, about the supposedly taciturn New England Man (which is a figure we get from books like Ethan Frome as much as we get from life). And I suppose that's, partly, why I wanted to write this book: to see if I could conjure up a New England that exists besides but as an alternative to what we all think we know and love (or hate, or both) about New England.

JU: So is the New England of the novel a facet of your personal experience of New England? An imaginary New England? Or perhaps a little bit of both?

In a similar vein, the way some of your characters relate to famous writers is also quite an alternative to what we might commonly assume. Certainly wishing to burn down a writer's home is not the usual response to, say, Mark Twain or Emily Dickinson. In my experience, people either love a writer or they don't really care about them; after all, if you don't like a writer, you can simply not read their writings. Do you think that we relate more deeply, and more negatively, to writers than we acknowledge? That perhaps we all have in our pasts that loathed novel or traumatic tour of a writer's house, which can bring out such a reaction in us?

BC:: It's a little bit of both. Because our notion of New England—anyone's—is in some way shaped by books, stories, movies, television shows about, or set in, New England. And the imaginary New England of these books, stories, etc., is no doubt shaped in some way by personal experience.

Some of that deep feeling we have about writers we love, and loathe, and both, includes anger, sadness, all the things we don't necessarily want to feel. For instance, the chapter in the book where the English professor hates literature and thinks that all writers are cunts. That's because the writers have done their job, they've made their readers—or at least one reader—see things in themselves they don't want to see. This is another way of saying that literature scares us as well as entertains us; it makes us more expansive, and it also sends us running from the vision of the narrow people we are. The writers' houses are convenient for the people in the book: you can't really burn books, there are too many of them; but the house you can see. You can take all your bad feelings out on the house, instead of the book, which might have caused you to feel, or understand, the bad feelings in the first place.

JU: It's interesting that you characterize these responses as the result of a book doing its job, because that's one of the questions that Sam is mulling over in this book: what does a story do? And he comes up with a lot of answers, from the very funny (the reading group in the bookstore, for instance) to the very sad (what we learn about Mrs. Pulsifer’s stories). Is there any way to sum up what a story's job is, then? What, for instance, is the job of this novel?

BC:: I think a story's job is to do what (thankfully) you say my novel does: make you feel different emotions and have different reactions and feelings to what should be a cohesive plot. If the story is doing its job, than some of these approaches should surprise you, in a good way, make you feel things you probably didn't think it should make you feel. (a bunch of people who've emailed or interviewed me expressed surprise that the book could make them feel as sad as it did, and I find that incredibly gratifying, and also interesting: the idea that a sometimes funny book—a ludicrous book, sometimes—could make you feel so sad). Also, a story's job is to confound a reader's, and a writer's, preconceived notion of what a story's job is. Although that sounds like so much metafictional hoo-ha that I'll stop there, while maybe I'm still ahead.

JU: Your response, though, sends me in two directions, because it makes me think about two of your characters to whom storytelling is very important: Sam and his mother. To take the latter first, Sam's mother engages in two very important acts of storytelling: one is the series tales she tells Sam about the Emily Dickinson house, and the other I shan't specify because I don't want to spoil it for people, except to say that it's related to the first. Is her storytelling different from the kind of storytelling you describe, and if so, what are her stories trying to do?

BC:: Her stories are both meant to distract herself (and Sam) from the pain of her husband leaving. Which is to say, they're meant as diversions, as entertainments. But, as she well should know, if art is any good, it often intensifies the feelings we're trying to escape. They're gruesome, they're vengeful, and they don't end up being cathartic at all—they drag Sam and Mrs. Pulsifer deeper into the problem, which is exactly the opposite of what she intends them to do.

JU: And then of course we have Sam, who seems to be damned if he does and damned if he doesn't: both his lies and his attempts at straightforward honesty backfire. (Funnily enough, I was browsing the paper today and they quoted that line of Dickinson's, "Tell all the Truth but tell is slant." I had forgotten it—very appropriate!) And yet he is our storyteller, he is telling us his story. In a sense, he is the classic unreliable narrator—or is he? What role does Truth have in a story? And do you think it's plausible to say that part of what Sam is doing in the book is learning how to tell a story?

BC:: I don't know if Sam is the classic unreliable narrator, there being so many different kinds of classic ones. There are the willful liars; there are the ones who deceive themselves so artfully that they don't entirely know they are unreliable; and there are the ones who tell the truth slant, and so we think they're unreliable, but only because we think we recognize the truth when we see it. I think—I hope—that Sam is a little bit of all three. And yes, it's fair to say that part of Sam's quest is to learn to how to tell a story, and also to learn that many people will interpret it however they want to, no matter how well you learn to tell it.

JU: And in Sam's case he can never get anyone to interpret it as he wants them to, can he? For that matter, he doesn't do so well interpreting the stories that others are telling him. No one story ever seems to do the job the teller intends, though they are certainly doing something to everyone.

I am interested in your definition of truth, what truth means and especially how truth and storytelling work together. Not only because what we as readers are told is the truth never seems quite right, but also because of the way truth is questioned within the novel. You especially play on the idea of memoir—what is a memoir? What does it mean to write a memoir?—through both the bond analysts and the reading group scene. And in a sense the novel is Sam's memoir. So I'm wondering what is your interest in memoir, your thoughts on the genre, and how it relates to truth?

BC:: My take on memoir is probably evident in, and from, the novel. My main beef is with memoirs that cross the line into self help, or those memoirs that seem not to make difficult choices in the book itself, difficult choices in terms of craft, of plot, of writing itself—these memoirs assume that all the difficult choices have been made in life itself, and, since the life matters to the writer, it will automatically matter to the reader. I'm not speaking of memoirs (like Donald Antrim's new memoir) that struggle with exactly these questions—what to leave in, what to leave out; of whether the truth can be known and whether, if it is known, it'll do anyone any good. Of course, I feel that novels, by virtue of their fictiveness, the necessity of their invention, have a built in advantage here. But then again, novels that don't seize that advantage (and there are plenty of them) are more aggravating than memoirs.

JU: Your line about the life mattering sums up a lot of my difficulties with memoirs as well—but I'm a little confused when you bring this over into the novel. What does a novel look like that doesn't seize upon the advantage of its fictiveness? And why is that more aggravating?

BC:: To my mind, this kind of novel assumes that certain subjects (whether they're autobiographical or not) have a certain built in power. And as such, they don't do much to transform them, and what we think we know about them, through inventive language, sentence structure, plot structure, theme. It's aggravating because I'm a novelist and I want novels to prove all the good things I've been saying about them.

JU: Something like the bond analysts, then, who feel like they need to have done something before they can write a memoir or a novel? That you have to have a great experience which you can then write about, otherwise you simply can’t have a novel period, as there’s nothing else involved? And do you think, perhaps, we as readers often approach novels in such a manner—that we expect the subject to have some sort of power in and of itself?

BC:: Yes, that's exactly right. The bond analysts stand for our worst impulses as readers and writers. At least in my, admittedly small, mind.

JU: And then perhaps, too, Sam is learning to be a reader as well as a writer, a storyteller?

I ask because I think what most confounded me, in reading the book, was that beneath the funniness and the sadness (for Sam is sad and funny, and I have never wanted to help a character as much as I have wanted to help Sam) there is something about your book that made me feel uncomfortable—or perhaps a better word would be unskilled—as a reader. Because so much in the novel happens because of stories, and misinterpreting stories, I felt very hesitant about interpreting anything I was reading. And yet that’s our end of it, as readers, isn’t it? We have our own job to do. And this book made me profoundly aware of the work involved in being a reader, and how important that work is.

BC:: That's certainly not my intention—to make readers hesitant to interpret the book, or any book. As you say, that's part of our end of the bargain, as readers: to enjoy ourselves but to work hard (and enjoy working hard) trying to figure out what the book has on its mind, what it has to offer; to try to understand what it says about the world, and to then decide whether we agree, whether it's worth saying. And our job as writers is to give readers something to work with, something to consider, to interpret.

JU: Hmm. I think I meant more that your book made me aware of just how much interpreting we do, and how important it is. That I found myself interpreting carefully, thoughtfully, rather than on autopilot as I often do; for me, Sam's misinterpretations of the stories and people around him were an object lesson on the importance of interpretation.

I wonder if that's another flaw of writing that focuses solely on the subject, not the writing—nothing to interpret?

BC:: That's an interesting point: that we've been taught (or fallen back on the easier habit of) to read for subject—in doing so, we forget or miss that one of the pleasures of fiction is the language itself, the sentences, the way they're put together, and how the transform the subject.

JU: Well, your book is definitely a challenge to that habit, and a necessary challenge too I think. So not only is the novel funny and sad, it's also (I would argue) important, for just that reason if nothing else.

Now I only have one more question, admittedly a goofy one but it's kept me wondering: traumatic experience at the Emily Dickinson house? Is it a story you can tell, or will it remain the mysterious incident that would lead to the novel all these years later?

BC:: I wish I could say, "It just remain a mystery." But I've been talking about it nonstop over the last few months—"it" being a trip I took the ED Homestead as a college senior in Fall 1989. Nothing really traumatic about it, but it stuck with me—the intelligence and kindness of the tour guides, the idiocy of the tourists (me included) feeling ED's bedspread, touching her desk, etc. Why do we go to these houses? That was my question then and still is.

JU: I'd guess that part of it is related to the fascination with writers' process—? How many books are there now detailing the writing habits of famous writers? At what point did it become part of a writer's career to write an essay about how and why they write? It's one thing that struck me in grad school, how many aspiring writers are looking for some sort of magic formula that will enable them to produce a book of their own: write between 4 and 7 in the afternoon on alternate Thursdays while subsisting on a diet of spinach and white wine, and you will produce a novel as good as x. Though touching the bedspread—that's bordering on some sort of religious experience, no?

BC:: That's the generous way of looking at it, and almost entirely right, too. The less generous way of looking at it is that the books are hard to understand—they get at things that are beyond us, they are written in such a way, line by line, that dazzle and frustrate us—but the houses are easy to understand, because we've lived in one ourselves. The houses are comforting where the books are not.

Essential Links
Writers Revealed Podcast
L.A. Times Review
Office Website for the Book
Read an excerpt!
Brock Clarke's blog

About the Author: Brock Clarke is the author of The Ordinary White Boy, What We Won't Do, and Carrying the Torch. He has twice been a finalist for a National Magazine Award in Fiction. His work has appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, OneStory, The Believer, the Georgia Review, and The Southern Review; in the Pushcart Prize and New Stories from the South anthologies; and on NPR's Selected Shorts. He teaches creative writing at the University of Cincinnati.

Lisa Kunik: The opening pages of The Invention of Everything Else transport the reader to an early twentieth century New York painted through a magical realist lens in which Nikola Tesla converses with pigeons. Likewise, your first novel The Seas embodies a magical spirit, that of the sea and mermaids. Has the realm of the magical always inspired your writing?

Samantha Hunt: I never think of it as magic or magical realism but I have always had an interest in mystery and those writers who, rather than solve mysteries, point out even larger ones — people like Haruki Murakami and Kelly Link. The world’s a mysterious place. Science and nature are stranger than any sort of magic or trickery. I’m very interested in the experiments being done by the British biologist Rupert Sheldrake. He studies things like why we know when someone is staring at us, or why, when we think of a long lost friend, very often he or she calls. He would like to demonstrate that these phenomena -- that we all agree happen -- are controlled not by coincidence or magic but by cells, biology. (He also happens to be doing experiments with pigeons and how they know the way home.) I like to think that’s the way I write as well.

LK: Your book is a fictionalized account of Nikola Tesla’s friendship with Louisa, a chambermaid at the Hotel New Yorker. What could you accomplish in a work of fiction that you couldn’t in a nonfiction biography?

SH: There are many excellent biographies already written about Tesla. That has never been my interest. I’d hoped to suggest some broader truths than just the facts of his life. For example, where are the inventors of today? Where is the wonder that leads young people to develop teleportation devices in their basements? Has invention been crushed some by greed and capitalism?

LK: Were there other books capturing the life of a person or an event in the form of a fictional novel that you looked to in writing The Invention of Everything Else?

SH: I’d read and admired Rene Steinke’s Holy Skirts, Bruce Olds’ Bucking the Tiger, Joanna Scott’s Arrogance and W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn.

LK: Louisa snoops around Tesla's room at the Hotel New Yorker only to find what appear to be journal entries or the makings of an autobiography. Were the recounted entries based on historically preserved documents, or were they a product of your writerly imagination? How did you manage to get inside the head of such a sparkling, larger-than-life character?

SH: The journal entries were pure imagination. Tesla did write an oddball autobiography published serially in Electrical Engineer magazine and that helped me. I read as much primary source material from him as I could find even some translations of Serbian poetry that he had done with Robert Underwood Johnson.

LK: When considering how pigeons—for which she and Tesla share a love— always find their way home, Louisa "realiz[es] that magic is a very unsatisfying reason for anything." In scientific discovery and research there are always elements of artistic inspiration and creativity, which, very often, are informed by magic. Do science and the spirit of the magical coexist in the mind of the inventor?

SH: Again, I would hate to call it magic. Magic dismisses a lot of wonder due to the material world. Perhaps it is better to speak of curiosity or even love of the world. I think of the TV programs of David Attenborough. When I watch those and he reveals to me the mating habits of the scorpion or the mimicry of the lyrebird (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3433507052114896375), now that inspires me to creativity! Though certainly, in the mind of the inventor, there must also be some capacity for imagining what’s unimaginable.

LK: In the book, Tesla claims to have communicated with Martians. With such claims, one could easily write Tesla off as a mad scientist. But did Tesla’s spirit of infinite possibility allow him to realize his genius?

SH: He claimed it in real life also. Tesla certainly had a very open mind. Rather than thinking of him as a mad scientist (as sadly, many people have), I approached him as one who simply had less of a filter between his thoughts and his words. He said many of the things that everyone thinks. He had enormous powers of intuition that he wisely paid attention to. A highly sensitive man.

LK: The epigraph, “Everything that can be invented has been invented,” alludes to a human tendency to impose order on a universe we can’t possibly control or completely understand. But the human mind is naturally inquisitive; do you think this desire to create or invent is what makes us human?

SH: The drive to create certainly makes us human. Whether it be art, iPhones, or babies, creation makes us human, makes us happy because it links us to something infinite and unexplainable.

LK: Tesla claims, “Invention is nothing a man can own.” What do you think Tesla would say about our litigious society, specifically when it comes to issues of intellectual property?

SH: I think it would make him rather depressed. It does me, particularly when I try to imagine the future that Tesla envisioned for us, and how we have gotten so far away from that vision. I do, however, think that Tesla would love the opensourcers of today. I think he’d adore the internet.

LK: Tesla, at least as rendered in the book, lives in an isolated world where he communicates, for the most part, with pigeons. Does a degree of loneliness necessarily accompany genius?

SH: Tesla believed so. He said that writers and artists could have wives, but inventors could not. I think and hope that there are ways to get at this loneliness without necessarily being alone. Look at David Lynch with his passion for Transcendental Meditation. He dives into the gray matter of creativity daily while managing to have a family and human relationships. Perhaps it is more a matter of staying open and honest - these are hard things to do in relation with other humans. And certainly anyone who is trying to create needs space to let the mind go awandering. I myself like to write very, very early in the morning, before the world has woken up.

LK: Who are the Nikola Teslas of our time? In what form does his spirit manifest itself in our contemporary world?

SH: Certainly not with those toiling long hours in that battle to find another cure for erectile dysfunction! I find a lot of his spirit present in the DIY community as well as those folks innovating new and localized energy sources or coming from the art world, people such as Steve Kurtz. But probably the real Teslas out there today are quietly working in their garages. We haven’t heard of them. At least not yet.

Samantha Hunt has spent four years researching Nikola Tesla, in the course of which she has appeared in several Tesla-related documentaries, visited Tesla fanatics across the country, and explored the five subterranean floors of the still-standing Hotel New Yorker. She is the author of the acclaimed first novel The Seas, and her short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker and McSweeney's and on This American Life. She recently received the first-ever "5 under 35" award from the National Book Foundation.

Lisa Kunik is a Brooklyn-based writer originally from Los Angeles. Her interviews have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail and her short fiction on LostWriters.net.

But Cheryl’s mother, Julia, cannot seem to let her daughter go, especially since she knows what life in Dinkytown is like– having herself gone to live there some twenty years earlier, back when the now dilapidated The Sabotage Café was Minneapolis punk-rock mecca. Cheryl’s attempt to escape her mother, and her mother’s life, join them together, and it seems that the farther Cheryl runs, the closer she gets.

Adam Goldwyn: How did you come up with the name The Sabotage Café? Is there an intentional irony in this choice? How does the theme of sabotage play itself out in the novel, if at all? And also, what about "café," since this word, reeking as it does of bourgeois respectability and Starbucks' capitalism, is the very thing Cheryl and her friends are trying to avoid?

Joshua Furst: The title rose from a number of sources: When I lived in the East Village in New York in the early 90s, there was a bookstore on St. Marks called Sabotage Books where the gutter punks who were the initial inspiration for the book seemed to spend a lot of time hanging out. Then, also, there’s a legendary collectively-owned Anarcho-leaning joint in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis called the Hard Times Café. The title of the book nods to both these establishments. Hopefully, it does more than this. Of course, much of the action of the book transpires in a place actually called The Sabotage Café. But I think more interestingly, the central story being told revolves around Julia, and the ways her mind is at war with itself. She, in her respectable, bourgeois suburb is a kind of Sabotage Café of one.

AG: I know this is my peculiarity as a reader, but whenever I find a writer discussing the aesthetics of a third party, I always try and see in that description the aesthetic of the writer himself. So when I came across your first description of the band Nobody’s Fool, I couldn’t help thinking that perhaps this was your aesthetic. The one line that stood out in your description of the band was “This ‘slacker’ attitude…with its unfocused energy and Midwestern fatalism, was the very thing that critics adored about them, but eventually did the band in.” This sentence seemed to me to be a summary of the entire novel; it seemed that this is how your characters live. Is there an element of personal confession in there as well?

JF:: The “slacker” attitude is a 90s motif that I wouldn’t want to wear too proudly. Chaos and entropy though (central components of slackerdom) do play a role in the ethos of the book, and in order to capture this ethos I found I had to adjust my writing process. Normally, when writing a story, I work out most of the structural and tonal issues in my head before putting any words on the page. By the time I begin writing, most of the major craft decisions have been made and the drafting of the story consists of playing—improvising and riffing and exploring character—within the formal constraints I’ve placed on the work. While writing The Sabotage Café, I found I needed to allow for more mess. I had to unlearn my craft. I wrote scene after scene in no particular order and with as little attention to the artful construction of the sentences as possible until I’d amassed a great many moments of lived reality for my characters. Only then did I begin to organize the information into a narrative. That this process left its imprint on the eventual texture of the book is heartening, because as you said, it is very much the way the characters live.

As for an element of personal confession, I must admit that I identify with the energy of rage, the combustion that passionate people are sometimes capable of. There’s not enough of this sort of anarchic freedom in America at the moment, and I think we’d be better as a people and a country if our wilder impulses had more space to roam.

AG: Additionally, I am curious about the phrase “Midwestern fatalism,” in particular. What is unique about Midwestern fatalism, as opposed to other geographic fatalisms? I mean, Minnesota is hardly the obvious candidate for a novel about post-punk fatalism, though it did offer such influential punk bands as Husker Du and The Replacements (and, though not punk, Minneapolis’ favorite sons Bob Dylan and Prince). Nobody’s Fool is loosely modeled on The Replacements, and their “life’s ambition… not to be rock stars but to be able to drink for free at their favorite local bar, the CC Club, for the rest of their lives” parallels nicely The Replacements hit “Here Comes a Regular,” which, I’m sure not coincidentally, is the song on your MySpace page. Why Minneapolis over more obvious candidates like New York or Los Angeles? What drew you to Minneapolis and Midwestern fatalism?

JF:: The reasons I chose to set the novel in Minneapolis instead of the more notorious scenes of New York or LA or San Francisco are multifold. I didn’t want to have to navigate any preexisting mythologies of the punk world, and the coastal scenes have been so well documented that I felt it was pretty impossible to approach them on my own terms. But there was something else at work in this decision as well. The fatalism of the Midwest is central to the tone I was trying to hit. For a long time, I had contemplated the differences in mood between coastal and landlocked regions. I’d noticed and been fascinated by the flamboyance of people’s stances—the modes by which they presented their emotions and beliefs—in cities like New York and San Francisco. There was something performative about these people, as though they knew, no matter how self-loathing, how tiny they felt, that they were on a world stage. In the Midwest, where I spent most of my formative years, people don’t have this kind of self-consciousness. The land stretches forever, unrelentingly, and you’re just a speck of flesh cowering on it. Depression is a lot less fun in the Midwest. Despair is more desperate. There’s no world party to disappear inside of. The ego has no currency. And this forces people to confront the facts: the world has no more interest in human beings than it does in the cows penned up in the barn, or the flies on those cows, or the microbes blossoming in the manure. The world doesn’t care. This can be demoralizing. To my mind, what distinguishes the Midwestern punk scene from it’s coastal counterparts was that instead of rising from a desire for fame—which a cursory look at Patti Smith or Darby Crash or even Henry Rollins’s biographies makes abundantly clear was a large part of the force propelling punks on the coasts—the Midwestern variety rose out of blind fury, a howling against the futility of it all and a lack of anything better to do. It was important to me, in The Sabotage Café, that the characters contain some trace of this.

AG: One of the first things I noticed about The Sabotage Café was the specificity in its description of location. When Cheryl first runs away she goes “clomping down the middle of the street, nearing the corner where Jonquil Court opens onto Jonquil Way, angling south headed toward East Fish Lake Road.” I was able to find this exact spot on Google maps. So, though the novel seems so deeply rooted in Minneapolis, it also seemed to me to be a story about an experience youth were having all over the country: the general malaise of the first couple years of the twenty-first century. But it’s also about a youthful malaise that seems almost timeless. Is this story unique, in that these constellations– Minneapolis youth at the beginning of the twenty-first century– will never come into alignment again, or is there something universally true about this story?

JF:: I’m not sure I’m comfortable claiming universality for my work—I hope for it, as I’d guess most every writer does, but my relative success at achieving it is, I think, better left to the readers to decide. I did want to convey an experience that was simultaneously specific to Minneapolis and the Midwest and also widely felt across the nation. The characters are responding to their direct environment, which includes the city they’re stuck in and the social and political climate of the country. We live in conservative times. Every city in America contains kids who’re living like those in my book. They’re responding to the very real commercial pressures that codify and mold our ambitions. Conformity is no longer one option among many; it’s the only option. You can choose from a wide range of clichés to become, but in the end you can’t escape becoming one. In choosing to say no, these kids are erasing themselves from the American reality. And of course, they’re reenacting their own particular cliché.

AG: At its heart, I think, the novel is about relationships between people, and what interested me was the way that the characters seemed to be doubles of one another. For example, Jarod and Cheryl are contrasting models of children, both of them dealt with their disabled mothers in an almost opposite way: Cheryl runs away, while Jarod stays with his mother and cares for her. At one point Cheryl thinks to herself “[Jarod’s] mother is an unrelenting mess of needs. Just like mine…Just like mine except with mine there’s no physical ailment, just an incessant attempt to suck me back in.” Trent and Jarod, too, contrast as young men and love interests. Over the course of the novel, we see Trent’s degeneration and Jarod’s growth. And, ultimately, what about Cheryl? It seemed significant to me that when she meets Trent, she adopts the nickname he gives her, Betty, and that she remains Betty until her eventual rejection of Trent when, as she runs away, he calls after her: “Cheryl! Wait!” and Cheryl thinks: “Cheryl. Not Betty, but Cheryl. The same old Cheryl she’d always been.” What purpose do all these doublings serve, and what aspects of character were you trying to explore?

JF:: While writing the book, I was very conscious of parallels I was creating between characters. I’d add Jarod and Cheryl’s father and Julia, Cheryl’s mother, and “the ho-bag,” Jarod’s mother, to those you’ve mentioned. On a certain level, I think this is just a natural instinct that rises up in the act of writing fiction. In teasing out meaning and ideas, the writer uses whatever is available to him, characters first and foremost. I’d like to think that the reader’s experience and understanding of the book will vary depending on which of these parallels he or she focuses on.

AG: To me, one of the most significant character pairings was Cheryl and her mother Julia. One of the novel’s great ironies is that, in her desperate attempt to run away from her mother, Cheryl is forced (or chooses, I suppose) to relive her life. Do you see, as I do, a cyclical pattern to the novel, and Cheryl continuing on her mother’s path, perhaps eventually leaving the squalor and uncertainty of street life for suburban security or do you see Cheryl’s experience opening up for her a different path?

JF:: The story is cyclical in a couple of ways. There’s the way in which Cheryl is following her mother’s path, but also, and more importantly, there’s the narrative itself. Julia is both reaching forward to her daughter’s experience and backward into her own. The two become one, and by the end of the novel, we’ve returned to the beginning. Cheryl and Jarod have in some way become Julia and Robert in the early days of their lives together.

AG: The novel ends with many lingering questions, but to me, the most pressing was what would happen to Cheryl? So, I am curious, why did you choose to end the novel at that moment?

JF:: I honestly don’t know what happens to Cheryl. To do justice to Julia’s experience, I had to relegate myself to what she knows—or at any rate, what she thinks she knows. When her world collapses in around her, Julia is forced to realize the limits of her power to cradle and protect her daughter. Though the book concerns itself primarily with Cheryl, it belongs to Julia and this is the central tragedy of Julia’s story.

Joshua Furst is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been the recipient of a Michener Fellowship, the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award and fellowships from The MacDowell Colony and Ledig House. He lives in New York City, where he teaches at the Pratt Institute.

Adam Goldwyn is a Contributing Editor of Literary Features & Contributing Writer for Small Spiral Notebook. He recieved a BA in History from Pomona College and an MA in Ancient History from University College London. He is currently working towards a PhD in Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Adam also serves as an adjunct lecturer in English and Classics at Brooklyn College.

Cara Seitchek: I was amazed to realize that this book is almost entirely “showing” instead of “telling” – one of those “writing rules” that teachers try so hard to engrain in their students. Did you have to work at achieving this or did it just happen?

Matthew Eck: I think like all writers I just write to write so that after awhile the story just starts to happen. Because I definitely don’t sit around and repeat rules about writing as I write. It’d be hard to get anywhere. But, when I edit, I do keep an eye out for certain things that I like to see in writing. Essentially though, there was always enough action and enough description in the novel to keep the immediacy of the situation in the front of my mind.

I like to remind my students that you have to be able to find those moments where the writers you admire the most show and where they tell—and then try and figure out why. Each writer has to learn to see where “rules” work and where they don’t. Then they have to take those skills of recognition and understanding back to their own work to give it the help and inspiration it needs.

It’s funny because I hardly ever bring the “show don’t tell” line out in a workshop these days. But when I do it’s because I want students to focus on showing an event that leads a reader toward the understanding of a character’s choices and the action that arises out of the consequences of their choices. We like to see that actions have consequences. Also, for a reader it’s far more rewarding to witness a character being clever than it is just to hear the narrator say he or she was clever.

But, all that said, there are times when writing calls for compression and economy so that the line, they were sad, might carry far more weight and move us more quickly toward the true heart of the story a few pages away. I think this is especially the case in a short story where you need to move the character through all the seasons of emotions before settling them back on sadness or such. I think like all advice though it is given to young writers to help them learn to discover and write interesting details.

CS: I read one interview where you said you “joined the army to get some stories. I joined the army for life experience.” How much of this book is autobiographical and how much is based on the experiences of people you met while in the service?

ME: Unlike Joshua Stantz, I was never really lost or alone in the middle of a war. But I often felt that way. I think the journey out of a war, the journey out of sadness and the hope for a safe journey home is a metaphor that rings true in all of us. A friend of mine from the Army called me a few days after reading the book and said that he saw a lot of me in Stantz. He said it was the most apparent to him in those moments where Stantz is longing for love. I wanted to be loved desperately at that point in my life. Stantz is a lot like me because he realizes that love might be all we have in this world. My friend said he remembered sitting around for hours talking about love with me while we pulled guard duty or stared at the ocean from our little railroad car that served as shelter.

The section with the shark is pretty much straight out of the war. That’s the closest thing to autobiography in the piece—outside the emotions. At least that’s what I’m saying today. Talk to me next week. Anyway, the shark was in one of the first war stories I ever wrote. I always recognized that moment as a defining metaphor for any war. Over time the shark became one of many metaphors for what I call the “Everywar.” The war that we’re always fighting. Some are fighting the war for real in Afghanistan and Iraq. Others are fighting a metaphorical war back home with depression or the loss of a loved one.

Most of the stories, most of the details, most of what seems true in the book is what I’ve learned to build out of all of the books and all of the stories I’ve ever heard. My writing has always been informed by what I’ve read and what I’m reading. Writing is a dialogue with all the great books on my shelves.

Joshua is also my brother’s name. In short stories I’d always just referred to the narrator as Stantz, then within the first thirty pages of the novel it just happened, another character called him by his first name in a moment of kindness and it just clicked. There was an instant connection of fear and sorrow and pity for everything that this character was about to witness, and for all the trouble that I was going to visit upon him. His choices and his actions weighed so much by the end. And all of the characters’ choices became wrapped up in his voice and his future. All the life and all the death he witnesses in that book. The wreckage. The spiritual wasteland he leaves behind and the spiritual wasteland he sees in front of him. All of that just hopefully moves a reader. In the end the emotions are true. I guess that’s all that really matters.

CS: Did you write while in the service? Keep a diary to record your impressions?

ME: I did keep a journal while I was over there—records of my apprentice days we’ll call it. What I was reading, along with my letters, always felt more important than a journal. We had a packing list of all the items we were supposed to take with us when we deployed to Somalia. I left my raingear out so that I could take more books. I was reading Kerouac, Salinger, Dostoevsky, and others. I left my raingear out because according to all of the briefings, and the evening news, Somalia was a desert. A week after we got there it rained for a month.
I hadn’t looked at that journal in years. Actually, after reading your question I realized it was in a box in the basement, so I ran down to get it before any mice might—not that we have mice. “I’m covered with the goodness of life,” runs the first line. “I take it all for granted.” That’s the Kerouac infused with the Rimbaud I’d been reading. The next line runs, “Ryan wants me to keep a journal so I might just try. My journal is in my letters. I’m sharpening my skills in them. I guess he wants me to keep my stories so I won’t forget. Like I’m some old man. But I am a forgetful sort.”

That’s weird. I haven’t looked at that thing in years. It’s like having a conversation with the ghost of my youth. Thirty-three-year-old Matthew, meet nineteen-year-old Matthew. I still feel young. And we still have a lot in common. I’m still reading Dostoevsky.

Writing The Farther Shore I had to move away from who I was back then, away from my story, to Joshua Stantz’s story, and the Everywar story underneath. My book and the current war are one. I wrote it as much to help all the men and women coming back survive themselves and their war. I did this because writers like Tim O’Brien, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Tobias Wolff, James Crumley, and Isaac Babel helped me survive myself and my war. I feel I owe those soldiers over there now an accounting they can use to come to some hope of understanding. And I feel I owe those writers I admire the most a thank you note.

CS: I was particularly impressed by the immediacy of the story and how “in the moment” I felt as I read it, something that the first person point of view contributes to. Did you try to write this from another point of view or did it always have this personal touch?

ME: It always had the personal touch. I wanted it to be immediate because I wanted the reader to feel as though they had just gone through this hellish experience with Stantz. First person is highly personal. I wanted the reader to suffer the consequences of a soldier’s actions as well. It’s an age old theme, the war will follow you home. It’s also in his name, Stantz, stance, I wanted people to take a stand with him. I hope that the voice makes that note of optimistic defeat in the end resonate just as hard and dark as war itself. He’s looking forward, but what is he really looking forward to?

Everything in this book was so personal to me that it was hard to separate a sense of my voice and my life from the work. I think we see this in writing all the time. The work is full of hope beyond hope.

CS: Your bio mentions that you served in Somalia, so it’s easy to assume that’s where this book is set, and yet, the ambiguous setting really makes the book timeless and relevant to almost any modern conflict. How difficult was it to keep the setting unidentifiable?

ME: It was a challenge in the first chapter because most readers want to the place to be named immediately. I just did my best to bombard the reader with sensory details to the point where they couldn’t help but move into the story. It’s also the use of in medias res. In early drafts people thought I was doing the novel a disservice by not naming the place or the conflict completely. Daniel Slager, the Editor-in-Chief at Milkweed, realized the importance of such a technique immediately. He realized what I was talking about when I said I wanted it to be the story of the Everywar, much in the same way we talk about the Everyman. He realized that I wanted this novel to speak to a veteran of any war. It’s a wonderful thing to watch as more and more people read the book and recognize why place is never mentioned.

I take your question and your summation as a huge compliment. You’re right. I made this choice early on because while my war was far removed from Vietnam and World War II and the Civil War, my writing and my life were inspired and transformed by the writing and the stories I heard about these other wars. There’s a universality in the stories that veterans tell. Conflict is timeless. I would love to see war fade out of the collective memory, but I know it never will. I hope like The Red Badge of Courage my book still rings true a hundred years from now.

CS: How much time had passed from your service until you wrote this book? How long did it take you to write it?

ME: It’s been a little over ten years since I was discharged. It took me a few years to digest the influences of my youth. I’m one of those writers that the university helped immensely. I have a degree in English literature and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing. The Army may have been my Harvard and my Yale, to paraphrase Melville, but I still needed the polish offered by an education. After the army I knew I had a story to tell, but I didn’t have a firm grasp of the tools and techniques necessary for telling such a story. And I always wanted to learn as much about fiction as I possibly could. I always knew I wanted to fictionalize my war. So I needed to learn the art that only fiction offers. It took me time to gain a perspective of what my war had meant to me. It took me time to develop a writing voice as well. I had a lot of practice and a lot of work ahead of me the day I was discharged from the army.

I wrote a solid draft of this book one summer in Missoula, Montana. I was delivering pizzas and I’d listen to Seattle baseball games and NPR on the radio as I drove around. Between deliveries I’d furiously scribble notes about my characters and a situation that might befall them. I’d listen to “Fresh Air” and pretend I was answering Terry Gross’ questions. Believe it or not those imaginary question-answer sessions taught me some very important lessons about the novel. After the initial draft it took another year of writing and rewriting before I really hit upon the draft we mailed out. When we sold the novel to Milkweed there was another year of revising and reworking. All-in-all a good time. I loved the editing process. I wanted to learn as much as I possibly could from Daniel Slager. Like all writers I want to get progressively better, so the editing process was highly interesting to me.

CS: Some reviews have compared you to Tim O’Brien, who is known for his war-focused writings. Do you have more war/military stories to tell or does your work cover other topics and settings?

ME: The comparisons to Tim O’Brien are truly humbling. He is a master of the modern war story and I believe that he will go down as one of the greatest war writers ever. I do have a few war stories that I’m still working on. For the most part I do my best to write as diversely as possible. I’m currently working on a novel about a serial killer. And I work on different short stories now and then. I recently finished up a short story that’s a variation on Chekhov’s “Ward No. 6.” I just like to wake up and write. I like to wake up and take what the day gives me.

CS: The other author I thought of as I read your book is Sebastian Junger, whose books can be classified as creative non-fiction. Do you consider your book to be strictly fiction or does it cross that line into creative non-fiction?

ME: Well thank you for that comparison, and you mentioned the O’Brien one earlier—a friend of mine sarcastically pointed out, “Too bad they keep comparing you to all these hacks.” I liked that one. He was actually my original composition teacher right after I got out of the army.

I would love to say my novel is thinly veiled biography. People love that. Again, I think just in asking that you’ve paid me a huge compliment, which is that the novel feels real. It evokes emotions that are known to be true in all of us. It describes a journey, an arch, and a place that we can imagine as tangible. That’s what I always aim for in my writing. That a story reads like a person’s life. I write to find those moments that define a character, and through that, find those moments that define all of us.

Milkweed Editions
Kansas City Sun's Review
Matthew Eck's website

Mathew Eck enlisted in the Army in 1992 served in Somalia and Haiti. He has a B.A. in English Literature from Wichita State University and received his M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Montana. He currently teaches Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Central Missouri. He edits fiction for Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing.

Nicole Krauss: Yes, though I’m wary of trying to articulate these things. A certain nebulousness about why one has chosen one's peculiar subjects seems like a helpful thing. Analyzing such decisions opens the door to a species of self-consciousness that I am always trying to shut out. But, without stopping for too long to wonder why, I can say that everything I’ve written so far seems to have found much of its energy in exploring the chasm between the self and others. My characters all seem to be somehow isolated. In the beginning it was because of something obvious such as the loss of their memory, or grief, but as time has passed I’ve had less use for these outward explanations, needing only the normal conditions of life in which to conduct further explorations into the negotiations of the self—the expansion or contraction of its freedom when it comes up against others, the use of the imagination as solace or for self-invention, the contortions it performs in the hope of being understood. It is one of the many lessons I’ve learned as a writer these past few years: that I can smuggle my pathos and trouble into almost anything, and once within, expand, investigate, test, and illuminate it there, in a side of beef as easily as a train to Poland, East 52nd Street as easily as my grandfather’s grave. So there’s alienation, but it doesn’t end there; the isolated characters I’m drawn to aren’t ones who are content with the conditions as they are. Who would be, one wonders? But of course there are those. Beckett—a writer to whom I always return—certainly mined the rich vein of alienation, but in all of his brilliant articulation of it there is little suggestion that things could ever be any different. And it seems to me that for some people things are different, and of course other writers have staked their tents in the rich messiness of human entanglement.That’s not my subject now, and it might not ever be. But, however removed, I work in view of it.

SSN: In the last seven years, the years since you began to write novels, have you noticed any changes in your reading life? Are you still the same reader you were before, or do you come to books differently now that you’re engaged in trying to write them?

NK: There’s no question that I’ve changed as a reader. I suppose when one turns any passion into a profession something of the simplicity and unselfconsciousness of the original pleasure is lost. Not all of it, of course, and there is the gain of other, newer sorts of pleasures that have to do with noticing and appreciating a writer’s decisions. I can still lose myself in a book, but it happens more rarely. It isn’t just the development of a critical sense that I’m talking about, and the detachment that comes along with that. When I was a student and writing papers every week about the books I was reading, I was still entirely open to persuasion, and, bursting with feeling, prepared to be moved at the drop of a hat. My reading really began to change when I started to write novels. I slowly started to acquire a sense of what it was I wanted to do myself. And that narrowed my patience with the sorts of books that didn’t speak to those aspirations. I began to write in the first place because it was a way to prolong the accompaniment and heightened sense that reading afforded me. And as I was getting older, and more experienced as a person, reader, and writer, I had a clearer sense of my peculiar tastes. I suppose you could say that my beginning to write novels coincided with the end of my student days and the beginning of my life as an adult, and no doubt that has something to do with these changes, too. I don’t think one becomes any less emotional as one get older, but the emotion is no longer spread evenly through everything one thinks and does: it hides and concentrates itself in more discreet places. But as such, when one stumbles unknowingly into one of these abysses, the diameter and depth of a well, it’s very powerful.

SSN: Elsewhere, you’ve described the difficulties involved in writing—the psychological cost, one might say. Why do you continue to do it?

NK: For one thing, it has become a habit, a rather extensive one that is not only limited to a professional life but affects how I interact with the world in the most basic ways. I’ve been writing seriously for half of my life now, and because I began young, like so many, the process of writing became integral to how I order, calculate, and absorb my experiences. I don’t think I would function healthily without it—though as it turns out, it’s rather difficult to functional healthily with it. Difficult, but not impossible. And in certain ways I’ve grown attached to the difficulty. I don’t like it, and in fact often it is a nightmare. But the reward, once one is inside a book and steadily working, is enormous. I’ve never found anything else like it. Writing affords one tremendous freedom—to exercise the imagination, to alter and amend, to collapse and expand, to ascribe meaning, to design, to perform, to affect, to choose a life, to experiment, and on and on. It is work that demands one to be in constant contact with the most essential things. You can’t really skimp on your existential duties if you’re a writer—the work grinds your nose into it. But then, one day, the freedom and all of the emotional trawling amount to something, and suddenly you enter into a different plane of consciousness. It’s thrilling when it happens. The trouble begins when it doesn’t.

SSN: Writing necessarily demands that you return to your past, and the past in general, to mine it for material. Does this pervert your relationship to it at all?

NK: I’m sure that it does, to a degree. I rely on the past heavily. I’m in constant conversation with it, often without being aware of so being. Sometimes it is a vague conversation, and sometimes it is very pointed. But the real perversion, if there is one, has to do with my relationship to the present. I am naturally an observer, and as such I have the sense of always standing apart from things that are happening around me. I assume that I was like this to begin with, and that it’s part of what drew me toward writing, which with time enhanced or exaggerated the tendency. But it is a very strange way to live, and often it frustrates me. The only exception to it, or relief from it, that I’ve found is the time I spend with my son—he and I both would refuse to have it any other way, and in his presence I can abandon the otherwise perpetual narrative I am otherwise carrying on in my mind. But that is something relatively new in my life, and so far it is limited to being with him. I often imagine what it would be like to throw oneself into the fray, what it would be like to talk without thinking so much about talking, etc. But that doesn’t make it any easier to actually do it. In The Counterlife, Zuckerman attends his brother Henry’s funeral, already writing in his mind the novel about the lust that killed Henry, and Roth has him remark, “This profession even fucks up grief.” It’s not only that one cannibalizes life to feed the addiction of writing, but also that one’s real-time emotions are informed by the many hours and days one has already spent contemplating those emotions, their cause and effect, at a remove, as well as the knowledge that one will inevitably put this new crop through the mill at some point in the future.

SSN: Other writers must influence you. What about artists? Do you ever think of any painters when you work?

NK: Absolutely. When I started to write The History of Love I was thinking a lot about Philip Guston, and the work he did in the last ten years of his life, when he returned to figurative painting after a long mid-period of working in the abstract. He painted these crude, incredibly moving self-portraits, often depicting himself painting, smoking, eating, or sleeping, sometimes doing two or three of these at once. They’re very honest, naked expressions, intimate without being at all quiet, energetic while contemplating a life’s demise, bright and also dark. Inevitably, Guston informed my thoughts about Leo Gursky, the old man in my book. But he didn’t only affect the content, but also my approach. Guston worked by addition. He added paint on top of paint, building forms that seem almost to bulge forward into the viewer’s space. When he scraped paint away, it was only to add more. A history of gestures seems to buckle under the surface. This extroverted quality is at the heart of who Guston was as a painter. Above all, he wished to communicate. There is a wonderful painting he did in 1979, the year before he died, called Talking. It’s of a hand gesturing while holding two cigarettes, one that appears to have burned to the filter, the other giving off an outpouring of red smoke. What looks like a beaded chain hangs down, presumably attached to the bulb casting light on the talking hand, and though the wristwatch seems to read 3 o’clock, there is the feeling that the talking will go on indefinitely. And at the same time, his paintings of this time are very solitary. He was facing his own death. From him, I learned a certain attitude toward these things. Another painter I was thinking of quite a lot of at the time is RB Kitaj, who sadly died last week. Around the time that I began The History of Love, I was in a bookstore looking at a book of his paintings, and in it were these little stories he’d written in prose to accompany some of them. The sound of his voice got into my head, as did the look of his paintings, a certain strangeness he managed so well, strangeness and emotional acuity, and these things also influenced me.

SSN: It’s the end of 2007 now. How do you imagine the next twenty-five or thirty years of your life as a writer? Ideally, what would they bring?

NK: Ideally, they would bring year after year of satisfying work, and at the end a number of books that I am not too embarrassed by. Ideally, these books would be very different from one another, perhaps even radically so, and at the same time be held together by the development of certain enduring concerns, as you put it in your first question. As long as we’re speaking hopefully, I’d like to imagine that the difficult periods, particularly those I’ve experienced between books, will become less of a nightmare. Though recently I met an older writer that I deeply admire, a writer who has written more than twenty-five books, and he assured me that this was not going to be the case. He even wrote it for me on a piece of paper I now keep framed above my desk: It’s not going to get any better. Resign yourself to this. Strangely enough, it comforts me to look up at this little promise and imperative. It isn’t an easy life, but it’s a relief to know more or less what I’m in for.

Nicole Krauss is the author of the novels Man Walks Into a Room and The History of Love, which won France’s Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, and was short-listed for the Orange, Médicis, and Femina prizes. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, and Best American Short Stories, and in 2007 she was selected as one of Granta’s Best Yong American Novelists. She was born in New York City in 1974, and now lives in Brooklyn. Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages.

Forgery begins as a travelogue, becomes a bildungsroman and a murder mystery and, finally, melds all three genres together into a seamless whole. The result is a novel which draws heavily from past literature, current circumstance and a strong dose of the author’s imagination and unique voice.

Our discussion took several Forgery-esque twists of its own: in a wide-ranging interview, Sabina, still suffering from jet lag and the after-effects of a uniquely Greek mix of wine and Aegean sun, covers everything from her major influences to the role of women in literature– both as authors and as characters– as well as a perceptive analysis of Greek culture, both ancient and modern, and its legacy for Greece and the wider world. –AG

Adam Goldwyn: One of Forgery's epigraphs is a quotation from Henry Miller's The Colossus of Maroussi. Rupert Brigg, the novel's narrator and protagonist, later mentions having read Lawrence Durrell's Prospero's Cell and Reflections on a Marine Venus. These works are the great travelogues of Greece. It seems to me that Forgery draws on this literary tradition of Western travelers in Greece, and is as much a travelogue as anything else. It also seems to me that there is an even more apt comparison to Durrell's Alexandria Quartet because, like Forgery (and unlike the aforementioned titles) it is more than just a travelogue: the novel is organized a plot that is both complex and suspenseful.

Also, both the Alexandria Quartet and Forgery deal similarly with their characters: everyone seems nice and innocent at first, but as the novel progresses and the narrator becomes more astute, he realizes that beneath the façade, everyone has some sort of dark and secret past in radical politics, shady business or some other equally romantic endeavor. Ultimately, no one is who they seem, and no one is to be trusted. Perhaps you could talk a little bit about the way Durrell and Miller influence you and/or your work, and which other authors inspired you.

Sabina Murray: As a woman writer, I often feel stymied by my gender and the expectation that comes with it: write small, domestic, emotionally expansive, and morally upstanding fiction. Or be quaint and funny so that a bunch of ladies cruising Barney’s can feel literary as they discuss your book. Of course Durrell and Miller felt none of that and that absolute freedom–a male freedom–to drink and fuck and explore and be held as some sort of hero is the cause of much envy on my part. I wanted to look back at some of the great American writers who wrote on the edge of sanity, sobriety, and the guilty maw of survival and that brought up Fitzgerald, Miller, Hemingway, and the like. Durrell flirts with melodrama but as we follow Justine we are reminded that great lives are lived to the very perimeter of the believable, and that–unless you’re half dead and like to read in the same way you look into a mirror to apply your make up–can make for some interesting writing. I like a sense of adventure and wanted this book to be a sort of Treasure Island for grown-ups. About grief and discovery, yes, but also about how a man or woman creates himself or herself against a background. For these large-hearted, difficult people, a certain retro feeling was necessary. You mention that everyone seems nice and innocent at first, but then slowly reveals that to be a façade. I don’t believe in moral people. I don’t believe it. What’s amazing to me is that some reviewers– this is with all my fiction, all of it–look at the drinking and smoking and sex that go on in the books and have a little “ugh” of disgust. Why? Is health and hygiene a value in fiction? It’s not in mine and if I could choose some literary company–fuck it, any company!¬–I would rather be with Henry Miller, and Fitzgerald, and Durrell than just about anyone else. For style, I’ve always liked Angela Carter although I can’t find her anywhere in this book. Forgery is more of tribute to the big American fiction of the middle of the last century.

AG: I like the description of Forgery as a grown-up's Treasure Island; it's fitting. Let me ask you about this male/female dichotomy you've created: this distinction between women writers with their "small, domestic, emotionally expansive, and morally upstanding fiction" and the "big" male fiction, "drinking and smoking and sex." In a way, I think that Forgery straddles both: it is "immoral" but also very domestic. The novel is about large domestic issues like relationships and marriages, and even the minutiae–arguments over who gets to choose the music on the record player, how to deal with illness and death, how to settle a will between in-laws. Even the main action centers on a home: Neftali's home on Aspros, where the gathered expatriates form a makeshift family. Then again, everyone gets drunk and fucks. Also, it is interesting that the main character is a male. Why did you choose a male protagonist? Could a female protagonist have worked in this novel? How did you balance "male" and "female" literary models? And should we read Forgery as a reaction or response to either the female "smallness" or the male "bigness" of twentieth century fiction?

SM: I think at this point I should clarify that I’m not talking about what inspires women to write, but rather the expectations that notable critics and readers have of books that women write. I would hope that I write for us all, rather than contrast myself against, my many admirable female cohorts. Women writers are not quite equal when it comes to being recognized as intellectuals and chroniclers of ideas: I still have to contend with the constant qualification that I am a woman writer, not just a writer, and although that may seem nitpicky, think of how hilarious it would be to refer to Chabon as a male writer. You are correct in observing a certain domestic grouping in Forgery: this is the family that the narrator makes. What’s lacking is the attendant futility of a trapped woman and the argument that the emotional life of the thwarted individual is what is truly valuable. Maybe it is, but it’s not in my book. As for making Rupert “Rupert” and not “Ruby,” I wanted that swagger. My last novel, different yet clearly one of my books, had a female protagonist who went around picking up men and eating them. This book, A Carnivore’s Inquiry, was a dark comedy that riffed on consumer culture and the American practice of empire. What amused me (I can say “amused” now since the book came out several years ago) is that certain critics didn’t have any problem with the protagonist eating people: they were more bothered by the amount she smoked, drank, and fucked around. Go figure. To have a male narrator is to not slant or color your character in any way. At least in fiction, women are still made from the rib. Rupert avoids the politics of identity simply by being male.

AG: I think that you are right about the difference between the Virginia Woolfs and Kate Chopins on the one hand and the Henry Miller and Jack Kerouacs on the other, in terms of what is expected, or what they can 'get away with.' As for male characters being able to avoid identity politics, my first instinct is to agree with you: male characters can just be, female characters are somehow always read in terms of femininity, they always come with that layer of extra interpretive baggage. But is this something inherent in literature, or is it the fault of literary criticism and feminism? Can this state of affairs be seen as a side effect of feminist literary criticism? Can your work be seen as a sort of sociological literary experiment: what happens when a female author addresses male themes in a male way?

SM: There are several reasons that female characters are burdened with unwanted baggage. I think one of them has to be the position that women hold in American society: gender equality is really for the intellectual elite. Another is recognizable heroines in the literary canon. Who do we have? Elizabeth Bennett? Jane Eyre? Nancy Drew? That’s a bit of an exaggeration. We have our Lady Brett Ashley’s, but that was hardly her book. And then of course you have Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina. Is it an inherently female thing to be victimized by one’s desire? Hardly. It’s society that demands that, but in literature—at least historically— it seems one and the same. And you have Mrs. Dalloway and her party and her subversive flower arranging. Lastly, I accept that feminist criticism has called attention to the femininity of characters. Look at me now: guilty as charged.

AG: Perhaps you could talk a little bit about how you came up with the idea. I have spent some time in Greece, and found your description of Rupert's experience of daily life in Athens and in the islands to be startlingly true to life (minus all the adventure, at least in my case), in terms of simple things like Athenian geography, but also in more complex things like the culture and mannerisms of the Greeks themselves and of the Western travelers, artists and exiles who go there. It appears that you’ve spent time in Greece in order to have been able to describe everything in such accurate detail. Did you decide to set the book in Greece and then research, or, having gone to Greece, did you decide to write a novel about it? How were you able to collect such sociological information and then to transform and render it into literary art?

SM: There’s the adage “write what you know,” and there’s my adage, “write what you’d like to know about.” I’ve been to Greece five or six times, and have always stayed for at lease a month. And yes, often find myself in fairly decadent company with other writers, artists, musicians, and a few people who are great company but I’ve never figured out exactly what they do. In my experience, no one has killed anyone yet. But some of these people are Greek and the mannerisms and carriage and joy in life has been adequately researched over many glasses of wine. I just returned from Greece yesterday and the jetlag and early onset nostalgia is figuring heavily into my responses, but there is no better place to waste your minutes than a Greek island with like-minded people from all over the world. And if I feel that way about a month a year, maybe others would like to spit their hours spending some time with pages culled from that experience, with some adventure and a little intro-Art History thrown in. I’m always looking for the story in everything and this one was easy to find. Politics, like art, is visible in every aspect of Greek life and that strange embrace was enough for me to feel confident to start writing.

AG: The other quotation you use as an epigraph is from Plato's Symposium, and it seems appropriate that a novel like yours has both ancient and modern quotations. As one of your characters says, "A year on [a Greek island] is not the same as a year somewhere else. It could be one minute, it could be a hundred years." This distinction between time and timelessness, between the present and the past, seems to be one of the important themes of the novel. Greece is a place with a rich present overshadowed by a richer past, and contemporary Greek culture has been shaped by an attempt to find a balance, not just between the ancient past and present, but the more recent past as well. All of the characters seem to have some issue from the past playing itself out in the present. Rupert himself acts as a bridge between past and present: an antiques dealer and amateur archaeologist looking for evidence of the past to display in the present. Why was it so important that all of your characters (and even the setting itself) have such well-defined back-stories, and what drew you to this theme? What is the relation between the characters and their setting, in terms of both time and place? Could this novel have taken place anywhere else? Could its characters have survived anywhere else, or is theirs a uniquely Greek situation?

SM: What is a uniquely Greek situation? Think of the Eligin Marbles: the Brits truly believe, on some level, that they are their just protectors in the same way that boys at Eton declaim their Greek declensions with a sense of utter historical inheritance. We’re all a bit Greek, in the origins of our art, medicine, philosophy. So on the one hand, sure, characters could have survived elsewhere. But the situation is truly, singularly Greek because of the small Greek inheritance anyone with a western European or North African or Central Asian (I’m getting needlessly nitpicky here but I am aware that some small boy in Bangladesh might not give a shit and I want to respect that) holds in the development of their identity. And the fact that the Greeks constantly have to define themselves against this loaded origin defines them in a way that no one else has to contend with. I was recently in Venice at a three-day party, one element of which was a guided tour of the Doge Palace. The tour guide let us know that Venice was the second nation (the first being Florence) to outlaw slavery. She said, “Yes, we were good then.” Implying national strength, but she said it with such flare that the undercurrent was ultimately, “We may have been good then, but now we’re completely fabulous!” The Modern Greek has the same sense of “we were good then” but not the “now we’re fabulous.” If you talk with contemporary Greeks about their cultural inheritance, conversation is most often about recent times of oppression and the art that flourished with it: twentieth century dictatorships (there are a couple) and music–Rembetika.

AG: I agree with you that Greeks have a different sense of Greek history than Europeans and Americans; we tend to skip everything from say, 400 BCE to the present day, whereas their reality is very much informed by much more modern history. Indeed, there seems to be an almost willful ignorance on the part of many Greeks regarding their ancient history. In Forgery, Nikos seems to me the representative of this. Early in the book, he says, "I have the Acropolis at my back every day. Every Greek has the Acropolis at his back. What I want to know is what is at the front." The opposite of this is Henri Michaud, the old French archaeologist Rupert meets at Delphi. I think one of the things that makes Greece so interesting is that it has something for both Nikos and Michaud, and that these two types of people live their whole lives in Greece and never meet. One of the great things about Forgery is that a character like Rupert has access to both worlds. How do Greeks reconcile these co-existing ancient and modern worlds? Why are Eton schoolboys still declining Greek? Why are Greeks so disinterested in their cultural heritage? You seem to have picked up on these cultural trends and woven them into the novel, but why do you think these trends exist, and how do they enrich the literary quality of the novel?

SM: I think the reason that many Greeks don’t focus on the Ancient Past is the silliness of doing such a thing in the face of all that has happened in the meantime. There has been gunfire on the streets of Athens in the last fifty years and the contemporary Greek is born of that turmoil. Nikos is from Istanbul and in his mind the purges of the early part of the twentieth century loom large, much as 9/11 heaves at the consciousness of the contemporary New Yorker. If you ask someone who attended a British public school to tell you in two paragraphs the identity of Thucydides, I’m pretty sure they could do it. But if you ask the same person, “Karamanlis vs. Papandreou?” I’m pretty sure you’d draw a blank. It’s not so much a hole in our education but the reality that our civilizations just don’t go back as far as we would like them to and when we find ourselves, from around the second century CE to the fifth BCE, a marauding bunch of pre-literate barbarians, its far more interesting to pretend that our past is shared with Socrates, Plato, Homer, and other favorites. Think of how many people went to see [the movie] 300. And they all rooted for the Spartans.

AG: Forgery is a novel about many things: it is a travelogue about Greece, a mystery/suspense novel and a novel about coming to terms with grief. Above and beyond all of those things, Forgery is a novel about relationships of all kinds: friends, lovers, families and spouses. Relationships that reflect upon one another, serving almost as competing models, and each with differing degrees of success and complication. The father-son relationship is explored between Nikos and Kostas, between Rupert and his son and between Rupert and the man who raised him, Uncle William. You also explore the spousal relationship in the context of Nikos and his fiancée, Rupert and Hester, Rupert's father and mother and Jack and Amanda Weldon. What types of relationships interested you and what issues were you trying to explore? What obstacles and problems do you see your characters trying to overcome in their relationships, and what is it they are looking for? And, assuming this doesn't require revealing any trade secrets, how did you go about constructing the relationships? Did you have the whole novel plotted from the beginning, or did the characters take you in unexpected directions? Which characters came first in the writing process? Which were easiest to write and which hardest? Do you have a particular fondness or dislike of any of them?

SM: I started this book a couple of years ago and then pissed off to Greece for a month and came back with the same sixty pages I’d left with. Predictable. One of my close friends, the poet Daniel Hall, and my husband, and I, were sick with longing for our island and so sat on the back deck at my house drinking white wine while I read from it. There were a lot of mosquitoes and we had set a fan up which would blow all the pages around at critical junctures, but somehow, in that one evening, I managed to read the whole thing. And then one of them asked what happened next, and I said, “I dunno. That’s all there is.” So I wrote in installments (I’d like to say like Dickens but people like James Wood might disagree) and then read them. So from one forty page installment to the next, I wasn’t completely sure what was going on beyond a faith in the Forgery thing. Of course serious ratcheting was necessary at the end and I do have a brilliant, forceful editor, so it worked out all right. I like all my characters. I, of course, love Rupert and wanted good things to happen to him. I love Amanda, who is flawed but only wants what other people have without so much effort. I have a tremendous sympathy for the lot. I only like seriously flawed people: everyone else is too boring. I’m going to have all my friends ringing me up now: Am I flawed? And I’ll say, “Wouldn’t you rather be flawed than boring?”

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Adam Goldwyn is a contributing writer and editor for Small Spiral Notebook. He received a BA in History from Pomona College and an MA in Ancient History from University College London. He is currently working towards a PhD in Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Adam also serves as an adjunct lecturer in English and Classics at Brooklyn College.

Sabina Murray was born in 1968 and grew up in Australia and the Philippines. She is the author of the novels Forgery (Grove, 2007), A Carnivore’s Inquiry, and Slow Burn. Her short story collection The Caprices was the winner of the 2002 PEN/Faulkner award. Her stories are anthologized in The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction and Charlie Chan is Dead II: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian Fiction. She is the writer of the screenplay for the film Beautiful Country, which was an Independent Spirit Award Best First Screenplay nominee. She completed her Master of Arts as a Michener Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin and is a former Bunting Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University and a recipient of a major grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Murray is a 2007 Guggenheim Fellow. She has served as the Roger Murray Writer in Residence at Phillips Academy Andover and is currently Associate Professor of English, Creative Writing, at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.

Kim and I discussed a number of different topics: her choice of setting, her views on beauty, the purpose of literature, the role of literary prizes and the difficulties even two people in love can have in maintaining their relationship. – AG

Adam Goldwyn: First, let me ask you about the setting of the novel. My Dreams out in the Street is deeply imbued with the sights, sounds and spirit of San Francisco, a city famous for its counter-cultural fervor. Your characters often hang out in the city's legendary counter-culture hot spots, like the Haight-Ashbury, but also the city's seedier areas, such as the Tenderloin and Mission districts, and other famous landmarks like Golden Gate Park. In terms of time, the novel is not set in the '60s and '70s, the hey-day of San Francisco rebellion, but in the '90s, when San Francisco was just becoming famous again, but for an entirely different reason: its new wealth as the center of Silicon Valley. Indeed, the famed corner of Haight-Ashbury now boasts a Ben and Jerry's, the epitome of bourgeois respectability. Perhaps you could talk a little about the relationship of the setting, in terms of time and place, to the novel: why did you decide to set the novel in San Francisco just as the dot-com boom was beginning? Could this novel have taken place in another time or location? Could its characters have survived anywhere else, or is theirs a uniquely a San Franciscan story?

Kim Addonizio: In the time the novel is set, the dot-com money was flooding San Francisco, driving up prices, and displacing a lot of poorer people. In 1997, the year the novel occurs, there were particularly heavy rains (winter is the rainy season there), and the homeless died in record numbers. Reagan, when he was governor of CA, closed mental institutions in the sixties, thereby kicking out a lot of mentally ill people into the streets, and the facilities to care for them never really materialized after that. So it's a particularly San Francisco story in that way, but these characters can be found in almost any major urban area. San Francisco is the city I know well, since I moved there in the late seventies. I moved across the Bay to Oakland in 2001. So I used what I knew and what I observed-big encampments of the homeless in Golden Gate Park, for example, or the Goodwill store where Rita goes to dig through bins for cheap clothing.

AG: That's interesting, because, though I hadn't thought of it as a novel about social consciousness, now that you point that out, it seems to me that it is one of the novel's major themes. To go to the obvious question: do you see this book as in any way political, or as a call to some sort of action? Are you trying to make a statement about public health or government policy? Were you trying to make people aware of the living conditions of the urban poor?

KA: I think this book has a social conscience, but I don’t think it’s particularly political, and it’s not a call to action; it’s a novel. I guess Upton Sinclair would have a different idea, but I don’t think novels are meant to work on that level; non-fiction or a documentary can generally accomplish a lot more in that direction. I’m just trying to write about characters I find interesting, but if this novel had the effect of making someone slightly readjust their preconceptions I’d be happy.

AG: San Francisco's famed counter-culture stems in large part from its unique literary history: it was home to Kerouac, Ginsberg and several other authors of the Beat movement, which was the first literary movement to depict the counter-culture of easy sex and easy drugs. Your characters are for the most part drug addicts, prostitutes and petty criminals: the types of characters the Beats championed. There seems to be a pretty strong literary genealogy for My Dreams out in the Street with the Beats, and other authors like William S. Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson, and again, there seems to be this San Francisco connection. What influence did the Beats and the San Francisco literary scene have on My Dreams out in the Street? What other works influenced your writing? As a novel, it necessarily draws from previous literature, but it also seems to be a novel about experience, by which I mean lived experience from the real world, not experience drawn from reading. In your writing process, or in the finished work, what is the relationship between lived experience and literary experience?

KA: Of course the tradition goes back farther than the Beats, if you hop over to Europe-back, I imagine, to the beginnings of literature. Some writers I read early on were people like Baudelaire, Jean Genet, Georges Bataille. And Hubert Selby Jr.'s Last Exit to Brooklyn was huge, for me. I liked the Beats, but I was never more interested in them than, say, Keats. I read Kerouac and Brautigan and Ginsberg and Burroughs, but I can't say I ever felt some big Beat influence. Everyone was reading them then. In high school I was a big Philip Roth fan. And then there was Aldous Huxley and Herman Hesse and Thomas Mann, some Dostoyevsky in there. Kafka. The Beats were just a part of that list. As for lived experience, imaginative experience is a part of life, so I don't separate them so much. There are autobiographical elements in all my work, but you wouldn't be able to know what they were, what's been transformed, what's been completely invented. At least, I hope not. I'm not interested in writing my story but in writing my characters' story. They're all some all some piece of me, though I've never been a homeless junkie prostitute, or a former child pageant star with OCD, or a pregnant teenager, or a criminal investigator. Personally I don't care if an author has lived through something physically or not. I want to know that she can write really well, create characters I feel for. And I want to undergo some sort of transformative experience through reading the book. I want to know the author has felt something deeply and thought about it and can convey some mysteries and discoveries.

AG: It's true that the Beat genealogy, and drug use for artistic purposes does go back a lot further than twentieth century America. I suppose this touches on a larger question about the interplay between literature and life. In one part of the book, two petty thieves and drug addicts, Jimmy and Stan, are at Stan's apartment, and you write: "Jimmy sat on a couch and picked up a few of [the books]. They all had little prize announcements on them– finalists or winners for the Pulitzer or National Book Award. Stan and his self-improvement bullshit. Jimmy opened one and flipped through the pages, looking at the lines of type, not seeing the words." You are obviously a well-read author, but all of your characters are decidedly uninterested in literature. Also, I couldn't help but notice that on the cover of the novel, just under your name, is written: "National Book Award Finalist." Are you having a little fun at your own expense? I think this might be the only mention of literature in the book itself. What is the role of literature in their world? Who is your intended audience? Is it the real life Stans and Jimmys, or the middle and upper classes, which are almost entirely invisible in this novel?

KA: Well, Stan is buying these books. He is in fact part of the audience for prizewinning books. How else would someone like him choose a book? He relies on the sticker. Jimmy is indifferent to literature, but Stan is actually interested, even if he doesn’t really get all of the content. And I can assure you that’s absolutely true to life. I didn’t know my publisher was going to put the NBA thing on my book, so no, I wasn’t really thinking about myself, just commenting on how books find their way mysteriously into all kinds of people’s hands. As for my intended audience, that includes people like Stan and anyone else the story might speak to. In the past, I’ve gotten correspondence about my work from prisoners and kids in juvey and high school girls in Japan and freshman creative writing students. My intended audience is anyone who wants to listen. Or rather, anyone who hears something interesting, even if it isn’t exactly what I tried to say.

AG: There is a moment when the PI Gary Shepard looks at his wife Annie's photographs and thinks to himself: "Black-and-white studies of poppies and lilies. Kids splashing in fountain spray or running across wide lawns. It's not that they were bad photographs. It was just her idea of beauty; it contained no difficulty, no darkness. He couldn't explain to her the kind of beauty he saw in people who were being pushed down, not allowed to bloom. Just that they survived was astonishing to him." When I read this line, I thought to myself that this could as easily be the aesthetic manifesto of My Dreams out in the Street: the novel is beautiful, not in Annie's way, but in Gary's. Am I right in thinking that there is some authorial confession coming through here, or is it purely for the sake of characterizing Gary Shepard? What is it you find beautiful about these types of characters and situations? What attracts you to writing their stories? What aesthetic principles do you adhere to?

KA: You mean, why would I want to write about these kinds of people rather than a soccer mom at the mall? If she's sleeping with her husband's brother and addicted to pills, I might be interested in writing about her. I guess I'm feeling for the edges of things, where more is overtly at risk. Maybe it's as simple as what Janet Burroway says-the first rule of fiction is: "Only trouble is interesting." Or Tolstoy's lines about happy families are alike, but all unhappy families being unhappy in their own way. If you're trying to write anything accurate about life, you have to include the fact that there is incredible suffering and evil in the world. You don't necessarily have to dwell in it, but you have to acknowledge it.

AG: So Rita is a sort of twentieth century American Anna Karenina? I like that. Rita and Jimmy are a family, as are Gary and Annie Shephard, and they are all definitely unhappy in their own way. There is incredible suffering and evil both in the world and also in your novel, yet nevertheless, the novel, to me at any rate, is a happy one. There does seem to me something heartening in Rita's optimism and fortitude. Am I reading it totally wrong? Where do you, as an author, draw the line between "acknowledging" and "dwelling" in unhappiness? And why is "writing accurately about life" a desirable goal? What is it that draws you towards that?

KA: Every writer worth reading wants to write accurately about life. Actually, the writers worth reading are the ones who succeed. But that has to be a starting point.

AG: At its core, My Dreams out in the Street is a novel about the relationships between people, particularly, it seems to me, the impossible distance between them. There seems to be a pattern in the novel, wherein the people who are physically the closest are the most emotionally distant, and those who are the most physically distant are the most emotionally intimate. Rita certainly has no emotional attachment to any of her johns, though she obviously has sex with them, and Gary and Annie's marriage is fraught with distance and tension that there is almost no emotional connection at all. Indeed, the relationship at the core of the novel, and the only one in which both people actually love each other, is the one between Rita and Jimmy, two people who have completely lost contact with each other and spend the whole novel trying to find one another. What interested you about the relationship between Rita and Jimmy? Why is physical intimacy so often tied up with emotional distance, and what is the connection between the two? What about relationships were you hoping to explore in the novel? Why is having a decent relationship so difficult in the world of My Dreams out in the Street?

KA: I find having a decent relationship difficult in the real world. When I started the novel I was yearning for someone, so I suppose that was one thing that drove the emotional dynamic of the book. Rita and Jimmy do love each other, but Rita hasn't developed enough of a sense of self to feel that she can survive without him, and Jimmy has kind of opted out of the difficulties of struggling with those issues that come out of real commitment. And everyone in the book is dealing with childhood shit. I know we should all get past it, but the stuff that happens to you when you're young-if it's difficult in some way-just forms the core of you, because you're not yet able to integrate it into something larger. And it's a kind of chicken-and-egg thing, to me. Poverty and the general ugliness of impoverished circumstances breed violence and ignorance, and it's hard as an individual to get above that.

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Rock Salt Plum Poetry Review's Interview with Kim Addonizio

Kim Addonizio is the author of two novels, Little Beauties and My Dreams out in the Street, both from Simon & Schuster. She has also authored four poetry collections, most recently What Is This Thing Called Love (W.W. Norton). Her work has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA Fellowships, and other awards. She lives in Oakland, CA and is online at www.kimaddonizio.com.

Adam Goldwyn is a contributing writer and editor for Small Spiral Notebook. He received a BA in History from Pomona College and an MA in Ancient History from University College London. He is currently working towards a PhD in Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Adam also serves as an adjunct lecturer in English and Classics at Brooklyn College.

I caught up with Wilson on his reading tour somewhere between Los Angeles and San Mateo, California.—LK

Lisa Kunik: Jorge Luis Borges’s story, “The Interloper” opens with a disclaimer; the narrator will recount his tale conscientiously but foresees yielding to the temptation to embellish or exaggerate. He plays the role of interloper in his telling of his story. Your narrator, Owen Patterson, tells us his story in a straightforward first-person narrative. Without giving too much away, we begin to find the narrator—who we have grown to trust—succumbing to the forces of the fictional world he creates. Was it a challenge to write a novel with a narrator who proves himself unreliable?

Antoine Wilson: Writing any kind of novel is a challenge! Owen’s lack of reliability was built-in from the start, so I guess the challenge was determining how it would play out, how much it would “show”—an unconscious process, for the most part. A few years ago a friend of mine pointed out that all first-person narrators are unreliable—it’s just a matter of degree. I’ve always been interested in narratives that involve some kind of self-presentation. Ostensibly, anyway, this is Owen’s written account.

LK: There is a systematic nature to the narrator’s stream of thought and action—from the opening line where the narrator begins, “My name is Owen Patterson,” as straightforward an introduction as they come—establishing Owen as a seemingly steadfast and predictable character. In the process of writing the book, how did you resolve that Owen would go out on such a limb to pose as a woman? Can grief, and even more so, revenge, push anyone to extreme action?

AW: That’s funny. I definitely wanted a straightforward kind of opening to establish a patina of normalcy from the start. Of course, the clues are all there in the opening paragraph. Who calls himself “a solid B”? I knew from the start what Owen’s plan would be—in fact, I knew it before I knew who Owen would be. I don’t usually start with that kind of premise, but that’s how it happened. I think grief and revenge can push people to extremes, sure, especially when family is involved; that said, Owen’s pursuing this particular plan is more of a sign that he’s got a bolt loose.

LK: Owen—a character you created—creates a character of his own. As a writer, that’s a lot of hats to wear. How did you negotiate these multiple levels of character?

AW: In outlining Lily Hazelton’s characteristics I tried to create the kind of woman Owen might create. In other words, I had to know Owen pretty well before I could begin to know what Lily was going to be like. Once I got rolling with her, though, it was mainly a balancing act—when was the scrim going to be transparent, with Owen’s own characteristics and concerns shining through, and when was it going to be opaque, with Lily seeming more like an independent, fleshed-out character.

LK: As I read, I found myself sympathizing most with the fictitious character of Lily Hazelton. It is almost as though her “sincerity” draws the reader in. Did you find yourself also allying with Lily, or were you always firmly planted in Owen’s head?

AW: Well, sympathy for Lily belongs only to the reading experience. What I mean to say is that in some sense she stands on equal footing with the other characters in the book, but to me she exists only as a fabrication of Owen’s. Any sympathy I have for her is displaced sympathy for Owen. But lots of readers have told me that Lily was their favorite character, etc., so that’s been interesting.

LK: I felt like the end of the book was dictated by Owen growing to believe Lily the way the reader does. Did you know where the book was going to end when you started?

AW: Not really. I knew from the start that Owen’s plan was ill-advised, and that things were not going to end well. I had a sense, too, that a meltdown of some sort was imminent. As for how the very end went down…that came about 2/3 of the way through the first draft.

LK: The novel is clearly set in Los Angeles (at least to this former Angeleno) from the descriptions of the Santa Monica Pier to the “Hamlet by the Sea” Owen and Patty live in. Los Angeles is a loaded setting that has been used by other authors as a character in and of itself, such as in Kate Braverman’s Lithium for Medea and Joyce Carol Oates’s Blonde. In your novel you play against type. You set your characters in Los Angeles yet they could be anywhere in suburban America, or urban America for that matter, without upsetting the story. Why choose such a loaded setting and not play with it?

AW: For a lot of people who live here, L.A. is normal. It doesn’t feel like a loaded setting. I wasn’t particularly interested in writing an L.A. book just yet, or at least one that takes on some of the larger questions of living in this place, but I did want the story to feel authentic, so I set it here, where I live. Call it laziness, but I didn’t see any reason to set it in, say, Portland or Ketchikan. Someday I’d like to write a big L.A. novel, a book that takes on the place in some way, but I’m still trying to find the right, um, idiom.

LK: Owen’s wife and her family see CJ or his absence in everything. With loss, does what was one has lost become in a sense even more present by the fact that it isn’t there?

AW: Sure. People gain great significance sometimes just by dying. It’s a shame they can’t stick around to enjoy it. What we’ve lost is always more significant to us than what we’ve got, especially in the world of literature and art. Look at Proust. You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone—it’s the one thing Joni Mitchell and Cinderella can agree on.

LK: I read that you yourself lost a family member to murder. One of the writer’s jobs is to find a narrator he can commit to. Do you think you would have been able to commit to Owen without your life experience behind you? Was it difficult to separate your experience from that of your narrator’s?

AW: I wouldn’t have chosen to write this novel if my half-brother hadn’t been murdered. That said, it wasn’t too difficult to separate my experience from Owen’s. The book and my life are tangent and circle—I shaved off just enough to keep the engine running.

LK: The question everyone is dying to ask. In your research for this book, did you or did you not wear thong underwear? Did it give you insight into the female psyche?

AW: No comment x 2.

LK: On the note of the thong, there is almost a superhero quality to the narrator, dressed in his wife’s thong and surrounded by software manuals, a scanner, and images of his deceased cousin. He fights evil—in the form of a one Joseph Raven, connoting the predatory beasts of Hitchcock’s “The Birds”—with Photoshop and the written word. Did you read comic books as a child? Were you influenced by television shows or movies?

AW: Wow, that’s interesting. I’ve never been much of a superhero person. Most of the comics I read back in the day were Richie Rich and Casper type things, followed by a fanatical devotion to Mad magazine. A few years back I finally read Don Quixote, which is an amazing book, and for some reason it took me this long to realize that Knight Rider was a recapitulation of all those knight-errant stories. Occasionally I let Owen see himself in that light—coming to the rescue and all that. Except that instead of powers, he’s got issues. Ha.

LK: I found humor in some of the darker moments of the book. One of the first rules of comedy—at least according to Lucille Ball—is that as we watch a character struggle, we laugh when things go from bad to worse. The line between horror and comedy is tenuous. When you started out, did you intend for the book to be funny?

AW: Yes. As a matter of fact, I was initially surprised when some readers didn’t find it funny. I suppose the question of humor relies in part on the distance between the reader and Owen, the degree to which they sympathize with him, the degree to which they feel betrayed, etc., all of which is meant to be in constant negotiation.

LK: In writing this book, were there any authors you looked to who have dealt with characters coping with death?

AW: Not really. But several years back I wrote a children’s/YA book on coping with death, and for that I read several different books. The one that stands out in my memory is Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s classic On Death and Dying, which I found fascinating. In terms of fiction, I’m often drawn to those books in which a sort of emotional overflow afflicts a hyper-rational narrator, from Remains of the Day to Pale Fire.

LK: CJ’s senseless murder hovers over the text like a dark rain cloud, occasionally casting a few drops to remind the reader of Owen’s, and more importantly his wife and his wife’s family’s plight. We live in a time of senseless violence. Do we create our own Lily Hazelton’s to cope in the world we live in?

AW: If you’re asking whether we pour our hopes and losses into fictional proxies to cope with our impotence in a violent world, the answer is a resounding yes. Turn on the TV. Open the newspaper. From Jessica Lynch to Paris Hilton, the list is endless. We live in an insanely complex nexus of fictionalized personae, all of which serve various unconscious needs.

LK: You’ve been a contributing editor to A Public Space. In Brigid Hughes opening remarks in the first issue she cites the source for the name of the journal, a remark made by the novelist Aleksander Hemon in a BOMB interview when asked if he trusted books. He replied, “No. But I love books more than ever. Because I learned that books don’t represent ‘truth.’ Rather they open a space, a public space, in which that truth can be negotiated.” Are his remarks relative to your book and making sense of your personal experiences?

AW: Yes, and one question being negotiated in The Interloper is whether it is, as Owen puts it, “the noblest mistake to see humanity in everyone.” There’s an ethical collision. Of course we want to see humanity in everyone; we want to believe that everyone is capable of feeling, for instance. But what about someone like Raven? Is he indeed unfeeling? Is the point of justice to make someone feel what they’ve done, or is it simply to eliminate them from the equation, separate them from society? I don’t know the answers to these questions, but in this novel I tried to open a space in which they could be negotiated, albeit in an oblique way.

LK: As a writer living and working in Los Angeles, what kind of literary moment do you see happening there? In a city living under the shadow of the Hollywood sign, where does the novelist stand?

AW: I’ve heard that the Hollywood sign casts no shadow. Seriously though, being a fiction writer in L.A. is tricky. You feel elevated and debased at once. Elevated because many people here hold books, and book-writing, in high regard. Debased because just as many people see books as a means to an end. They need “material” for their “projects.” As far as a literary moment, I’m afraid you’ll have to ask someone closer to the center of things, like David Ulin. I’m too focused on my little postage stamp over here to characterize the whole big moment. I will say, though, that there’s lots of creative freedom here—the place is too spread out and schizophrenic to coalesce into any dominant aesthetic.

LK: Any advice to aspiring novelists on cranking out that first book?

AW: Read widely. Ignore the so-called market. Ass in chair. Risk something.

Lisa Kunik is a Brooklyn-based writer originally from Los Angeles. Her interviews have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail and her short fiction on LostWriters.net.

Antoine Wilson is the author of the novel The Interloper. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, StoryQuarterly, and Best New American Voices, among other publications, and he is a contributing editor of A Public Space. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and recipient of a Carol Houck Smith Fiction Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin, he currently lives in Los Angeles. More info at antoinewilson.com.

Callie Miller interviews Antoine Wilson.

And click below to view the trailer for The Interloper.

Like Son–and her first novel Trace Elements of Random Tea Parties (FSG, 2003), which I was surprised to learn)–were both inspired by one woman: Nahui Olin. Felicia admits, embarrassedly, “She’s kind of my muse.” She is embarrassed because she attended Cal Arts where “muses” are decidedly dorky and out of date. When I talk to Felicia more about Nahui, I’m not sure what is more fascinating: this unconventional and underrated artist or Felicia’s relationship to her.

Like Son is the story of a Mexican-American transsexual named Frank Cruz. Frank leaves home at eighteen for LA, but when he learns that his estranged and blind father -- a blindness he learns he may very well inherit -- is dying, he returns to help his father navigate his death. On his deathbed, his father gives Frank a mysterious crumbling photograph of a woman with a stunning gaze. The woman is Nahui Olin: a member of he early twentieth-century avant-garde who may have been in love with Frank's grandmother. Frank takes the portrait and heads for New York's East Village. There, he meets the glamorous and gorgeous Nathalie. Nathalie reminds Frank of Nahui, whose face and history have now obsessed him. Frank and Nathalie begin to date and shortly afterwards, they move in together. After September 11 hits, Nathalie is thrown into a depression and suddenly takes off with no explanation, and Frank must contend with his past and his ideas of himself. The book, as Felicia herself concedes, is very much about history – what we inherit from our families, whether we like it or not.

When I ask Felicia to tell me more about Nahui Olin (I read in another interview that she referred to her as the "anti-Frida") she tells me that her first introduction to Nahui was when she saw a portrait of her in January 1998 in The Orange County Weekly when she was still living in southern California. She was captivated by the portrait – her beautiful, fierce, thoroughly contemporary stare. "At first, I thought she was this riot grrl, in a band coming through town.” It turned out that the photo – Nahui Olin, 1924 – was actually for an article discussing a future Edward Weston photography exhibit in Laguna Beach. Felicia went to the Weston exhibit, and became even more fascinated with Nahui when she saw the actual photo in the exhibit. A former history major, Felicia tried to do some research into Olin but had difficulty finding information about her. She could only find passing references in other people's biographies of Frida Kahlo and Edward Weston. So, she began writing fictional accounts of her – many that would make its way into her first book, Trace Elements of Random Tea Parties. At the same time, Felicia’s discovered two new biographies about Olin and soon realized that Nahui Olin was as equally fascinating as her photograph. A talented poet and painter, Nahui was also a child prodigy - in 1924, her childhood diaries would be published as a book: A Dix Ans Sur Mon Pupire (From My Desk, at 10). But most of all it was clear to Felicia that had Nahui been alive now, her art would have been understood and appreciated, whereas in the 1920s, her significant body of work was mostly written off due to her transgressive behavior. The “real” Nahui made her way into Like Son.

Felicia tells me that before she saw Nahui's photo she was planning on becoming a school teacher and writing was not really a large part of her life (although Felicia received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2000). But then Nahui led her to New York, where she published her first novel. Shortly after, she would lead the kind of real, true-to-life, writer's life that so many covet, attending Writing Festivals in Jamaica, heading out on book tours, and even a teaching gig at the The New School.

The portrait that inspired the book – and Felicia career – is featured on Like Son's jacket cover. Because I'm an editorial assistant and know how expensive requesting permission to use photos and music lyrics in novels can be, I ask Felicia how difficult it was to obtain permission to use the photo, which obviously, had to be the photo on the cover of this book. She laughs. "We were really worried about that! I knew that the great Sandra Cisneros had used a Weston photo on a cover of her book. But…she is the great Sandra Cisneros. Johnny [my editor] told me to just give it a try and lucky for us, it turned out rights were with a small company in Arizona. They were very supportive and granted us permission to use the photo."

In New York, Felicia also found romance with a writer--T. Cooper. They share an East Village apartment with a bathroom decorated with semi-ironic Christ paraphernalia, and lots of collections (as mentioned, unicorns and sparkly pens being the current fixations). When I ask if it is difficult to live with another writer (especially with a writer who also shares the same editor, Johnny Temple) she tells me it is no problem at all. "We have a railroad apartment," she says. "My desk is at one end of the apartment and T's desk is at another." She tells me that often their schedules are so different that they aren't even writing at the same time.

I ask Felicia if she was living in the East Village at the time of 9/11 – like Frank and Nathalie in the book – and we begin to talk about her conflict about including 9/11 at all in the novel. "Many writers I know," I tell her, "feel a responsibility to talk about it but also feel fearful about talking about it too early." She nods. "This is something I thought a lot about. I even tried to revise the book, at one point, so that it did not include 9/11. But then, because the book was set at such a specific time period and place, it would seem unnatural to omit it. And Nathalie and Frank sleep through it," she points out. "They don't even realize it happened until after the fact."

In another interview, I read that she felt that growing up Mexican but looking white offered her an interesting perspective on life. She had said (in a Bookslut interview): "people reveal a side of themselves that they wouldn't necessarily reveal all their lives, like they wouldn't have said certain things in a polite conversation had they known I was Mexican." I ask her if this helps her with her writing and with getting inside characters who are radically different from herself. She pauses for a moment. "I think all writers have different points of entry into their writing and yes, I do think that this is definitely my way."

At that point, my new fancy iPod recording device dies. (Felicia kindly points out that it seems to happen just as The Cure begins blasting in the coffee shop). And with our conversation waning, our coffee mugs dry, I sign off. We shake hands goodbye, and I step out into the hot, humid, summer evening, trying to piece together Felicia Luna Lemus’ many obsessions.

Jennifer Bassett works in book publishing, is a Senior Editor for Swink magazine, Contributing Editor for KGB Bar Lit, and really likes playing her Farfisa VIP 345 Organ.

Felicia Luna Lemus is the author of two novels, Like Son (Akashic Books, 2007) and Trace Elements of Random Tea Parties (FSG, 2003). She teaches writing at The New School and lives in the East Village of Manhattan. For more information visit her website: felicialunalemus.com.

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Believer Interview

Jess deCourcy Hinds: Can you describe what you first felt looking at Mann's photographs? Can you remember the exact moment when you thought, "I have to write about this"?

Dani Shapiro: I do remember the exact moment, which was long after I first became obsessed with the work of Sally Mann. After Family History came out, I was in that worrisome state of casting about for ideas for a new novel, and nothing was really taking hold. I had a couple of characters floating around in my mind, an estranged mother and daughter forced to deal with each other after the mother falls ill—but the idea didn’t have enough guts for me, it felt obvious and familiar and too domestic—all things I try to shy away from when starting a novel. But I couldn’t quite let go of these characters either. And then, one day, while I was in the car driving from my house in Connecticut into New York City (many of my ideas come to me in the car) I had what pretty much amounts to a eureka moment: I realized that the mother was a photographer who had taken a series of provocative nude photographs of the daughter as a child. Hence the estrangement. And Sally Mann—who I think had always occupied some small space in my head since I first saw her work in Immediate Family in 1990—came glaringly into focus. My first thought was, hasn’t someone told this story before? I thought about Ann Beattie’s Picturing Will and Kathryn Harrison’s novel Exposure, both of which dealt with photographers and their children. I immediately re-read both books and, to my relief, I realized they had nothing to do with the story I wanted to tell.

As for the first time I saw Mann’s work, it was probably 1989 or 1990—I had a boyfriend at the time who was beginning to collect photography and I saw her photographs of her children at The James Danziger Gallery. I was stunned by the power and the provocative, complicated beauty of the images. I identified with the children, I think, particularly with Jessie, her oldest daughter, who had a preternatural precociousness that I think I also had as a little girl. I was immeasurably moved and wanted to own a print of “Candy Cigarette”, which—interestingly enough—is one of the few images in which Jessie is clothed. But unfortunately I couldn’t afford it.

JDH: Do you often get ideas for stories through images, or do your story ideas usually come from a more verbal place?

DS: I think my ideas almost always come through images, and through something else—something hard to describe. Joan Didion once described that feeling, that knowledge that she would have to write about something as “the shimmer around the edges”. That sums it up for me, that ping – that feeling that something has exited the material world for me and has entered another realm in which it is available to me.

JDH: I've certainly read good books about angry children and angry parents before, but no author explores anger with the psychological complexity you do in Black & White, Family History, and Slow Motion. Even your piece from Story in 1993 explores anger—a mother irritates a daughter by intruding on her while she's getting a bikini wax. What are your thoughts on anger?

DS: I’ll resort to another favorite quote. Edward Albee once said this: “For the anger and rage to work aesthetically, the writer’s got to distance himself from it and write in what Frank O’Hara referred to in one of his poems as ‘the memory of my feelings.’ Rage is incoherent. Observed rage can be coherent.” I’ve thought of that quote often, over the years. You can substitute pretty much any intense emotion there—grief, elation, heartbreak, desire—and it’s true that it is impossible to write out of the immediacy. One of the main reasons Black & White is written in the third person (it’s my first novel that is not narrated in the first person) is because I knew that I needed to have the narrative distance to take a step back from Clara’s understandable rage at her mother, and be able to have a small measure of omniscient sympathy for Ruth. Or perhaps an authorial sympathy. Black & White is my first novel in which I felt I had a kind of removed, beneficent, almost God-like view of all of my characters. Otherwise, the book would have risked being a daughterly rant.

I’m glad you brought up that short story, “The Way Women Laugh”, which was published a long time ago in Story Magazine. It was, by my estimation, my first decent story. Talk about the shimmer around the edges—that story was borne out of a moment when my own mother did in fact walk into a room in a spa where I was getting a bikini wax. If you’re a writer, and your mother walks in on your bikini wax, you’re pretty much gonna write about it. I was blessed with a mother who gave me tremendously good fodder as a writer. She was a difficult mother in almost every other way, but she supplied me with many years worth of material—which is probably how I managed my own rage toward her. You might even say that I turned her into my muse—the way Ruth turns Clara into hers. Though nakedness in writing and nakedness in image-making are completely different animals. As is taking on one’s mother—versus taking on one’s daughter.

JDH: I was able to respect Ruth as an artist—she was really ruthless (excuse the pun) and her focus and tenacity were admirable. Did her artistic seriousness help you feel sympathetic towards her?

DS: I only realized the pun in Ruth’s name after I finished the book! The ruthlessness of artists is something I think about a great deal. And certainly Ruth’s seriousness enabled me to connect with her. I felt for her, even though I found her choices monstrous. What does an artist do when she finds her true subject matter—and that subject matter is her own child?

JDH: How have your feelings about Mann’s photography changed since becoming a mother?

DS: After the birth of my own son (he’s now eight) I revisited Mann’s work and saw it very differently. I also was affected by the realization that the photographs had been staged. They clearly weren’t snapshots—captured moments. That idea had eluded me before. I hadn’t been looking at the images from the perspective of wondering how they had been shot. But I found myself mulling over the idea that these images had been set up, lit. A child had been asked to take her clothes off. To pose nude.

JDH: What have been some of the more surprising or interesting reactions so far from readers of Black & White?

DS: I’ve been surprised by the vehemence of some of the responses, though I guess I shouldn’t be. Some readers have been finding Ruth so profoundly narcissistic that they have no sympathy whatsoever for her. Others find her quite human and tragic as a character. I read a wonderful bit of Proust recently, where he describes every reader as the “reader of his own self”. So, in a sense, I think any given reader’s relationship to his or her own parents probably plays in a very visceral way into the response. I’ve also been accused, by one critic, of “gunning for Sally Mann”. That surprised me, because though the work of Ruth Dunne is very much inspired by Mann’s work, Ruth is in no way similar to Sally Mann, either in her biographical details or in the trajectory of her life.

JDH: You were an actress and model before you pursued a writing career. Would you say those experiences of being behind the camera helped you understand how Clara would feel when photographed by her mother?

DS: In one, very specific way, I suppose that my early experiences as a child model played into my understanding of Clara. When I was a little kid, I was part of two very public ad campaigns—the first was when I was nine months old and I was the baby in the Beechnut Baby Food commercials. This, obviously, I don’t consciously remember at all. But then when I was three, I became the Kodak Christmas poster child and I do have some memory of that shoot. I think I understood on some level that it was important—that a lot was riding on it. And that probably helped me to understand Clara’s sense of hyper-awareness that something big was happening when she was in front of the camera.

JDH: Slow Motion, your bestselling memoir, was the first book of yours I read—and I was absolutely blown away by it. And I wonder if one reason it was a bestseller was because so many of us serve in roles as caregivers to ill relatives, and these roles aren't recognized or appreciated by society. I think America's optimism, our "can do" attitude also makes this a difficult, lonely place to be sick and be a caregiver…People are starved for honest stories about tragedy; so that's why I think your book strikes such a chord with people. Do you agree? What were some other responses from readers?

DS: I think the key word in your question is honesty. People are starved for honest stories, stories in which the teller, or the writer, isn’t puffing themselves up or making more (or less) out of something that happened to them, but rather, trying to lay it out in all its bare truthfulness, without regard for how he or she will be judged. I found a way, while working on Slow Motion, to really almost willfully not think about people eventually reading it. I told myself that I could change my mind about publishing it. That I could always pull it back. And by doing so, I enabled myself to take risks that I otherwise might not have taken. I wasn’t interested in protecting myself—I was interested in telling a story as truthfully as I could.

JDH: I also wanted to ask about the subtitle, A Life Rescued by Tragedy. This grabbed me at the bookstore, but after I read the book I wasn't sure if it completely captured the book for me. Do you mind if I ask whether the subtitle was your idea, or your publisher's?

DS: I’m so glad you’re asking that question! I HATE that subtitle. I absolutely detest it and I always have. I allowed my publisher to talk me into it. The hardcover of Slow Motion was published simply with the subtitle: A True Story. That was mine—I preferred it to memoir. And when the paperback came out, my paperback publisher convinced me that readers needed something more to go on. (And you did say it grabbed you at the bookstore, so perhaps in that one sense they were right.) But I have now had to live with that subtitle for the past eight or nine years and it makes me cringe every time I see it. Mostly because the neatness and tidiness—not to mention hyper-self-awareness—that it imposes on my book has nothing to do with the book I wrote.

JDH: I couldn’t agree more. You know, there's something so delicious about the idea of being rescued, but I’m also wary of the idea. "Rescue" is a word used to describe women more than men—princesses are rescued in fairy tales. If we can’t be rescued by tragedy, do you think we can be rescued by happy things—love, children, success? In a way, your memoir also explores being "rescued" by literature and writing.

DS: I think I believe much more in being rescued by literature and writing than the silly idea of being rescued by tragedy. Great art has the power to redeem. And I am certain that becoming a writer did, in fact, save me. It gave me a way to shape my history, to organize it mentally, psychologically, emotionally, and ultimately creatively. Becoming a writer has allowed me access to my own inner life in a way that I don’t think anything else—including years of therapy—possibly could have. Tragedy—on the other hand—is simply that. Tragic. And the idea of being rescued by it is again way too neat and tidy—as is being rescued by the happier things you mention: family, success. The real rescue is much deeper and inward than anything that can be quantified on the outside.

JDH: I enjoyed some of your shorter work on your website, particularly your story in One Story and your piece in the New Yorker about a pregnant girl at her high school prom. I'm wondering if you wouldn't mind sharing the initial germ of an idea that led to you write either of these stories. And, when writing the New Yorker piece, did you intentionally visit a prom as a reporter, or did you just happen to observe the scene and take notes?

DS: The germ of the idea for “The Six Poisons”, which was published in One Story came from running into someone I didn’t want to see in a yoga class. It happened a couple of years before I actually sat down to write the story, but the moment stayed with me, and I found myself thinking about playing out a whole relationship, a whole history against the backdrop of a yoga retreat. The holistic contrasted with the human. A chance to explore the limits of new age wisdom. And that particular New Yorker piece, about the prom, happened in a funny way: I was sitting on my stoop in Brooklyn, where I lived at the time, and my neighbor, who was a teacher at a city high school, stopped by and started telling me about some of the dramas surrounding that evening’s prom. I thought it would make a great “Talk of the Town” piece, so I ran inside and called my editor. She gave me the go-ahead and I went. So yes, I did visit the prom as a reporter. All of my “Talk of the Town” pieces were entered into as a reporter.

JDH: You recently became a contributing editor at Travel + Leisure. How does working on a magazine feed your creativity as a writer? How does travel? Any trips planned this summer?

DS: I’ve tended to write magazine pieces over the years in between writing books. This Travel + Leisure thing is slightly different for me in that I’m producing their back page each month, interviewing an interesting person on the subject of his or her favorite place. I do find that really fascinating—to be able to delve into why a particular place has meaning or resonance. The first back page I did was with a close friend, Milos Forman, who chose The National Theatre in Prague—where he was about to direct a play—his lifelong dream. I've also profiled Jamie Lee Curtis, Jonathan Lethem, Angelika Taschen, and Nora Ephron—who chose Las Vegas and totally made me want to go. That woman can convince anyone of anything.

As for travel, I don’t know that it directly feeds my work, but certainly it opens up my head. My husband and I, along with Hannah Tinti from One Story, recently started a writers’ conference in Positano, Italy at a gorgeous hotel there. It’s called Sirenland and we’re planning to run it each March. And one of the glorious side benefits for me is that it allows us to know that at least once a year we’ll get out of the country.

JDH: That sounds lovely….To change topics completely: You were once quoted saying "Research is a euphemism for procrastination." Tell me more about this. What are some ways you prepare to write a book if you're not doing conventional research?

DS: What I meant by that was that writers—myself included—can decide in the middle of a book, or a story, that suddenly they need to know everything about a particular tree that grows on a particular island in a particular climate—and can spend the rest of the day bopping around the internet in search of a single detail. Sometimes this is necessary—sometimes it’s useful—but I’ve found, for myself, that most of the time my imagination does a better job of creating a cohesive narrative than any amount of research that accumulates a bunch of facts. It’s also my experience that writers who spend a lot of time accumulating facts then feel like they have to use them, otherwise they really would have been wasting time. Sometimes, when you’re reading along in a novel and you stub your toe against some random detail, some random fact and wonder what it’s doing there—mostly likely it’s there because the writer spent a day finding it.

As for preparing to write a book, I try to keep in mind something Grace Paley once said in a workshop at Sarah Lawrence. She told us that she wrote in the bathtub. At the time, I thought she meant that she literally climbed into the bath with a notepad and pen. Years later, I realized what she meant. She meant that she took baths. We need that dreamy time. That ruminating, quiet time that allow ideas, places, characters, a voice to emerge—like the eureka moment I had in the car about Sally Mann and the character of Ruth Dunne. So I guess that the best preparation, for me, is to find a way to get very quiet and listen. I also read a lot. I re-read Virginia Woolf, who is a tonic for me. I read books that take narrative risks and are full of thrilling language. I try to remind myself that these books, too, began with a writer taking that leap of faith of first setting pen to the blank page.

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Interview with Gayle Brandeis

Scott Esposito: Jamestown's world is very violent, so violent in fact that it often feels cartoonish. Maybe its best summed up by the observations of one of your main characters, bus-rider and slacker skeptic Johnny Rolfe, who says "Some great, quaint pre-annihilation philosopher described the movement of history as thesis, antithesis, synthesis, whereas I've seen a lot more thesis, antithesis, steak knife, bread knife." Why are things so violent?

Matthew Sharpe: Because they were and are. The Jamestown settlement was a fertile ground for the flowering of man’s inhumanity to man: English against Indians, Indians against English, English against English, Indians against Indians. But especially English against Indians. The settlers decimated the locals, commandeered their land, kidnapped, tortured, and killed them. The English thought their God was better than the Indians’, thought their skin and clothes and civilization were better. And England’s foreign policy in the early 17th century bears a striking resemblance to ours now: extract the foreigners’ resources, save them with our superior values, kill them with our superior weapons, and do it all with breathtaking incompetence.

SE: With all this violence, is there an element of trying to shock people, trying to snap at them a little and get them to pay more attention?

MS: We live in a violent nation. We are purveyors of violent art, especially our movies. As the writer Maggie Nelson has said, there is a difference between showing violence as spectacle and writing about it. One thing novels are really well suited to is illuminating via language the texture of consciousness. So what does it feel like to be a sentient, conscious being—to be matter that is aware of itself—and to perpetrate or come to bodily harm? That was a question I was asking while writing Jamestown; representing the intimate experience of historical violence is one of the tasks I set myself in this novel.

SE: At one point a character remarks "I accommodate, therefore I am but briefly," which sort of updates Descartes' "I think, therefore I am." Would you say that this is indicative of the separation between our world and Jamestown's?

MS: I don’t think I know if I’d be if I didn’t think. I do know that I’ve observed time and again that the qualities and values a civilization professes to hold most dear are not necessarily the ones possessed in abundance by its most powerful citizens—witness Bush, Cheney, Rove, Steinbrenner. The Indian gentleman in my novel who utters the remark you quoted above is dying when he says it, and he’s dying because he’s too nice a guy, too accommodating of the wishes and needs of a colonist, in this case. He suspects he might’ve survived had he been more of an asshole. I suspect it of him too.

SE: The reason the Manhattanites head south is that Brooklyn and Manhattan are at war, and Manhattan is hoping to get the upper hand by finding increasingly rare oil. Toward the end of the novel the two sides meet to have a peace negotiation. Almost immediately they start bickering and Manhattan notes that Brooklyn's "increased violence and frequency of your recent attacks is a sign of your desperation." Is it just a coincidence that this sounds almost exactly like the Bush administration's rhetoric regarding the war in Iraq?

MS: No.

SE: Toward the end of the novel you take a time out to list the names of everyone who died in it. Why was it important to list the names of the dead?

MS: For the same reason it is important to honor each soldier and citizen who’s given his or her life in Iraq and Afghanistan. Can you imagine if we could imagine the interrupted lives of each Iraqi who’s died in this war? What a wonderful world it would be.

SE: Although the book is set in the near future, it closely follows the events that took place at the historical founding of Jamestown in 1607. Center-stage here are Indian/English relations and the love affair between Johnny Rolfe and Pocahontas. What about the founding of Jamestown made you want to use it as the structure of your novel?

MS: The events of the Jamestown settlement constitute a foundational myth of our nation. We model ourselves on and live through myths and rely on them to justify our actions.

SE: Was structuring it around historical fact useful as a writing constraint, especially since in many ways this novel seems to defy limits?

MS: Yes. The model of improvisatory music comes to mind. Jazz musicians may use the harmonic structure of, say, “All of Me” to create a new melody for “All of Me.” Not that I regard historical fact (is there such a thing, by the way?) as merely a writing constraint.

SE: You've called Jamestown an "ahistorical fantasia," which I think means you've taken real elements of our history and applied them to a fantasy that occurs during an indeterminate historical point. First, do you have a definition of "ahistorical fantasia," and second, do any particular influences or reasons stand out as helping you decide to write the novel this way?

MS: “Ahistorical fantasia” would take as many words to define as are in the novel itself. Reasons for writing one I hope I’ve at least partly enumerated above. Influences include Henry Darger, Jimi Hendrix’s version of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” The America Play by Suzan-Lori Parks, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, Richard III and King Lear by William Shakespeare.

SE: In addition to "ahistorical fantasia" I think I would label this book, "hysterical realism." James Wood, who coined the term, has been rather vocal against this genre. Among the problems with it, he says it combines "the boredom that always attends upon cartoonish" with "rather old-fashioned, straightforward realism." Would you consider Jamestown hysterical realism?

MS: I don’t remember what James Wood’s definition of hysterical realism is but I do remember he used the term as a dis (though I gather you don’t mean it that way), so no, I don’t think I’m writing hysterical realism. I didn’t set out to write in an already existing mode or style. I improvised and wrote according to my interests, proclivities, and moods.

SE: The book begins with a long section of alternating chapters of narration from Rolfe and Pocahontas. Each chapter begins with an opening like "To whoever is out there reading this" and sounds reminiscent of MySpace or LiveJournal blog entries. How did you come to use this format to narrate the time leading up to the meeting of the Indians and whites?

MS: I’m not an authority here, but I think it’s possible the people you call the whites are not all whites. And I think the “blogging to no one” feature of the opening section might be seen as a metaphor for the possibility, in any communication, that one’s intended message will not be got by its intended recipient, as you suggest with your next question.

SE: Communication and its failings is a big theme here. Do you think there's a contradiction in a novelist writing a novel that examines the failure of words?

MS: Yes. I meant to do that.

SE: Jamestown also makes liberal use of Internet communication technologies—blogs, email, and instant messaging. What possibilities do these mediums open up for you, as a novelist?

MS: I think a novel is a good medium in which to represent language use. Any way that language gets deployed in the world—any form of speech or writing—can make its way into a novel. One way to try to make sense of contemporary life in a novel is to have that novel swallow and digest contemporary forms of language use, which now include the argot of blogs, email, and IM’s.

SE: Are there other writers that you think have been using them well?

MS: In The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami gets at the irreducible feeling of remoteness and apartness that inheres in email.

SE: At one point Pocahontas laments her decreasing straightforwardness, saying "I used to always speak my mind in my own language too but that's getting harder the older I get." How do you think Pocahontas's emphasis on speaking her mind separates her from the other characters, who tend to court duplicity to various degrees?

MS: Pocahontas understands perhaps more consistently than some of the other characters that language doesn’t only describe the world, it also is a part of it and causes things to happen in it.

SE: Despite the miscommunication in this novel, there's also an awareness of certain things that we all understand. For instance, at one point Rolfe notes "decrepitude is egalitarian." Would you say that this kind of basic, shared stuff is essential for linguistic communication?

MS: I don’t know. I’ve tried to communicate with non-human animals, with trees, with rocks and machines, and sometimes I think they’ve tried to communicate with me. The results have been even more uncertain than communications with humans.

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Salon.com Review
Village Voice Feature

Scott Esposito's work has been published in the San Francisco Chronicle, The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Rain Taxi Review of Books, Boldtype, and The Chattahoochee Review, among others. He hosts the literary blog Conversational Reading and edits The Quarterly Conversation.

McGhee spoke with me from her home in Minneapolis, where she lives with her family.

Mary Phillips Sandy: I read an interview in which you said that this book started when Joseph came to you and told you to write about him – is that typical for you, that books start with a character demanding attention?

Alison McGhee: No, this was the only time that’s ever happened to me. I blame myself, really, because I was being melodramatic. I’d been a couple of months without a real focus in my work, and that’s a kind of hell for me. I pretended I was Job. I spread my arms to the universe and said, “Give me something to write about!” Then this boy just leaped into my mind. He was sitting in the wheelchair and he looked up at me, his hands were on the wheels. He said – he swore at me, but I won’t say that for the interview. He said, “What, you can’t write about me?”

And I really didn’t want to. I’m not a boy; I’m not a teenage boy. I don’t know what it’s like to get through life using a wheelchair. I felt intimidated by the whole idea of it, but he truly would not leave me alone. I wound up putting years into the work and figuring out what he wanted.

MPS: How long did it take you, from that initial conversation with Joseph to the end of the book?

AM: It took about three years, from the very beginning image, to beginning to figure out who these people were, and the setting, and the research and drafting and drafting and revising and revising. Three years.

MPS: Sounds like it was quite a challenge. Was there ever a point where you wanted to throw in the towel, tell the kid in the wheelchair to go away and leave you alone?

AM: Yes! I wanted to do that quite a bit, especially the first six months. But then I realized, you know, in for a penny, in for a pound. I just followed him through, and he was- it was a difficult book to write. He did not want to reveal himself to me, much the way he is in the book itself. I had to be gentle and work and keep teasing out information from him.

MPS: Many of your books are written for kids or teenagers, or are focused on them. Is there something that keeps bringing you back to the world of kids?

AM: That’s a good point. Many of my books – even if they’re designed for adult readers – will feature a child as a main character. Usually those characters are teenagers, older teens like Joseph, or a nine to eleven year old girl. I’m not sure why I return to that, other than that it feels so visual to me, so powerful, those particular ages. As a writer, or as a human being I suppose, I don’t feel as if I’m any particular age. I don’t feel as if I’m only a woman in my forties. I feel as if I’m all the ages I ever was. Those specific times of life are very, very intense, and I can tap into the emotion and intensity of those times without even thinking about it. Maybe that’s why I’m always drawn to it.

MPS: Plus you can talk about superheroes in a way that grownups rarely do.

AM: Superheroes are so cool. When I was a little girl, I put myself to sleep almost every night by making up adventures where I was Batman’s companion. We were saving the world together.

MPS: There’s a real sense of freedom in reading about a world in which adults exist on the periphery, and the adults who are there don’t understand anything. They’re just an impediment to the action. It made me think of all these books I loved when I was younger, like Pippi Longstocking.

AM: Or Harriet the Spy.

MPS: Or Harriet! What other books did you read as a young person that still influence you now?

AM: Perhaps the most influential book of all was My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George. That’s the one about a boy who leaves his family in the city, and he goes and lives on a mountain on his own. He tans his own deerskin, he’s completely self-sufficient. That was enormously influential. Another that I read over and over was Heidi, the original Heidi where she makes her way up the mountain to her grandfather. That sense of the outdoors, the wilderness, and being out in the sun and the rain and the wind and the woods, that’s always been really influential in my writing.

MPS: You grew up in the Adirondacks.

AM: Yes, I did.

MPS: I was wondering if Joseph’s terrible homesickness for the Adirondacks, as he’s sitting there in the Midwest, mirrors your own longing for the place you grew up.

AM: It absolutely does. Falling Boy is the first book I’ve ever written that I have been able to set in Minneapolis, which is the city I’ve lived in for twenty years. I am such a landscape-bound person. The land where I grew up, those foothills of the Adirondacks, is so in my bones. It had always, up until now, felt like the only place I could truly root my characters. Something shifted in me a couple of years ago. I suddenly realized that Minneapolis had gotten into my heart and soul, too, and once I felt that sense of love for this place, I was able to set Falling Boy here. And yet, Joseph moved to Minneapolis from upstate New York... so he does mirror my journey.

MPS: Are you planning on setting more books in Minneapolis now that you know you can write about it? The setting in Falling Boy was very evocative, your use of the place names and streets and playgrounds. I’ve never been there, but I really felt the sense of that place.

AM: Oh, that’s good to hear. Yes, in fact, I have a little novel for children coming out next summer that is set again in this exact place. It also features Zap and Enzo, nine years after Falling Boy.

MPS: They come back?

AM: They come back! Enzo lives with Zap in an apartment that’s just above the apartment of the main character, who’s a little girl who’s nine.

MPS: She does? That’s great. I’m so glad she gets to live with Zap.

AM: I know, I know. I love Zap, isn’t he just a perfect human being?

MPS: He is. He reminds me of so many gentle, hippie boys I’ve encountered, the boys who put things in their hair.

AM: He’s sort of based on my older child, my son, who juggles constantly, who has that long hair whipping around his face. I think in some ways he was the inspiration for Zap.

MPS: I was going to ask that. You have kids of your own?

AM: I do, I have a son who’s sixteen and daughters who are fourteen and eleven.

MPS: Do they like your books?

AM: They don’t read many of them, actually. They read the picture books. My son has read Falling Boy, and he did like it. He’s read a couple of the others, but the girls haven’t read them [laughs]. Which is- I think, probably, they’ve just grown up in this book world, so it’s no big deal to them.

MPS: That’s very funny. Falling Boy is dedicated to “Luke O’Brien, whose unexpected answer to my superhero question gave me the pivotal perspective from which I wrote the book.” Can I ask what that question and answer was?

AM: Luke is my son. As I was trying to feel out the book, I knew that it had something to do with superheroes. So I began asking kids, mostly the ones who pass in and out of my house, “what do you think is the essential characteristic of a superhero?” Most of the answers were, “a cape!” You know. “Duh, a cape!” Or, “they have to fly,” or “they have to rescue someone,” “they have to save the world,” “they have to have some special superpower,” blah blah blah. None of it was what I was looking for. I wasn’t even sure what I was looking for.

Then I asked my son, Luke. “What, in your opinion, is the essential characteristic of a superhero?” And he said, “a supervillain.” He said it so quickly- there was something in the way he said it that let me know that the key to the book was in that answer somehow. As I kept working on the book I realized that his answer was, in a way, the great truth and the great sorrow of the book. Which is that if there are no supervillains, then there can be no superheroes. So the adults, as ineffectual as they are, are not supervillains. Joseph’s mother, who’s portrayed as this supervillain, is not a supervillain.

So therefore Enzo’s great quest to find a superhero who will rescue her from this life she doesn’t care for is in vain. What we have, in the end, is our ordinariness. We have to find the heroism in that. And that’s what the book seemed to be about to me, ultimately. It was encapsulated in that little, one word answer.

MPS: That was something that occurred to me as I was reading Falling Boy. At Enzo’s age, it’s such a vivid time, and everything seems like good and bad. Good versus evil. The whole crux of growing up is realizing that nothing is quite good and nothing is quite evil.

AM: Exactly. And there’s a lot of sorrow in that.

MPS: You talked a little about your next book. What is the title?

AM: The next one is for children, younger children, and it is called Julian Julian and the Art of Knowing. That comes out next summer from Scholastic.

MPS: Anything else on the horizon that you might want people to know about?

AM: There are several other picture books coming. The book that came out the same week as Falling Boy, in fact, is called Someday. That is a book that is very near and dear to my heart, the way Falling Boy is. That’s a picture book that I think of as a picture book for grownups. It’s about the hopes and dreams and love and devotion between a parent and a child.

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Alison McGhee has won the Minnesota Book Award four times and has been a finalist for the award an additional three times. She is the author of NBC Today Show Book Club selection Shadow Baby, Rainlight, and Was It Beautiful? She also writes books for young adults and children, including the novels Snap, All Rivers Flow to the Sea, and the New York Times bestseller A Very Brave Witch. Her picture book Someday was released by Simon & Schuster in March 2007.

Mary Phillips-Sandy grew up in Waterville, Maine, where she was a co-founder and assistant director of the Maine International Film Festival. She now lives in Brooklyn and is the editor of RuinedMusic.com. She also performs with DraculaZombieUSA East Coast Annex (Serious Business Records).

Cara Seitchek: In “Justice Shiva Ram Murthy,” you are writing in a male point of view. How difficult was it to write from the point of view of a different sex and age?

Rishi Reddi: It wasn’t too difficult to write from a different point of view. In fact, sometimes I find it harder to write in a point of view that is closer to my own. If it’s too close, you find you can’t let your imagination soar as much.

CS: Justice Murthy’s pain at discovering that he ate beef is so real. Did the story have its origins in an incident from your own life?

RR: The idea for this story came from a small newspaper article – one of those six line stories on the side of the page. An Indian Hindu man had sued a fast food establishment because he had eaten French fries made with animal fats instead of vegetable oil. The judge threw the case out, but the man clearly was involved in the outcome and pursued this as far as he could. I first imagined my character as a young man in his 20s, but I changed it to someone more set in his ways and ornery.

CS: You capture the dislocation and disorientation of a new immigrant like Justice Murthy strongly. Is this drawn from your own experiences as you moved so frequently in your childhood?

RR: Experiences like these are par for the course for a new immigrant, but I think everyone, at some time, is looking for home. Everyone experiences this dislocation in some way at some time in your life – whether you’re in your twenties or an adult, sometimes you just don’t feel right about your current situation, so you go in search of home. All humans go through this experience of searching for home, and I think it’s a strong image that connects all the stories.

CS: In “Lakshmi and the Librarian,” you break one of those “rules” of writing – you shift points of view from Lakshmi to Mr. Filian’s. Was this deliberate or just how the story evolved as you wrote it?

RR: This was the first story I completed and when it was first workshopped in a writing class, the teacher noticed the point of view shift and said it was justified, and therefore not bound by this rule. I wanted to look at Lakshmi through the filter of the librarian’s eyes so we could see this woman as he did. So I learned if you are going to break the rules, you have to have a reason to do so.

CS: Also, in this story you use the present tense, while you use the past tense in the other stories. Why did you choose a different tense to tell this story?

RR: I didn’t use the present tense on purpose, but it did make the story more immediate. It was a way to get into the story as a writing exercise. Actually, I think you lose something when you don’t write in the past tense – you lose a sense of time passing and the freedom of working in the narrative voice. Past tense is a roomier voice than the present voice. I think the present tense is a little more hip and a bit flatter.

CS: How did the Bonsai tree come to be in the story? It seems like the perfect symbol for family tradition and endurance and other themes in the story.

RR: My husband and I were traveling in Montreal and went to a botanical garden, where we saw this whole collection of beautiful bonsais. And I wanted to put one in a story – there was just something about them that felt right to me. They seem fragile and small but they are just as hardy as any tree.

CS: My favorite phrase in the book is “talons of tradition”, which underlies your stories and describes so many of the situations that your characters find themselves in. Do you, yourself, feel these talons as well?

RR: That phrase was pull quote in The New Yorker and it never struck me until I saw it there. And then it made sense to me. Those talons of tradition really reverberate in Indian culture. There’s a real irony in that people travel abroad from India to give their children the best of everything, but they are attached to centuries of traditions. Indians in India don’t need to put the fences up against other cultures, so while they progress and develop, Indians abroad are more traditional and more tied to traditions from the 1950s. As a second generation Indian, what is Indian to my parents is the India of the 1960s and 1970s, which doesn’t relate to what Indians in India are thinking today.

CS: Some of your characters appear in more than one story. Did you deliberately connect the stories through these characters or did they just appear as you wrote?

RR: The characters re-appearing just happened on their own. I was working on “Karma” and going to “Bangles” and I realized I needed a snooty character. Since Prakash had already appeared, I just thought he needed to come over to the new story. And, when you think about it, how many Indian families could there be in Boston? Only so many, so it made sense that they would know each other. As I wrote more and more, some characters kept popping up.

CS: Does the order of the stories in the book reflect a specific order, whether chronological or the order in which you wrote them, or something totally different?

RR: My editor chose “Justice Shiva Ram Murthy” to start the book because the story has such a unique voice. We worked together on the order of the other stories. I felt that “Lakshmi and the Librarian” should go first because you meet a lot of characters in that story and the other stories are offshoots. We wanted “Devadasi” to go last but it was sort of sad, so we made it second to last, and then ended with “Lord Krishna” to provide some form of satisfaction. Of all the stories, I think “Bangles” is my favorite story.

CS: Do Lata and Luke, characters in the “Validity of Love” get back together? Some of the plot line in “Lakshmi and the Librarian” seems to suggest that they do.

RR: I hope they do. One of my friends feel like they don’t, but I think their relationship is more than a simple boy-girl relationship. I’d like to write about Lata as an older woman sometime and see what happens to her.

CS: In “Bangles,” Arundhati feels disconnected from her family and must eventually rely on the kindness of strangers. Was there a particular story or incident that inspired this story?

RR: This story came out of seeing a woman on the subway in Boston. She was an elderly Indian woman wearing a sari and her hair in a bun, and I thought it was great that she was out on her own, but there was something sad and lonely about her. Widows in the Indian culture are shoved aside and are no longer part of everyday life, and it’s quite sad.

CS: In the back of the book, you have listed several books that inspired you. Is there one book that perhaps has influenced you the most? Or is there one you thought about after this list was printed?

RR: You just don’t know what stays with you when you read something, but that awareness of literature stays with you. I do read the Brenda Ueland’s book, If You Want to Write, at least once a year. But lately I’ve been reading Edward P. Jones’ The Known World because it goes back in history and takes up a different dialect with great confidence. I’m writing a book set in the 1910s and 1920s, focusing on the first immigrants to this county and I find I lack confidence when writing back in time. I’ve also been reading The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai, which looks at the Indian Diaspora in the United States.

CS: Is there a particular character that you feel closest to? Or that you feel you might write about again?

RR: I really like Justice Murthy because he is so ornery. I also like Shankar in “Karma” and Lata, but I liked them all in some way – you have to if you are writing about them.

CS: Many characters are doctors or in medical school. Did you deliberately choose this profession for your characters because your father is a physician, or was this more of an unconscious choice?

RR: It was a very conscious choice – the group of Indian immigrants who came to the US in the 1960s and 1970s, all came to be doctors and engineers. In fact, I read some statistic that about one sixth of all physicians in the US are Indian.

CS: While most of your stories take place in Massachusetts, the last one, “Lord Krishna,” takes place in Kansas. Since you have lived in so many places, why did you choose Kansas to set this story in when you have so many other settings to draw from?

RR: It was more natural for the religious conflict in “Lord Krishna” to take place in a smaller town than Boston. It’s a fairly common experience for immigrants. I moved to Kansas when I was in high school, and I know that it is a hard place to move to. It all came together when I was writing the story to put my characters in that place.

CS: Indian dance and dance lessons were a thread that ran through many of your stories. Do you still take lessons in Bharata Natyam (one of the oldest forms of Indian dance)?

RR: I don’t dance – I looked into it when I was in my 20s and as a child, I enjoyed it. In college, I met people who had danced their whole lives, and there was a sense of loss that if I had lived somewhere else, then I might have been able to take dance lessons. I love Indian dancing as each one tells a story and they are very didactic.

Rishi Reddi has been an enforcement attorney for the state and federal environmental protection agencies, as well as a lawyer for the Massachusetts Secretary of Environment. Her short stories have appeared in The Harvard Review, Louisville Review, and Prairie Schooner, and her English translation of Telugu short fiction has appeared in Partisan Review. Her work has been featured in Best American Short Stories 2005 and received an honorable mention for the Pushcart Prize in 2004. Reddi was the recipient of an Individual Artist’s Grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She serves on the board of directors of South Asian American Leaders of Tomorrow (www.saalt.org).

After meeting at her KGB reading in February, Vendela and I corresponded over email about a number of topics, including: mothers in contemporary fiction, communication disconnects in her latest novel, and the threads of violence, forgiveness and travel, which are elegantly woven through her two slim, elegant novels.

Felicia C. Sullivan: Your first book, Girls on the Verge, investigated the rituals that help young American girls develop their adult identities. Through coming to terms with acts of violence, the characters in your two subsequent novels (And Now You Can Go, Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name) find themselves hunting for their identity. Can you speak to this thread that continues from your first book of non-fiction to your latest work? Do you believe that one's identity is inexplicably bound to or defined by one's origin?

Vendela Vida: I grew up in an immigrant household—my mother is Swedish, my father Hungarian—and neither of them had any knowledge that seemed relevant to my life as an adolescent growing up in San Francisco. I’m sure every teenager feels their parents’ advice is out of touch, but my parents definitely had foreign notions of how things were done (“When your friends come for your party on Friday night, you should wear a long hostess dress and a white apron"). I don’t mean to mock them, because I think they were and are very good parents and amazing people, but I left California, where I grew up, for the East Coast at the earliest opportunity.

When I was younger I tried hard to distinguish myself from my parents, but now that I’m a little older and have a family of my own, I find myself embracing my heritage. I think that’s a necessary part of figuring out who you are---abandoning the self you grew up with. I’m phrasing it that way deliberately: it’s not necessarily the person you were, but the person that everyone believed you were. Maybe that’s why travel is so important in both my novels—the characters have to divorce themselves from their familiar surroundings, and from people’s perceptions of them. Don’t get me wrong: Families and communities can be edifying, but sometimes other people’s perceptions can keep someone in a holding pattern.

FS: In your acknowledgments of Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name you mention Galen Strawson’s essay “Against Narrativity,” which made you curious “about the kind of person who would see their past as unconnected to their present,” and is the impetus for how your latest novel ultimately emerged. Your comment also reminded me of Woolf’s Moments of Being – for her, the past and present are inexplicably connected – there is little distinction between the two, rather they serve to constantly inform who we are. Can you talk a bit more about Strawson’s essay and how Northern Lights emerged?

VV: I edited an interview with Galen Strawson, a philosopher, for the first issue of the Believer. A year or so later, I came across an essay he’d written in the TLS called “Against Narrativity.” It’s about how most of us see our lives as a continuing narrative, but there’s a small percentage of people who don’t view anything they do now as being related to anything that’s happened in their past—Strawson calls these people “episodics.” I started imagining what kind of person could compartmentalize their lives like that, and came up with the character of Clarissa’s mother.

As someone who spends her life weaving together stories (even when I’m not physically writing), I consider myself a very narrative-minded person, so it was interesting to delve into the idea of what kind of person wouldn’t see their lives as a narrative. And even more challenging to try to create a narrative for someone who’s non-narrative. When Clarissa goes on her quest to find the truth about her identity, she’s trying to create a narrative of her life as well. (She and I would both agree with Woolf.)

FS: Speaking of weaving, or more specifically storytelling, I was reading an interview your gave where you said you were the kind of kid "who was making up stories and getting in trouble." Any anecdotes you want to share? Also, what were the kinds of stories you were writing as a kid/teenager?

VV: When I was 8 or 9, a friend came over to spend the night and I told a neighbor, a woman who happened to be very Catholic, that my friend’s parents’ had died in a terrible helicopter accident over the equator, and my parents were adopting my friend. I said all this while my friend was maybe 20 feet away. That night, the neighbor called my parents to tell them that she thought what they were doing was wonderful, and well…I remember having to apologize to the neighbor and to my friend, who was probably more confused than anybody.

The stories I wrote when I was young were very dark—I remember publishing one story in the school paper about a person’s secret self chasing their real self down a damp alley with a knife. This was in the fifth grade. But I was a really happy, well-adjusted kid so the stories just left everyone puzzled. One day my English teacher sat down with me to talk to me about my stories, and his reaction really amused me; I told him what another teacher had told me--that fiction shouldn’t be confused with autobiography. Basically, from the start, my writing has embodied a darkness that people can’t easily reconcile with my personality.

FS: I also read that your parents weren't big readers, but they had a library in their home filled with books purchased mainly at estate sales. What books fascinated you when you were younger and have your tastes dramatically changed as an adult? What are you reading now? What are your bookshelf mainstays?

VV: For some reason, I read a lot of W. Somerset Maugham when I was younger (around 10 or 11). I have no idea why. I don’t remember anything about his work except that the collection of his short stories we had was a two-volume set that fit neatly into a box, and I liked the feel of it in my hands.

Right now I’m traveling and have three books in my bag: Michael Chabon’s new novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Roberto Bolano’s The Savage Detectives, and Renata Adler’s Pitch Dark (someone recommended it to me after reading Northern Lights). My bookshelf mainstays are J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and A Heart So White by the Spanish writer Javier Marías.

FS: Switching gears, Olivia, Clarissa’s mother (who abandons her family and flees to Sweden), in Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, fascinates me. She evokes Ingrid of White Oleander, Elsie Fox of Borrowed Finery – mothers who don’t know how to be mothers, perhaps should never have been mothers. They practice self-preservation at the expense of their children. Towards the end of the novel, when Clarissa finally confronts Olivia, she asks, “Don’t you feel any obligation” when she really wants to know “Don’t you feel any love?” to which Olivia responds, “That was not my life. I had every reason to seek something else.” For Olivia, motherhood seemed like a piece of clothing one could easily discard. How did you come to create Olivia? This kind of mother figure?

VV: Well, Olivia’s character was definitely influenced by the Strawson essay, but by a few other factors as well. To some degree, I created Olivia in reaction to the mother in my first novel, And Now You Can Go. I love the mother in that novel; I love her strength and her sense of humor (both of which I based on characteristics of my mother). In many ways, the mother in And Now You Can Go tries to help Ellis, the protagonist, have greater perspective on the world, to not be so solipsistic. I think a lot of readers liked that mother, and I know for a long time people would say to my mother, “Are you as wonderful as the mother in your daughter’s book?” (“Yes,” she would answer.)

When I was starting Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, I knew I wanted to explore motherhood and its legacy through a different lens, a different sort of mother. I wanted the mother to disappear one day, and I wanted that disappearance to say something about her. Once I knew this would happen, I became really intrigued: what kind of mother would leave her daughter in a mall and never come back? What would have happened to that mother for her to do such a thing? In trying to answer those questions, I began to think about Olivia as someone who’d experienced a “split” in her life, a defining moment that changed her personality. And that reminded me of a friend I had when I was growing up whose mother had been raped. I’m not sure how my friend found out—she probably overheard conversations— and told me. But we were so young—eight or nine—that we couldn’t fully comprehend what rape was. We didn’t even know what sex was so how could we understand rape?

Although I was young, I could see a change in my friend’s mother after the incident. She wasn’t as exuberant, and her laughter, when it came, was very studied and sad. For a long time, I’ve known I wanted to write about a mother like this, in part to figure out the answers to questions I couldn’t ask her when I was young, and would never ask her now.

FS: My god, I couldn't even begin to imagine. Not only do you have a mother who has to deal with the aftermath of rape, but there's this tragic communication disconnect – her unable to really communicate to her daughter what she went through and how it's changed her, and her daughter, your friend, too young to really understand what any of this means. I can see that the inability to speak and the inability to understand might create a kind of unavoidable distance or fissure in a mother/daughter relationship.

Recently I saw a Korean horror movie – A Tale of Two Sisters (a movie about family secrets, violence and how memory ghosts) – where symbols of blindness (e.g. statues of children shielding their eyes with their hands) were a constant. And this put me to thinking about Jeremy, Clarissa’s mentally handicapped brother, a minor character, but one who has been unable to speak since birth. His only intermittent utterances are screams. Is there a connection to Jeremy and the larger themes of the book? Violent, unspeakable acts, a mother’s desire for solitude and secrecy but a daughter’s need for answers in her life filled with a continuum of communication breakdowns and disconnects?

VV: Definitely. One of the book’s themes (one that I was conscious of, that is) is the difficulty of communication, even between people who love each other. The novel begins with the death of Richard, the man who raised Clarissa, and her discovery that he wasn’t her real father; he was so close to her—did so much for her—but never told her the truth. And then there’s Pankaj, Clarissa’s fiancé, who’s been withholding information from her as well. He thinks he’s protecting her by keeping a secret from her, but I believe what we don’t tell people speaks volumes.

I had fun with the fact that Clarissa’s job is working as subtitler for foreign films—she’s supposed to clean up translated subtitles, and make them more accessible, more accurate. Yet she herself can’t even translate or make sense of the events that are transpiring around her.

I chose to make Jeremy mentally handicapped—and make it clear he’d never spoken—to underscore this theme of (non) communication. Clarissa’s so close to him, and yet she has no idea if he understands anything she’s trying to say to him. His non-verbalness was another exploration of the relationships Clarissa has that are unreciprocated.

Clarissa travels to Finland without knowing Finnish, so that obviously provides for a great deal of misunderstanding and unfinished sentences and hand gesturing. But the person she ends up communicating with the best is Anna Kristine, a Sami healer, who doesn’t speak a word of English. That was a deliberate choice on my part—to have the apex of communication in the book occur between two people who don’t speak a word of the other person’s language.

I think, as a writer, I’m acutely aware of the ways in which words can fail us.

FS: Mothers are sacred to us and they are wholly celebrated in much of contemporary fiction. Although there may be parental discord, in the end, there is reconciliation – mother and daughter made whole, abuse and pain are forgiven. But your book, for me, was different. Because although Clarissa seeks a reunion with her mother, wants to discover who her real father is, the confrontation between the two is not neat, redemptive. Rather, the story becomes more about Clarissa, her past and how it informs her identity as a woman and ultimately a mother. Has she, as her mother predicted her namesake, rewritten history?

VV: That’s a good question—and a complicated one. I don’t want to give away too much about the ending, but, in some ways, Clarissa does follow in her mother’s footsteps, and in other ways, she breaks away from the cycle of betrayal and parental neglect. I think I’m incapable of writing neat scenes between complicated characters—it feels false to me. I’d rather create endings that force the reader to ask questions of themselves than tie everything up with a pretty pink bow.

FS: Both Ellis in And Now You Can Go and Clarissa in Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name could be perceived as victims – one forced at gunpoint to hear a man contemplating suicide and the other abandoned by her mother – or perhaps not. Do you see these characters as victims? Or more apt, do these characters perceive themselves as victims?

VV: I don’t see either of them as victims. Do they see themselves as victims? Well, that’s a question that’s at the heart of And Now You Can Go: how grave was Ellis’s gunpoint encounter with the man in Riverside Park? Ellis ultimately refuses to play the part of victim. I do believe it’s a choice—whether you want to play the role or not. I think our society often gives people the easy way out, and the way out is to play the victim. We can blame drinking or our childhoods or…anything, really. I’m not very interested in the victim mentality when I’m writing; I think of fiction as the antithesis of easy psychological explanations. Thus, I can safely say that Clarissa doesn’t see herself as a victim either.

FS: I recently read that Northern Lights is the second book in a three-part series, where you're examining the themes of violence and forgiveness. Can you tell us about your new novel? Is it set in Turkey?

VV: Yes, the new novel is set off the coast of Turkey. It’s about a 50-year-old woman whose daughter has died of a drug overdose. I don’t want to say too much about it, not because I’m superstitious, but because I like to surprise myself when I’m writing, and not have the entire plot set in stone beforehand.

FS: You're quite a busy woman – a mother to an eighteen-month old, a writer, an editor, a teacher, a wife – what's a typical day for you like? And I ask this selfishly as a fellow multi-tasker: When do you get time to write?

VV: I really wish I were someone with a set schedule; I’m in awe of people with schedules. But every day is different. Some days I find myself working on the Believer from the moment I wake up until well after dinner; other days—usually weekends—I devote solely to spending time with my family. I try to write 750 words every day, and this usually happens at night. I’ve found that if I tell myself I need to write for X amount of hours a day, that ends up being a bust: I’ll just stare at my computer for three hours and then say, “Finished!” But setting a word count keeps me honest.

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Interview with Robert Birnbaum

Vendela Vida is the author of two novels, Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, which was published earlier this year, and And Now You Can Go. Her first book, Girls on the Verge—a journalistic study of female initiation rituals—grew out of her MFA thesis at Columbia University. Vida is a founding co-editor of the Believer magazine, the editor of The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers, and a board member and teacher at 826 Valencia, a non-profit youth writing lab.

Image Courtesy of Andy Rogers/PI