Interviews, Novels Colin Winnette Interviews, Novels Colin Winnette

An Interview with Rachel B. Glaser

 “Make your characters want something” is the well-worn phrase in fiction classes, and I’ve never agreed with it as much as when I read Elijah Thrush. Purdy creates love triangles among two elderly white enemies, a black man hired as a spy, a child who speaks in kissing sounds, and an animal that lives locked in a room. Love is written about in a great, new way.

For this series I’m asking writers I love to recommend a book. If I haven’t read it, I read it. Then we talk about it.

In this installment, I’m talking with Rachel B. Glaser (author of Pee on Water and MOODS) about I Am Elijah Thrush by James Purdy.

Colin Winnette: Some books we love and would recommend to anyone because we just deep down believe that everyone should read them(!), other times our recommendations are tailored to suit the individual receiving the recommendation . . . but then there are books we love in a selfish way, that we hesitate to recommend to anyone, as if they need our protection. Where on that spectrum does I Am Elijah Thrush fall for you? Is there, in your mind, an ideal reader for this book?

Rachel B. Glaser:  I know what you mean about “protecting” the books we love. I think I Am Elijah Thrush should be reprinted and read again by many, but I did enjoy the way the book made its way to me, as if by mistake.  It feels great to “uncover” a book.  There is an idea that it’s rare to come upon a great book that you haven’t heard recommended many times before, but it keeps happening, which is encouraging to me, though it means that there are great books out there, lonely from not being read!  Though I felt precious about this book, I did the opposite of keeping it to myself, and have been regularly buying it online (bookstores never have it, though they all have tons of Purdy!) and distributing it.  In terms of an ideal reader for this book—someone who enjoys the absurd?  I feel that Jane Bowles has a lot in common with Purdy, so anyone who appreciates her writing should seek out I Am Elijah Thrush.

CW: It’s true. It’s a little depressing to think about how many great books are out there, going unread. Without your recommendation, I never would have heard of this one. In fact, it was sort of a difficult title to get my hands on. But I’m thrilled to have had this opportunity to read I am Elijah Thrush, because it’s a fantastic book, wild and funny and moving and super strange. What brought you to this particular book originally? And, if you can remember, what were some of your initial reactions?

RBG:  I’m so glad you enjoyed it!  My boyfriend, John Maradik, picked this book up off the shelf while at Grey Matter Books (in Hadley, MA) with the poet/our friend Christopher Cheney.  John read it and loved it and then Cheney read it immediately after, and they were both so enamored and entertained with it that I felt there was no way I could feel the same, but when it was my turn I was just as surprised and delighted.

From the first line you can tell it’s going to be good:

Millicent De Frayne, who was young in 1913, the sole possessor
of an immense oil fortune, languished of an incurable ailment, 
her willful, hopeless love for Elijah Thrush, “the mime, poet, 
painter of art nouveau,” who, after ruining the lives of countless 
men and women, was finally himself in love, “incorrectly, if not 
indecently,” with his great-grandson.

That first line is like a book in itself!  Each word is so forceful in creating a story and defining the characters.  When I read Purdy, especially this book, I am consistently deeply surprised.  In some ways, a first line like this could deflate surprise.  For instance, we already know Elijah Thrush is in love with his grandson.  It is not revealed in some suspenseful way.  The surprises happen on a smaller level, in the sentences and the moments of the book.  So, my initial reaction was disbelief and joy.  Since I knew that Purdy had written many books, reading and loving IAET felt like the beginning of a long life with Purdy.

CW: That opening line really is something. It’s almost as if, for Purdy, love and obsession are givens. It’s how those states are expressed that occupies him most. We learn that the narrator is “in love with a bird” long before his “habit” is revealed, and with far less ceremony. Purdy presents the object of the narrator’s affection as if there is nothing potentially strange about it. It’s the ‘habit,’ the form that the narrator’s love takes, that interests Purdy. What do you make of the way these characters love?

RBG:  I think their love drives this whole plot home.  “Make your characters want something” is the well-worn phrase in fiction classes, and I’ve never agreed with it as much as when I read Elijah Thrush.  I used to think of characters wanting in a more traditional way, like character A just wants to become a famous musician.  Character B is really hungry and hasn’t eaten in days.  Purdy creates love triangles among two elderly white enemies, a black man hired as a spy, a child who speaks in kissing sounds, and an animal that lives locked in a room.  Love is written about in a great, new way.  It feels good to watch these loves like an outsider, to not immediately relate.  I also enjoy how all these loves are hopeless.  No character in love falls out of love.  All the loves have barriers keeping them complicated.

CW: That’s a good point. These are all perpetually frustrated loves. It’s all messy and there’s no way out of the mess. It’s a tragic kind of farce. A huge part of the joy of the book for me was watching these characters navigate those “barriers” you mention. So, rather than just making his characters want something, Purdy keeps his characters wanting, and in a major way.

RBG: Yes, I think you’re right. The characters in this book are in an almost constant state of wanting. They have much anxiety, pain, and sorrow over their love. Love is a cruel torture in this book. Moments of joy, surprise, and friendship, ease the mood, but do not erase the pain. So much of Purdy’s work feels exaggerated, but he’s just exposing the ridiculous, unrelenting, human parts of ourselves.

CW: Let’s talk about the weirdness here, and how Purdy manages to maintain an unpredictably bizarre world with emotional consequences that are acutely experienced by the reader. The various frustrated loves and emotional sacrifices all have recognizable and sympathetic emotional content, but are presented in somewhat alien packages. Again, I think of the example of the narrator’s “habit”. It is simultaneously horrific and bizarrely tender. It presents an emotional state I relate to, though the physical reality is like nothing I have ever seen or experienced before. Could you talk a little about Purdy’s tactics in this regard? Did you have a similar reaction?

RBG: While trying to find other people writing about Purdy online, I once came upon a review (I think on Amazon) where someone referred to Purdy’s writing as “Social Fantasy.”  I had never seen this genre referred to, (and have not since), but it accurately described Purdy’s work to create unexpected, heightened (often absurd) interactions between characters that create a tension of possibility and show human existence to be inane, dramatic, and incongruous.  The characters of Jane Bowles and James Purdy are capable of anything, nothing is “out of character” for them.  Ascertains are reversed, logic is dismantled.  This is how I’ve come to think of the term “social fantasy,” which has been a continual reference point when working on my own work.  I think this feeling might be what you are getting at too.  The way Purdy writes human emotion so beautifully and true, even in the most (especially in the most) unfamiliar relationships.

CW: “Tension of possibility,” that’s perfect. (The book is always one or two steps beyond believability, which is not to say we don’t feel for the characters, but their lives are, as you say, pointedly absurd. So while it begins to feel that nearly anything could happen, there are still identifiable consequences to the absurdity, and we feel for the characters, so we’re invested in that “anything”.) I also think “social fantasy” is a great way of talking about your and Purdy’s work. I’m always curious when I hear a writer talk about personal points of reference in their own work. Could you list specific examples of how you’ve applied that reference point in your writing? Is it a conscious thing applied during drafting/editing or a just useful way of talking/thinking about your work in general?

RBG:  Twice in my life I have stumbled upon an author that I feel has pre-inspired me. The first time it was with Barthelme, the second with Jane Bowles. Both times it felt I had been channeling them before I’d ever read them. Barthelme gave me extra confidence to let my narrative voice go wild, and allow my characters to talk in an unrealistic manner. Bowles and Purdy encourage me to write characters that act and want unusually. Sometimes I am writing a story that is very strange, and no matter how typical the characters act or talk, the story is still going to have a weird, intriguing undercurrent. Other times, as with the novel I am working on, the situations are familiar to me, and I need to picture Bowles and Purdy and find the inspiration to make it “bristle with impossibility” (as Purdy once said).

CW: Are you far enough along in the new book to talk about it? If so, would you tell us a little bit about it?

RBG:  Sure, Colin!  It’s my first novel and currently called “Paulina & Fran” (or alternately “Careers in the Visual Arts”).  It’s about the complicated relationships between girls, the culture of art school, artist/career disappointments, and the power of nostalgia.  It’s a love triangle at art school in the early 2000’s, but I’m hoping to transcend some of the conventions of the kind of book I just described!  I’ve got some crazy sentences in there, but recently I realized my female characters are not insane enough.  I was somehow reading a summary of what had taken place on a reality tv show I have never seen (Real Housewives of Somewhere) and I saw that the ladies on this show were acting far more ridiculous than I had arranged for my characters to act.  So I am I taking this as a challenge.  Here is one of my favorite sentences from the story:

“Libraries!” Paulina cried, “What a trap for youth!”  One did not 
become realistic in libraries.  One filled their head with mold 
and ideas, and left their sexuality in a coil near the stacks, 
where it turned to nothing and joined the dust on the floor, 
swept by losers. 

CW: Could you talk a little about your attraction to absurdity? I know you’re a die-hard Bowles fan, and we’ve talked about Gaeton Soucy in the past, but who are some others and what draws you to them?

RBG:  In Junior High I was reading Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, and the plays of Christopher Durang.  I went to public school in New Jersey, and I think I was partially attracted to absurdity because I was surrounded by a lot of conventions.  Art seemed like an escape out of the ordinary.

CW: You’ve also got a new book of poems forthcoming on Factory Hollow Press. Is your poetry equally influenced by the writers you mention? How does your approach to poetry differ from your approach to writing fiction, if it does at all?

RBG:  The influence of Purdy and Bowles might be even stronger in my poetry, though I wrote most of the poems in MOODS before I’d read either author.  I love making bold declarations and those occur in a higher density in my poems.  When I’m writing a poem, I feel like I’m prancing alone on a stage.  When I’m writing fiction, it feels like I am organizing my closet, bidding on things at a massive auction, or strategically planning a war.  These sensations are partially a reaction to the number of words on the page, but not entirely.  A poem distills things.  I think I am more accepting of my poetry.  I write it with immediacy and don’t mess with it, bemoan it, and cart it around the way I do with fiction.

CW: Any final thoughts on I am Elijah Thrush by James Purdy? Anything you want to make sure gets said before we say goodbye?

RBG: I want to comment on the bravery and nerve of Purdy. People who read this book often assume that Purdy was African American, because few white writers write so boldly about African Americans. The racism against Albert is a constant force and pain in the book. I think what I find so complex, interesting, and troubling, is the way the characters Millicent and Elijah are racist and loving at the same time to Albert — both in the same sentence and in the same feeling. In many books, racism is implied or alluded to, but in Purdy’s book it is bared and explored. Purdy’s narration as Albert is so thoughtful, bizarre, and intimate. It is important to see from Albert’s point of view, to experience his pain and his love, and there is so much of both.

Thank you, Colin, for your great questions!  I feel I understand Purdy on an entirely new level!

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An Interview with Roxane Gay

I’m interested in why we read what we read. Why we pick up the particular books that we do, and why we keep at them. What brought you to Battleborn? What led you to read it for the first time, and why did you want to talk with me about it here?

For this series I’m asking writers I love to recommend a book. If I haven’t read it, I read it. Then we talk about it.

In this installment, I’m talking with Roxane Gay about Battleborn by Claire Vaye Watkins.

Roxane Gay’s writing appears or is forthcoming in Best American Short Stories 2012, New Stories From the Midwest 2011 and 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, NOON, Salon, Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, Brevity, and many others. She is the co-editor of [PANK]. She is also the author of Ayiti. You can find her online at http://www.roxanegay.com

* * *

Colin Winnette: I’m interested in why we read what we read. Why we pick up the particular books that we do, and why we keep at them. What brought you to Battleborn? What led you to read it for the first time, and why did you want to talk with me about it here?

Roxane Gay: This book was sent to me by a publicist at Riverhead. I hadn’t even heard of it, but once I started reading, I couldn’t put the book down. I was excited to discuss the book with you because it has been, by far, my favorite book of the year in a year of great reading.

CW: Most, if not all, of these stories focus on characters who are struggling with the past, and who will likely continue to struggle after the story’s end. In your opinion, what is the function of a book like this? To observe and report? To capture a state, or states, of being? Are there therapeutic efforts here? All/none of the above?

RG: I’m sure writing is therapeutic for many writers but I think there’s a lot more than that going on here. This is a book about how strength is forged and how sometimes, we cannot help but succumb to our weaknesses. The collection’s title really shapes how the stories are read and really helps each story capture this sense of what it means to be battleborn.

CW: Or, more specifically, what did the book offer you?

RG: As I read these stories, I wanted nothing more than to keep these stories near me, always. There is such control and grace in each story. Watkins tackles complex and intense subjects but there’s no melodrama here. Not only did I derive an immense amount of pleasure from reading Battleborn, I learned so much as a writer.

CW: What is a story like “The Diggings” doing in a collection like this? It was one of my favorites, but it’s certainly an outlier.

RG: I don’t really think “The Diggings” is an outlier. On the surface it seems like that because it’s set during the Goldrush and it’s a story about brothers but it’s also a story about desire and desperation and suffering and you can see those themes in most of the stories in this collection. I tend to think of this book as a masterclass. The range of stories is simply amazing and so when I consider Diggings within the context of the rest of the collection, I think, “Of course.” Not only does it fit thematically but it also fits with the diversity of the overall collection.

CW: I recently drove from Texas to California. We passed through Las Vegas on the way and eventually began to see the brothels in the small towns that surround it. It was a peculiar sight: rows of 18-wheelers and compacts alongside a few double-wides marked with a sign that read something like “Shady Ladies Ranch.” Watkins takes on one of these brothels in “The Past Perfect, The Past Continuous.” A lot of us have images of the places written about in the book — Vegas and the surrounding desert are iconic images — but few of us have experienced the intimacy of a life lived there, or even an extended visit. Watkins gives us insight into these intriguing places, or helps us imagine them a little more fully. How did you react to the function of place in this book? In many ways, the book is its setting, and those who populate that setting.

RG: Place is everything in this book, an inescapable gravity for the stories. I felt totally immersed in the stark beauty — both natural and manufactured — of the West and how that starkness shapes the people living within that landscape.

CW: Which story sticks out to you as best exemplifying what this book has to offer? If you could only recommend one story, rather than the collection, which would it be, and why?

RG: My favorite story is “Rondine Al Nido,” but my first instinct was to say that every story is the best in its own way. “Rondine Al Nido,” though is something else. The narrative frame intrigues me because it keeps you sort of off kilter. The story is disturbing but we see these rather unpleasant moments unfolding in really subtle increments. The horror, for lack of a better word, builds so slowly that it becomes almost bearable. The elegance of how this story was told takes my breath away.

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An Interview with Amelia Gray

Can you talk a little about what brought you to the book? What were the conditions that led to your picking it up for the first time, and why did you want to talk about it here with me?

For this series I’m asking the writers I love to recommend a book. If I haven’t read it, I read it. Then we talk about it.

In this installment, I’m talking with Amelia Gray about Airships by Barry Hannah.

* * *

Colin Winnette: Can you talk a little about what brought you to the book? What were the conditions that led to your picking it up for the first time, and why did you want to talk about it here with me?

Amelia Gray: This great book! I first found Barry Hannah teaching at Texas State, during my first year of grad school. I was 22, and here was this motorcycle-riding troublemaker writing the best fiction I had read in my life. Can you imagine? I couldn’t handle it.

CW: Oh wow, so you studied with him? How fortunate! Were these workshops? One-on-ones? How was it structured and what was it like?

AG: I sort of studied with Hannah. Really, I was a bystander for the others who were studying with Hannah. We were only allowed one workshop semester with a visiting writer and I figured I was a young idiot (I was right!) and that I should hold out for Denis Johnson in my last year. Still and all, I feel very lucky about it.  I sat in on some one-off workshops and he was about how you might expect — feisty, intimidating, kind in his way. He was approachable. He liked to shoot the shit.

CW: It’s interesting, knowing your work, but not knowing before that you studied with Hannah, I would have probably listed him as one of your influences. Is there anything about your approach to writing, or even living, that you trace back to him specifically?

AG: One thing he said in a Q&A I’ve since quoted to other people a million times, to the point that I’m paraphrasing it, but he said that a story starts as a diamond in his mind, perfect in every way, and when he sits down to write, the diamond crumbles into dust. It crumbles a little more slowly as he gets older, but no matter how many times he sits down to write, it crumbles. That idea has always been a comfort to me.

CW: Some might say you can never recreate/re-present an idea, which occurred to you in a specific context, and in a specific way, so every time you sit down to write, you’re not destroying what was there before, you’re just not able to make it again as it was. You can’t. You’re making something else.

AG: I don’t think it’s willfully destructive so much as it is a simple study in the imperfect leap from brain to page. Like the lady who destroyed the fresco last month — she had an image in her mind and she did the best she could.

CW: When we were setting up this interview, you mentioned you only recently came to Airships. What was your initial reaction to this particular book? Did it differ from the work of his you read as a 22-year-old?

AG: Well, so I was young when I met his work, and so star-struck that I had him sign two of his books: Bats out of Hell and Yonder Stands Your Orphan. I was working my way through Bats out of Hell, reading his stories aloud to boyfriends, but I found I didn’t feel comfortable reading the book. I mistreat books, I break the spines and leave them face-down on the sink while I’m washing my hair and whatever. I wanted to read this book and mistreat it but I couldn’t bring myself to, maybe because he wrote in it and he was mythologized in my head. Every story he wrote was brilliant and changed my writing, and that was a little scary. I was afraid to break the spell. Then he died and I was too sad to read him for a while. Then, finally, recently, I was neither sad nor afraid. Turned out I’d read half the stories elsewhere so it’s not quite true that I hadn’t read it anyway.

What a book! What mastery in such considered writing that seems loose and funny! There’s so much life and air and love and light. I feel lucky that I didn’t read some of these stories when I was 22, that I saved their first experience for when I had the heart to appreciate it. I’m borrowing argument from the Catholic virgins here.

CW: Yes! There is irresistible heart at the core of Hannah’s stories, even the more brutal, such as “Coming Close to Donna.” I think it has a lot to do with the fact that he doesn’t shy away from love. Some kind of intense love is at the heart of almost all of these stories, and few writers other than Hannah can so boldly and confidently say something like, “Love slays fear,” (“Escape to Newark”) and make us really and truly feel it, while at the same time keeping it in voice, buried in the characters in the story, distancing himself from it. Is this something you’ve felt while reading, and, if so, can I ask you something as simple as, how do you think he does it?

AG: Yes, exactly. I’m glad I wrote that paragraph above about love and light before I read this one, because now I feel we are in a synchronicity. “Nothing in the world matters but you and your woman. Friendship and politics go to hell.” I suspect he does it because all of his characters have enough of him within them that they each can burst forth with this unique, authentic voice. He’s really writing the same story over and over again, his own heart, the song of himself, whatever you’d like to call it. That he does it so damn well is where you’ve got to sit up and pay attention.

CW: I’ve had this itch about Airships for awhile now, or a curiosity, and it’s about the way Hannah uses religion from story to story. It feels a little different each time, as if he’s approaching it from a variety of angles, and I begin to wonder about this personal relationship to religion. Having known him, what do you make of the biblical references scattered throughout Airships?

AG: Hannah had a near-death kind of experience right around the time I knew him and he told us that he found Jesus in that time. I think I remember him saying that Jesus actually came into to the hospital and sat with him. He wrote in one of my books: “Christ is the strength that you do not have to pray for. Thereness, my lass.”

CW: I’m tempted to let that hang, because it’s beautiful and strange and I really love your answer, but not knowing about your upbringing/your relationship to religion, I have to ask what that meant to you? His message, and his honest belief that he was visited by Jesus? Just as a reader of his work and a fan.

AG: I found it to be an honest belief from the man, the belief that he was visited by Jesus. I was raised in the Presbyterian church and have heard that stuff enough that I don’t find it that strange. I hope that if Jesus ever visits me it’s cool hospital Jesus and not freaked-out jail cell Jesus.

CW: Is there a story that best exemplifies, for you, what this collection can do? Is doing? I think of a story like “Testimony of Pilot,” its range, the strange violences, the characters brutalized by love and the mere passing of time, it feels like this story shows so much of what Hannah is capable of, and he seems so completely in control of all of it. It feels vast and airtight.

AG: Actually I was thinking ‘Testimony of Pilot’ too. There are others that are tighter in terms of plot but I just love ‘Testimony of Pilot” for just that organized appearance of chaos. “Appearance of chaos” instead of “chaos” because there is that work there, yes, though the seams are all stitched tight. And it has one of my favorite lines of all time.

CW: Not to ruin it for those who haven’t read, but I’m guessing it has something to do with a dragon?

AG: Oh yeah, you got it.

CW: There’s a brilliant move in TOP, where Hannah allows his narrator to get sort of out of control, to work himself up to a frenzy — I’m thinking of the recital led by Quadberry — and (credit where credit’s due, Adam Levin first pointed this out to me in a writing seminar at SAIC) Hannah acknowledges it, owns it, and sort of cuts right to the heart of how storytelling works and why we bother to do it. The narrator gives us a nod, after it’s all said and done, and he admits how memory distorts and that he got carried away. He’s mythologizing. What are your thoughts on that reading? Is Hannah writing this self-reflexively? And where else does he exhibit these kinds of acrobatics?

AG: That recital scene is exactly what I’m considering when I think of the appearance of chaos. It feels out of control because we’re not used to that kind of structure in a long story like this. It reminds me of some other writers, ‘How to Tell a True War Story’ by Tim O’Brien, parts of Train Dreams by Denis Johnson.

CW: What’s your position when it comes to control over a story? Do you let a story run away with you, or is each piece carefully plotted beforehand? 

AG: Every time I write, I’m trying to run away from the careful plot, but the plot drags me back in. It’s like one of those bungee runs or the third Godfather.

CW: If you could only recommend one story from the collection?

AG: ‘Love Too Long’ gets me every time.

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