Inkslinger On writing, on books, and on book arts

A Conversation with Tracy Chevalier by Ellen Fagg

With the publication of Freedom, Jonathan Franzen is back in the news.  Up here in St. Paul, he gets play even in readings by other (not surprisingly far less famous/notorious) novelists – which is to say, I’m already tired of PR wildfire.  Our culture seems seriously in need of a bad boy.  Or a bad boy turned penitent.  Or a bad boy receiving forgiveness by Saint “O.”

Deep into my holier-than-thou attitude aimed at the paparazzi around this particular writer-celebrity, I nearly skimmed Tracy Chevalier’s discussion of Franzen in her Tin House interview.  The curse of being a female writer with a strong book club fan base, it seems – as if any mention of book clubs and Saint “O” necessitates beating a dead horse.  But, I discovered, trust the wit of the woman who penned that graceful volume Girl with a Pearl Earring.  She dives into the prejudice against book clubs and the exaltation of the sweeping male saga.  Club versus club.  Here's a taste:

EF: In contemporary fiction, it seems like male writers have the ability – or are allowed the ability – to speak for all people.  Do you believe it’s possible for women to write with that kind of authority?

TC: I’m sure it’s possible.  I’m just not sure that women have taken up the gauntlet.  And I’m not sure why.  It’s true that there’s a whole genre of men.  You named David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen, but the older generation, as well – Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, John Updike, Joseph Heller – it’s all men.  Where are the women in there?  Maybe I shouldn’t admit this in print, but I don’t read those writers very much.

EF: Why not?

TC: They just don’t interest me.  I’m not interested in the big sweep.  Maybe it’s partly because I live in Europe now so I think the great sweeping American novel doesn’t necessarily appeal to me…. I don’t know why it is that I’m so critical.  Or, not critical exactly, because they’re clearly good writers.  I mean, I read The Corrections and there’s some brilliant writing in there, but it’s too long…. You know, I have Don Delillo’s Underworld and I just can’t begin to crack it.  It’s just too long.  I see it as this big mountain, and other novels, particularly by women, I don’t see them as mountains…. I just feel the men’s books are like big skyscrapers, and [Margaret Atwood’s] writing is like a horizontal art gallery.  You know?

EF: That’s an interesting metaphor to describe the difference.

TC: Yeah, like the great penis in the sky.

EF: It’s interesting because so may readers are women, and yet the publishing establishment is having a problem reaching those readers.

TC: This brings up the whole Oprah thing, of course, and Jonathan Franzen.  Franzen is an interesting case because of the question of whether it’s actually there already – this school of white, male American writers who write against a great sweeping canvas.  When Franzen was published, I think his publisher took a very deliberate step to market it that way.  Wasn’t there a quote from Don Delillo on the cover?

EF: Yes.

TC: It’s like, “C’mon, buddy, join the club,” and people see that.  He talked about how much he admired these writers – which is a completely legitimate thing to say, but it’s very much like joining the club.

Tracy Chevalier is the author of Girl with a Pearl Earring, The Virgin Blue, The Lady and the Unicorn, and Burning Bright.  Her interview was first published in Tin House no. 14.

A Conversation with Sherman Alexie by Rob Spillman

Sherman Alexie

Why write?  What's your motivation?  Anger?  That's the question poet/writer Sherman Alexie is asked all the time:

SA: It used to be.  But you can’t sustain it.  You become bitter.  Nothing is going to change.  Anger leads to resentment, then to spiking your orange juice, then to martyrdom.  Certainly I’m angered, by politics, by racism, sexism, all these “isms.”  A lot of my image was a misperception, sarcasm mistaken for rage.  A white guy could say the same things and get away with it.  The hostile Indian is still an icon.  It’s what people expect.

RS: Do you feel a need to live up to your image as a “ticked-off Indian”?

SA: In public forums I like to create drama.  I don’t take it seriously. Nothing changes in an hour.  At a book festival, in a classroom, over the course of an evening, those aren’t effective forums.  It’s not like Ollie North’s devotees are showing up.  I’m also slamming liberals, especially liberals, and they don’t like that.  They want to be congratulated.  The real value of art is a long promise, no one book is going to do it.  I don’t want to sit up onstage and be profound.  I’m just a writer trying to sell my book.  I try not to be seen as too self-important.  I just want to have fun.  My hard-core political life is outside the writing.

RS: Do you worry that people might wonder if you’re growing soft by writing beautiful stories like “Saint Junior” and “One Good Man”?

SA: That was part of my inspiration for this book [The Toughest Indian in the World] – changing the expectation people have of me.  You never read about middle-class or upper-class Indians.  It’s all about poverty.  I’m now in the top ten percent of income in the country.  My needs are met.  My concerns have stayed.  But writing about a real marriage is real revolutionary.  We live our lives.  I wanted to write domesticity.  A friend of mine read these stories and said they sounded like Rick Moody, Rick Moody with braids.  It’s a combination of going to a powwow, then coming home and watching Michael Jordan on the TV.  It’s about the romance of the ordinary.  I tried to be really ordinary.  I wanted to avoid what people were expected of me, avoid flights of magical realism…. In the collection I wanted to point out how we all worry about the same damn things.

Sherman Alexie, a Spokane/Couer d’Alene Indian, has published eleven collection of poems, multiple collections of short stories, and several novels, including Flights, Reservation Blues, and Indian Killer.  His interview was first published in Tin House no. 4.

A Conversation with Claribel Alegría by Abbie Fields

Claribel Alegría and her husband, Darwin “Bud” Flakoll.

Over the past months, I’ve watched the news regarding U.S. relations with Cuba with bated breath.  In March, Minnesota Democratic Rep. Collin Peterson introduced into the U.S. House of Representatives HR4645, the Travel Restriction Reform and Export Enhancement Act. Chairman of the Agricultural Committee, Peterson advocated agricultural trade with Cuba that would benefit Minnesota farmers and lessen hardships experienced in Cuba.  He also advocated fewer restrictions on U.S. citizens wanting to visit the island.

Over the course of house debates and deals, the export and agricultural dimensions of the bill seem to have been put aside.  Still, the travel restrictions look ripe for reform.  This doesn’t mean no travel restrictions, but the idea is to roll back to a Clinton-era understanding of the rules.  George W. Bush turned the heat up on Cuba; Obama may be finally turning it down.  Not way down, but a start.

I’ve already got travel guides, history books, and other literature on Cuba lined up on my desk.  I’ve begun planning.  Why?  Because visiting Cuba means taking the blinders off.  Seeing Cuba means seeing the world in a radically different way.

I’ll let poet and essayist Claribel Alegría explain:

AF: You lived in Mexico, Chile, Uruguay, Argentina, and Paris during the 1950s and early 1960s, which was where many of the writers who would become the most critically acclaimed of the Latin “boom” were living at the time.  Writers such as Cortázar, Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, García Márquez, Benedetti, and, of course, Neruda.  Why do you think this was such a key moment for young Latin American writers?

CA: I think the Cuban Revolution had a lot to do with it, because when the Cuban Revolution won, lots of people from the United States, from Europe, from all over suddenly focused their eyes on Latin America.  They were wonderful writers, but nobody had paid much attention to many of them.  And there was a publishing house called Seix Barral in Barcelona, Spain, that had started publishing these writers, and that caused a sort of “boom.”  So these writers are very well known in Spain and the rest of the countries of Latin America….

AF: Do you think the interest in these writers had something to do with political repression in their countries, or with living as political refugees or exiles?  For instance, the writers who were in Paris in the early sixties.

CA: Yes, many of them were in exile because they couldn’t go back to their countries.  Julio Cortázar, for instance, wasn’t in forced exile but he chose exile because he didn’t like the Peronistas [in Argentina], and so he went to Paris.  When I met Vargas Llosa he was working at Agence France-Presse.  It was dangerous for him in Peru at that time, I think.  And for Mario Benedetti, it was far too dangerous to go back to Uruguay.  So they were living in exile.  I am talking about 1962 to 1966, before we went to Majorca….

AF: I know you do not consider your writing “political” as such – you have said that your political poems are not really political, but are rather poems of love to your country.  Do you think that political events have motivated your writing?

CA: Let me tell you something.  Before the Cuban Revolution – there’s that Cuban Revolution again! – I didn’t care about politics.  I thought that writers couldn’t do anything about these dictators in Central America.  I thought, What can we do with these military dictators and the U.S. government always helping them?  Then the Cuban Revolution happened and I marveled at that.  I thought if the Cubans can do it, why not Central Americans?  At that time I was living in Paris, and I started thinking about 1932 in El Savador.  I was only a child in ’32; I was seven years old, but I remember – a child’s memory is really something.  And then I started talking about this, and it was Carlos Fuentes who told me I needed to write about it.  But I had been a disciple of Juan Ramón Jiménez, who had taught me to work very hard in poetry – that was my genre – and I had no experience with prose.  I’d always worked with poetry, all my life.  And then Bud, who was a newspaperman, suggested we write it together.  And that’s how Cenizas de Izalco (Ashes of Izalco) came about.  And, yes, in Cenizas I was very focused on the fact that the people who would read the book would find out what had happened in Central America.  The love story is incidental.  We mostly wanted to transmit the historical event.

But when I said that my poems are poems of love, that is true too, because I never sit down to write a poem in order to denounce something.  For that, I have prose, or the testimonials, or historical novels.  However, I was hit really hard by the things that were happening in Central America, and those things filtered into my poetry, and so some people think they are political poems.  I don’t care; it’s okay, whatever they think.  I never wanted to commit my poetry in that way.

Claribel Alegría's interview was first published in Tin House no. 32.

A Conversation with Charles D’Ambrosio by Heather Larimer

Charles D'Ambrosio

Agents, editors, writers, readers – they’ll tell you: Get rid of back story.  But should back story be so reviled?  Really.

“Back story” in these instances, of course, usually means explanation.  This is what happened before to the characters.  Boredom!  Chop it up and take it to the dumpster.

But what if back story could be made sexy again?  If that tussle on the mattress (or table or couch or the turf of the local football field) that spawned you, in all its I-don’t-want-to-go-there-but-f*ck-that’s-a-story glory, could be revived?  Because surely your characters did something nasty to get where they are.  And surely that’s more interesting than letting them play out conservative, bourgeois values in front of you and the world.

Maybe Charlie can help you understand:

CD:My brother-in-law was childhood buddies with the Mitchell brothers, who made, most famously, Behind the Green Door.  I want to go down into the gone world of San Francisco porn.  I don’t like the story; I like the back story.  When I approach a thing I want somebody to say, “I’m sorry, I can’t tell you the story,” because my response is like, “Fuck you, I don’t want your story, I want the story about how you won’t tell me the story.”  Back story is where the fecundity is before everything cools and hardens and dies into cliché.  It’s where life is.  It’s where contradiction is.  If somebody offers me the story, I immediately look for the back door and the room where all the props are stored.

HL: So what’s you take on porn?

CD: The porn thing is particular and amazing.  I suspect it began with hippie chicks who’d fuck on camera for fifty bucks and then like so much of the sixties – the glories of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll – everything turned to shit.  Porn is where free love had to start paying for Vietnam, maybe.  Anyway, I’m always interested in this kind of black de Sade underside, what happens when the civil barriers between people are removed.  In Piero Pasolini’s brilliant movie of 120 Days of Sodom, one of the characters says something like, “The only problem with sex is the need for another person.”  Woody Allen has an answer for this, but forget it.  The point is, once you pose that extreme question the next step is the elimination of the other, the annihilation of that other who frustrates, who pollutes your need.  We live in muck and I’m not big on purity as an answer; more muck, I say.  But the consciousness fascinates me.  And I want to sink down into it.  It’s gone but I’ve got a tour guide, a great one.  Then there’s this lingering fifties thing, this strange Sandra Dee world.  A lot of guys making porn in this particular heyday were maybe jocks in hot cars whose main sexual ambition was to get a hand up a girl’s skirt; then they did, and more, and what happened after – after, the aftermath of an innocence, the horror and despair of what was initially a victory – that’s the shit.

Charles D’Ambrosio is the author of two collections of short stories, The Point (1995) and The Dead Fish Museum (2006), and a collection of essays, Orphans (2005).  Interview was first published in Tin House no. 14.

Coming Up: Tin House Interviews

Tin House, The World Within

Now that I've finished going through The Paris Review Interviews -- all four volumes of them -- I'm turning my attention to Tin House's single volume of interviews: The World Within: Writers Talk.  Tin House kindly sent me a copy last December, and I'm oh-so-grateful they haven't asked me to return it!  The contents are fabulous.  Right after receiving the volume, I posted this snippet from Rikki Ducornet's interview with Rachel Resnick.  Starting next Monday (September 27, 2010), I'll explore the other marvelous interviews.

I'll be frank -- I enjoy the Tin House interviews more than those in The Paris Review.  Some of The Paris Review interviews are astounding, of course.  My favorites have been with Salman Rushdie, Norman Mailer, Maya Angelou, Huraki Murakami, V.S. Naipaul, Jack Kerouac, Truman Capote (true love!), Peter Carey, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison.  Each of these writers spoke passionately about place, voice, politics, crisis, the purpose of art, and/or the value of history.  They said racy things -- and I play these words again and again in my mind.  The Tin House interviews consistently go after these racy thoughts.  They let the writer be who they are -- at least as far as interviews can.

Join me starting Monday.  I think I'll begin with Charles D'Ambrosio and porn.