October 19, 2017 At Work Carrie Mae Weems on Her Favorite Books By Jo Steffens The following is excerpted from Unpacking My Library: Artists and Their Books, a collection of interviews with contemporary artists about their personal libraries, to be published by Yale University Press in November. Carrie Mae Weems in her library. Photo: David Paul Broda INTERVIEWER Your photographic work incorporates family stories, autobiography, documentary, and other narrative forms. What do you consider to be your role as a storyteller? CARRIE MAE WEEMS In the past I’ve employed elements of text in and around my work, but I’m certainly not a storyteller. Storytelling requires skills that I don’t possess. Rather, in my work, text functions as a conceptual frame for creating play, counterpoint, tension and/or positioning meaning. The word is a form and the shape of things. INTERVIEWER Is there one book that stands out as having had a big impact on you when you first read it? WEEMS Books are my playmates, my best friends, my running buddies, my partners in crime, my solace, and my occasional lover. Read More
October 18, 2017 At Work Time Marches On: An Interview with Jon McGregor By George Saunders Left: Jon McGregor. Right: George Saunders. Jon McGregor is a fiercely intelligent, very deep well of an (English) human and writer. I’ve spent some of my most memorable moments in that country on stages with Jon, benefitting from the original and soulful way he thinks and talks about fiction. I’ve recently spent a similarly memorable and transcendent moment with him via his astonishing new novel, Reservoir 13—a strange, daring, and very moving book. For me, fiction is here to create a compressed, distorted scale model that helps us see the real world anew. Reservoir 13 does this, and in a truly original way—its scale and the way time works within it combine to mimic, with rare fidelity, the way things are in reality, and the way real life, lived, actually feels. And it is this fidelity that, paradoxically, allows us to see how very weird and impermanent and unreliable and unreal so-called reality is. The book is a rare and dazzling feat of art that also (in my reading of it) outs us, in a gentle way, for a certain gratuitous drama-seeking tendency we all tend to have as readers—a tendency that makes it harder to see the very real, consequential, beautiful, and human-scaled dramas occurring all around us in real life, in every moment (in nature, in human affairs). I spoke with Jon on a good, old-fashioned landline; I was calling from Corralitos, California, and I imagined him (in spite of the fact that he told me very clearly that he was in his office, in the university where he teaches, in Nottingham) sitting in a pub in an archetypal English village like the one described in the book—a village that is still haunting me, and which, because of the rich detail of the prose, I feel I’ve lived in before, and for which, on closing the book, I found myself homesick. INTERVIEWER Now, let me just say you did something really innovative to my reading in terms of suspense. There’s something that drives us through the book—I think it’s sometimes called a MacGuffin, you know, the thing we’re supposed to be concerned with. But in the meantime, real life is playing out in this village at just the scale and pace that life actually plays out. We fall in love with the town. We fall in love with the people. And although there are incidents, they’re human-scaled. Do you agree with me that this is really a radical subversion of the tyranny of plot? How did that idea work its way into the book? Read More
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