garth greenwell and idra novey!

March 2, 2016

2016.03.01 at community bookstore!

garth greenwell (what belongs to you, FSG books, 2016) and idra novey (ways to disappear, little, brown, 2016) are hilarious. they're also both very thoughtful and well-spoken, and they bounce off each other well. i have to say that idra novey talks really fast, and greenwell went into really deep territory, so there'll be more paraphrasing than usual.

idra novey: i came up with questions i can throw on out.

garth greenwell: ok. this is scary. (laughs)

IN: (she describes a scene about mothers that takes place on a train.*) you're so good at pinpointing the complexities of experience that way. [...] i wondered if you could talk about the editing process.

* i haven't read either book yet. sorry.

GG: i'd never written fiction before i wrote this book. i didn't know anything when i started writing the book -- i didn't know what i was doing, and i really felt like at every point i was trying to ride the energy of the sentence and carry my way forward.

GG: (two phrases that kept coming up as he was writing the book)

be patient and don't try to rush to the end of a sentence, don't try to rush to the end of a scene, don't try to rush to the end of a moment.
- there's all sorts of information we take in whenever we're with other people, and it's not always verbal.
be indulgent. any idea, anywhere the sentence took me, i would go. that meant, [when] editing, everything was already there; i just had to take away all the crap.
- my thing is sort of to write 20% more than i know i need.

GG: i have a question for you. this book -- idra's book -- is a wonderful assemblage of disparate parts. (not only are there many parts, there are also many stories and ideas for stories.) where do your ideas come from, idra?! were those ideas you took from your notebook over the years? and are you tempted to realize any of them?

IN: i was really tired when i worked on this book, and i had one job and another, and i would work on it at night, and i think i was a little delirious -- i think i just kind of wrote it. i wanted to write, and i just missed writing, and there was no time to do it except after eight at night.

IN: i think that, for me, was my freedom. this book was a joy to write because i couldn't travel the way i used to, and, so, i would just travel in my mind and make up these crazy stories and that would keep me joyful.

IN: i don't know if i'd give that advice -- get really tired (because then you'll be less inhibited).

IN: i think you self-censor less when it's a weird hour.

audience Q: is beatrice (the translator in ways to disappear) a combination of people you've known?

IN: i kept coming back to her as a different person.
IN: the first time, i kind of thought about clarice lispector [whom novey has translated]. it was more about thinking about that relationship between writer and translator.
IN: i don't think you can write a character with any emotional truth if you haven't had that emotion. (you don't have to have experienced it in the same way as the character; it's just that the fundamental core has to have been experienced.)
IN: i was curious about how you can be known to readers as one human being, and you can be known to friends, and you can be known in another language. when i speak portuguese, i think i become another person because i don't speak it very well, so i have to think of really simple jokes.

audience Q: how does the nitty gritty practice of translation influence your own writing?

IN: i think translating is a great way to travel.
IN: it kept my emotional imagination going.
IN: there's a lot of american literature out that talks about how people come here and get their english wrong, but, as it happens, it happens a lot the other way around, too.

audience Q: is it the writer aspect of you that makes you want to travel or the other way around?

GG: in my case, the answer in the moment certainly felt quite dramatic -- i moved to bulgaria, and i started to write fiction.
GG: i'm not actually well-traveled. i didn't go to europe until i was twenty-eight.
GG: bulgaria is kind of an incredible place to have as a home base to get around europe. (istanbul is close by, and greece is just to the south.) i never left bulgaria. i just traveled around bulgaria, partly because i don't like traveling (or doing the tourist thing). i hate being somewhere i don't speak the language. but, definitely, bulgaria made me a prose writer somehow.
IN: oh, i think i kind of played around with everything always. i think translating fiction was kind of a free apprenticeship.
IN: (she didn't tell anyone she was writing a novel until she'd sold it. then she'd tell people she had a novel coming out, and they would ask, "oh, whose?" because she's a translator, and she'd be like, "mine!")

GG: was there anything in particular that seemed hard or that you felt you had to learn as you were writing this novel?

IN: i think it was the house of cards problem. if you pull a poem out [of a poetry collection], the house doesn't fall. i think it was this weird thing that i didn't want to contaminate the process, where you wouldn't want to pull something because of the work it would create.

IN: you just have to be true to the book.

GG: it was hard for me to move people across a space.

IN: i found that impossible ... which is why i didn't really do it.

GG: exactly! that's why i decided to write it all inside his head, then i wouldn't have to move anyone!

GG: it's interesting because we are in this moment where we have all these poets writing novels and it's interesting to see ways in which they're novels but they're not novels. [...] like, poets will find ways to write novels without writing any scenes.

GG: i do think there's a danger that there's a sort of monolingual canon of MFA texts, that you can assume that someone with an MFA has read all these american authors but they're totally unaware of literature in other languages.

IN: i don't read a lot of american writing.

GG: pedro lemebel -- he died january last year, and no one wrote about it in the english-language world, and it made me so angry.

(greenwell wrote a piece about lemebel in the new yorker -- he didn't ask his editor if he could, simply said he was going to -- you can find it here.)

GG: it's estimated there are eight million bulgarian speakers in the world, and almost none of them reads bulgarian literature.

GG: the thing that i became aware of as i was thinking about trying to put the book into the world is that this is the first literary representation of gay lives in bulgaria. [...] the spark for my novel really came from my experience in bulgaria and being a high school teacher and being the only openly gay person my students knew.

(i couldn't type fast enough, but what he said was important, so here's a paraphrase: it reminded him of being a gay kid in kentucky and discovering james baldwin's giovanni's room when he was at a point when he was being told that his life was of no value, and it made him think of how books can actually save lives. he was also very aware of the privilege of being american and that, had this been written in bulgarian, no one would have read it, and how sad that might have been. the novel is being translated and published in bulgarian.)

GG: if [the book] gets any attention, it will be that of scandal. that's fine. i speak bulgarian (and have some experience as an activist).

GG: the greatest hope for my book and its fate in bulgaria -- i hope it says this is one foreigner's very partial experience in this community. and my greatest hope is that one bulgarian writer will find the courage to say that this american writer got everything wrong.

álvaro enrigue with natasha wimmer!

February 18, 2016

160218: at community bookstore! álvaro enrigue is funny and charming and smart and has many ideas about what the novel should be, and natasha wimmer is a translator with bolaño under her belt.

natasha wimmer: one of the challenges of translating sudden death was translating the tennis vocabulary. the tennis they're playing is not tennis as we know it today. as i was struggling to get my head around this, i got my second email from álvaro, and here's the email: "we have to talk, dear natasha."

NW: the initial contact between translator and author is always a little bit fraught.
álvaro enrigue: it's true. before we made contact, natasha had given an interview -- of course i googled natasha immediately after i found out she was going to translate -- and she described the situation as "i have never worked with a living author before."
NW: (in the e-mail, enrigue describes a letter he got about the type of tennis played at the time.) he had decided we needed to put this letter itself into the book. to me, that perfectly sums up the fun we had working together -- the english version is not the same as the spanish -- just to sum up, that curiosity is at the heart of the book. sudden death is the opposite of serious, but it's also serious, too.
NW: i think it's the humor that enables the seriousness.

NW puts AE up the challenge of summarizing his book and telling the audience what it's about.

AE: i've been writing books like [sudden death] always, maybe not with as much luck as i did this time.
AE: i published in these incredibly fancy publishing houses in spanish where they do everything for you somehow, and they would publish the book whenever they wanted, however they wanted, you didn't have an opinion. when i moved to another prestigious publishing house in spain that involved more of the author, they involved the author more in the publicity and packaging of the book. so the editor told me to write what the book is about to put on the back of the book, so i said, why don't you just print the book in tiny print.
AE: the idea i always have is that a book should be difficult to be defined, and i don't think the rules should ever be respected, so why should you break the rules and explain how you did it?

NW: do you want to tell us a little bit about quevedo?

AE: he's not very well-known in the english tradition; i don't know why. he was a very samrt poet.
AE: he was an incredible writer of sonnets. he wrote, i think, one of the best collections of erotic sonnets ever written.
AE: i think he's still the best critic of the imperial morals of spain.
AE: i have the impression that poetry stays in your brain somehow. it wraps itself around your cerebral cortex. there are many circumstances when you see something, and a poem returns.

NW: my original reaction to the novel was that, at the same time, it was an intensely cerebral book but it was also an intensely physical book. i'm curious about how you balanced the two things and whether, because you're writing about historical figures who can be dry, whether you used the physical to make them come to life?

AE: no, i never think about it when i'm writing.
AE: i am interested in the ability the novel has to hurt the preconceptions about many things that, in this specific case, included the modern spanish empire and the vatican and those things. and you cannot become enemies of these things if they haven't first done anything.
AE: i think the novel should always be a little destructive about the means that explain ourselves as human beings. i think of the carnality of my characters as bringing them down. [as in, taking them off any pedestal and bringing them down to the human level.]
AE: why would you write a novel in which the characters look like, i don't know, the supreme court building in washington, dc?

NW: i think the novel is a lot about imperfections. in a way, you're building up and taking it [the novel] down at the same time.

AE: the novel is a register. it's a register about the life of someone.
AE: i think it would be a little dishonest to ask the reader to suspend their credibility. the thing about cervantes -- and i swear this is my last seventeenth-century reference -- is that you can put anything in a novel.
AE: a novel is about the novel. a novel is about how that novel was written. we live in this world full of fantastic things and to think that you can still write like jane austen, i would feel silly doing it.
AE: what i enjoy as a reader is to follow the mental process of someone ... what a person that is my sister or brother or is my contemporary can do with that material.

NW: let's get to the new world. were you trying to say that something positive can come out of the clash between the old world and the new world?

AE: i think there is always some sort of redemption in everything. if you're mexican, you have this official story of mexico -- it's very similar to americans.
the figure of cortez is so grotesque to mexicans that he doesn't really show up in mexican literature.
[he went on to talk about how, as he researched and read, he found these cool connections between old mexico and new mexico and how they threaded through spain and to the philippines. it was cool. i'm sorry i couldn't get any of it down.]

audience Q: do you play tennis?

AE: no. two of my kids play tennis. that's enough.
AE: i played baseball as a kid. they're very close. there's a ball.
AE: it was not love for tennis; it was love for caravaggio.
AE: i think the novel should also try to break the definition of what makes a novel. the idea should always be to expand the definition of a novel according to your powers.

audience Q about the english edition and adding things to it.

AE: to publish the novel in english, having known english myself, would be silly. you learn in the first few pages that you're reading a translation. why pretend that what's impure about translation -- why should we hide that?
AE: translation is an itinerary through which literature moves.

audience Q about the strong women in the book.

AE: it's in general not recognized by the critic, the role of the model in the painting.
AE: in one sense, the artist gets freedom through fame.
AE: i have many beliefs about novels. if you're a novelist, you can go to the sources that sustain historical discourses and have theories about them without having to legitimize them.

audience Q about whether the reception of the book is different in spanish and english.

AE: i have another book that's a novel in spanish and short stories in english.
AE: the reception of books is always different, and you have to consider that the spanish-speaking world is so vast.

another Q that i didn't write down.

AE: i think a novel shouldn't make you suspend your credibility. i think the novel should offer you a way in as a contemporary of the story.
AE: a novel is a question; it should never be an answer.

[160202] toni morrison @ brooklyn by the book!

February 6, 2016

toni morrison is incredible (there's your understatement of the year). she's so gracious and wise and smart and funny, and her talk with claudia brodksy (professor of comparative literature at princeton) was so, so great. i tried to catch as much of it as i could; there's no time i hate the iphone keyboard as much as i do when i'm at a great talk and trying to transcribe as much of it as i can.

(i did really horrible paraphrases of brodsky's questions; i'm sorry.)

Q: about God help the child: while no two of your stories resemble each other, whether in story or style, which is remarkable in itself, still, there are a number of really distinctive things in God help that many were struck by. in God help, you intermingle a third-person omniscient with multiple individual narrative voices that are adversarial to each other. why did you take this direction?

first of all, let me say that i don't really trust the characters. i like them or i don't like them -- it doesn't really matter what i feel. i want to be accurate. i want to do them justice. but i know they don't really know.
in home, that was a huge tension for me because i could allow the character to have his say but also have the third-person reader as part of the conversation.
they're like us -- they're human beings, and they know what they know, they know what they feel.
in God help, having multiple people comment on the same action seemed necessary to me. it was important for me to say more by saying less.
i hate that title. it's ... silly. i have to tell you my original title was wonderful. and everybody hated it in the publishing world. my original title was ... the wrath of children. because it was about that and i wanted that level. it wasn't that the kids were angry; it was wrath.
i tend to go off on tangents because that's what i do.

Q: i got the sense that something else was at stake in the style. would you care to comment on your creation of this daughter whose mother rejects her and becomes a model and of the mother whose shown her daughter anything but sweetness?

the main problem i had with this was language. contemporary language eluded me in a literary sense. there were lots of shortcuts. i didn't understand how i could elevate modern, convenient language so it would have more meaning than it normally does. so i put it aside, and then i went back to it when i knew.
my world of language is usually academic.
[contemporary language] is hard and kind of stupid.
it was interesting to me that the male character is a problem and he's hostile but he wants to learn. he's a lonesome guy; he's lonely; but he writes, and that's where he thinks, that's where he is.
i wanted very much to have every book i write to end with knowledge. i always thought that if you begin in a certain place, at the very end, there has to be the acquisition of knowledge. which is virtue, which is good, which is helpful. i don't speculate about what they [the characters] do with it.

(there was a question here i didn't write down.)

when i was a little girl -- and my sister's a year-and-a-half older than i am -- and we were playing on the floor in our house during a time when -- i think i was three and she was four -- when my great-great-grandmother had moved from flint, MI, to our little town in ohio to visit several relatives. she was understood to be a legend. she was a very, very sought-after midwife, and the first time i ever saw this in my life was when she walked into a room and all the men stood up. anyway, she came to our house at one point. she came in and greeted my mother and said, "those children have been tampered with." she -- my great-great-grandmother -- was pitch black, the blackest woman i'd ever seen -- and what she meant was we were not pure, we had been sullied. now, it may occur to you that i've been writing about this forever.
the ramifications of colorism are overwhelming. and i don't mean colorism in that it only affects colored people. it affects all people. they're constantly making judgments.
- it's not just about color but how we decide who belongs and who doesn't.
- we're human beings. we're a special little species, no matter what some people try to say.
- is there something lacking in you -- is that why you need an enemy? you know and i know that that's not about the other one; it's all about you.
the concept of altruism, the concept of goodness is often seen as weak, as the lesser thing.
i just think goodness is more interesting. it's varied; it's complex; it's layered. evil is constant. it can elevate itself, but it's all about pain and death. you can think about different ways to murder people, but that's not interesting -- you can do that when you're five. but, when you're an adult, you have to think about how to be good, and that's interesting.

Q: are you working on a novel now?

i've set it aside a little bit because i'm working on those lecture series for harvard, but i have to tell you it's the best thing i've ever written.
so far -- and this may change -- the title is justice. i don't care what you say, knopf, i'm not changing it.
the character in the novel is mute -- he has no voice box, so he can't talk -- but he hears everything.

then on to audience Qs! the first: which of your novels was most difficult to write and why?

i have to say the one i'm writing now is the most difficult one. i don't think of them that way. they're so different. each one's a different enterprise for me.
(while talking about a mercy) read that book.
the ending is the point.

Q: what advice would you give young writers?

i would say wait 'til you're fifty.
when i was teaching at princeton, i would tell my students, don't tell me about yourselves. write about what you don't know. so my advice to young writers is forget yourselves, invent something, and move along.
(brodsky says, "so no autobiographies, no memoirs?") yeah. they won't let me lie.

Q: what keeps you going? what fuels you?

i don't know how to stop.
i can't imagine me in the world without writing or thinking of something to write. so i don't need to be pushed.

Q: what have you learned from the women you've created?

i've learned a lot from them. a certain kind of strength. not power, just strength. a willingness to go places i may have never been willing to go, as well as a sovereignty, that it's okay to be me, not the publishing me but the me inside.

[160121] beyond lolita: sex and sexuality in literature

January 21, 2016

tonight, i went to a fabulous event at bookcourt that was part of a series of discussions going on around the country titled "beyond lolita." the series is in support of pen america's emergency fund; you can read more about the writer's emergency fund and donate here!

the event was moderated by michele filgate (left), and panelists were (from left to right in the image above) laura miller, ashley c. ford, saeed jones, dylan landis, and elissa schappell. you can read their bio's on bookcourt's site (here).

michele filgate did an awesome job moderating, and she started off with a series of direct questions. all the panelists were awesome; i was admittedly only familiar with laura miller and saeed jones; and i walked away a new fan of ashley c. ford, who is fucking badass.

(also, meghan daum was there as well, in the audience, and i had a little fangirl moment in my head. i recently read my misspent youth, and i love meghan daum.)

Q: what rules do you have when writing sex, and do you think of writing sex scenes differently than other scenes?

ashley c. ford: whenever i write anything, i try to write it as honestly as possible.
- ACF: two ways to go with sex -- i grew up on romance novels; even now, when i write sex, there's a hint of that romance novel suspense to it. i rarely write the act because the act is usually the least interesting part -- in writing, not in life.
- ACF: i either go with suspense or i go with comedy because sex is often funny.
elissa schappell: for me, the most interesting sex is bad sex.
ES: i think, if you're going to write a sex scene, it should first turn you on.
laura miller: i'm the critic who doesn't actually write sex but is here to pass judgment.
someone mentions the bad sex award, and LM says she finds it kind of contemptible because it's about shaming. "i actually find it prudish."
saeed jones: when straight white men write about sex, it's literature. they get that taken for granted. when it's anyone else, we have to answer all these questions.
- SJ: i'm interested because i'm interested in masculinity and its performance. when two people come together, regardless of who they pretend to be or who they think they're attracted to, in that moment, they're laid bare.
- SJ: i'm interested in the failure and the juxtaposition.
- SJ: it is comedic, and it is is sad sometimes, and that's more illuminating to me.
ES: there's a moment in sex where someone shows him/herself to be very different from how they appear.
SJ: i'm interested in the tells and what we give away.

Q: how do we navigate -- or fail to navigate -- a diverse array of identification in our writing about sexuality?

ACF: writing about my sex life right now tends to be particularly interesting because i'm in an interracial relationship and my partner's white and i find myself very submissive in the bedroom.
- ACF: it's very hard to write about it. so i write around it. and i find that, when i'm writing around something, that's what i'm supposed to be writing about.
LM: what a sex therapist once told me when i was interviewing him: we all have an erotic imagination, and what it sometimes seizes on are the things that frighten us. like a taking possession of our fears.
- ES: you could have saved me thousands of dollars.
dylan landis: it's worth asking if your books are populated by the same people.
- DL: i think a stereotype of any kind will explode the work, and you'll have no art left.

Q: dylan, tell me about the challenges of writing about the open sexuality of a teenager.

DL: writing about teenagers is important to me.
DL: when you're a teenager, your sexuality is like a brand new sports car. what are you going to do with it? are you going to drive it too fast? are you going to drive it over a cliff because you feel like shit? are you going to drive it into your parents' house?

Q: elissa, what do you love to have come across your desk?

ES: i want to feel something i haven't felt. i want to see someone be vulnerable in a way i haven't seen before, to see someone be brutal in a way i haven't seen before.

Q: laura, you've written about prudishness. do you advocate for more explicit sex scenes in the literary novel?

LM: i don't think people should feel obliged to do it if they don't want to, but i don't think people should be shamed for it.
LM: i'm more concerned that there's so much of a stigma attached to it that keeps people from taking chances and going out on a limb because you're so exposed.
LM: in the science fiction/fantasy community, there's a pushback from the traditional male readers who don't want to read women writing about sex.
- ACF: is there no sex in the future? because i'm not going then.
- LM: i think it's partly that they're afraid that their genre is going to be turned into romance. there's a huge genre hierarchy.
- LM: dealing with sex is seen as a woman's thing in that genre territory.
(LM gives a shout-out to jane smiley who writes good sex well but is not given enough recognition for it.)

Q: saeed, what are you seeing -- or not seeing -- that you really want to see?

SJ: i'm looking to feel more human after encountering someone's work.
SJ: what i don't want to see is repetition.
SJ: i think, as an editor, sometimes when i'm rejecting, i'm trying to protect writers. like, with people who write about sex and trauma, are you still living that trauma?
SJ: i got a trainer in september who i see twice a week, and he asked me, "what's your goal?", and i said, "well, my next book is coming out in 2017 ..."
- SJ: there is this phenomenon where people think you belong to them. like people have ownership of you once you've given them access to your work.
SJ: i don't believe readers are wrong as long as they're thoughtful.

Q: ashley, you write all the things women of color aren't allowed to write. what's the reaction to that, and is there a difference between your writing and your activism?

ACF: the response has been majorly positive.
(she has a raccoon problem on her fire escape.)
ACF: the negative reactions are intense, but sometimes they're so silly and so baseless that you find the sliver of humor in it.
ACF: i'm lucky that i have the emotional constitution that can do that. not everyone can be like "fuck you very much."
ACF: the first person i was reading who made me think, "i want to be like that," was my friend and mentor, roxane gay.
ACF: activism is completely different. i think, right now, the closest i get to activism is teaching.

then on to audience Q&As:

Q: re: lolita

ES: i think the thing that's interesting about that is that he's able to turn us on. for me, that really is astonishing that he's able to do that.
SJ: i find the book repulsive, and i find it repulsive because it's so familiar. in particular, the obsession -- we have these silent obsessions.
- SJ: seeing the way that manifests in lolita was repulsive because it was just as human as i'd feared. that's the horror.
ACF: i think it's so easy for us to think of any kind of sexual perversity as subhuman, so, when someone forces you to look at what you're capable of feeling or finding desirable, it's messed up, but i think it shows how much of us is an active choice.

Q: what about a female pedophile, like with tampa?

ACF: to me, it's the same shit, not necessarily a whole lot different in what it's doing. i do think it's interesting that she had scenes that were just pornography.

Q: how do you think about brutal sex? and graphic sex when it comes to that?

DL: sex is not sex if it's molestation or rape. sex then becomes an instrument of violence.
SJ: i was the kind of kid who was running toward sex. is it there? is it over there?
SJ: writing is an opportunity to explore the gradients and nuances of a sexual encounter. recognizing that there's all this potential allows us to write about sex acts with more clarity.
SJ: anything can be pornographic. that's between the reader and his therapist.
ES: i don't like this idea that you shouldn't write about something because it might offend someone. be authentic.
ES: it's funny -- as a teacher, i spend a lot of time telling my students it's okay to write about their lives.
LM: i have heard often people saying that this book feels voyeuristic because there's too much detail -- i find that destructive.
LM: someone will probably be turned on because that is the human erotic imagination. and it's so damaging to say that we can't even talk about this because it's voyeuristic.
ACF: when i was growing up, books about little black girls and black teenagers were all about what was being done to their bodies. not about them learning their bodies or taking ownership of their bodies. it wasn't until like the last two years that i learned to enjoy by body during sex.

Q: recommend a writer who's writing about sex and sexuality in interesting ways.

ES: roxane gay
DL: louise erdrich
SJ: garth greenwell
ACF: roxane gay and lydia yuknavitch
LM: alan hollinghurst
- LM: i like reading about gay sex because it's something i'll never experience.
- SJ: i'm sorry. it's great.

38 in 2015!

December 16, 2015

i went to 38 book events this year and did a lot of hearing authors twice. i heard kazuo ishiguro twice, jenny zhang twice, jonathan galassi twice, patricia park twice, marie mutsuki mockett twice, meghan daum twice, jonathan franzen twice (and i’m still kind of kicking myself about that because i should’ve just gone to the b&n event, too), and the anomaly to that is that i heard lauren groff three times because she was on two of the panels i attended at the brooklyn book festival* before i went to hear her at bookcourt.

(* i counted the brooklyn book festival as one event for my tally of events attended. i did count the two talks [toni morrison and patti smith] i attended at the new yorker festival as two events, though.)

mcnally jackson and bookcourt are tied with 7 events attended at each, followed by greenlight and housing works with 4, then the 92Y with 3 and AAWW with 2. 11 events were attended at other locations.

not too shabby, i say. in 2016, i shall endeavor to attend more! :3