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
October 2, 2018 At Work The Adoptee’s Perspective: An Interview with Nicole Chung By Julie Buntin Nicole Chung (photo: Erica B. Tappis) By the time I received Nicole Chung’s proposal for All You Can Ever Know on submission at Catapult, I was already—like so many others—a fan of her work. Her essays about identity and family in places like the New York Times, Longreads, and The Toast had left a permanent groove in my imagination. When something happened in the news, I’d wonder what Nicole thought about it. To read one of her articles was like diving into clear water after months of wading through flotsam: here was moral and stylistic clarity, and writing with purpose. Nicole’s sentences have led me to a more nuanced understanding of what it means to be human. You can imagine how I felt when I learned our bid for her debut memoir had been accepted. Even as a proposal, All You Can Ever Know had an urgency of intention that can take years to wrest from a manuscript. Nicole’s voice is so distinct, she could write compellingly about pretty much anything. But in making the story of her transracial adoption and the search for her biological family her subject, she has done us all a great service. There are so few narratives of adoption from the adoptee’s perspective. Despite having known many adopted people, I had never read or heard anything quite like Nicole’s story before. After years of working together, Nicole and I sat down to have a formal conversation about her story, the evolution of her book, and what it means to both of us to be both writers and editors. INTERVIEWER I know that as a child you struggled to find stories that matched your experience of growing up adopted. Did this absence of comparable stories present a challenge for you as you worked on the book? CHUNG Yes—people ask me for recommendations all the time, and it’s difficult to know what to say, especially if they’re looking for books that kids and teens could also read. The majority of the books that deal with adoption—both fiction and nonfiction—are written by non-adoptees. I don’t think I read any adoption stories when I was growing up, except for Anne of Green Gables and a few others from a different era, when adoption wasn’t the institution it is today. I certainly never got to read anything about transracial adoptees like me. Read More
September 27, 2018 At Work There is No Story That is Not True: An Interview with Toyin Ojih Odutola By Osman Can Yerebakan What Her Daughter Sees, 2018. “There is no story that is not true,” says Uchendu halfway through Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Storytelling is at the core of Brooklyn-based artist Toyin Ojih Odutola’s drawings, which focus on the fictional narrative of TMH Jideofor Emeka, male heir of a long-standing noble clan, who marries Temitope Omodele, the son of a bourgeois family with recently acquired wealth. The power couple are cultural leaders in their community, and they exhibit their renowned art collection at notable art venues in the United States. Ojih Odutola deepens the fiction by presenting her own exhibitions as curated by the fictional couple, for whom she is the Deputy Private Secretary. The thirty-three-year-old artist left Nigeria with her family at an early age, and spent her formative years in Huntsville, Alabama. Her new show, “When Legends Die,” at the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York, dedicates two rooms to approximately thirty-five drawings. The press release, written by Ojih Odutola, explains that the show is organized by the lord’s nephew upon the aging couple’s decision to include the next generation of clan members in their curatorial work. I met Ojih Odutola at Jack Shainman Gallery in August, when the artist was busy finalizing her drawings for her exhibition at the gallery. Read More
September 19, 2018 At Work Beyond Hygge: An Interview with Dorthe Nors By Alexandra Pereira Dorthe Nors. Photo: Astrid Dalum. The Danish writer Dorthe Nors lives alone with a black cat in a house so far west on the Jutland peninsula that she’s practically in Scotland. It’s not far from the rural parish community where she was born, in 1970, and raised by a carpenter father and a hairdresser-turned-art-teacher mother. She spent years poring over Swedish literature and art history at Aarhus University, harnessing a lifelong adoration for Ingmar Bergman’s The Magic Lantern and his workbooks. Early on, Nors had hoped to infiltrate Copenhagen’s cliquey literati, but she soon realized this endeavor was a waste of time—time taken away from her writing. Scouted by Brigid Hughes, the former Paris Review editor and founder of A Public Space, Nors’s alarmingly succinct short-story collection Karate Chop—published to acclaim in Denmark in 2008—was received rapturously when it was published in English in 2014. A story from Karate Chop, “The Heron,” was the first by a Danish writer to be published in The New Yorker. Her staccato novella Minna Needs Rehearsal Space—which was published in the States alongside another of Nors’s novellas, So Much for That Winter—cemented Nors as an author who is able to thoughtfully admonish our digital generation. In it, Minna is a struggling musician who would be producing more work if she weren’t so taken with monitoring online activity. Minna’s staccato thoughts read like status updates. In 2014, Nors received the Per Olov Enquist Literary Prize. Her novel Mirror, Shoulder, Signal was a finalist for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize. Being alone is not something that feels particularly natural in Denmark, a small, cozy country imbued with the national concept of hygge. Yet solitude is a recurring motif in Nors’s work. She often returns to lonely flaneuses who wander the shiny streets of Copenhagen, a city renowned for its happiness. Her protagonists navigate the locales they’ve outgrown, unfriend ex-lovers, reference long-dead Scandinavian writers, and gaze out onto the Øresund strait. Like Lorrie Moore, Nors writes heartrending and compact stories, though they’re punctuated with satire. Her tone is pensive, sardonic, and sometimes macabre. This interview took place while Nors was just up the coast from Copenhagen—where she lived for seven years—for the Louisiana Literature Festival. We met early on a Saturday, and the award-winning author guided me to a no-frills café. Bossa nova Muzak was playing. “The music and the food are terrible,” she told me, but this is where she found a writing sanctuary free of pretense or distractions and created some of the curiously existential, semiautobiographical characters who color her four novels and countless novellas and short stories. In person, Nors is as unfussy as her prose. She is undramatic, typically Nordic, and matter-of-fact, with a tendency to laugh and smile often. She seemed genuinely surprised and delighted that I’d read much of her work in preparation for our conversation. Her utterances are gentle. They lack the usual harsh Danish eeehhh—instead, she intersperses a soft om here and there among otherwise clear, direct phrases. Read More
September 11, 2018 At Work Becoming Kathy Acker: An Interview with Olivia Laing By Chris Kraus Left: Olivia Laing. Right: Kathy Acker. When Olivia Laing’s third book, The Lonely City, appeared in 2016, she was hailed as one of the leading contemporary nonfiction writers in the U.S. and the UK. After a breakup in her midthirties, she’d moved from London to New York. Adrift in a strange place and afraid of being alone for the rest of her life, she used her loneliness as a conduit to understanding the work of visual artists like David Wojnarowicz, Henry Darger, Zoe Leonard, the reality-media pioneer Josh Harris, and many others. Loneliness, for Laing, became a new means of perception, a secret channel. A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Lonely City was named a best book of the year by various publications. Laing never expected that her next work would be a novel. In fact, she was laboring over a new nonfiction book when Crudo erupted. Triggered by her readings of the American writer Kathy Acker, Crudo was composed over seven weeks. Writing in a bracing and racy picaresque style, Laing adopts the third-person character “Kathy” that Acker herself often uses. The result is a hilarious mash-up between Acker’s emotional realism and taste for transgression, and the events of Laing’s very twenty-first-century life as she vacations in Italy, updates social media, and plans her small wedding. The book begins breathlessly, with one of the best openings in recent memory. “Kathy, by which I mean I, was getting married,” Laing writes. “Kathy, by which I mean I, had just got off a plane from New York.” Slipping in and out of her Kathy Acker persona while closely following the events of Laing’s life and the media feed of the summer of 2017, Crudo is at once boldly experimental and highly pleasurable. Writing in real time about Jared and Ivanka, Brexit, the flooding of Houston, Trump’s tweets, and Grenfell, Laing captures the psychic effect of living in the perpetual state of remote emergency that defines the present. “There were several photographs of a care home in which several residents in wheelchairs, elderly black women were up to their chests in dirty brown water,” she writes. “The President was on it, he was using a full arsenal of exclamation marks.” As she astutely concludes, “Numbness mattered, it was what the Nazis did, made people feel like things were moving too fast to stop and though unpleasant and eventually terrifying and appalling, were probably impossible to do anything about.” Olivia and I met for the first time two years ago, when we did a conversation in London for the program 5×15. Here, we continue over email. Read More