The Pleasure of the (Queer) Text

I returned to the WROTE Podcast recently for a 2-part discussion of reading and writing queerly with Dena Hankins, SA "Baz" Collins, and moderator Vance Bastian. (Previously, I did a solo conversation there.)

The strength of the discussion is also what makes it sometimes awkward and even contentious: we all have utterly different tastes, touchstones, and experiences. I'm not a natural fit for such a conversation, as I don't think of myself as a "consumer of queer content", but rather as a reader/writer who sometimes reads/writes queer stuff. I hardly ever seek out a book only because it's about a queer topic or has queer characters, and I only ever set out to write such a thing if I'm writing for a specifically queer market, which rarely happens.

As I say in the program, if a book's not trying to do something new and different, and if it's not aesthetically interesting to me, I'm unlikely to read it. Why bother? I've got more books than I have time to read already, and I'd rather read an innovative and thought-provoking hetero book than a familiar, conventional queer book.

Barthes gets at this in The Pleasure of the Text, presenting a fairly familiar Modernist case, one that describes well my own textual pleasures and (very occasional) moments of bliss:

The New is not a fashion, it is a value, the basis of all criticism.... There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present-day society: to retreat ahead of it: every old language becomes old once it is repeated. Now, encratic language (the language produced and spread under the protection of power) is statutorily a language of repetition; all official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology. Confronting it, the New is bliss (Freud: "In the adult, novelty always constitutes the condition for orgasm").

...The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition: content, ideological schema, the blurring of contradictions — these are repeated, but the superficial forms are varied: always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning. [trans. by Richard Miller]

This is not, of course, what most readers want, and what is New to one is not New to another. My pleasure is your boredom, my bliss your pain. Nonetheless, I wish more queer writers today were more interested in finding new forms and shapes and styles. I mention in one of the episodes Dale Peck's new anthology, The Soho Press Book of '80s Short Fiction, which is queer in that it is not heteronormative in its selections, putting Dorothy Allison, Robert Glück, and Essex Hemphill alongside Raymond Carver in a way no other anthology I'm aware of has done. What the anthology also does is show that many American queer writers were, once upon a time, interested in a truly wide range of aesthetics. Peck's anthology can only gesture toward those aesthetics, since it has to fit many different purposes between two covers, but it made me think about the ways that queer artists have for so long been the ones to embrace vanguards. (Queer Modernism is often the most interesting Modernism, for instance.) To be queer is to be outside the norm, and thus to be outside the norm's language and forms.

I ended the first episode with a point that right now seems to me the most important one: If we want to identify as a queer community (I'm not sure I do), and we really want to do something for the queer world generally, we should be advocating for queer writers from outside the U.S. and other relatively safe, progressive places. The two books I mentioned in the last moments as ones I'd be reading if I had time to read stuff other than things for my PhD are Under the Udala Trees by Chinelo Okparanta and Guapa by Saleem Haddad. There are likely many others I don't know about.

If there is a value in queer reading communities, then those communities must not replicate the insularity of most American readers. If you want to be a politically and socially intentional reader, as describing yourself as a queer reader (or consumer of queer content) suggests you do, then your political and social intentions as a reader can't begin and end with you staring at a mirror.

Finally, I got into a bit of a disagreement with Baz Collins about Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life, and for my perspective on that book, my initial post about it remains my most substantial declaration of love.

Conversation at Electric Literature

The good folks at Electric Literature invited me to converse with Adrian Van Young, perhaps not knowing that Adrian and I had recently discovered we are in many ways lost brothers, and so we could go on and on and on...

And we did.

We talked about Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Sublime, writing advice, writers we like, Michael Haneke, neoliberalism, The Witch, and all sorts of other things. It was a lot of fun and we could have gone on at twice the length, but eventually we had to return to our lives.

Many thanks to Electric Lit for being so welcoming.

An Interview with One Story

A new interview with me — the first to come out since Blood: Stories was released — is now up at One Story's blog, part of the publicity leading up to the One Story Literary Debutante Ball. Many thanks to Melissa Bean for conducting the interview, and for her very kind words about the book.

Here's a taste:

MB: On that note, what inspires your stories?

MC: Daydreams and nightmares created by anxieties, fears, and desires.

I don’t write fiction for the sake of therapy, per se, but I am prone to anxiety and I have an active imagination, so it’s often the case that a story starts from one of my weird anxiety fantasies.

Read more at One Story...

Guy Davenport on Writing and Reading

Guy Davenport, illustration from Apples & Pears

I've just begun reading Andre Furlani's Guy Davenport: Postmodern and After, a magnificent book (so far), and went to track down one of the items cited there, a 2002 interview by B. Renner for the website Elimae. Alas, the site seems to have died, but god bless the Wayback Machine: here it is, cached.

The interview is not as meaty as some others, for instance Davenport's Paris Review interview, but it's always interesting, and I was particularly struck by this:

DAVENPORT: At Duke I took Prof Blackburn's Creative Writing course (Bill Styron and Mac Hyman were in the class) and got the wrong impression that writing is an effusion of genius and talent.  Also, that writing fiction is Expression of significant and deep inner emotion.  It took me years to shake off all this.  Writing is making a construct, and what's in the story is what's important.  And style: in what words and phrases the story is told.  (William Blackburn, the full name.  His guiding us all toward autobiographical, confessional, "emotional" writing is -- in reaction -- why I write about concrete objectivities that are fairly remote from my own experiences.  I like to imagine how other people feel in a world different from my own.)

Also:

ELIMAE: Almost none of your stories take place in the U.S. or involve American characters. Is there a particular reason for this? Are Americans and the U.S. less noteworthy than other peoples and places, especially Europeans and Europe, or is it as simple as a matter of going to subject matter that hasn't already been done to death by other American writers? 

DAVENPORT: A clever critic might note that they are all set in the USA.  "Tatlin!" is a fable about totalitarian governments strangling creativity, not always blatantly and openly.  At the time I was lecturing on Hermann Broch's The Death of Virgil, the classic study in our time of Government and The Poet.  Vladimir Tatlin's genius suffocated by Stalin seemed to me to be paradigmatic and timely.  I learned from Kafka's Amerika that you don't have to have a realistic knowledge of a place, and from Nabokov that "realism" is simply a fashionable mode.

We are still immigrants.  Culture imports and exports.  There was a great anxiety that European culture would be obliterated twice in the 20th century.  I became interested in "Europe" through Whistler's etchings.

And then there's a Davenport desert island list!

ELIMAE: Here's my version of the "desert island" question: if you could select any six books (besides your own) originally written in your lifetime, and be the author of those books, which six would they be?  

DAVENPORT: Your 6 books question is diabolical!  I couldn't have written any of 'em.
    Eudora Welty, The Golden Apples
    P. Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower
    Michel Tournier, Les Meteores
    Isak Dinesen, Anecdotes of Destiny
    Mann, Doktor Faustus
    Beckett, Molloy

Finally, I also found an interesting mention of Davenport in this interview with John Jeremiah Sullivan, whose whole response about the connection of writing and reading is great, but here's the Davenport part:

That said, how do you get to be a better reader? I asked Guy Davenport this question one time, because talking to him could really make a person despair; he just knew so much, he’d read so much in many languages, but not in a pedantic or scholastic way, in a really passionate way. He gave me what I thought was very solid advice, which was: first of all, start reading and don’t stop. The other thing is to follow your interest. He said there ought to be a phrase, “falling into interest,” to go with falling in love.

Follow your interest; follow the writers who energize you, not the ones who exert a sense of obligation on you. The books that do the one or the other will change, as time gone on. The landscape shifts. Don’t adhere to systems unless that feels good.

Delany & The Bat

Ed Champion interviews Samuel Delany for his Bat Segundo Show. An informed, wide-ranging conversation that's very much worth the time to listen to:

Delany: And I think pornotopia is the place, as I’ve written about, where the major qualities — the major aspect of pornotopia, it’s a place where any relation, if you put enough pressure on it, can suddenly become sexual. You walk into the reception area of the office and you look at the secretary and the secretary looks at you and the next minute you’re screwing on the desk. That’s pornotopia. Which, every once in a while, actually happens. But it doesn’t happen at the density.

Correspondent: Frequency.

Delany: At the frequency that it happens in pornotopia. In pornotopia, it happens nonstop. And yet some people are able to write about that sort of thing relatively realistically. And some people aren’t. Something like Fifty Shades of Grey is not a very realistic account.

Correspondent: I’m sure you’ve read that by now.

Delany: I’ve read about five pages.

Correspondent: And it was enough for you to throw against the wall?

Delany: No. I didn’t throw it. I just thought it was hysterically funny. But because the writer doesn’t use it to make any real observations on the world that is the case, you know, it’s ho-hum.

Correspondent: How do we hook those moms who were so driven to Fifty Shades of Grey on, say, something like this?

Delany: I don’t think you’re going to.

A (Second) Conversation with Maria Dahvana Headley

Today marks the official release date of Maria Dahvana Headley's first novel, Queen of Kings, and to celebrate the occasion, I present to you below a conversation Maria and I had via instant message yesterday. This is a Mumpsimus first: a second interview with someone. Though I've done a bit of interviewing here over the years, I have never, until now, returned to an interview subject. Talking with Maria is always a great joy, and there isn't a person I'd rather do my first second interview with.

The first interview, back in 2005, with Maria is here. But now the first in what perhaps will become a series here: the (Second) Conversation With... series. We shall see...

Queen of Kings is a historical fantasy set in 30 B.C., and it stars Cleopatra. But not exactly Cleopatra as we have understood her in most of the history books -- for though this Cleopatra conforms to the known history, certain elements of that history are explained via supernatural phenomena. It's a bloody fascinating adventure, and I mean that in every sense of the phrase "bloody fascinating". I am not, I must admit, generally much interested in history or literature from before about 1580 C.E., but nonetheless, I found Queen of Kings to be a real page-turner; if it can keep somebody like me interested over its entire length, then I expect folks who really love ancient history and myths will be in ecstasies of joy whilst reading.

Also, don't miss Maria's music playlist for the book at Largehearted Boy.


Matthew Cheney: I know you were working on another novel when you found yourself suddenly amidst Queen of Kings. What was it about ancient Egypt, Cleopatra, and magic that took over your imagination?

Maria Dahvana Headley: I think it was the fact that the other novel was about my family history. Anything might have looked desirable in comparison, particularly after 4 years of working on that book. Kidding. Ish. Queen of Kings hit me suddenly one afternoon when I'd been roaming around moaning about how I couldn't seem to finish the other book.

I didn't even know it was about Cleopatra at first -- this book is the first installment of a trilogy, and I had the idea for the second book before I had the idea for this one. I ended up following a character backward into the classical period, 30 BC, which is when Queen of Kings is set. It's not really a spoiler to say that my main character is immortal. There's no time travel, but if you've got an immortal protagonist, you can do a lot of interesting things in terms of setting.

In Which I Interview Carol Emshwiller

Eric Rosenfield has very kindly posted the video from my interview with Carol Emshwiller on April 18. Thanks to Susan Emshwiller for jumping in as camera operator. The interview was preceded by a magic show, which explains my first, awkward question. I'll embed the video below the jump.

The Carol Emshwiller Project, by the way, is still alive. Now that I've got a copy of The Collected Stories, vol. 1, I hope to post at least a little something about it over there, but I'm not going to have time to do so for a week or two, I expect.

Secret History Revealed!

Rain Taxi has posted online an interview I conducted with James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel, editors of The Secret History of Science Fiction.

Most of the discussion took place in a Masonic lodge in southern New Hampshire, although at one point I was blindfolded and taken to an undisclosed location that smelled of patchouli and motor oil.  Jim Kelly ducked out briefly to launder some money vacation in the Cayman Islands, and John Kessel made me repeat long passages of Latin that made my skin itch.  But I let nothing stop my relentless pursuit of the truth...

Likely Stories

From a wonderful new interview with Brian Evenson by John Madera at Rain Taxi:

Brian Evenson: Some of the stories I always come back to, when I’m teaching full stories and trying to get students to understand how all the different elements of a story are working together, include William Trevor’s “Miss Smith,” which I think does amazing things with shifting the reader’s sympathy; Franz Kafka’s “A Country Doctor,” which does something amazingly manic with doubling and which may be my favorite story ever; Isak Dinesen’s “The Roads Round Pisa” or “The Monkey,” both of which do things that I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone else do; Peter Straub’s “Bunny Is Good Bread” and “Lapland,” which do very important things in terms of questioning the relation of genre to literature; Denis Johnson’s “Car Crash While Hitchhiking,” which manages to collapse as a story while still establishing an incredible resonance; D. H. Lawrence’s “The Prussian Officer,” because it works even though it does all sorts of things that contemporary writers have been taught a story shouldn’t do. I often teach Kafka’s “A Fratricide”—it’s far from his best story, but it’s very rich in the things it can teach a writer; I can talk about it for hours. I love, too, to teach Muriel Spark’s novellas, Ohle’s Motorman, Dambudzo Marechera, Barbara Comyns, Leonard Sciascia, Ann Quin, Jean Echenoz, Eric Chevillard, certain Chekhov stories, Bruno Schulz, Heinrich Böll, Nabokov, Gary Lutz, Stanley Crawford, Kelly Link, etc., etc. There are a lot of writers I draw on and they’re different every semester, which is probably why I find it difficult to stick to an anthology. I end up teaching stories that I think are likely to be helpful or important to particular students.

Writing Advice from Cormac McCarthy

The Wall Street Journal just ran an excellent interview with the seldom-interviewed Cormac McCarthy, and I thought this advice was particularly sound:

WSJ: The last five years have seemed very productive for you. Have there been fallow periods in your writing?

CM: I don't think there's any rich period or fallow period. That's just a perception you get from what's published. Your busiest day might be watching some ants carrying bread crumbs. Someone asked Flannery O'Connor why she wrote, and she said, "Because I was good at it." And I think that's the right answer. If you're good at something it's very hard not to do it. In talking to older people who've had good lives, inevitably half of them will say, "The most significant thing in my life is that I've been extraordinarily lucky." And when you hear that you know you're hearing the truth. It doesn't diminish their talent or industry. You can have all that and fail.

I was struck, too, by this:

CM: I'm not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

Oh, Cormac! Aspire! I've spent up to six years on a single story! The possibilities for suicidal ideation as an obsessive short story writer are vastly greater than those of an obsessive novelist -- imagine years spent on twenty pages rather than hundreds! And then the struggle to just get, say, 5 cents a word for that story, if you can get paid at all! Cormac, baby, stop being such a wuss!

It's also clear that Mr. McCarthy has never encountered Big Fat Fantasy:

WSJ: Does this issue of length apply to books, too? Is a 1,000-page book somehow too much?

CM: For modern readers, yeah. People apparently only read mystery stories of any length. With mysteries, the longer the better and people will read any damn thing. But the indulgent, 800-page books that were written a hundred years ago are just not going to be written anymore and people need to get used to that. If you think you're going to write something like "The Brothers Karamazov" or "Moby-Dick," go ahead. Nobody will read it. I don't care how good it is, or how smart the readers are. Their intentions, their brains are different.

The interview is long and fascinating, well worth the time to read it.

Basic Black

Last night I stumbled onto a great program on Boston's public tv station WGBH, "Basic Black", where host Kim McLarin talked for half an hour with Tavis Smiley and Cornel West about life in the Obama era (I was particularly taken with West's suggestion that Obama himself is "reluctant to step into the Age of Obama" and with the discussion of the meaning and implications of the terms "black" and "negro".)  The entire show is available as a streaming video.  (I've only recently discovered my tv gets WGBH, so I'm sure some regular viewers are thinking, "What, Cheney, have you been living under a rock?!"  Until a year ago, I hadn't ever owned a tv, so, well, yes...)

The website includes past shows as video or audio podcasts, and scrolling through the archives, I see lots of programs I'll be looking at soon, because the topics and guest lists are of the sort that are rare on U.S. television: thoughtful conversations with artists and intellectuals.  A roundtable on black theatre in Boston.  Poets Elizabeth Alexander and Major Jackson.  The great dancer Bill T. Jones.  Anna Deavere Smith.  Sweet Honey in the Rock.  Patricia Williams.  Wole Soyinka.

And lots more.

A Conversation with Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr.

Rain Taxi has now posted my interview with Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., wherein I ask him lots of questions about science fiction, the academy, postcolonialism, Marxism, aesthetic criticism vs. other criticisms, and snails.

(Actually, I'm lying. I didn't ask him about snails.)

I first made a note to remember Istvan's name when I encountered his essay "Science Fiction and Empire", which I thought was fascinating and even, dare I say it, scintillating. When I read Adam Roberts's review of his book The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction, I knew I needed to read it. So I did. And then I had questions. Thus, an interview was born...

Here's some of what Istvan has to say about his book:

I wanted to do a lot of things writing The Seven Beauties, and they kept changing—which probably shows up in the zig-zag way the book is written. My first and overriding goal was to write something useful and stimulating for students and younger scholars of SF. That meant producing a sort of textbook from hell—the opposite of a normal class text. I mainly wanted to generate problems and suggestions that folks interested in studying SF could develop, critique, or just run away with. Early on, my model was the mathematician Paul Erdös, who is known not so much for the originality of his solutions as for the questions he posed. He made a career of formulating intriguing problems that would attract younger mathematicians to solve. So Seven Beauties is supposed to be a sort of compendium of interesting problems. In some cases I stated things more assertively that even I believed them to be, since some folks don’t get inspired unless they feel provoked.

But I also wanted to place SF in a larger historical and cultural context, and specifically an artistic one. I’m trained in comparative literature, and I’m committed to literature as a tradition. There has been a lot of impressive scholarship on SF from cultural-studies perspectives. The main way that students and scholars look at the genre now is in terms of popular culture, gender/race/sexual identity/class critique, postcolonialism, vestiges of New Left Marxism, and the postmodernist notion that SF and contemporary social mythologies are converging. I can’t add much to that rich and diverse work, and fortunately I don’t have to. What I wanted to do was to treat the science-fictional imagination as if it were not just a symptom of some other, more basic social process, but something that audiences consider valuable on its own terms. To find out what those terms are I reversed the normal way of looking at SF, sort of like a Magic Eye picture, so that science-fictionality would be my context, and the historical-contextual forces would be constructed by it. That’s actually a rather Old School approach, which is why I wrote in my intro that the book could be read as steampunk criticism. My premise is that SF has been a powerful imaginative force influencing the social imagination of the past long century.

For more about Istvan, see his own webpage.

Delany in Conversation

As readers of my introduction to The Jewel-Hinged Jaw know, my fascination with Samuel R. Delany really began when I read an interview with him in Charles Platt's book Dream Makers. I've been an avid reader of Delany interviews ever since, and so when Jeff VanderMeer asked me to do a quick interview with him for the Amazon.com blog Omnivoracious, I was particularly thrilled.

That interview has now been posted.

I want to offer here particular thanks to Kyle Cassidy for allowing us to use his marvelous photograph.

Shortly after I finished putting together a draft of the interview, the mailman brought a copy of a new book, Conversations with Samuel R. Delany edited by Carl Freedman for the wonderful Literary Conversations Series from the University Press of Mississippi. The interviews focus on the recent years, and I'd seen most of them in their original form, but there are a few that were published in fairly out-of-the-way places and a couple that have not been published before, including a particularly excellent one conducted by Freedman himself. It's a marvelous and thought-provoking book.

A Conversation with Jedediah Berry

by Geoffrey H. Goodwin

(Geoffrey Goodwin was last seen around these here parts when he interviewed Thomas Ligotti. I'm thrilled that he has now returned with an interview with Jedediah Berry, author of The Manual of Detection and of one of my favorite stories of recent years, "Minus, His Heart" (first published by Chicago Review and conveniently reprinted in Best American Fantasy 2008). Jed has worked for Conjunctions and Jubilat, and he is currently Wizard-of-Many-Things [my term] at Small Beer Press.)

Geoffrey H. Goodwin: You've worked in the field a long time. When did you last have a job outside of books and publishing?

Jedediah Berry: My first job out of college was with PEN, the non-profit writers’ organization, and before that I was doing a work study job with the literary journal Conjunctions. I would have to go back to my first year of college, when I was washing dishes and painting curbs yellow. (Laughs.) So it's been a very long time. I've done odd jobs, certainly, in between. House painting, web design. And once I was paid by an eccentric old man in my hometown to paddle around his pond and rake the weeds out of the water. That was a study in futility.

GHG: What was the first thing you ever had published?

JB: The first thing online was with a journal called La Petite Zine, which is still going, and it's a site that I visit often. They published a very short, weird story of mine which was not even a story. It was a bestiary, just prose poem descriptions of fantastical creatures. I think my first print publication was with 3^rd Bed, a journal which sadly is no longer with us. The fiction editor, who was Tobin Anderson, took this very short two-page vampire story that I sent them. That was a thrill. I was very happy to be in 3^rd Bed.

GHG: Where else has your short fiction appeared?

JB: It's been in the Chicago Reviewand Fairy Tale Review, and those stories were later picked up by the Best New American Voices and Best American Fantasy anthologies. I have a story coming out in Conjunctions, which for me is very exciting, because when I first saw Conjunctions in college, I didn't know there were literary journals. [ed. note: That story, "Ourselves, Multiplied" is now available in Conjunctions 52: Betwixt the Between edited by Bradford Morrow and Brian Evenson.] That was my introduction to the fact that there was this vibrant community of readers and writers out there, and that new work was being published several times a year in this very accessible format. (Laughs.) So having a story in there is something coming full circle for me. Otherwise, I’ve had stories in some anthologies edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. That was the first time I was actually paid for my fiction, which came as a surprise at the time. I thought, "Oh, you're actually going to pay by the word? Amazing! Let me add a few!" (Laughs.)

GHG: So The Manual of Detection. You'd worked with Small Beer for a long time, so you knew a certain perspective that lots of writers don't have. Plenty of people write--and you'd done sort of the zine scene at conventions, so you had a bigger perspective than some...

JB:And yet the process still somehow caught me by surprise, I think partly because it started a bit earlier than I was expecting. Kelly Link had generously mentioned the novel to a couple of editors when I was maybe just halfway through it, so there was some interest in it that I didn't know how to field. I just kept that closed off for a while, because I needed to focus on finishing the book. And then I sent it out to a number of agents, and found one who I was so happy to find, Esmond Harmsworth. He sent me a copy of the Inspector Barlach novels by the Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt. I’d never read those books, and I was captivated by their strange and uneasy playfulness -- they were written in the 1950s but felt completely fresh. Furthermore, they were books I absolutely needed to read. That’s how I knew I was working with the right agent.

GHG: Let's talk about noir: you’ve mentioned Hammett and Chandler...

JB: I was really unprepared to write a detective novel, so Hammett and Chandler were part of the homework that I assigned to myself, and I fell in love with Chandler’s work in ways that I didn't expect. It’s the voice that draws me back to his novels, and I think that probably shows in the parts of my book presented as case files from the missing detective, Travis Sivart. I read those books but I also watched a lot of film noir. The imagistic style of those films -- everything is cast in long shadows, so much obscured, everything unknown and potentially a threat -- that was something that I tried to work with in the book as well. But often from the outside in, because the main character, Charles Unwin, is a bumbling file clerk. He's not of that world at all. He knows it through these case files that he has been working on for years, but he finds himself dropped into that world and he has to navigate it. That world doesn't know how to handle him either. The criminals don't know who he is or what he's up to, which allows him to slip through where an experienced detective might now. That was one of the pleasures of writing the book: tracing this incongruity between the older, cozy mysteries and the gritty noir mysteries of later decades, and having this character who wants nothing to do with detective work stuck in the midst of it all. Hopefully that allows for a certain perspective whereby each world becomes a little more heightened. I tried to push that as far as possible.

GHG: Is this the first thing you've written with any noir feel?

JB: It was, really. I had written things that were inspired by fairy tale and fable, and to some extent I consider this book to be an extended fable that is disguised as a detective novel. There are the noir trappings, and they're very useful, because it's like having this symbolic order which is recognizable, it's a set of tools and a set of images that can be rearranged and shuffled. But that's very surface stuff for me. As with fairy tales, I think, you have so much going on that's on the surface, it's allsurface -- the substance is what the reader brings to it by interpreting the arrangement of these symbols. I like that kind of play in fiction.

GHG: I always hate to ask the sort of marketplace questions, so we'll do them in a clump. How long did it take you to write?

JB: It took me about four, four and a half years working on the book and then another year to a year and a half revising. I started it my first semester of grad school, finished the first draft, and that was my thesis. And then I rewrote and revised a lot in the year after that.

GHG: Somehow that's comforting. And so you chose noir, quite early on, in a sense, with where you are with your writing. What led to deciding to do that, since you hadn't before?

JB: Well, there were a number of things, and I didn’t really start with it. What came to me first was this organization called the Agency, which was a kind of Orwellian bureaucracy presiding over a number of secrets. But then I thought it would be fun to make it a mystery-solving outfit. So once I did that, and once I realized I had detectives, the noir thing just fell into place. That was a decision based partly on my sense of the genre in film, which I knew better than I knew the books. I watched the Howard Hawks version of The Big Sleepseveral times, as well as films like Gildaand The Big Combo.

But the other part is this file clerk protagonist. He is by nature a fastidious character whose sense of having things in order and classified properly I found compelling as a writer, if only because it’s akin to my process and my way of thinking. So then you pair that with a detective, who of course is also a seeker of some truth, which is what makes detective fiction such a wonderfully useful narrative. And that was the real convergence, when Unwin's need to have things correct both logically and factually matched up with this other darker, more mysterious world, which resists cataloguing and classification. Underlying things is this unsolvable crisis, and that's the lure of the noir, where getting to the truth usually just makes things worse.

GHG: Let's see. It sounds like you came to the detective idea very organically; the work was already in progress and it sort of ended up going that way. At least for me, that's helpful to know. Let's derail into Small Beer. So you started as an intern, you approached them and just said, "Hey, I'd like to intern?" while you were at Amherst. How many years ago?

JB: That would have been in 2004. I started in just the way you described: told them I wanted to volunteer. The office was in their house in Northampton at the time, so I would go there once a week, spend the day working on press releases, or shipping books, or proofreading, and in a few memorable cases retyping books we were putting back into print, but for which no digital file existed. It was a great experience for me because previous to that I had only worked on journals; it was my first time seeing how books were produced. And Kelly and Gavin make books so well, and with such style, so it was a great spot to be. I was very happy to be there and once I had been donating my time for a couple of years, they found a way to take me on as an employee. And since then we've moved the office out of the back of their house and into a nice old mill building loft space in nearby Easthampton, where we can let the books roam.

It was also wonderful to find a kind of haven at Small Beer while going to graduate school, because Small Beer occupies this kind of wonderful niche, as I think of it, between quote unquote literary fiction and quote unquote genre fiction. That was where my sensibilities were leading me as a writer. And as receptive as my teachers and fellow students at UMass were to that kind of genre play, it was really Kelly and Gavin who had been in that world for years, so they knew what I was up to and became important readers and mentors early on.

GHG: Talking about genre; you mentioned finding writers that were lyrical--we talked about Angela Carter and Thomas Ligotti. How about in science fiction? What have you read, what did you read?

JB: I feel like I'm always trying to get caught up on science fiction. In my early days, I veered more towards the fantastic than science fiction. My mom had Tolkien on her bookshelf, and before I could read I remember taking those books down and looking at these bizarre geometric patterns on the covers -- I think they were supposed to be the rings -- and I thought, someday I will be able to read, and this is what I will read. (Laughs.) I loved Peter S. Beagle and I read a lot of Conan comic books. And I had a close friend in junior high school and high school, Shahrul Ladue, who was a voracious reader and who read so much more than I possibly could. He was a great resource for me, because he would give me these condensed versions of almost everything he read. He would tell me what was going on with the latest installment of The Wheel of Time, or with Piers Anthony and Xanth these days.

(Both laughing.)

JB: But we were also reading Ursula Le Guin and Philip K. Dick. And the thing is, I remember reading certain books and stories in school -- Kafka, Poe, Lewis Carroll, and Ray Bradbury of course -- and thinking there's a line that's not being drawn here, between the stuff that I'm reading on my own and the stuff that is coming to me in school. There's a connection here that needs to be made. Then in college I read Angela Carter, Italo Calvino, and Jorge Luis Borges, and the connection became more clear for me. I think an important moment came with the publication of the New Wave Fabulists issue of Conjunctions. It's exciting to see the genre walls being broken down and connections being remade: a tracing back to shared roots, and it has nothing to do with the marketing of something, but rather about literary source and shared concerns.

GHG: You've known you wanted to write from a young age?

JB: I originally wanted to be a filmmaker, but I was writing from a pretty young age. My friends and I used to write skits and perform them, and I was writing a lot of poetry, and then in college I took a writing workshop and realized that that was what I needed to be doing, and I've stuck to writing seriously ever since.

GHG: Your undergrad degree was at Bard, what was your major?

JB: English--they call it Languages and Literature, at Bard College -- with an attached Creative Writing component. I wrote a messy, sprawling kind of Victorian fairy tale novel for my thesis that was inspired in large part by the Christina Rossetti poem "Goblin Market," and that still sits in some deep dark place in my file drawers.

GHG: What's next? You said you have the story in Conjunctions: 52 Betwixt the Between: Impossible Realism. Now what are you going to do with the rest of your life?

JB: I'm trying to decide between a couple of different projects. I'm doing research for one of them. I grew up in Upstate New York, and from a young age I've had the stories of Washington Irving rolling around in my head. I have something that I would really like to do with the Rip Van Winkle story that would be a kind of American historical folk tale. It's something that's been on my mind for a long time. I think I'm a little intimidated by it, because it feels like it would be a big project. But that's something I'm just beginning to work my brain back into. There are other things, too.

GHG: Such as?

JB: Such as the post-apocalyptic Alice's Adventures in Wonderland-on-a-train novel. (Laughs.)

GHG: Did you just come up with that right now?

JB: No, no, I actually do have some notes on that.

GHG: How do you do an apocalypse on a train?

JB: It's already happened, but the train is running, and there may be air pirates--well, I shouldn't actually talk about that too much, but visually I see it as a Miyazaki film. There are a lot of short stories I want to write. I've been gathering little ideas that I haven't been able to give any attention to while finishing and revising the novel. I'm looking forward to doing some shorter pieces.

GHG: This one's a little more complicated. Some would say that coming from the sort of DIY zine culture, even academic writing, getting an MFA, is radically different than the big gears of publishing. You, more than most, had your feet firmly planted ... and jumped into those grinding gears. What was the experience like?

JB: It's been an interesting thing. I wouldn't call it a jump because I do still feel very much in the small press world, and that's where I intend to remain -- most of my brain lives there. When I was starting to realize that I could actually publish this book, and considered smaller presses, I knew that the one I worked for would have been the obvious home for it. But also at that point I desperately wanted the book out of my hands; I had been working with it for so long, the editors at Small Beer had been readers, and I needed a different perspective. I also needed to not be conscious of its production. I do so much in my daily life to make books happen, which is work that I love, but I somehow couldn't imagine being involved in that process with my book anymore. So I did let it go, to some extent. That said, I was pleasantly surprised--and I may be lucky in this regard -- that I found an agent and an editor who were willing to work closely with me and were really smart about what I was up to. The imprint I’m with, The Penguin Press, is a relatively new one, and when I visited their office the first time I was struck by the energy and the sense of camaraderie there. I immediately felt at ease.

But right now we have all these crises in the publishing world, and the small press is going to be even more vital than it has been, and that's where the important things are going to be happening. So I'm trying to keep a foot in each world, and I'd like to think also that the worlds are not as separate as they sometimes seem. My editor at Penguin is a huge fan of Kelly Link's, and he knew Small Beer Press and is a fan of what we do. And I think because of that he better understood what I was up to with my book, and how I would want it to be handled.

GHG: What else do you do? You make beer, don't you?

JB: Oh, no, that's my colleague Michael J. DeLuca at Small Beer. He's an excellent brewer—and writer, for that matter.

GHG: OK. I know less and less about beer every day. What else do you do?

JB: What else do I do ... I drink his beer. (Laughs.) It doesn't seem like there is much else outside of the books that I'm reading or writing or reviewing, most of the time. I play board games--sitting here in the basement of Pandemonium Books is particularly appropriate because for years I played role-playing games and I still love strategy games like Settlers of Catan and Mystery of the Abbey. Have you ever played Mystery of the Abbey? It's kind of like The Name of the Rose: The Board Game. What else? I have a Chihuahua named Milton who demands a lot of attention, and I ride my bicycle.

GHG: Which role-playing games, specifically?

JB: Well, I grew up in the town of Catskill, New York, a place which I loved in many ways, but at least when I was growing up there, certain things were not present. There was one creaky old used bookstore, and it closed at some point, so naturally there were no hobby shops. I’m not even sure where we managed to find the dice we needed. A twenty-sided die was a mythical object then. I remember my parents and I were on vacation in Florida, and I bought, at a dollar store, some old board game called Heroes of Olympus that was supposed to have a twenty-sided die in it. But the die was missing.

In any case, my friends and I, though we were aware of gaming as something that was going on somewhere, we didn't have access to any of it: we were geeks in a desert. So we made up our own games, our own worlds, for years. I’m thankful for that now. You asked when I knew I wanted to be a writer, and those games were an important part of that puzzle because there we were making up stories, making up characters. I would spend days inventing imaginary worlds for my friends to inhabit, and the cooperative storytelling process really honed my sense of how to put together a narrative.

GHG: You mentioned comic books earlier.

JB: The first two comics I bought were an issue of Detective Comics starring Batman, and an issue of Conan the Barbarian, and I became devoted to both. I've been thinking a lot about the Batman comics recently, because--and some of my early readers noted this when they were looking at my book--I have a kind of Rogue's Gallery of strange villains. One of them is a former carnival magician, the nefarious biloquist Enoch Hoffmann, who is the nemesis of Detective Travis Sivart. I wasn't aware of it at the time, but looking back I see how important those Batman comics were, especially in the sense of creating these heightened personas. They were so themselves, so thoroughly and sometimes so viciously. It’s a kind of myth-making, and it’s really informed my writing process. Of course a lot of comics writers have gone in and explored the psyches and the subtleties more thoroughly, but in their pure form, those characters are absolute symbols of themselves, and that allows for a kind of storytelling which is more like mythology or fable than anything else.

GHG: And there's a direct correlation between that and role-playing characters, because that tends to be the heightened emotional peaks of the experience that tend to play out.

JB: Right.

GHG: What comics recently?

JB: Recently I’ve really enjoyed Bryan Lee O'Malley’s Scott Pilgrim series. I've also been going back and reading Miyazaki's work--I love his films, and reading the manga of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, for example, has been rewarding. And I did dig up the Conan comics after I saw somewhere that Barack Obama has an impressive Conan collection. It’s comforting to know that our President has a bit of a geek side.

GHG: What are some of the weirder questions you've been asked so far? Or is there anything I should ask?

JB: I need a good weird question. Hit me with something really strange!

(Both laughing.)

GHG: How do your parents feel about your work?

JB: (Laughs.) I think my mom is really happy. She read those cozy British mysteries, and got me to read some Agatha Christie when I was young, so I think she sees that the course I’ve taken can be traced back to her. She’s an amazing storyteller, and from her I learned how to withhold the important pieces of information as long as you can. I still listen to the way she tells a story -- it can become so convoluted, yet she draws it all together in the end. She read my book and--she's a very careful reader -- she noticed a consistency error involving one character’s hat. She’s a tough reader, but proud of course.

GHG: Milton the Chihuahua is named after Milton the writer?

JB: Actually, he was adopted from Louisiana, and he came with the name Milton. At first I tried calling him by a different name--I was going to call him Grendel because he looks like a strange little creature and is kind of gargoyle-esque. But Grendel just didn't stick. I went back to Milton, and realized it was a perfectly respectable name, not only because of the poet but also because he--the Chihuahua--acts a bit like he’s your long-lost eccentric uncle, and I like the idea of Uncle Milton, which is how he's often referred to. Milton found his way into a scene in the novel. He's been in a few pieces of mine, actually. He appears in a short story called "The Other Labyrinth" which was in a Datlow/Windling anthology for young adults, The Coyote Road. One of the really satisfying things about publishing that story was that Charles Vess did an illustration for it, and I love Charles Vess's work. I had described Milton clearly enough, I guess, that his drawing of the dog in the story looks pretty much like my dog. It’s hanging on my wall now.

GHG: What other fantasy writers in the past few years, since Amherst, have you enjoyed?

JB: Just recently I've been reading Gene Wolfe, and I'm absolutely enthralled by his work. I've been reading his short stories, and I'm now preparing to get into the novels. I read a section from Wizard or Knight, one of those two books -- I think it's a diptych -- and my first impression of that was of Beckett writing epic fantasy. So I'm looking forward to reading more of his stuff.

GHG: It was turned in as one book, and they forced him to split it.

JB: Oh, is that right? Interesting.

GHG: And I've only read the first half, so I feel like it's their fault that I only got my hands on half of it. Needs to be rectified, at least on my end. And you've mentioned some writers, I'll just list them off: Borges, Calvino, Slattery...

JB: Yes, Liberation I thought was such a wonderful novel. Smart politically, and in its storytelling. I think Brian Slattery has the ability to take an idea and pack it so full -- he stretches things to their utmost in a way that is absolutely compelling. It's a book that's spilling over with ideas, just dizzyingly impressive. Calvino -- that’s going much further back—became important to me not only for the ways he worked from fable and folk tale, but also for his sentences. The clarity and precision of Calvino's writing is something I admire deeply. That, and the fact that he maintains a sense of levity at the same time. His Six Memos for the Next Millennium is the closest thing I have to a guidebook for writing.

GHG: Five speeches and one memo. Yeah, I had a workshop with Rikki Ducornet inspired by Six Memos.

JB: I loved her story collection, which I read around the same time.

GHG: Three short story collections that you would love to press into people's hands. That you think people should read?

JB: There are so many that I’d like to recommend. I could easily pick three just from the Small Beer list. But if I’m trying not to seem too biased? The Voice Imitator by Thomas Bernhard, Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino, The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter. But those are slightly older books; how about I add in three more recent collections? Farewell Navigator by Leni Zumas, Black Juice by Margo Lanagan, and The Baum Plan for Financial Independence by John Kessel. Sorry, that last one is a Small Beer book. I cheated.

GHG: Thank you for doing this, Jedediah.

A Conversation with David Beronä

Over at Colleen Lindsay's digs, The Swivet, I interview David Beronä, who wrote a marvelous book called Wordless Books: The Original Graphic Novels.

One fun bit of trivia I forgot to mention in the intro to the interview -- before David and I had any knowledge of each other, we were both reviewers for Rain Taxi, and you should definitely check out his review there of one of the most recent wordless books to gain a lot of attention, Shaun Tan's The Arrival.

Interview at Bibliophile Stalker

Somehow, in the merry-go-round-that-aspires-to-be-a-rollercoaster that is my life, I missed this interview that Charles Tan conducted with me about Best American Fantasy (volume 2 is now, finally, making its way into the world!), writing, reading, theatre, teaching, reviewing, etc. It was a fun interview, and I'm grateful to Charles for giving me the opportunity to ramble on about some favorite topics. Here's a taste:

What for you makes a good story?

I wish it were something simple and reliable -- I wish, for instance, that I loved every story with the word "arugula" in it. That would make writing and reading much easier. But, alas, it's all more ineffable than that. Generally, it boils down to surprise and individuality. I don't continue reading stories if they don't contain some element of surprise -- if they don't make me wonder where the writer will take the next sentence, the next paragraph, the next page. I'm not a fast reader, so if I feel like I can write the rest of the story in my head, I stop reading. Similarly, I want stories that are not like all the other stories I encounter -- I want stories that create a sense of individual voice and craft. Thousands and thousands of stories are published every year, and most of them have far too much in common with each other.

A Conversation with Brian Francis Slattery

Brian Francis Slattery is the author of Spaceman Blues and the upcoming Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America, two books that every intelligent and discerning reader should own. (And if you, like me, thought Spaceman Blues was fun and moving and beautiful and strange, just wait till you plunge into Liberation!)

I figured now would be a good time to talk with Brian, because the U.S. is going through some economic turmoil, and such turmoil murmurs in the background of Liberation. Perhaps he could give us some pointers of how to avoid total collapse. He is not, after all, a stranger to the field of economics...


Just for the sake of clarity, what is your relationship to the dismal science? "Engaged", "Married", "It's Complicated"?

It's complicated. I have a masters degree in international affairs, specializing in economic development, and for my day job, I edit public-policy and economics publications for a variety of places. But I'm not an economist--I don't have a PhD and I'm not smart enough to construct the models that economists construct. I know enough to do my job and to be able to tell the difference between good economics journalism and... how to put this... not as good economics journalism. I also know just enough to know that I don't know enough about the details of many fiscal policies to have an opinion about them that's worth much. So it's complicated.

Is the American economy doomed?

I don't know. I do know that some economists think that we may see a serious decline in the U.S. economy over the next few decades, and they see it arising from a number of possible different causes. I'm not sure what to do with that information, though. You can imagine the different scenarios as more or less mutually exclusive possibilities, which makes our chances of pulling through seem all right. However, you can also imagine the multiple possibilities arrayed around us like a dense minefield, in which each mine can set off the ones around it, making our chances of getting through the next century with our current quality of life intact seem pretty dim. One thing does seem clear: The current trajectory of our fiscal and monetary policies is unsustainable in the long run, and much depends on how we react to it. Hopefully, of course, it won't all hurt too much; hopefully the people who are hurting already won't be hurt even more.

If politicians were really to put aside political posturing and try to solve some of the problems with our economy, what would they do?

I have no idea. This may sound overly naive, but from what I understand, right now (September 30) I think that many of the people in Congress and at the Fed and Treasury are actually working in what they perceive as the public interest. They're looking a complex problem from a variety of angles, through the lenses of a variety of concerns, and it looks different to each one of them. Certainly there's a lot of posturing going on, but I'm not sure that's ultimately what's making this difficult.

I'm not saying that everyone involved is a saint, either. But we're facing a big problem with grave consequences for failure, and coming up with a solution is hard. If I were suddenly to find myself an official at the Fed or a member of Congress, I wouldn't know what to do. I simply don't know enough. All I have is my half-knowledge of the subject and my social-democratic inclinations, and the policy direction that emerges from extrapolating from those is is too half-baked to put in print.

This morning I got one of those emails that one gets, not the kind for clitoral enhancements, but rather the same species as the ones saying that if you investigate the numerological implications of John McCain's houses you'll discover that Obama is a genetically modified zebra posing as Mae West. In any case, this email suggested that instead of bailing out the banks, the government should just cut every adult in the U.S. a check, because splitting $700 billion by the number of adults in the country (the email roughly estimates 200 million) leads to very big checks for everybody. So why won't the government do this? We could all become rich!

OK, I'll bite on this one. Writing everyone a check as an economic stimulus package strikes me as kind of a shotgun approach to fiscal policy. You're making an awful lot of assumptions about the way people are going to use the money you give them.

That said, $700 billion divided by 200 million comes out to $3,500 per adult. You can buy a really nice TV with that kind of money. But you can also imagine that money being spoken for, maybe several times over, before the ink is even dry.

Would you describe Liberation as a pessimistic novel? An optimistic novel? A picaresque novel of realistic inclinations and satiric leanings with a slight bouquet of wormwood?

I love that third sentence. I don't know how optimistic or pessimistic the book is; I just have no perspective on it. I do know that much of it comes out of the love-hate relationship I have with my own country. Definitely there are some things I hate about it, which fuels some of the passion in the book; anger is an energy, like John Lydon says. But really, there's way more love than hate. Which perhaps accounts for the ending. And the parties.

Let's talk music, since you're also a musician. Do you listen to music while writing?

No. I do listen to music a lot when I'm editing my own stuff, though. This is about to go off on a tangent that you probably weren't expecting, but here goes. About a year and a half ago, I was the beneficiary of a vast collection of recordings of 78s (I have them as MP3s), and I tend to listen to them when I'm sitting in front of my computer. I really love all of it, and I'm so grateful to be able to listen to it, this music that was recorded more than eighty years ago and survived at least five changes in the format of recorded music to become digital. I love the idea that, having made it this far, it just might stand a good chance of surviving the next eighty, too. Which always gets me to thinking about what recordings from our time are going to be listened to a hundred years from now. I like to think that it'll be totally random, the product not of popular consensus, but of the work of a few enthusiasts who just refuse to let the thing they love go. Which suggests to me that the popular and the unknown will be put together side by side without judgment, just like Carlos Gardel and Carlisle and Ball sit next to each other on my hard drive now.

What's a good soundtrack for the collapse of the United States of America?

Anything you can play without electricity.

Our leaders tell us that reinvigorating the economy requires spending. So if I want to go out and spend some money on, say, books, what books should I spend money on (aside from your own, of course)?

Books about farming and animal husbandry might not be a bad idea.

If you could resurrect 3 people, with their brains intact, and foist them off on the world, whom would you resurrect?

Sun Ra, Geoffrey Chaucer, and John Maynard Keynes.

Finally, zombie movies. What's your position with regard to them?

Love them. All of them.

A Conversation with Diana Spechler

Diana Spechler's first novel, Who By Fire, has just been released to strong reviews from all over. It's a compelling story of three members of a family: a sister (Bits) whose life is a mess in all sorts of different ways, a brother (Ash) who has fled to Israel to study at an Orthodox yeshiva, and a mother (Ellie) who thinks Orthodox Judaism may be a cult from which her son must be saved at any cost. But that's just the beginning -- as the present-time events of the novel unfold, a complex past, full of guilt and blame and miscommunication, reveals itself.

Diana Spechler’s fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train Stories, Moment, Lilith, and elsewhere. She received her MFA degree from the University of Montana and was a Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University. She lives in New York City, where she is at work on her second novel.

Diana's about to begin a busy book tour, and I was pleased to grab some moments of her time for a few questions about the book and her writing process.


How did you decide on building the novel from three first-person points of view? Why three? Why first?

The novel started as a short story, "Close to Lebanon," which the Greensboro Review published some years ago. It's told from the first-person point of view of 23-year-old Bits Kellerman, who lives in Boston, uses sex as a vice, and is worried about her younger brother, Ash, a college dropout who became an Orthodox Jew and moved to Israel to learn in a yeshiva. In the beginning of that story, Bits hears about a suicide bombing in Jerusalem. Throughout the rest of the story, she's waiting to hear from her brother.

When I finished "Close to Lebanon," I thought I was through with those characters. But a few months later, I started wondering about Ash. Who was this guy? Why did he make such a drastic life change? So I tried writing from his point of view, also in first person. For some reason, I never even thought to use third for either of them. I liked the immediacy and intimacy of first; it seemed appropriate for the telling of such an intensely personal story.

For many, many drafts, the narratives belonged only to Bits and Ash. I worked on the novel for several years before deciding that Ellie's voice could really add something to the story. I'm glad that I finally gave her some of her own chapters. It shaped her into a flesh-and-blood character, whereas before, she felt sort of blurry and undefined to me. Including her perspective also wound up lending more shape to the novel.

Did the shape of the novel change much as you were revising?

Yes. It changed frequently and drastically. In early drafts, there was no plot. The finished product, by contrast, is quite plot-heavy. Adding Ellie's voice dramatically altered the story. Sometimes I think back to early drafts and I remember characters who once existed and no longer do.

Sorry if I'm being vague...I'm trying to avoid a spoiler!

Did you have a sense of the narrators as writers with an audience? It was interesting to me that Ash found ways to explain Hebrew terms and Jewish traditions, since he would only do that if he had a sense of writing for someone other than himself.

I suppose I was imagining the narrations as peeks into the characters' minds, or perhaps into their journals, although I don't think any of them are the journaling type.

I had a difficult time figuring out how to include all the Jewish/Hebrew references without confusing the reader. At one point, I toyed with the idea of adding a glossary, but ultimately, I decided to embrace the challenge of getting the information into the story. I hope that the information sounds natural, rather than didactic or artificial, in the context of the novel; I certainly tried to make the seams invisible!

The novel moves along quickly and is a brisk read for a book of almost 350 pages. How did you approach pacing it? How conscious were you of working to balance plotting and characterization?

I think the fast pacing happened naturally. The chapters felt best to me when they were short. The ones I wrote long, I wound up breaking up into two or three chapters, interspersing them with the voices of the two other narrators.

What inspired you to include the cult-deprogramming subplot? Was the topic an interest of yours before working on the book?

Yes! I'm very interested in cults, particularly in charismatic personalities, the controversy over the existence of brainwash, and the controversies over which groups are "cults" and which are not. I learned about Ted Patrick ("Black Lightning") while I was working on Who By Fire, and knew instantly that he belonged in my novel. He's such a fascinating figure, who eventually kind of disappeared amid an onslaught of lawsuits. Back when he was deprogramming cult members, people either loved him for fighting cults or hated him for being aggressive and meddlesome. I liked how the Ted Patrick phenomenon paralleled the question in my novel of whether Ash had joined a cult or was infusing his life with meaning.

Have you come to any conclusions for yourself about what is and isn't a cult? Is the term even a useful one?

Jon Krakauer wrote a great book about the Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints called Under the Banner of Heaven. One of the things he talks about is that if Joseph Smith had lived thousands of years ago, people today might be more forgiving of the Mormon religion. By the same token, if Moses had "parted the sea" and presented the Ten Commandments in the 1800s, people would probably roll their eyes about him and call him insane. If you think about it like that, it kind of puts things in perspective.

I guess I consider a cult a religious group that sucks its members dry financially and uses force to keep its members from leaving. Admittedly, that's not a great definition; I think many groups walk a fine line between religion and cult.

When did you first travel to Israel? Were your impressions similar to Bits's?

I spent a summer in Israel right before my senior year of high school. It was one of those organized trips involving a bus and lots of other American kids. I loved it. I sobbed the first time I saw the Western Wall, even though I didn't quite understand what it was. We camped out in the Negev Desert one night, covered ourselves in limestone dust just for fun, and woke in our sleeping bags to the otherworldly sight of a pack of camels making their way across the sand, backdropped by the first blue light of the day. I lacked Bits's cynicism. I was in love with every aspect of Israel, and all I knew at the end of that summer was that I wanted to get back there as quickly as possible.

How has your perspective on Israel changed since high school?

I'm more educated about the history and politics now than I was then, but I'm still starry-eyed about it. Israel is a beautiful, magical place.

Have you gotten much feedback from readers for whom you've opened up an unfamiliar culture? And have you heard from any Orthodox readers?

I've heard from a number of non-Jews that reading Who By Fire taught them a lot about Judaism and Israel. That thrills me. I wondered while I was writing it if I was alienating a non-Jewish audience, but the editor who acquired my book isn't Jewish, and neither is my publicist, and the reviews have mostly appeared in publications that aren't geared specifically toward Jews, so it seems to be accessible to everyone.

So far I haven't heard much from the religious community, but I'm not anticipating a splash of any kind. First of all, I don't consider my portrayal of the Orthodox Jews edgy or offensive. Second, it's fiction! The characters aren't real. And third, there are some Orthodox characters in the book who aren't the greatest people, and there are others who are kind-hearted and wonderful.

An enthusiastic reader runs up to you and says, "Diana Diana Diana I LOVED your novel! I read it twelve times and memorized almost all of it! What should I read next!" After you calm yourself and the reader down, what do you suggest?

Depends on the day. No, it depends on the minute. I have a new favorite book every five seconds, but some of the ones I always recommend are The Secret History by Donna Tartt, Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, That Night by Alice McDermott, and Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson. More recently, I'm loving Rules for Saying Goodbye by Katherine Taylor and Twenty Grand by Rebecca Curtis. Also, two of my best friends have published books that I think are totally incredible: The God of Animals by Aryn Kyle and Come Together, Fall Apart by Cristina Henriquez.

Talking Animals

The latest issue of BOMB magazine includes a conversation between Jonathan Lethem and Lydia Millet -- it's unfortunately not online, but it's so good that it's really worth the price of the magazine to read it. One of the best interviews I've read in a while. Here's a sample:

Jonathan Lethem: I was recently reading an essay by Mary McCarthy, a quite brilliant, free-ranging one that she first gave as a lecture in Europe, called "The Fact in Fiction." At the outset she defines the novel in quite exclusive terms, terms that of course made me very nervous: "...if you find birds and beasts talking in a book you are reading you can be sure it is not a novel." Well, as the author of at least one and arguably two or three novels with talking animals in them, I felt disgruntled. McCarthy is one of those critics whose brilliance dedicates itself often to saying what artists shouldn't do -- like the equally celebrated and brilliant James Wood, with whom I disagree constantly. For me, the novel is by its nature impure, omnivorous, inconsistent, and paradoxical -- it is most itself when it is doing impossible things, straddling modes, gobbling contradiction. But anyway, when I lived with McCarthy's declaration for a while, I found myself replying, "But in the very best novels the animals want to talk, or the humans wish the animals could talk, or both." [...]

Lydia Millet: [...]The animals that want to talk, the people that want them to...exactly. But to the critics -- it's so easy, and so exhilarating, to denounce things. Isn't it? But prohibitions like that -- "It's not a novel if it has talking animals in it," "It's not a novel if it has philosophy in it" -- besides being snobbish and condescending, serve more to elevate the critic than to advance or innovate the form. In fact, I think it's a sign of an art form losing power in culture when its arbiters try to define it by its limitations, what it can't or isn't allowed to do. Shoring up the borders of the form, in other words, to isolate it and make it puny. Novels should do anything and everything they can pull off. The pulling off is the hard part, of course, but my feeling is if you don't walk a line where you're struggling to make things work, struggling with the ideas and shape and tone, you're not doing art. Art is the struggle to get beyond yourself. And if you want to use talking animals to do that, and you can make them beautiful, nothing is verboten. [...] Once you exclude you're calcifying. You're well into middle age and headed for death.