Collected Miscellany

Interesting Q&A with Christopher Buckley on his new book, Losing Mum and Pup, his endorsement of Obama, etc. I hope to have a review soon.

I really enjoyed Laila Lalami’s new novel Secret Son and so inquired about having her answer some questions via email.  She graciously agreed.

Here is a brief bio for those who may be unfamiliar with her work or background:

Laila Lalami was born and raised in Morocco. She earned her B.A. in English from Université Mohammed V in Rabat, her M.A. from University College, London, and her Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Southern California. Her work has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The New York Times, The Washington Post and elsewhere. She is the recipient of an Oregon Literary Arts grant and a Fulbright Fellowship. She was short-listed for the Caine Prize for African Writing (the “African Booker”) in 2006. Her debut collection of short stories, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, was published in the fall of 2005 and has since been translated into Spanish, Dutch, French, Portuguese, Italian, and Norwegian. Her first novel, Secret Son, will be published in the spring of 2009. She is currently Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California Riverside.

My questions and her answers are below.

1) What is the most challenging part about moving from the short story format to a novel and what is the best aspect?

The structure of my short story collection made it possible to take out one story and revise it, or even get rid of it and replace it with another, without having this affect the shape of the entire book. But with the novel, changes to one chapter inevitably meant changes somewhere else in the novel, so the revision process was much more labor-intensive. On the other hand, working on a novel really enabled me to stay with the same story for a long time, to inhabit it, if you will, and to keep adding layers to it.

2) How would you describe your writing style? What authors have influenced your writing?

Perhaps it is up to critics to describe my writing style. I have a hard time looking at my work with a critical eye, since there is no possibility of being completely objective. My favorite authors-and I think these are the people who have influenced me the most, since I go back to them often-are J.M. Coetzee, Chinua Achebe, Ahdaf Soueif, Graham Greene, Joseph Conrad, Leila Abouzeid, Mohammed Choukri, Tayeb Salih, among others.
3) What sparked the idea for the character of Youssef?

I think I started with this image of a young man walking back home to the slum where he lives, having just watched a movie. In some sense, this journey from idealized dreams to stark reality-from lies to truths, if you will-takes place throughout the book. For instance, when Youssef’s mother reveals to him that he is the illegitimate son of a wealthy businessman, she only gives him a small part of the story of his birth, and then she changes that story several times in the book. Or when Hatim promises Youssef that he will publish an article about what happened at the university, the piece that comes out bears only a small resemblance to the events as Youssef experienced them.

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Laura Miller talks about her recently released The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia on Little Brown’s Blog Talk Radio show:

Cover via Amazon

The folks at Little Brown are using this new media stuff.  There is still some time left in their Blog Talk Radio live interview with Marie Phillips.  (My review of God’s Behaving Badly is here.)

I am looking forward to the show with Laura Miller on Wednesday.  I am reading here The Magician’s Book right now.

Now I just need to finish so I can ask some good questions . . .

I was able to talk with Michael Rosenberg, the Detroit Free Press columnist and author of War As They Knew It, at an event here in Columbus back in September.  And after our chat Michael was gracious enough to agree to answer some questions via email.  I have finally managed to put that together.  The good thing is it is Michigan Ohio State week so the subject matches very well.  (FYI: I ask Michael ten more questions – this time more focused on football – at my personal blog.

*IE problem now fixed*

So without further ado:

1. How did you convince someone to publish yet another book on the Ohio State Michigan rivalry and/or Bo and Woody?

That was the first challenge of selling the proposal: convincing publisher’s that my book would be different. I really emphasized the social history and my reporting background, and thankfully, publishers understand that even when others have tackled a subject, it is possible to write a high-quality book with new insight and information. Laura Hillenbrand was not the first author to write a book about Seabiscuit
. There have been dozens of Muhammad Ali books, but three of the most recent – David Remnick’s “King of the World,” Mark Kram’s Ghosts of Manila and Dave Kindred’s Sound and Fury
” – were critically acclaimed. Once editors read my proposal (which ran 60 pages) I think they understood that this book was different.

2. As a columnist what did you like the most about writing a book?  What was the most difficult aspect; or the part you disliked?

I love being a columnist, but I find myself rending verdicts and offering a point of view in almost every column, and I really loved the opportunity to just tell a story. There is no judgment in this book – radicals and intense football coaches and even Richard Nixon are not judged by the author. I wanted to take readers inside their heads, to understand why they did what they did.

The most difficult part was the sheer volume of work and the discipline it required. I tend to write columns in pieces, then put them together – I almost never write top to bottom and send it in. Obviously, it’s hard to write a 300-page book that way. Yet I had to keep that approach in order to weave the story together. What happens on page 20 might foreshadow what happens on page 240.

I thought I could write a book, but it’s hard to know until you try it. There were many days when I was not sure I could pull this off.

Questions 3-10 below

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I haven’t done a “Ten Questions” with an author in a while, but when I read the creative and interesting The Dart League King, Keith Lee Morris seemed like a great candidate.  Luckily for me, he graciously agreed to answer some questions via email.  

Here is a brief bio:

Keith Lee Morris is an associate professor of English and creative writing at Clemson University. His short stories have been published in A Public Space, Southern Review, Ninth Letter,StoryQuarterly, New England Review, The Sun, and the Georgia Review, among other publications. The University of Nevada published his first two books: The Greyhound Gods (2003) and The Best Seats in the House (2004). He lives in Clemson, South Carolina.

Questions and answers below:

Below please find another in the reoccurring series of short Q&A’s with authors. This time with Jim Krusoe. Krusoe is the author of five books of poetry, the short story collection Blood Lake, and the novels Iceland and Girl Factory. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund. Jim Krusoe teaches creative writing at Antioch University and Santa Monica College.

For my review of his latest book Girl Factory see here. And here is a fascinating podcast interview by Michael Silverblatt.

On to the questions:

1) When people ask what you do for a living how do you answer? Teacher, poet, writer, novelist?

I generally say that I’m a writer who teaches writing. In many ways I don’t find the distinctions—fiction, poetry and the essay—inside the general activity of writing to be as important as the act itself. I’ve done all three, and for me they seem equally difficult.

2) Some have used the word Kafkaesque to describe your work. What is your reaction to that? How would you describe your writing style to a first time reader?

Kafka’s work and mine have in common a shared landscape of dream. That is: not naturalistic, of a limited point of view, and idiosyncratically obsessive. Where we overlap the most is not in the supremely self-contained dreams of The Castle and the later work, but more in Kafka’s unfinished novel, Amerika, where sections of the unruly real world keep poking through, like drunken strangers at a wake.

3) Does being a poet impact your fiction writing? If so how?

A reason I wrote poetry for twenty years before attempting fiction was that I didn’t feel certain enough of this world to be able to actually describe a real street, with real houses and real neighbors. I’m not sure I can do that in fiction even now. Fiction implies a world outside the writer; in poetry, the voice of the writer is always present, is always the lens. So my version of fiction has been a sort of compromise between the two worlds, there is a lot of attention to language and to the huge leaps I associate with poetry, mixed with a more-or-less linear narrative and a real, made-up city, St. Nils. I can’t imagine writing a story set in New York or Los Angeles, for example.

4) Is there any science behind yogurt as a life preserving fluid in Girl Factory? Is this the natural alternative to cryogenics?

One of the pleasures of writing this book was to discover how acidophilus can preserve life beyond all imagining, and then also having to invent a way to undo its effects. So if it is a science, I’d say it’s a very new branch.

5) Why are memory and perception such slippery things? Are we incapable of seeing reality or are we unwilling to face it?

Just the other day I read that the organisms most capable of seeing the universe as it is are probably certain one-celled animals. They have the fewest number of filters between what exists and what they perceive. And then for humans, our memories are even trickier because they’re so malleable. Given therefore that what we are seeing is most certainly not reality, and out of that (whatever that is) we may remember only a part, mixed in with a lot of wishful thinking, is it any wonder things in humanland are somewhat confused? That’s why I have a hard time with words like “truth” and “reality”. For me, deliberate lies, and deliberate falsifications of experience are more relevant, and lord knows there’s enough of those to go around. And as for everything else—it’s up for grabs.

6) Is there a fine line between being a hero and a fool? Jonathan wants to be a hero but his actions always lead to tragedy.

I suspect that the intentions of a fool and a hero are very similar. It’s the results that separate one from the other. I think about Oedipus, for example, who spent the first part of his life thinking he was a hero, and then had that taken from him by a mere shift of perspective. Does that seem so different from anyone else’s life?

7) If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is Jonathan insane? Or is he just a bumbling idiot?

And the rules for insanity are probably much the same as for heroism. There’s a great American capitalist tradition of starting business after business until you succeed, and the entrepreneurial fantasy world is littered with stories like this. What they tend to leave out are all those people who go broke a few times and then shoot themselves. Apropos of which, friend of mine observed that reading about Jonathan trying to bring those women back to life was very like her having watched me work on various versions of this novel, which, at the end, topped forty drafts and took seven or eight years. It’s not a work model that I especially recommend.

8) Girl Factory seems to leave a lot of questions for the reader to answer or that happen off page (Why the girls are in the vats, what happened to Spinner, what happened in Mexico, etc.). Do you know the answer to these questions or does each reader bring an equally valid answer?

Not to harp on it, but in dreams situations are usually a given. I don’t ever remember being in a dream where I tried to figure out how I’d got there; only that I had to deal with it. I left large parts of this book vague for that reason, and for two other reasons as well. First, if I had detailed the back-story, then I would have an obligation to deal with it, and that would change the novel’s concerns. Second, I rather like the uncertainty because it feels right. When I think about my own life—how it happened, how I got here, and what actually went on in a relationship—I find I can’t answer these questions with any degree of certainty.

And yes, in Girl Factory I did have my opinions about what happened behind the pages in some instances, but I would like to think a nosy reader’s theory is as welcome as mine.

9) Does the average person care about literature or books? Should they?

When a person says, “Let me tell you something that happened to me once . . .” I can feel every cell in my body relax and my defenses drop; I’m able to take in new information. Accordingly, stories (told through the medium of literature) contain varying amounts of information about what I need to know. I would hope that others as well wish to understand as much as possible about themselves and our world, and one of the best ways to engage this process is by reading. Admittedly, there are plenty of people who would rather not ask any questions at all, but would prefer to believe they have all the answers they need.

10) If you were given control of the local (meaning most prominent paper in your area) newspaper’s book coverage what are three things you would change or implement?

Ah yes, being a book review editor is one of the several thousand things I am completely unqualified for, and this being the case, here are my suggestions, any one of which—or all—might prove fatal to an actual paper:

1) Do more theme issues, with the book review using fiction, poetry, and non-fiction, to examine controversial topics and to discuss new concepts and theories.

2) Use more reviewers who are writers, rather than professional reviewers. Not that there’s anything wrong with professional reviewers, but it is taxing to do these reviews day after day and bring to them a sense of freshness and discovery. Given that there is already a large pool of largely unemployed writers, it shouldn’t be too hard to find new voices. Speaking for myself, I always learn a lot whenever I find myself doing a review even though personally I try to avoid them.

3) Be less reverent.