October 16, 2017 At Work Suitcase Full of Candy: An Interview with Svetlana Alexievich By Mieke Chew Svetlana Alexievich headlined this year’s Louisiana Literature festival, a gathering of writers, readers, and Scandinavian publishers held twenty-five miles north of Copenhagen, at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. The event was conducted in Danish and Russian, and the audience peopled a hill overlooking the Baltic Sea, craning their necks to glimpse the 2015 Nobel Prize winner. Alexievich spoke of the “wild, sacred years” of the Soviet Union, the responsibility she felt to free people from time through her books, and the legislation of memory. She was reluctant, when asked, to describe the evolution of her style. (“Must I explain everything?”) And she assured listeners that women are just more interesting than men. I hovered backstage for two days waiting for our interview. Meanwhile, I occasionally saw Alexievich eat, laugh, and chat with a group of friends, all Swedes (she lived in exile in Sweden for years). More recently, and still at risk of persecution, she returned home, to Belarus. “When I walk my dog in Minsk, I go past a church,” she told the festival audience, “I see the youth with their new cars. The priest comes out to see them. They want their cars to be blessed.” This is how she prefers to answer questions—through details. When we spoke, Tine Roesen, Alexievich’s Danish translator, acted as our interpreter. When the interview ended, after forty minutes, I figured Alexievich had had enough. Outside her hotel, she wrapped a scarf around her head and tied it under her chin; it was starting to rain. She stepped toward me and firmly shook my hand. Back in New York, a few weeks later, I read the transcript: The translator, mindful of Alexievich’s schedule, had suggested we end the interview much earlier than we had. Alexievich declined and started to ask me questions. INTERVIEWER In The Unwomanly Face of War, your first book, you say you hear texts everywhere. How did you start interviewing people? ALEXIEVICH I was born in a big city—Ivano-Frankivsk in Ukraine—but when I was a child, my father moved us back to his homeland in Minsk. We lived in a Slavic village and in the evening, sitting on benches, people talked, and we, the children, listened, of course—this was after the war, they were all women. This made a big impression on me. A much bigger impression than books, which filled our house. Because in books, the Soviet government made war look like a victory—beautiful, without misery. I don’t think one could even have more than two people killed in a book. What the women said was frightening, different. They would talk of death but also of love. And this, of course, affected a child’s mind. INTERVIEWER And how were you allowed to publish your books, books that changed the past? ALEXIEVICH It was a different time. I would not say it was easy, because no one could understand when I showed up, to a factory, or somewhere else. Why women? Why not men? But it was a different time. I couldn’t get published for three years. Then the times changed, glasnost, perestroika. So, for three years, I wasn’t allowed to publish The Unwomanly Face of War, but then it changed. The manuscript was getting passed around in Moscow, and someone gave it to Gorbachev’s aide. And in Gorbachev’s report on Victory Day, he said, according to one book, War has an unwomanly face. This was quite a signal. Before that, the censors said: what a frightening book, naturalism, pacifism. Who will go to war after this book? Read More
October 10, 2017 At Work Feeling Foreign: An Interview with Hernan Diaz By Joel Pinckney Photo: Jason Fulford In Hernan Diaz’s first novel, In the Distance, Håkan Söderström, a Swedish immigrant, traverses the western expanse of nineteenth-century America on his way to New York to find his brother. Along the way, he gains the reputation of a terror and a legend, much to his bewilderment. Håkan is an atypical Western protagonist. He is a foreigner inhabiting a space typically reserved for American desperados, and, though a figure of physical prowess, he is emotionally and psychologically unsuited for life in the American territory—he kills, but he is haunted by it, “overwhelmed by an active, all-consuming hollowness … a stillness that had nothing to do with peace.” I met with Diaz last month at a café in Chelsea. He described the café, with its kitschy diner-like booths and railway-themed decor, as “irresistibly hideous”—a characterization perhaps apt for his protagonist, a figure of endless intrigue whose form provokes others “discovering what a man could be.” Diaz was candid, eager to discuss his work (and share his cheesecake). We talked about the usefulness of considering his book in light of the Western tradition and the American experience for immigrants today. INTERVIEWER Håkan Söderström comes to the American West without any knowledge of the English language. Before he learns English, your narrative is told in such a way that the reader experiences spoken English in the same way Håkan is experiencing it, given no dialogue that Håkan himself wouldn’t be able to understand. How did you decide on that technique? DIAZ It was the result of working within very tight constraints. I was worried about abusing archaisms and relying on a hokey Western vernacular. I didn’t want the book to sound like the transcription of the fake dialect in some bad Western film. How do I make these other characters talk, then? Oh, wait a minute—Håkan doesn’t understand what they’re saying! To me, one of the most fascinating formal problems in literature is point of view, because taken to its ultimate limit, I think it’s also an ethical problem, since it’s related to power. How much about your characters do you know? How far into situations or people can you see? Is it right, just to solve a narrative problem or achieve an effect, to break the laws you had set for yourself? I stuck with Håkan’s point of view in a very drastic way, in that regard. If he doesn’t understand, neither do we. Read More
October 5, 2017 At Work Mistaken Self-Portraits: An Interview with Meghan O’Rourke By Alex Dueben Photo: Sarah Shatz Meghan O’Rourke is a poet, an essayist, the author of the acclaimed memoir The Long Goodbye, a teacher, and an editor; she served as the poetry editor of The Paris Review from 2005 to 2010. The Summer issue of the Review includes O’Rourke’s “Poem for My Stranger,” and her third collection, Sun in Days, was published last month. Sun in Days differs from her other books: it is less lyric, with longer poems that are almost essayistic, and it includes a series of “Mistaken Self-Portrait” poems, which find the poet taking on the voices of Demeter, Persephone, Meriwether Lewis, and—to borrow a phrase from O’Rourke—a mother of an unmade daughter. It’s a book about illness, moving past grief, wanting a child, and getting older. I spoke with O’Rourke when she had a few spare hours, while someone looked after her son. INTERVIEWER Your poetry collections all seem to be about different stages of your life. Halflife was a young person’s book, Once was in conversation with your memoir and shared its concerns about grief, with the loss of your mother, and this new book of yours, Sun in Days, feels not post-grief, but … I’ve been trying to find the right word. O’ROURKE I know exactly what you mean. When I was working on Sun in Days early on, it was clear to me the poems were constellating around whatever that is—not quite post-grief. It’s actually hard to articulate, which is in some ways what interested me. INTERVIEWER When did you start writing these poems? O’ROURKE I wrote them while I had, as I describe in the book, a mysterious illness that no one could identify. Eventually, they diagnosed it as late-stage Lyme disease that had gotten into my nervous system. I mention this because while I was trying to write this book, I had this sensation that I was no longer myself. I could tell my brain had changed, but it happened so slowly that it took a while to realize. I had a very difficult time recalling and using language, which is a problem if you’re a writer. I also had this bizarre fatigue. We lack the language to describe illness, as Virginia Woolf talks about in her book On Being Ill. When you think of fatigue, you think of times you’ve been tired, but it wasn’t like that. I felt drained. I was trying to write, but I was unable to. The poems I was writing were so bad. They weren’t making sense, and I found it so depressing. “Unnatural Essay” and “A Note on Process” started because I gave myself the assignment of writing a line a day. I felt like I had to put all of my energy into making some kind of sense out of one thing. Sometimes I would write three lines, but there was this impulse toward aphorism or compression in a way that’s not quite how we think of the line in poetry working, in non-prose poems, at least. So those lines ended up more like prose. Read More
October 3, 2017 At Work Pleasure Principles: An Interview with Carmen Maria Machado By Lauren Kane Her Body and Other Parties is Carmen Maria Machado’s first collection of short stories, but Machado is no novice: her writing is prolific and varied, from essays on higher education and retail consumerism, fiction on clairvoyance and the afterlife, and criticism on Leonora Carrington and Game of Thrones. In Her Body, Machado flexes that versatility as her characters navigate the emotional landscapes of love, sex, and grief within the contexts of pandemic narratives and ghost stories. Throughout each of the book’s eight stories, Machado uses elements of the fantastic as a vehicle for better understanding the complications and challenges of reality. Machado and I spoke over the phone at the end of August, as she was preparing to start the semester at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is the artist in residence, and just before her collection was named to the longlist for the National Book Award for Fiction and as a finalist for the Kirkus Prize. Our lively conversation took us from Victorian England to Law and Order and a lot in between. INTERVIEWER Let’s start at the beginning. What prompted you to start writing? MACHADO I have been writing basically my whole life. My family read to me a lot, and my grandfather’s Cuban, so there was a lot of storytelling in our household. I learned about stories through that oral tradition and through reading, and as soon as I was able to pick up a pen I was writing “books” and “stories” and sending them to publishers. I found Scholastic’s address in The Baby-Sitters Club and sent a letter saying, Here’s a chapter of my novel. Please let me know if you would like more of it. I wrote constantly, poetry and prose. For a while I wanted to be a doctor, but only because I was reading a lot of books about doctors. When I got older, I thought I wanted to be a journalist for a while. But I always returned to writing fiction. It was a stable thing in my life, and it was just luck that it was natural for me. But I feel like it was pretty late that I decided I wanted to be a writer, with writing as a part of my identity, as opposed to somebody who writes. Read More
September 25, 2017 At Work Survival Story: An Interview with David France By Garth Greenwell David France, center, in June 1983. “Amid the largest influx of gays in city history, I migrated to New York to become part of what epidemiologists call an ‘amplification system’ for disease.” Last month, the British Library hosted a conversation between the journalist and filmmaker David France and writer Garth Greenwell on the occasion of the publication, last November, of France’s book How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS. In 2013, France wrote, directed, and produced the Oscar-nominated documentary film How to Survive a Plague, about the early years of the AIDS epidemic and the activist organizations ACT UP and Treatment Action Group. The book expands that narrative, interweaving the stories of individuals to trace the scientific history of AIDS and the birth of AIDS and LGBT activism, and to show the profound and underrecognized effect of the gay community’s struggle on American society and culture. “Their resistance and cunning,” Carl Bernstein wrote, “will remain as seminal to medical history and humanity as the efforts of Pasteur and Salk.” The exchange below is an edited version of France and Greenwell’s discussion, with thanks to the British Library. —Nicole Rudick GREENWELL It seems to me that we’re in a moment, and have been in a moment for a few years, of a revisitation of the height of the AIDS crisis in America. The extraordinary amount of recent cultural production around that crisis would include memoirs by Sean Strub, Dale Peck, Alysia Abbott, Bernard Cooper, Cleve Jones, whose memoir of AIDS activism was made into a miniseries, your own documentary, which we’ll talk about, and also Jim Hubbard’s documentary United in Anger, a film production of Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart, new biographies of the artist David Wojnarowicz, the activist and singer Michael Callen, and the poet Essex Hemphill, a resurgence of interest in the extraordinary African American composer Julius Eastman, major novels by Tim Murphy, Larry Kramer, Rabih Alameddine—all in the last few years. This follows a period in which interest in AIDS seemed to have waned, and you’ve said that in 2008 and 2009, when you were carrying around a proposal for this book, no one was interested. What do you think is behind the sudden interest in this period? FRANCE There was a belief that the story of AIDS had been told, that it had been captured in the canon of the time—another long list—and that we had gathered and collected and transmitted those stories for the generations. The argument I was making in 2008 and 2009 was that all of that work had been produced inside the plague, and the reporting was very early, the thinking was very early. The arguments and conclusions represented the thinking in the middle, when no one knew what was going to happen. It was all very powerful, like Paul Monette’s work—devastating, so much of it. But by 1996, when the new drug class came to market and made it possible to survive an HIV infection—meaning we’d reached the end of the plague as we knew it, the untreatable, almost-certain-death period—we were all sent into some sort of dizzying future we hadn’t imagined and couldn’t celebrate it. There was no way to have a party, because of what had happened. So to look at that period—no one had done it. Read More
September 19, 2017 At Work Type Writing: An Interview with Jim Shepard By Lesley M.M. Blume Jim Shepard is always funny in conversation, but never more so than when he’s imparting dark musings about the future of the country or about human nature in general. And he can often be found musing about these dark things, for he is, as he puts it, “resourcefully pessimistic.” As evidence, he cites the title of his just-released book, The Tunnel at the End of the Light: Essays on Movies and Politics. Many of us nursing the bitter cocktail that is the Trump administration are familiar with this sentiment, but Shepard’s book has been decades in the making. There has always been something to despair about, he announces jovially: The title “reflects the sinking sense I’ve had following American politics since the late 1960s. It’s been an ongoing cycle of progressive and thoughtful people saying, Well, this is a new low, but we have something to look forward to—and then hitting a new low after that.” An award-winning, seven-time novelist and professor of English and film studies at Williams College, Shepard has studied certain iconic, influential American movies, from Casablanca to Goodfellas to Schindler’s List—along with “what they’re selling us”—for clues as to why this country keeps finding itself in the soul-crushing cycle of Icarus highs and lows. They provide, he concludes, a constructive road map. He pulled his book’s title from an anecdote about the 1974 noir film Chinatown, in which scriptwriter Robert Towne told director Roman Polanski that the dark ending was like “the tunnel at the end of the light”—much like the circumstances contributing to the déjà-vu political landscape Shepard sees now. He and I spoke last week about how movies both reflect and generate the circumstances that made the presidency of a creature like Donald J. Trump possible in the first place. INTERVIEWER So are we doomed forever to the despair-redemption political cycle you describe? I mean, how much lower can we go? SHEPARD Well, it’s generated by a pretty toxic combination of late-model capitalism refracted with Americanism. And part of what The Tunnel at the End of the Light is about is the way the myths we tell ourselves as Americans, and the things we cherish most tightly, interact so poorly with late-model capitalism. The two together create a sort of spiral that’s very hard to break out of. Is it possible to get out of it? Yeah, but each time I imagine the pessimistic future, the future out-pessimists me. INTERVIEWER Where do you see yourself on the spectrum of pessimists? SHEPARD My good friend, Elizabeth Kolbert, the climate writer for The New Yorker, loves to come over and visit because she says that as Cassandra-ish and apocalyptic as she is, she always feels upbeat after she leaves my house because “at least I’m not as depressed as Jim is.” Read More