July 18, 2018

“Narrative Life-Forms” illustration from Wonderbook.

Jeff VanderMeer is the New York Times best-selling author of more than twenty-five books over a thirty-year career, including the best-selling Annihilation. He has won the Nebula Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the World Fantasy Award (three times) and has been a finalist for the Hugo Award. His highly imaginative guide to what he calls “imaginative fiction,” Wonderbook, features diagrams, maps, and renderings by the illustrator Jeremy Zerfoss that break down the mechanisms of creativity without losing any of its verve. It includes sidebars and essays by George R. R. Martin, Lev Grossman, Neil Gaiman, Michael Moorcock, Karen Joy Fowler, and many more. First published in 2013, the recently released expanded edition contains an additional fifty pages of material, including a section on ecology and fiction as well as on the process of bringing Annihalition to the big screen. VanderMeer spoke about the project with one of its contributors, Nnedi Okorafor, an award-winning novelist of African-based science fiction, fantasy, and magical realism for both children and adults. “I don’t actually remember how I came to know Nnedi,” VanderMeer says. “It feels like I’ve known her forever, even though it’s only from 2011 or so, I believe. I have always loved her affinity for owls and other creatures.”

INTERVIEWER

Wonderbook is one of the best books about writing I’ve ever read or experienced. And I’m not saying that because I’m in it, even though that certainly gives the book a kick! Wonderbook is a collaboration of many of the most creative minds in literature and art, it features examples of writing philosophies, methods, and styles, and it’s just plain fun. It also teaches about creativity by its very existence—it’s a beautiful book. How did you come up with Wonderbook’s spectacularly organized chaotic form?

VANDERMEER

Abrams Image came to me and gave me a suitcase full of money and said, “Come back with the world’s first fully illustrated writing guide, all laid out and camera ready.” Or something close to that. I hired the artists and the designers and commissioned the sidebar articles, like yours. Then I turned it in to Abrams. No publisher has ever said anything as compelling or invigorating to me before or since. But the energizing thing was that no one had done a visual writing guide before—the closest thing would be Lynda Barry’s marvelous imagination carnival What It Is or, in another medium, Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. It took three designers and dozens of artists across four continents and, a lot of stop-starts. It’s difficult, when you’ve written fiction for so long, to extract that muscle memory as a writing manual and especially to then translate it into visual metaphors, which hadn’t been done before in this way. Without Abrams letting me do the layout, it never would’ve happened. Because there was so much trial and error to get all the elements right. Read More

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July 2, 2018

At Work

We Speak About Violence: Abdellah Taïa and Edouard Louis in Conversation

By The Paris Review

In 2013, the French writer Edouard Louis organized a symposium on autofiction at the École Normale Superieure, in Paris, where he was studying. The symposium was titled “Je vois écrit: Ecriture de soi et politique du récit” (“I Write You: Writing of the Self and the Politics of Narration”). The subject was of urgent interest to Louis: he was only months away from publishing his first novel, En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule (published in the United States, in 2017, as The End of Eddy), an autobiographical novel about growing up gay and poor in a conservative, working-class town in France. Among the day’s panelists was the writer Abdellah Taïa.

Born in Rabat, Morocco, in 1973, Taïa moved to Paris in 1998; he published his first story collection in 2000 and another in 2004. Two years later, he came out as gay in the Moroccan daily TelQuel, making him the first openly homosexual Arab writer. In the aftermath, he wrote the bildungsroman L’Armée du salut (Salvation Army, 2009), an autobiographical novel whose publication in English was introduced by Edmund White. (He also directed a film adaption of the book in 2013.) Since then, he has published five other novels, including Le jour du Roi, which won the Prix de Flore in 2010.

Last year, Semiotext(e) published Another Morocco, a translated selection of stories from Taïa’s first two collections; Louis’s second novel, History of Violence, a best seller in France, was published last month in an English translation. In between these two events, Taïa and Louis, who have become friends, conducted a conversation over email—on recognizing similar concerns in one another’s work, resisting victimhood, and the effect of shame on writing. Our appreciation to Noura Wedell for her translation from the French.

—Nicole Rudick

TAÏA

How can I disappear from a world that doesn’t like me, a world that brutalizes and rapes me because I am a homosexual and an effeminate Moroccan adolescent? How can I die in the eyes of others but stay alive elsewhere, in some dream place, some true fiction, while I prepare my vengeance to come? Those two questions were my obsession when I was still in Morocco. How to flee the system in order to realize myself? How to hide in order to see better, to love better, to better transgress? But I didn’t know where to go. I didn’t know where to learn how to protect myself. The world was very clearly dominated by the most powerful, by the most rich, by the dictators, the rapists, or by the parents who simply followed what they were told and sometimes killed their own children rather than give them guidance.

One day I understood the first thing I had to do in order to become a little strong, a little rebellious. I had to change my name. I had to stop being Abdellah Taïa. But in order to be what? To be whom? And where exactly? I chose this new name, Azzedine Matar. The first name was the name of one of my favorite Egyptian actors. As for the family name, in Arabic it means “rain.” The rain that washes and purifies, the rain that would allow me to be born again, that would allow me to resist. Since my adolescence, that’s been my name. Not my writer’s name but my secret name, my unsullied name, my name between the sky and me, between Allah and me. When I met you for the first time, Edouard, I felt immediate fraternity. Recognition. A tie that was so precise. A way of walking and trembling. It was during the symposium you organized at the École Normale Supérieure. The theme was “I Write You: Writing of the Self and Politics of Narration.” And when I discovered the title of your first book, The End of Eddy, I understood the nature of my feelings for you, of my intuition. You’d also thought about changing your name. To flee with a new name, to write anew, naked and more than naked … You are the first person to whom I’ve told this secret. Read More

June 25, 2018

At Work

Hero’s Journey: An Interview with Taylor Mac

By Garth Greenwell

Taylor Mac in act 7 of A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, at St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn, 2016. Photo: Teddy Wolff.

In October 2016, at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, the theater artist Taylor Mac performed A 24-Decade History of Popular Music in its entirety for the first and only time. The show, which Mac had been developing since 2012, retells American history through its popular music, spending an hour on each decade, beginning in 1776 and ending in 2016. The New York Times music critic Wesley Morris wrote that the twenty-four-hour performance—which featured a glow-in-the-dark production of The Mikado, visionary costumes by Mac’s longtime collaborator Machine Dazzle, and a large penis-shaped balloon—was “one of the great experiences of my life.” In 2017, the work was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama, and Mac received a MacArthur Fellowship.

The University of Iowa’s Hancher Auditorium commissioned the 1864-to-1856 decade of A 24-Decade History, and in April 2018, Mac performed an abridged version of the work in Iowa City. Two days before the performance, I interviewed Mac at Hancher’s Strauss Hall for the Creative Matters Lecture Series. The exchange below is an edited version of that discussion, with thanks to the University of Iowa.

INTERVIEWER

I want to start with a personal story. Taylor and I just met for the first time, but we have some friends in common, one of them being my best friend and really the center of my queer family for twenty years. He was at the epic twenty-four-hour performance of A 24-Decade History of Popular Music in New York in October 2016. It was an experience that changed his life.

At one point in A 24-Decade History, there’s a horrifyingly homophobic Ted Nugent song about fag bashing, which Taylor turns into a slow dance at a junior-high queer prom. Taylor asked everyone in the audience to dance with a same-sex partner they didn’t know. My friend danced with a good-looking guy sitting in his row, and he said it was the most extraordinary experience. At first, everyone was giggling, and Taylor was quite severe with them and made them stop and said, No, take it seriously. And my friend said that over the course of this dance, he felt something profound happen between him and this other man, something that felt real to him. Over the next six months, he left his partner of thirteen years, he found this man, discovered that, in fact, something profound had happened between them, and last week they moved in together.

So my first question is, Taylor, does this happen often? And, since I think the answer to that is going to be some species of yes, is it part of the design?

MAC

Well, I don’t set out to break people up. My job as a theater artist is to remind people of the things they’ve forgotten, dismissed, or buried, or that other people have buried for them. It sounds like your friend came to the show having some problems with his boyfriend and our show unearthed things in him, and then he was able to grapple with that truth about himself. If I can do that for people, that’s a real joy because I don’t believe that he’d be served staying with his former lover and not loving him. Nor do I think the former lover would be served by that. So no, it isn’t the first time. There are babies who are alive right now because of people who met at our shows. Read More

June 14, 2018

At Work

What’s Queer Form Anyway? An Interview with Maggie Nelson

By Annie DeWitt

Maggie Nelson defies classification. She is the author of nine books, spanning poetry, autobiography, art criticism, and theory. This week, Soft Skull Press has reissued her book of poetry, Something Bright, Then Holes. First published in 2007, Something Bright was Nelson’s fifth book, and she has not published a new book of poetry since. Nelson’s nexus is fluidity: gender, pleasure, desire, and the body are questioned with equal rigor as modality, criticality, and theory. Those concerns are present in Something Bright. “I don’t have to be ashamed of my desire / Not for sex, not for language,” the narrator tells us in “A Halo Over the Hospital.” But in this collection, Nelson’s heady, narcotic philosophizing is underpinned by a more personal vulnerability. “Live with your puny, vulnerable self / Live with her,” we are told.

While Something Bright, Then Holes charts many landscapes—from the polluted Gowanus Canal, to a friend’s hospital room, to the inner tautologies of “leave-taking”—the collection centers around the issues of love and loss. “What part of this autonomy / am I not supposed to like?” the narrator expounds in “The Mute Story of November.” The self and the other (romantic, or intellectual) are like binary stars. They threaten to destroy or consume one another: “Yesterday we found something very hard / at our core, a fierce acorn. I don’t know / if we were born with it, or if its mass simply accrued / in the darkness.”

INTERVIEWER

I wondered if you could talk about the experience of having a book reissued ten years later. Is there a sense of Didion’s invitation to check in on the selves we once were? An old friend come to visit? Or, the sort of estrangement that one often feels as an artist from the work that came before?

NELSON

It’s a beautiful edition, so I feel very lucky. It’s also sweet to me that my dear friend Tara Jane O’Neil did the first cover and then did this one as well. I feel estranged from this book in the sense that it is my last book of poetry—not like, the last book of poetry I will ever write, but the last one I’ve written, and it’s wild that a decade has gone by since. But I can see many themes in these pages that have cropped up in my more recent prose books, so I feel a strong continuum of thought. There was kind of a magic splintering happening inside me at the time of Something Bright—very painful, but also magic. It’s also the last book I wrote in New York, and I can really feel that—all that time spent talking to and about strangers at the canal, all that looking outward, all the late nights, the wandering, the perching. My life isn’t like that anymore. Anyway, it’s nice to see these poems again. Read More

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June 5, 2018

At Work

My Own Boundaries Seem to Be Fading: An Interview with Lauren Groff

By Lucie Shelly

Photo credit: Megan Brown.

“I still wouldn’t choose Florida as my home state, but I’m glad it chose me,” Lauren Groff replied when I asked why she had chosen to live on the peninsula full of snakes and rains, marshes and forest. Still, the author, whose works include the Obama favorite Fates and Furies and the acclaimed collection Delicate Edible Birds, named her new book after this unchosen habitat. Florida brings together eleven stories written over the course of the dozen years Groff lived in the state, but she never intended to pay homage. “The fact that these are all Florida stories comes out of the fact that I feel ambivalent or unsettled about the place where I live,” she said.

It seems almost contradictory that ambivalence, as a mode, would be the seed for such potent fiction, but one of Groff’s distinguishing skills is the ability to write within such contradictions. Her work is subversive, but quietly—it captures what’s mysterious about the inevitable, what’s bizarre about the inescapable. This collection has some familiar motifs from her novels—long marriages, frightful domesticity, foreignness, and the surreality of motherhood. And while most of the stories have appeared elsewhere and received big awards, brought together, these narratives of young families, divorced couples, and unconventional women vibrate with something new. These are stories about how human nature is an extension of the natural world, how our relationships are contoured by greater forces, and how time is delivered by nature—regardless of the checks and measurements we superimpose.

The rains in Florida are biblical, to say the least. The margins between earthly and celestial routinely dissolve. From the little girls abandoned alone on a tropical island in “Dogs Go Wolf” to the mother in “Flower Hunters” who reads the naturalist William Bartram while her children trick-or-treat in a storm, the characters in Groff’s stories experience the fluctuations of the outdoors on an elemental level. Nature is eroticized in a way that is not quite sexual yet wholly sensual. I asked the author for a word to describe this writing technique, one that transforms humans into phenomena, creatures—while at the same time placing, with precision, those characters in their environment. Her suggestion was wilding.

This call-and-response between domesticity and nature animates quotidian banalities, such as adultery in “For the Love of God, for the Love of God” and “Eyewall,” parenthood in “The Midnight Zone” and “Yport,” and aging in “Above and Below” and “Salvador.” Groff takes the structures we mistake as essential to life and makes them look absurd before nature’s implacability. The stories in Florida suggest that the relationship between humans and our planet—that home none of us chose—transcends the power struggle of dominance and submission.

I corresponded with Groff as she was bouncing between Iceland and the state that claims these stories. “I love Iceland—and yet I felt immediate relief on touching down here,” she wrote. “After twelve years, Florida has, despite everything, become home.”

INTERVIEWER

Many of the women in this collection are Florida transplants, once northerners “dazzled by the flora and fauna.” Do you still feel that sense of wonder?

GROFF

Most days, I have a moment or two of wonder. Yesterday, when I took the dog for a walk after dinner at sunset, there was a giant dead rat snake on the sidewalk that I marveled at, and then I came home in the dark through such a pungent smell of jasmine, which is in full bloom right now, and my head got a little swoony from the potency of the scent. Read More

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May 31, 2018

At Work

Carnival and Chaos: An Interview with Herbert Gold

By Robert Kaiser

Herbert Gold, now ninety-four and still clacking away on his Royal typewriter, was once a famous author. His most successful novel, Fathers, was admired by critics and read widely: it was a best seller for many weeks in 1967. In the New York Times, Eliot Fremont-Smith called it a “beautiful … book, the best and most deeply felt that this talented, sensitive and dispassionate author has yet produced.” It was Gold’s seventh published volume of fiction; there would be nearly twenty more, plus six books of nonfiction. Saul Bellow was a personal friend and an admirer; he published short stories by Gold in his magazine, The Noble Savage. Vladimir Nabokov put one of Gold’s stories, “Death in Miami Beach,” on his personal list of favorite American short stories. When the success of Lolita allowed Nabokov to give up academia to write full-time, he chose Gold to succeed him as a lecturer on Russian literature at Cornell; and in 1967, Gold interviewed Nabokov for The Paris Review.

Gold was neither as successful nor as famous as many of the Jewish American writers of his generation, but he was no slouch. He’s left his mark on twentieth-century American literature, even if he rarely made a splash, and has lived as a writer for nearly seven decades, outliving many of his contemporaries. He knows that his end is nigh, but he’s in no hurry to leave. He has been writing poems for the first time in decades, and has a new collection of verse called Nearing the Exit.

An interview with Gold is challenging because—despite his remarkably good health—he is nearly deaf. This interview took place in Gold’s rent-controlled apartment on Broadway, near the top of Russian Hill, in San Francisco, where he has lived for half a century. It’s a quiet spot with a glorious view of the Bay Bridge. Gold won’t say exactly how much rent he pays but admits that it’s less than a thousand dollars a month, surely one of the best housing deals in the city, and a fitting spot for telling the stories he’s been telling for most of a century. Read More

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Category Archives: At Work

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Organized Chaos: An Interview with Jeff VanderMeer

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We Speak About Violence: Abdellah Taïa and Edouard Louis in Conversation

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Hero’s Journey: An Interview with Taylor Mac

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What’s Queer Form Anyway? An Interview with Maggie Nelson

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My Own Boundaries Seem to Be Fading: An Interview with Lauren Groff

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Carnival and Chaos: An Interview with Herbert Gold

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