November 15, 2018 At Work Building a Monument: An Interview with Natasha Trethewey By Lauren LeBlanc Natasha Trethewey (photo: Nancy Crampton) Two-term national Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize–winner Natasha Trethewey was born in her mother’s hometown, Gulfport, Mississippi, on April 26, 1966. The daughter of Eric Trethewey and Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, an interracial couple who traveled from Kentucky to Ohio in order to be legally married, Trethewey shares her birthday with Confederate Memorial Day. I was previously unaware of the holiday, which is still celebrated across the South to commemorate the deaths of Confederate soldiers. Upon the inauguration of Barack Obama, pundits announced we had entered a postracial era. Roughly a decade later, it is easy to say that white supremacy is stronger than it’s been since the civil rights movement. Talking with Trethewey on the phone, we noted the different ways that signals and symbols of white supremacy—beyond the obvious statues and memorials—continue to stand in plain sight. We are both daughters of the Deep South, and we discussed the old department stores that once lined Canal Street in New Orleans, such as Maison Blanche. Remarking on a Washington Post review of a John Grisham novel, Trethewey said, “One thing he mentions is a dismissal that I hear, too. You write about race. Aren’t there larger or more important subjects to write about? But this reviewer said that Mississippi writers in different genres all write about race because not writing about race in Mississippi is like writers from Arizona not writing about the desert. How can I not?” Trethewey stands witness. It would be impossible for her not to. In 1985, her stepfather murdered her mother, and she traces her desire to become a poet to her grief. This dedication to survival and memory have informed her five poetry collections, as well as her nonfiction book, Beyond Katrina, a book that should be read in conversation with Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones and Men We Reaped. Trethewey’s Pulitzer Prize–winning collection Native Guard confirmed her as the guardian of the histories that must be retold. This collection chronicled one of the first African American regiments during the Civil War. Her exquisite and brutal lyricism as well as her commitment to truth makes Trethewey one of the most important American poets of our time. Her new book, Monument, is a collection of both new and selected works. It’s a vibrant and timely book, deeply aware of our nation’s chaotic moment and its historical resonances. The most recent poems ripple with questions that have always informed her work: “Why is everything I see the past / I’ve tried to forget? … Do you know what it means / to have a wound that never heals?” and “How, then, could I not answer her life / with mine, she who saved me with hers?/ And how could I not—bathed in the light / of her wound—find my calling there?” She interrogates the black experience in America, the trauma of domestic violence and murder, and the destruction of the Gulf Coast. Trethewey is a tremendously empathic and enthusiastic force in our nation’s bleak period. Her words settle with profound gravity, yet her laughter is quick and comfortable. Read More
November 14, 2018 At Work Falling in Love with the Straight Guy: An Interview with Dan Callahan By Ben Shields Dan Callahan Dan Callahan lives in a two-story brownstone in Park Slope, Brooklyn. He and his partner, Keith Uhlich, write about films, and their home is a museum of the moving image. Pictures of Liv Ullmann, Ingrid Bergman, and countless others adorn the walls, and film history books cram the bookshelves. Callahan himself has written biographies of Vanessa Redgrave and Barbara Stanwyck, as well as The Art of American Screen Acting, 1912-1960. This October, Squares & Rebels released his debut novel, That Was Something. There’s a great deal of Callahan in the novel. The protagonist, Bobby, is an NYU undergraduate cinephile, as was Callahan himself. But the star of the book is Monika Lilac, a glamorous woman he meets at a screening of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Cronaca di un amore. Everything about Monika is stylized, including her name, taken from her favorite silent picture, Lilac Time (1928). She holds legendary silent film parties in her apartment (talking prohibited), and encourages everyone to talk less generally, especially in love. Every outfit and utterance from Monika is memorable, even when she misfires; she embodies Oscar Wilde’s aphorism: “The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible.” Bobby’s best friend, Ben Morrissey, is a photographer, a Don Juan charmer, and a heterosexual. He’s also the love of Bobby’s life. The problem of sexual orientation complicates a painful romance that is both reciprocal and unrequited. Their friendship takes detours into places of euphoria and heartbreak, and the only thing that never changes in the book is the cinema. Films populate That Was Something the way that characters might another novel. Even the towering persona of Monika Lilac pales in the light of the silver screen. The novel begins: “I was looking for the keys to the kingdom, and I found them or thought I did in Manhattan screening rooms, in the half-light and the welcoming dark.” After a walk through of his home, Dan and I spent a rainy Sunday afternoon in his dining room talking movies, literature, and his foray into fiction. A photo of Marlene Dietrich, signed in silver, presided over the conversation. Callahan imbibed a lot of coffee and spoke rapidly, as though always on the verge of an insight. His eyes are wide, as if the theater lights have just gone down. Read More
October 25, 2018 At Work The Library Fire: An Interview with Susan Orlean By Brent Katz Susan Orlean Susan Orlean stood in a crowd facing the Los Angeles Central Library. We were supposed to meet in the rare books room, but as I was setting up and Orlean was arriving from her son’s dentist appointment, somebody pulled the fire alarm. At the LA Central branch, fire alarms trigger deep memory. On April 29, 1986, this dignified and eccentric building in the center of downtown burned for over seven hours. Four hundred thousand books were destroyed. Hundreds of thousands more were damaged, by the fire and by the water used to fight it. Orlean, the author of The Orchid Thief and Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend and a New Yorker staff writer since 1992, learned about the fire when a librarian lifted a book to his nose, inhaled, and said, “You can still smell the smoke in some of them.” Then she found Harry Peak, the “ditzy” out-of-work actor who confessed to some friends that he had started the fire. His story, and that of the 1986 fire—the largest library fire in American history—makes up one of the central threads in Orlean’s newest work, The Library Book. Orlean had already been interested in how modern libraries function, with their complex networks of departments and branches, but the 1986 fire gave her book a center. From that year, she moved forward into the present day, and back to the nineteenth-century origins of the LA Public Library, providing an alternative history of a city known more for movies than for books. The library also became a portal into Orlean’s personal history. The book is dedicated to her son—her future—and to her mother—her past—who first brought Orlean to the Bertram Woods branch of the Shaker Heights Public Library, outside Cleveland, when Orlean was a young girl, and who died during the writing of this book. After a few minutes out in the sun, Orlean and I decided to cross West Fifth Street to a Starbucks. It was Yom Kippur, and Orlean was, as she later tweeted, “fasting except for coffee. I know that’s technically cheating but believe me you would not want me without coffee.” By the time we got our drinks and settled into a spot in the Starbucks courtyard, the fire department had arrived, and a PR person from the library texted that it was safe to reenter the building. This interview was conducted in the rare books room, with a brief follow-up over email. ORLEAN A very eventful way to begin an interview. INTERVIEWER If one knows you only through your writing, it seems like this kind of thing happens to you all the time. Read More
October 22, 2018 At Work Becoming Radicalized: An Interview with John Wray By Valeria Luiselli Valeria Luiselli (left) and John Wray (right) John Wray seems restless under the confines of any single identity. He writes fiction in English and German, carries both a United States and an Austrian passport, and works under a pseudonym. The Right Hand of Sleep, which won Wray a Whiting Award, is an austere political thriller; Canaan’s Tongue is a supernatural Southern gothic; and Lowboy, his 2009 breakthrough, narrates one day in the life of a schizophrenic teenager roaming the subway tunnels beneath New York City. “These days, writers have brands,” wrote Carolyn Kellogg in the Los Angeles Times when Wray’s fourth novel, The Lost Time Accidents, was published in 2016. “Wray is all over the place … What to expect of his next book? Something not much like his last.” To some of us, however, Wray’s shape-shifting is a source of fascination. Wray’s fifth novel, Godsend, is forthcoming this month from Farrar, Straus & Giroux. It tells the story of eighteen-year-old Aden Sawyer’s journey from the suburban California of her childhood to a Pakistani Koran school, and from there across the mountains into Afghanistan, a place—for a teenage American girl ignorant of the culture’s tribal code—of dreadful, mortal danger. It is derived, to a degree, from the true story of John Walker Lindh, the young man who became infamous in the weeks after the attacks of September 11 as the “American Taliban.” But it owes just as much to a story Wray heard while traveling as a journalist in Afghanistan, about a girl of British background who fought there among the mujahideen, disguised as a man. I visited Wray in September, at a peculiar collective house in Brooklyn that he shares with the writers Alice Sola Kim, Isaac Fitzgerald, and Akhil Sharma, and in which Nathan Englander and Marlon James have writing spaces. We sat in creaking teakwood chairs in the cluttered kitchen, and ate slightly overcooked spaghetti, for which he apologized profusely. Read More
October 18, 2018 At Work A Reckoning Is Different than a Tell-All: An Interview with Kiese Laymon By Abigail Bereola Heavy: An American Memoir is Kiese Laymon’s third book. The first, Long Division, a novel, and the second, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, an essay collection, were both published in the summer of 2013—one in June and one in August. Laymon’s work is known for its honesty and courage, as well as for the way he reckons with his own past and our collective national one. In Heavy, he takes the stuff of his life and renders it on the page. Laymon discusses violence in many forms, gambling and addiction, the treatment of black students at predominantly white institutions, and more. He also discusses weight and bodies and the way all these things lend themselves to a heaviness that can be both physical and emotional. There’s a fable-like quality to the storytelling: it imparts its lessons in layers. Laymon and I spoke on the phone as he was making the twelve-hour drive from Oxford, Mississippi, to Tampa, Florida, to meet with booksellers. The sounds of the highway occasionally made themselves heard in the background. In conversation, he is genuine and open, turning questions back around to his interlocutor with sincere curiosity. His work forces us to ask: What if everybody wrote like this to those who love and hurt them about the ways they have been loved and hurt? What would that do, and what would it look like? Until then, we’re just lucky that Laymon shows us a path toward reckoning. INTERVIEWER What does heaviness evoke for you? LAYMON Heaviness evokes fear and desperation and, most importantly, a soulfulness. For me, it’s not one thing. I think I thought it was one thing before I started the book, but as I worked on it, I began to embrace the soulfulness in heaviness. It’s something most people try to avoid, but it’s also something that I need to make it through the day. Read More
October 12, 2018 At Work Ave Marías: An Interview with Javier Marías By Michael LaPointe It has been said of Anthony Trollope that as soon as he finished a novel, he turned to a fresh page and started on the next, and it’s tempting to think that Javier Marías enjoys a similarly unstoppable flow of invention. The Spanish author has published more than a dozen novels—one of which, Your Face Tomorrow, comprises three volumes—plus a book of stories, countless translations, a work of literary biography, and a weekly column for El País. Because his digressive, intellectual, and liquid style is among the most consistent in contemporary literature, and because his fiction shares characters and thematic concerns, it sometimes seems as if Marías has been writing one very long book for his entire career. But in fact, as he told me in our recent conversation, his process of writing is far from preordained. “I always feel as insecure as if it were the first book I’d written,” he said. His most recent novel is Berta Isla, which will be published in an English translation by his longtime collaborator, Margaret Jull Costa, in the UK this fall and in the U.S. next spring. Partly narrated by its eponymous heroine, Berta Isla returns to the milieu of espionage from Your Face Tomorrow. Marías has a persistent fascination with those who renounce their lives in order to work in the shadowy wings. As in several of his recent novels—The Infatuations and Thus Bad Begins—Berta Isla probes the nature of historical memory, asking what should be remembered, and what forgotten. Those questions are ultimately unanswerable, but as in the best of Marías’s fiction, it’s captivating to watch the minds of Berta Isla’s characters work them over. I reached Marías by phone at home in Madrid on the eve of his sixty-seventh birthday. His characters can speak at length on virtually any topic, and while this is a literary effect he achieves painstakingly, it’s true that I had no difficulty in prompting him. Our conversation wandered from Brexit to Balzac, from his apartment’s balconies to the distant kingdom of Redonda, a barren island off the coast of Antigua that through a series of bizarre events (catalogued in his Dark Back of Time), Marías rules over as “king” (“with inverted commas, of course”). INTERVIEWER I always enjoy birthdays because they’re like holidays that only you can observe. MARÍAS I’m getting old enough not to enjoy them so much, but at the same time, I suppose I’m turning the age where I should be glad that I can still celebrate them. My mother died when she was a week from sixty-five, and one of my best friends, Juan Benet, an author whom I admired very much and who was my literary master in some respects, died when he was sixty-five. And so I think, I’m older than my mother now ever was, and, I’m older than Benet. Sixty-seven for me is maybe like seventy-seven for other people, on account of those two deaths. Read More