First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Ilyon Woo about her latest book, Master Slave Husband Wife.

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From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: So, a work like this that you’ve been thinking about for 20 years before you start writing it– and I don’t know how long it took you to actually write it – and now it’s out in the world and outside of you. Is there one thing that you’ll take away from this?

Ilyon Woo: A takeaway? That’s a really good question. You know, the one thing I keep thinking about is just in terms of the creative process – have you seen Sesame Street where there’s a character named Don Music?  He plays these songs on the piano and Kermit the Frog introduces him and he says, you know, here we are in the studio of Don Music and he’s in the process of writing this incredible song, it is going to be hit.  And Don Music is starting to write a song, which is obviously Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, but he gets stuck, because he can’t rhyme something or it loses a word, and he’s like, I’ll never get it. I’ll never get it. And he bangs his whole head and his hands and his face on the piano. For me being a pianist’s daughter, this seemed like the ultimate, you know, I mean, you just don’t bang a piano, right? So, there was that. But there was also that frustration that I could empathize with when you’re trying to do something, and it just doesn’t work. You just want to throw everything down. Maybe my takeaway as an artist is how even if you keep banging your head on the piano that eventually, I can find my way writing my way out of this. And usually, I found that when I got to that wanting to bang my head on the piano phase, it was because I didn’t know enough. It was because I was trying to force something when I wasn’t ready to get there. And if I could pull back for a moment and do a little more research around it, then something would pop open. And luckily, I have my own real life Kermit, my writing partner, Rachel Kousser, who would, you know, pat me on the back and also say, Isn’t it time to like peel your face and fingers on that keyboard?

***

Ilyon Woo is the is the New York Times best-selling author of Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom, one of the New York Times’s “10 Best Books of 2023” and People Magazine’s “Top Ten Books of 2023. Woo is also the author of The Great Divorce: A Nineteenth-Century Mother’s Extraordinary Fight Against Her Husband, the Shakers, and Her Times.  Her writing has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, and The New York Times.  She has a PhD in English from Columbia University.

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Jill McCorkle about her new story collection, Old Crimes.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: I saw a lot of nostalgia in your stories, not necessarily in the stories but the impact on the reader.  Most of your characters seem to be wistful or have important memories of times before cell phones and of Esso gas stations and you brought up Charlotte’s Web a few times and those first indelible memories that help shape us.  

Jill McCorkle: I think there is this longing for the purity of those early beliefs and hopes and dreams. Obviously, there are a lot of schoolteachers and librarians along the way. And you know, I do go back again and again to some of the earliest memories in life. I often tell my students that when you’re trying to evoke a certain emotion on the page or to give feeling to a character, I think one of the best things we can do as writers is to reach back into our own memories and maybe not the most recent experience of an emotion but to go all the way back to when it is so pure and so clear and not cluttered with all we know.  As a kid you really know joy and you know, sadness.  I always use the analogy of like the Crayola box of crayons, you know, those primary colors, there’s no denying what the color is or what you’re feeling in those early, early memories. So, I find myself looking back to childhood, a lot and what was learned in fairy tales and those scary, scary stories that serve a very good purpose.

*

Jill McCorkle is the author of four short story collections and seven novels including the New York Times bestseller Life After Life.  Five of her books have been New York Times Notable books and her work has appeared in Best American Short Stories.  She has written for The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Garden and Gun, The Atlantic, and other publications. She is currently a faculty member at the Bennington College Writing Seminars and is affiliated with the MFA program at North Carolina State University.  Her new short story collection is called Old Crimes.

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Vanessa Chan about her new novel, The Storm We Made.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: So did you have any techniques for yourself either how you soothed yourself or how you wrote it or how you logistically went about writing it that helped you as the writer because the novel has so much trauma in it?

Vanessa Chan: I mean, you actually see my technique in the structure of the book.  The book is structured the way I would want to read it, and the way I wanted to write it, where there are multiple points of views, so that you don’t have to stay so long with a particular point of view going through a particular terrible trauma, and you get to cut away to someone else, doing something else somewhere else. And I, as a writer, got to do that as well. That’s another reason why there’s an adult point of view in a different timeline because it allowed me to escape elsewhere. I personally didn’t want to have my mind in a labor camp for that long and I didn’t think the reader would want that. I don’t believe in gratuitous violence. I believe in honesty in the writing. I believe that we should tell it as it was especially with historical fiction. I don’t believe in romanticizing the past or protecting the reader, but I also don’t believe in dwelling in a particular assault scene just because.

***

Vanessa Chan was born and raised in Malaysia. Her short stories have been published in Electric Lit, Kenyon Review, Ecotone, and more. She was the 2021 Stanley Elkin scholar at the Sewanee Writers Conference and has also received scholar awards to attend the Bread Loaf and Tin House writers’ conferences. The Storm We Made is her first novel.

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Antoine Wilson about his novel, Mouth to Mouth.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: Do you want your writing to have an impact? And what does that mean?

Antoine Wilson: I tend to try to write for a reader who is me, you know, some version of myself. I try to write books that I would like to read. In fact, the first novel that I wrote after graduate school took me about three years to write. And at the end, after I had deployed everything I’d learned, basically, and, you know, there’s some nice things about it, but I’d written a book I didn’t want to read, which was really a strange experience. And so, impact-wise, I don’t know if I think about impact as much as wanting to enchant. I think wanting to enchant the reader and get them into the fictional world, and hopefully, you know, every subsequent page is more interesting than the previous one. You know, I do think about the reader, but I guess it’s kind of vague.

Mitzi Rapkin: Tell me about your experience of writing. I mean, there’s your logical mind when you’re writing and then there’s some creative element that for some people, they say it feels channeled. I’m curious about your experience, and if you feel enchantment when you’re creating.

Antoine Wilson: I wish I felt it more.  I think it’s a Virginia Woolf anecdote, you know, where she says she spent all day getting people from the dining room into the living room. It’s interesting because it is such a humble craft.  Something I like to do sometimes when I feel like all these other work on my bookshelves, all these other people’s books are these great castles in the sky, and I’ll pick one up off the bookshelf, and just open it to the middle. And it’s made of sentences. Unless it’s like, you know, Thomas Pynchon or Nabokov or something, it’s mainly made of sentences that I could have written, you know, and it’s a humble art. And so, there’s that aspect of it. And then there’s yeah, the enchantment. It’s so fun to make discoveries, and to uncover something as it happens, and to surprise yourself. That may be alongside sort of, you know, wanting to offload all this accumulated subjectivity going on in my head, those little discoveries are this sort of the built in reward in one side, and then on that sort of craftier, more Apollonian less Dionysian side is revision. I love when I’m three quarters of the way through the process of writing a book because I finally understand the book. I spent a lot of time in this deep, contingent uncertainty place that’s not comfortable. But whatever, that’s what you have to do, I think. And so, when I get to the point where I feel like I know the book, and I know what needs to happen, and I know I have some sort of sense of mastery over what I’m trying to do that’s really fun. And I love revision. I love trying to make everything as neat and clean and tight and doing what I wanted to do as much as I can. And then afterward, it’s like painting a floor. You got to paint the floor so that when you do the last strokes, you go right out the door, not in the corner of the room, and I like to like leave no prints behind. So, my books tend to be a lot tighter and neater then. You wouldn’t imagine that the process was as chaotic as it is. I’ll put it that way.

***

Antoine Wilson is the author of the novel Mouth to Mouth, which was featured on Barack Obama’s 2022 Summer Reading List.  His other novels include The Interloper and Panorama City. His writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Quarterly West, and Best New American Voices, among other publications. He is a contributing editor at A Public Space.

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Buzzy Jackson about her debut novel, To Die Beautiful.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin:  You were just saying about your activism after writing this book about a female member of the Dutch Resistance during World War II.  A lot of times as artists we see what’s going on in the world and our art is a response to it. But you saw what was going on in the world of Dutch resistance during the war and made your art and then you went back into the world as an activist with refugee issues.  Has writing ever done that to you before?

Buzzy Jackson: That’s an interesting question. No, I don’t think so, you know, and writing this book was really different than any of the other books I’ve written before. I think writing a novel, and this book is told in first person, so trying to put myself in the position of Hannie, the main character, and all the other characters in the book was really an intimate and emotional experience that I had not had as a writer before. It’s World War II and a lot of horrible things do happen in this book. Some readers have said, was it hard to write those parts?  Absolutely, it was really hard. I mean, I had times when I would just procrastinate writing a scene because I knew how violent and sad it was going to be. I mean, I knew exactly what I was going to write, but I just kind of thought, I’ll do that tomorrow when I’ve had more coffee. And, there were times when I was writing, and I had to actually just stop and walk away because it was upsetting.  I remember sending the manuscript off kind of thinking it was done, quote, unquote. And of course, there’s like many rounds of revisions from my editors, and getting the book back and realizing Okay, now it’s time to dive back into some of those harrowing scenes was tough. And at one point, this is just so weird, I’ve never done this before, but I was like, I have to get these revisions done, this is an incredibly intense chapter because I have done the research, it’s a true story and I know this horrible thing actually happened. So, just to keep my own spirits up, I don’t know why it occurred to me to do this, I got my phone out and brought up the Pixar movie Toy Story. I just put it on silent and I just set my phone next to my computer so I could have a corner of my eye, like happiness and children and bright colors and toys and you know, something beautiful that had nothing to do with the Holocaust, just to kind of have a little life raft out there. You know what I mean? And it did help. It really did.

***

Buzzy Jackson has a Ph.D. in History from UC Berkeley and is a member of the National Book Critics’ Circle. Her debut novel is To Die Beautiful. She is currently working on a new novel based on a historical American true crime.

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to David James Duncan about his new book, Sun House.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: You have these characters, and I’m sure that you’re in love with them in a certain way, and some of them probably annoy you just like real people, and you’re writing about them over 16 years. And I’m sure that you went through your own personal changes over the course of writing this novel. So how do you maintain a narrative voice over 16 years, while your life is changing so much? And maybe your ideas of the world? I don’t know.

David James Duncan: Yeah, in some ways they did. By the end of Sun House one thing that’s dropped away is that I was much more an activist when I was younger. And in touring Sun House, I’ve met so many people who still love The River Why and The Brothers K, both of which still sell a lot of copies. And I realized that I like the effect my novels have had on the world more than the effect my nonfiction has had. When you’re going after the people who love dams, at a time when 80% of the world’s rivers have been dammed, and most of the time by petty dictators or by corrupt bureaucracies, like the Bonneville Power Administration that has driven many of the salmon runs and steelhead runs to the Columbia, Snake River to extinction, you just have to be so testy going after those people, you know, and I’ve done a lot of that.  I’ve had a lot of things like I’ve done a couple of town halls in Seattle, of salmon activism, where you can just see how the room divides politically, and there’ll be this mass exodus of people out of the lecture hall when I get a little too specific about – I’m not even going to start because I’ve pretty much renounced that. I’m doing everything I can for wild salmon still, but it’s in a way that is taking a more mythological approach in this form of a graphic novel that I’m writing that’s completely mythological. It’s all told in the verse of William Butler Yeats, “The Song of Wandering Aengus”.

I went out to the hazel wood,

Because a fire was in my head,

And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

And hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,

And moth-like stars were flickering out,

I dropped the berry in a stream

And caught a little silver trout.

 

When I had laid it on the floor

I went to blow the fire a-flame,

But something rustled on the floor,

And someone called me by my name:

It had become a glimmering girl

With apple blossom in her hair

Who called me by my name and ran

And faded through the brightening air.

 

Though I am old with wandering

Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

I will find out where she has gone,

And kiss her lips and take her hands;

And walk among long dappled grass,

And pluck till time and times are done,

The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.

This is a mythological allegiance to the pursuit of beauty that Yates held to his entire life and only seemed to get into trouble when he got political. And so, I’m just at this point in life maybe some of the fight is gone out of me, but I’m just more attracted to the truth that is beauty.

***

David James Duncan is the author of the novels The River Why, The Brothers K, and Sun House, the story collection River Teeth, and the nonfiction collection and National Book Award finalist, My Story as Told by Water, and the best-selling collection of “churchless sermons,” God Laughs & Plays.  He lives on a trout stream in Missoula, Montana.

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Paul Harding about his new book, This Other Eden.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: What do you make of these, I guess gifts from the universe, I don’t know what you would call it, when all of a sudden you’re Googling something and then it turns out there’s a reference to that thing in Maine, and you’ve been writing about Maine for your whole writing career, and all these things coalesce and  they are sort of gifts from the universe.  How do you explain that? And then, how do you teach something like that as a writing teacher?

Paul Harding: Yeah, well, so I do experience them as sort of gifts, you know, that idea that if you tune yourself in, you’ll get a signal kind of.  But you have to be careful.  One of the things I always teach is, don’t mystify things that are actually not mysteries, because that’s something writers love to do.  They like to put that sheen of mystery, on things but there are true mysteries in our human experience, and what will make them more compelling as mysteries is if they are placed within the context of things that are not mysterious, that are very clear, and that you can write about them. They’re very material, they’re concrete, they’re literal. And then these mysterious things become more figurative, and more experiential, and more subjective.  So, one of the things about these gifts from the universe is you can’t explain them, they do not occur within a realm in which explanation is available. This is how I teach a lot of writing, is that, again, you experiment with the idea that if you’re writing about the most profound human experiences, you are in the realm of mystery, there’s a certain point at which you step over and beyond the threshold of the realm or whatever, where explanation is even a possibility.  I always feel like there’s a point at which I’ve passed a boundary where any impulse towards anything like explanation is the equivalent of just explaining something away, or it’s doing violence to the characters or doing violence to the reader, you know, because if you bring the reader along, and you’re standing sort of shoulder to shoulder and you just basically say to the reader, look where I got to with this, I think this is pretty astonishing. You know the art has brought me somewhere that feels like it’s true, and it’s beautiful, to paraphrase Keats, then the way to just destroy that experience for the reader is then to tell them what they should make of what you brought them. So, it’s just descriptive, you keep describing it, since it is character based, I just keep thinking, you’re asking the characters, what is it like, what is it like, what is it like? Just describe for me what it is like and then you get into their point of view.  The idea of just giving the reader and giving yourself and especially the characters when you’re in there with them, the courtesy and the respect of accounting for their own experiences of these mysterious visitations or whatever it is.

***

Paul Harding is the author of Tinkers, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and Enon. He is director of the MFA in Creative Writing & Literature at Stony Brook University, and lives on Long Island, New York.

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Michael Cunningham about his new novel, Day.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin:  As we’re talking about the challenges of the middle of novels, it might be instructive to talk about that.  Maybe there’s something about making sure that the first third, although I hate rules, that you’re opening something up, and then in the middle, which can be the hardest, that you’re finding ways, not in a bad way to limit the possibilities so you can move towards an ending that isn’t necessarily prescriptive or final.  You still want an ending that opens up the story, but maybe for the characters, you’re creating more limitations or something.

Michael Cunningham: I also hate rules. But I teach writing, and I always talk to my students at the beginning of the semester about how there aren’t any rules, but they’re kind of are. Or rather, let’s say there are storytelling principles that seem to have stood up more often than not, please take whatever I say along these lines only as something that has proven to be a reliable hypothesis. And we did this exercise just a couple of weeks ago, I have them do writing exercises before they start writing full stories.  So, I had them write a page, an opening page that in some way or other makes it apparent to the reader that something important is going to happen. Whether the entire house is going to fall down, or we get the first intimations of a relationship about to go bad.  But remember, students and writers everywhere, that no one really wants to read what you write, there’s too much out there already. And you really need to make it apparent early on that this is going to be worthy of your attention, you hope. So yeah, get to it and then keep it alive. I think part of the problem with middles is it’s too easy, if you are a new writer or an old writer, it’s too easy to sort of think of the middle as the part of the story that keeps the beginning from colliding with the end. And you want to remember that narrative, like life, is full of surprises, and you want to think about something needs to happen in the middle that turns things around. And this is where the professor kind of says, you know, I don’t know, I don’t know how you do that exactly. But do it. Remember that every section of any story is a living thing and treat it as such because if your attention starts to waver if you start to feel like you already know this, trust me, the reader will.

***

Michael Cunningham is a novelist, screenwriter, and educator. His novel The Hours received the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1999. He has taught at Columbia University and Brooklyn College. He is currently a professor in the practice at Yale University.  His new novel is called Day.

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Salar Abdoh about his new novel, A Nearby Country to Call Love.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: Can you talk a little bit about the women burning themselves in your novel, which is not just an incident that begins the book that these characters are really interested in, but it’s mentioned throughout the novel.

Salar Abdoh: When I started this novel, many things were on my mind, and I had been thinking about the fact, the reality of women and especially young women, and sometimes very young, young girls essentially, burning themselves.  There would be periods, where there would be like copycat and once we entered the age of social media, it got worse, because then you know, it could be shared and some adolescent in a village who still has some access to social media would say, oh, so let me do this because I don’t have anything my life. But in general, what I was interested in, again, as a writer, but as a writer, who had had to travel a long distance.  I had a long learning arc because of my background, you know, my father was in professional sports. That’s really what I thought I was going to be doing for the rest of my life for a long time.  I didn’t come into the world I know automatically. I was not the studious type. I was always reading books, but my older brother, who I sort of write about in this book was.  So, I came from a world of again, I have no other word for it, and very masculine.  Machismo is a real thing in this world. A couple of things that I was troubled by in the world because I also now teach in academia in America, and I got back and forth.  I thought there was a divide between what happens in academia in the West and the discourse that exists here and the absolute reality on the ground of much of the world.  And it’s that reality, I’m a boots on the ground writer. My research is to just throw myself into a geography and see how people live and live with them. I didn’t have to read in a book or books about the situations of women or read about it in newspapers. I started to see women’s lives. And it’s not that I hadn’t seen it before or paid attention. But you know, as a man, you have to teach yourself, because everything in the world in the culture that you know, has pushed you towards lack of understanding.  Everything you know, is about, you’re a guy, you’re from that place, don’t worry about these things. I had to learn to see and not just see, but see again, and again and again. So, when I saw what was happening to women, and the extreme case was when they felt like they had no recourse they were burning themselves, especially in the provinces. I become very disturbed. I started researching it a little bit.  But that also led me to thinking about what women’s lives are in the world, you know, in a way that was very flesh and blood, not book material, not seen on TV.  I wanted to see what it feels for a 12-year-old Afghan girl in the Badakhshan province to be married off to a 74 year old man and why she kills herself or why she risks the Hindu Kush mountains, to come to Iran to go to Turkey and somewhere along the way, she’s probably raped several times, you know, and these stories I started to collect. And the other thing that happened was that I started to translate a lot as a service to the writers in Persian in Afghanistan and Iran and other places. I would say four out of five things I translated were pieces by women, it just happened. I didn’t choose them, they came to me, and they have things to say. And I realized, my God, I’m translating these things, and I’m learning about these lives. And it’s not that I didn’t know it, but now I deeply know, it’s a part of my being, I can’t turn my head away from this. And I would not have been able to write A Nearby Country Called Love if I hadn’t been doing these translations.

***

Salar Abdoh is the author of Out of Mesopotamia, Tehran at Twilight, Opium, and The Poet Game, and editor and translator of the celebrated crime collection, Tehran Noir.  He divides his time between New York City and Tehran, Iran. He is a professor at the City University of New York’s City College campus in Harlem, where he teaches in the English Department’s MFA program and also directs undergraduate creative writing.  His new novel is called A Nearby Country Called Love.

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Alice McDermott about her new novel, Absolution.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: Writing in this epistolary type of style, how did that change the voice for you when you’re writing that way? Like, if you had not chosen it, do you think it would have been more difficult to write, or your character would have been revealed in a certain way? How did that then guide the actual storytelling?

Alice McDermott: You know, I think if I had attempted to tell this story more in The Quiet American mode, sort of only looking back only over a couple of months, or even as it happens historical novel mode, if I had begun not with the voice — Let me tell you about what it was like in those days, but rather, I woke up one morning in 1963 and I did this and I did that, then I would have lost interest in it. What really intrigues me and interests me is – and I think this has appeared in all my work –  is that looking back through time, is that the way memory is a mode of storytelling, and that the story we tell two days after an event is an entirely different story that we tell 20 years after the event, because the lens changes with all subsequent events. And that’s what interests me.  I’m not interested in this innocent 23-year-old wandering through the streets of Saigon and wondering what her husband’s doing. I’m interested in the 80-year-old who looks back at herself as a 23-year-old and said, I didn’t even know he was in the CIA. All the things I didn’t know, and I didn’t know I was going to end up childless and I didn’t know all the events, some of them that I think she ends up telling inadvertently almost, that’s what interests me as a storyteller.

***

Alice McDermott is the author of nine novels, including Charming Billy, winner of the National Book Award, and That Night, At Weddings and Wakes, and After This, which were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She is also the author of the essay collection What About the Baby?: Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and other publications. She lives outside Washington, DC.  Her new novel is called Absolution.