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The Girls in the Garden: An Interview with Lisa Jewell

8/1/2016

THE GIRLS IN THE GARDEN, best-selling author Lisa Jewell’s thirteenth novel, begins with the aftermath of a summer neighborhood party. Twelve-year-old Pip watches her inebriated mother throw up. She guides her to bed. It’s late at night. She’s worried about her sister, Grace, who turned thirteen earlier in the day and has yet to return home from the party. An adult man, a neighbor of some sort, knocks on the back door and asks her to go outside with him to where “the party’s still going on.” Sensibly, Pip declines. She wants Grace to come home so she can lock the door for the night. Eventually, Pip goes outside searching for her sister. She wanders into the community gardens where the party had been. She shines her flashlight at a hedge. She sees something strange on the ground by the hedge. It’s a foot. “The foot is attached to a person.” The person is Pip’s sister, who isn’t moving. She’s “half-undressed. Shorts yanked down to her thighs, floral camisole top lifted above [her chest]...Her face is a bloodied mass.”

Pip and Grace, along with their mother (Clare), had recently moved into what they thought was a rather standard London flat after their father, a prize-winning documentary film maker, torched their old house in a paranoid schizophrenic episode. Much to their surprise, the back gate of their new flat opens up to an idyllic private park. As Pip writes to her father, who’s convalescing in a psychiatric hospital, the “totally massive private park... [is]like Narnia, there’s all these tall trees and pathways and a lawn that takes you up to all these big white houses with windows that are as tall as two men... And in the park itself, there are all these pathways and little tucked-away places. A secret garden, which is hidden inside an old wall covered with ivy.”

The park is idyllic, as is their neighborhood. The rich and the poor mingle, everyone apparently liberal-minded and enlightened. Parents homeschool their children, paying particular emphasis to the mindfulness exercises on their curriculum. One senses a benevolent, permissive hippy-dippy vibe. After dinners, the children entertain parents and their guests with their unique arrangements of Daft Punk songs on acoustic guitar, flute, and fiddle.

Of the novel’s many wonderful characters, perhaps the most wonderful is that of the park, which holds a constant sense of magical possibility and acts, in many ways, in loco parentis to the neighborhood children who congregate and hang out their while their parents are otherwise occupied. One parent justifies the prolonged unsupervised park time because it provides “all the peer-to-peer stuff” necessary for proper childhood development. Pip and Grace are overjoyed when other children accept them into their coterie.

And yet, things are not as Edenic as they appear. Parents become increasingly out-of-touch with their children, who experiment with drugs and alcohol. Innocent first kisses have the potential to blossom into something more sinister. Decades earlier, a fifteen-year-old girl died in the park under mysterious circumstances that seem to have presaged the attack upon Grace. And yet the adults carry on as if everything is constantly hunky-dory.

THE GIRLS IN THE GARDEN is very much a novel about parental responsibility and the abdication thereof. In this way, it’s reminiscent of Lauren Groff’s ARCADIA and, at times, of Joan Didion’s coolly-observed essay, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.”

And yet, THE GIRLS IN THE GARDEN is, foremost, an impeccable psychological thriller. As Jewell’s novel progresses and the layers of apparent innocence are unpeeled to reveal predatory behavior, spitefulness, and appalling negligence, the novel becomes a taut mystery. Any one of several characters could have assaulted Grace. As Publisher’s Weekly commends, “Jewell adeptly creates a pervasive atmosphere of unease in this well-spun narrative.”

As I mentioned last week when interviewing Mary Kubica, psychological thrillers are a relatively new staple in my reading diet. They fascinate my readerly interest in ways that, at times, “literary fiction” fails to do. The stories are riveting. The quality of the writing in these novels has also been revelatory. In many cases—and, especially, in the case of Lisa Jewell’s novel—the writing is exceptional.

Today, Lisa Jewell has graciously agreed to answer some craft questions via email about writing THE GIRLS IN THE GARDEN.

Question: I’m curious about your novel’s construction. Pip’s dramatic discovery of her wounded, unconscious sister occurs within the novel’s first five pages. This is followed by a 180-page-long “BEFORE” section that lays out the events, circumstances and conflicts that lead up to Pip’s discovery. The novel’s gripping last 125 pages (“AFTER”) lead us to the discovery of who perpetrated this act of violence upon Grace.

When you wrote the novel’s first draft, is this how you envisioned its eventual structure? Or did you write the novel chronologically, which would have placed Grace’s discovery at about page 185? The reason I ask is that I could very easily see the novel being successful with either layout. Did you (or your editors) feel it was necessary for your readers to begin with such a dramatic discovery?

Lisa Jewell:
I started writing the novel in February 2014 with a chronological structure – the original version starts on the night of the ‘bad thing happening’ (it was a different ‘bad thing’ first time around) and then follows the characters through the aftermath. I got to the halfway point and realised that I had no idea how to progress the story; I barely knew the characters and I genuinely couldn't decide who’d done what in the dark of night and why. So in July 2014 I binned 40k words and started afresh. I can't remember what informed my decision to start the story in the middle, but from the word go the whole thing fell into place and I wrote nonstop and linear for three months without a backwards glance until I got to the end. It was important that the reader was given the chance to cast a suspicious eye over the proceedings that built up to the main event, to question each character’s actions and motives as the tension builds.

Question: Theoretically, one drawback of having a long “BEFORE” section is that, essentially, the material is all back story to Grace’s discovery. For me, the “BEFORE” section works because the action within it all has a forward momentum. However, because the first five pages frontloads the wham! moment, were you ever concerned that readers’ interest might flag during this section? If so, what steps did you take to counteract that?

Lisa Jewell:
My interest didn't flag as I wrote the BEFORE section so it never occurred to me that the readers’ interest would flag. As I say, I really wanted the reader to feel ‘in the know’ and to be able to look at all the characters with a sceptical, questioning eye, not take anyone at face value. Without the knowledge that someone on the garden had done a ‘bad thing’ those first chapters would have been just an extended getting-to-know-you exercise. With that knowledge though, it's a chance for the reader to play detective.

Question: Pip writes these amazingly honest, truthful letters to her father throughout the “BEFORE” section. I marvel at the device of these letters, how they allowed you, as the author, to seamlessly plug in so much necessary exposition and back story. But these letters do more than that: they serve to ground Pip as a character. She becomes the one character whom readers sense they can trust. Was this your intention? What else do you think you gained by allowing readers to see so much of Pip’s impressions in these letters?

Lisa Jewell:
Pip’s letters were one of the things I changed for the second version of this book; I was aware that given that it was fundamentally a book about kids, there was no child's voice present in the book and that this was a failing. I deliberately selected Pip as my ‘voice’ because, as you say, she is trustworthy and pure. And I chose the vessel of the letters to her dad to implant a much-needed first person narrative, something direct and clean and straight to the point. With so much for the reader to question, Pip needed to be an oasis of truth, somewhere to catch your breath and look around you at the bigger picture.

Question: Outside of Pip’s letters (written in the first person), the rest of your novel is told in a loose third-person perspective that follows various characters around, letting us see glimpses of their insights and impressions. Since the novel relies, in part, on the sometimes conflicting nature of others’ impressions, it makes the first person/third person delineation all the more interesting. How did you manage this? Was it difficult to decide what to reveal in the third person accounts, and what to tell readers through Pip’s letters?

Lisa Jewell:
Peeling away the layers of my story is something I always enjoy, and something that comes quite naturally to me. Because I'm not a plotter or a planner, I'm constantly writing by the seat of my pants and the revelatory pauses – or cliffhangers – are vital to me so that I can work out were I'm headed next. So they’re not consciously ‘seeded’ and there are no ‘decisions’ as such. I just write as far as I can go, then come back the next day and go a little further. I think my writer’s brain has a natural synchronicity with a reader’s brain, it travels at the same pace.

Question: This might sound goofy, but I adored the drawings Pip included in the letters to her father. Did you draw these yourself? They have such an innocent charm and, especially in the case of her drawing of the garden, impart useful information to the reader.

I was curious though. The last of Pip’s drawing appears on page 62. Why didn’t you include any beyond that? Were you worried that, as the novel progressed through more psychologically-nuanced material, they might seem a little light-hearted?

Lisa Jewell:
I asked my daughter to draw them! She was at the time the same age as Pip so it made total sense. I enjoyed verbally describing the characters to her and then watching her translate those descriptions into drawings – she got them spot on and I didn't need to ask her to change anything! I think the drawings petered away when Pip realised that her father wasn't reading her letters anymore, that she was writing the letters into the ether.

Question: You write children and young teens remarkably well. There’s nothing trite about your young characters. Or overly sentimental or sappy. What advice can you give when writing about young characters? What particular difficulties do young characters pose when writing about them?

Lisa Jewell:
I have two daughters who, whilst being incredible in a million different ways, are also rude, opinionated, bad-mannered and, on occasion, incredibly dark. I have no sentimentalised views about children – I think, as Gordon thinks, that they can be unutterably awful. I also think a thirteen year old child can be capable of anything. So I started writing about this community of children with no filter – I never once said to myself; well, a child wouldn't do that, a child wouldn't say that. And that is probably the advice I would offer; write children as though they were adults, no special dispensations, no filter.

Question: I was impressed by the names of young characters: Pip; Grace; Willow; Catkin; Fern; Dylan; Tyler. Together, they speak of a peculiarly youthful idealism and dreaminess. When naming your characters, how hard do you work at establishing characterization and, perhaps, the novel’s zeitgeist through those names? Do you ever worry about the names coming off as overly symbolic or ham-fisted?

Lisa Jewell:
I choose names as parents would choose names for their offspring. No parent just plucks something randomly from the air, the name they choose is long thought about, imbued with meaning related to the parent’s ideals, their history, their aspirations. So I do the same for all my characters, especially the children. The family I'm writing about currently have children called Ellie, Hanna and Jake; completely normal non-symbolic names for a down-to-earth family who are not trying to tell the world anything about themselves through their choice of names. So, no, I'm confident that I always give my characters exactly the right names and never worry about being ham-fisted.

Question: As I mentioned earlier, as the novel builds to its conclusion, readers sense that many characters could have been responsible Grace’s assault. This creates great tension, but did you worry about casting suspicion too broadly? Were you worried about a red herring or two, thinking perhaps readers might see too easily through some of the suspicions you cast on the characters?

Lisa Jewell:
I'm not really a thriller writer, I write about families and relationships and secret histories, so I don't tend to think in terms of red herrings or twists. I've tried to come up with ‘big twist’ in my last few novels and I totally can’t do it! This was really a novel about a community, about how your preconceptions and assumptions about people you thought you knew can be shaken when something bad happens, how thin the veneer of trust can be. So I wasn't looking to trip up the reader or hoodwink them, I just wanted them to put themselves inside the community and watch it all unravel.

Question: I liked how history worked as a minor theme of this novel. One of the characters is a octogenarian Holocaust survivor working on her memoirs. We have the knowledge of the unsolved death decades earlier in the park, and how Grace’s assault might be somehow connected to it. Pip and Grace’s father, the film maker, received an Oscar nomination for a “documentary about Polish skinheads, the neo-Nazi thing.” History repeats itself. There are fears that the father, once released from the psychiatric hospital may lapse back into another mental breakdown or dangerous paranoid schizophrenic episode. These thoughts were on my mind while reading THE GIRLS IN THE GARDEN.

When you notice a theme like this developing in your manuscript, do you actively work to develop it further? Or, perhaps thinking that understatement is best when exploring complex themes, do you work to tamp down the overt references and connections?

Lisa Jewell: I have to confess that I didn't actively notice this theme as I was writing and I'm not sure I recognise it now. I don't tend to write with themes or messages in mind. I see myself as a pure storyteller, but I'm sure things seep through, sub consciously.

Question: Beyond providing a gripping and electrifying story, what else do you wish to impart on your readers? After readers race to the conclusion of THE GIRLS IN THE GARDEN, what do you hope they’re thinking about?

Lisa Jewell:
I’d hope that they were thinking about what actually happened on the night in question; my description of events is deliberately hazy and slightly surreal. I wanted the reader to fill in some of the blanks, imagine it for themselves, to be Tyler, to feel what she was feeling. A lot of readers have complained about the ending, about the lack of comeuppance. This saddened me as I’d hoped that the reader would think, well, a lot of people here behaved badly, this child was damaged and pushed to the limit by many different factors, the victim herself wanted no revenge, and the adults acted protectively, sealed themselves over the children, asked no questions, but ensured it would never happen again. It’s strange to me that so many readers wanted retribution and punishment for a child. So that's what I hope; that readers will look at the events and the players and ultimately feel compassion.

Addendum: Yesterday, The New York Times ran a very positive review of THE GIRLS IN THE GARDEN. This well-written and very compelling novel deserves to get a lot of attention this summer. I’m very grateful to Ms. Jewell for availing herself to my questions and for providing such wonderful and thoughtful responses. As some readers of this blog know, I’ve been writing a psychological thriller of my own, and it’s been very instructive being able to ask both Ms. Jewell and Ms. Kubica questions about their writing processes. I hope other readers and writers find them as interesting, and as helpful, as I do.

A friend of mine, Jenniey Tallman, recently published a strange yet forceful post-apocalyptic short story, “We Are Persistence Runners” at Electric Literature. Do yourself a favor and give it a look!

I’ve also had a few short stories published in recent weeks. Here’s “After the Riots,” which appeared in Atticus Review. And here’s “Pools,” which appears in Pinball’s latest issue. Many thanks to Michelle Ross and Lucas Church, editors at these fine publications, for all their help and assistance! These enigmatic stories are quite unlike the novel I’m writing, but I’d like to think they say a lot about our current socio-political moment. In any case, I hope you enjoy them!

Lastly, many thanks to Deborah Schneider for generously helping to facilitate my interview with Lisa Jewell.

Roth and his Paragraphs

7/27/2011

As you might have gathered from reading past posts, I’m something of a Philip Roth fan. I’ve read a dozen or so of his novels but, given his long and productive career, that barely touches the surface. What I like about Roth is that he does not shirk from taking on “big” subjects. Yes, at times I cringe at his characters’ misogyny, but there’s such energy to his prose—which is strange, because his digression-filled narratives so often cut back and forth in time, a strategy that in less-gifted hands is momentum-killing.

James Wood, writing about 2007’s Exit Ghost, called Roth “the great stealth postmodernist of American letters,” which is fitting. We don’t often lump Roth in the post-modern camp because, on a sentence level, he does not consciously seek to dazzle. His first book, the National Book Award-winning story collection Goodbye Columbus, was published three years before Nabokov’s Pale Fire. He comes from that last generation before Barthelme and Pynchon.

As Wood says,

“Roth has been the great stealth postmodernist of American letters, able to have his cake and eat it without any evidence of crumbs. This is because he does not regard himself as a postmodernist. He is intensely interested in fabrication, in the performance of the self, in the reality that we make up in order to live; but his fiction examines this ‘without sacrificing the factuality of time and place to surreal fakery or magic-realist gimmickry,’ as [Roth’s character, Nathan] Zuckerman approvingly says of [another writer’s] work. Roth does not want to use his games to remind us, tediously and self-consciously, that [his characters] are just ‘invented characters.’

[Implicit in Wood’s assessment is idea that razzle-dazzle sentences and “magic-realist gimmickry” necessarily lead to the creation of characters that readers do not perceive as being “real.”]

While Roth’s sentences don’t call attention to themselves, I have long admired him for his paragraphs. Especially when detailing past incidents, he can crunch so much into his paragraphs. Multiple speakers. Multiple lines of dialogue. Multiple actions. Yet always there is enough of a connecting narrative thread to pull the reader along.

I was reminded of Roth’s paragraphs again when reading Portnoy’s Complaint last week for the first time. To be honest, the novel as a whole disappointed me, but some of the paragraphs floored me.

Here’s one in which the young Alexander Portnoy recalls his father arguing with his mother while leaving his house one morning to go to work:

“Talk?” he cries. “It’s the truth,” and in the very next instant is thomping angrily around the house hollering, “My hat, I’m late, where’s my hat? who saw my hat?” and my mother comes into the kitchen and gives me her patient, eternal all-knowing sphinx-look… and waits… and soon he is back in the hallway, apoplectic and moaning, practically in grief, “Where is my hat? Where is that hat!” until softly, from the depths of her omniscient soul, she answers him, “Dummy, it’s on your head.” Momentarily his eyes seem to empty of all signs of human experience and understanding; he stands there, a blank, a thing, a body full of [excrement] and no more. Then consciousness returns—yes, he will have to go out into the world after all, for his hat has been found, on his head of all places. “Oh, yeah,” he says, reaching up in wonderment—and then out of the house and into the [car], and [he] is gone until dark.”

Is that a paragraph or what?

In the later Zuckerman books, especially in the American Trilogy (American Pastoral, I Married A Communist, The Human Stain), the paragraphs get even better. And longer. And still you wish they’d never end.

As some of you know, I’ve been working on a new novel, which I hope to finish by sometime in September. In it, I’ve been trying to write Roth-like paragraphs incorporating the multiple speakers and multiple acts. This is something of a stretch for me, but it’s going well and I’m having a lot of fun writing it.

Falco Errata: Recently, I wrote about Ed Falco’s Burning Man collection. I neglected to mention that he’s also the man responsible for the forthcoming Godfather sequel. Here’s an interview he gave to The Roanoke Times last month about that project.

Tallman Errata: BLIP’s summer issue included a short-short by my friend Jenniey Tallman. Check it out here. She also has work forthcoming in Gargoyle soon. But BLIP is so good. They’ve also got work up by Jessica Hollander, Kim Chinquee, and Alan Michael Parker, among others.

Blackwell Errata: Check out Gabriel Blackwell’s hypertext-y “Neverland,” now up at Uncanny Valley. It’s a really fun piece, so be prepared to spend some time there. Or, better yet, make multiple visits.

Placental Material & Meaningless Jabber

6/8/2011

I recently came across Bernard DeVoto’s 1936 essay “Genius is not Enough,” which took Thomas Wolfe to task for including too much “placental” material in his published novels.

At that time, Wolfe’s critical appreciation was at its apex. On the strength of his first two novels, Look Homeward, Angel (1929) and Of Time and the River (1935), he was widely considered one of the best novelists then alive. DeVoto’s take-down put an end to that. Nowadays, if Wolfe is remembered, he is remembered as an out-of-control stylist who famously asked Maxwell Perkins (his editor) to fashion something that might resemble a “novel” out of the tens of thousands of manuscript pages that he had delivered to Perkins in a steamer trunk.

DeVoto recognized that passages within Wolfe’s novels could be brilliant, but he added that

“… there were parts that looked very dubious indeed—long, whirling discharges of words, unabsorbed in the novel, unrelated to the proper business of fiction… aimless and quite meaningless jabber…”

This material, DeVoto suggested, might have been necessary to Wolfe when conceptualizing and writing his novels.

“…it was as if the birth of the novel had been accompanied by a lot of material that had nourished its gestation.”

As the novel progresses through various stages of completion, DeVoto believed it was the job of the novelist to discard the placental “psychic material” that guided its creation.

“There comes a point where the necessities of the book are satisfied, where its organic processes have reached completion… The [purpose of the placental] material which nature and most novelists discard when its use has been served.”

   ~~~

Several weeks ago, my son Sebastian let on that he and his friends had been reading my blog at school. He told me that his friends thought the blog was “awesome,” and then when that compliment did not have the desired effect, he said that, “Dad, you don’t understand: my friends think you’re, like, the greatest Dad ever.”

I’m often forced to rally around whatever stray supports I can find to justify the efficacy of my life, so I truly appreciated what Sebastian said. Yet, these compliments were strangely inhibiting. Not only did I worry that I might write something that would radically alter how my son’s friends would regard me (and, by extension, him), but it also never occurred to me that what I wrote could possibly resonate with a fourth-grade audience.

Of course, it also occurred to me that Sebastian was maybe buttering me up with praise just to make me feel good, for Sebastian is like that: someone who genuinely cares how others might be feeling.

   ~~~

I’ve been working furiously at novel revisions lately. A couple of weeks ago, I shot my agent a revised draft. I had line-edited the manuscript again, paring down my sentences and bringing characters into sharper focus. As I was doing this, and doing away with my baggier sentences and razzle-dazzle effects, I realized I was achieving the emotional resonance that I had sought. I chucked a few scenes, and added others that I hoped added insight into characters’ motivations and inner conflicts.

Last week, my agent questioned certain aspects of my novel that she thought caused readers to disengage with the narrative. From the outset, I had rigged the novel with a series of supports that had nothing to do with the novel’s actual story. For example, although my novel is set slightly in the future, I included an 1,800-word digression about the Palmer Raids of 1919. Another chunk dealt with the etymological derivation of “pupil.”

What my agent was questioning was my placental material.

This material provided a kind of background chatter as I built up the world of my novel, yet it wasn’t until several days after my conversation that I realized NONE of it was necessary to the novel itself.

   ~~~

My agent tells me that a couple of editors have specifically asked to see my novel again. Others will also be seeing it soon. This brings me great hope. What had been a 399-page beast is now a relatively sleek 359-page monster. It’s a novel that I honestly believe deserves to be published.

   ~~~

Hessel errata: Stéphane Hessel’s Indignation will soon be re-titled and published as Time For Outrage in this country. Here’s the announcement from Publisher’s Marketplace:

French Resistance hero Stéphane Hessel's TIME FOR OUTRAGE, translated by Marion Duvert, a 29-page call-to-arms that has reportedly sold more than 4 million copies worldwide since its publication in October, rejecting the dictatorship of world financial markets and defending the social values of modern democracy, reminding us that life and liberty must still be fought for, and urging us to reclaim these essential rights we have allowed our governments to erode, and to defend them for those who can't defend for themselves, to Cary Goldstein at Twelve, for publication in September 2011, by Eileen Cope at Trident Media Group on behalf of Sylvie Crossman at Indigene (US).

This news also brings me great hope. I’ve written before on this blog about Hessel, and also mentioned his work in an interview. Hessel’s message is exactly what is needed to re-invigorate liberal activism in this country, and Twelve has a fantastic record of bringing thoughtful books to the forefront.

   ~~~
Tallman errata: Last week, The Rumpus published a fantastic story by Jenniey Tallman, my friend and one-time collaborator. If you have some time, check it out. But warning: it’s “an illustrated sex toy mystery,” so be careful if you’re browsing it at work!

A Slug Inevitably Discharges Liquid, Which Is Gross: Thoughts on the Collaborative Process with Molly Gaudry, Lily Hoang & The Beatles

3/28/2011

George Harrison, January 1969

In January 1969, the Beatles gathered to rehearse material for what would eventually become their last released album, LET IT BE. A film of the same name documented these rehearsals, and although it might sound exciting--The Beatles rehearsing new songs!—the movie is dreadful.

As the sessions start, the new material (including hits like “Get Back,” “Let It Be,” and “The Long and Winding Road”) is in very rough shape. Many of the filmed performances are, at best, rudimentary. In one excruciatingly painful sequence, Paul McCartney calls out the chord changes to his band mates as they slog through perhaps their first pass at “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.”

To say the band lacked enthusiasm would be an understatement.

I’ve seen the film several times and have listened to countless hours of bootleg audio recordings from these sessions. Last night, watching it again, I was struck by how incredibly brave it was for the band to reveal their collaborative process. At times, the band appears disinterested in each other’s songs. During one heated moment, Paul McCartney rejects George Harrison’s suggestions for the lead guitar part on “Two of Us.” The brow-beaten Harrison ends up telling the domineering McCartney that he’ll play Paul’s songs however Paul damn well wants them to be played.

Although not depicted in the film, Harrison briefly quit the band during these sessions. Upon hearing Harrison’s announcement, John Lennon immediately suggested that Eric Clapton become his replacement.

Still, there are brighter moments, including this bit documenting the creation of “Octopus’s Garden.” Ringo Starr (piano), Harrison (guitar), and Lennon (drums) goof around with the nascent song, which was ostensibly written by Starr. Harrison takes over at the piano to provide ideas on how the song might be developed— lending the kind of generous suggestions that McCartney probably would not have countenanced.

Literary collaborations are far less common than musical collaborations, yet they can be just as messy. A few years ago, Julianna Baggott and Steve Almond wrote an epistolary novel together, WHICH BRINGS ME TO YOU.

Almond, in a Poets & Writers interview, said that “the collaborative process was more than we had banked on. As in: a lot more.”

He and Baggott argued a lot. Neither were particularly careful about each other’s feelings. Although they ended up with a published novel, the subtext of this article (and Baggott’s interviews) makes me wonder if it was worth it. What had been a friendship seems to have fractured.

Collaborations have been much on my mind lately. Earlier this year, “The Boy and The Palm Reader,” a story I wrote with Jenniey Tallman was published in The Collagist. As we said in an interview, the process was phenomenal. We had none of the arguments that Almond & Baggott experienced, and—to the best of my knowledge—neither of us sought to have the other replaced by Eric Clapton.

Last week, another friend asked me to help write some poems with him. I’m very much looking forward to the process. Mind you, I’ve yet to send over my revision suggestions, which is when conflicts might arise. He’s a far better poet than me and it’s possible that all my eventual suggestions will be rejected. Still, I’m looking forward to seeing something gel together that neither of us could have created if left to our devices.

Lately, I’ve been searching for good pieces of collaborative literature. Here’s “Bone Letters,” by Nicelle Davis and Peter Schwartz. And here’s “360,” a poem written by Kevin McLellan and Steven DeMaio.

“The Fan Dancers,” written by Molly Gaudry and Lily Hoang, is one of the best collaborative pieces I’ve read. At times sparse, at times lush, this amalgamation of poetry and prose startles. The jarring styles and images are nothing short of magical.

Although Gaudry and Hoang touched on their collaborative process in their PANK interview, I asked them a few more questions via email and they were gracious to respond

Why collaborate?

Two heads are better than one? Or because Molly’s head is better than Lily’s, or Lily’s head is better than Molly’s, or because Lily has always wanted to be one half of a conjoined twin and it matters not what Molly wants.

What are the risks in collaboration?

One head might not like what the other head is doing. One head might move at a slower pace than the other head. One head might be brilliant and the other head might feel like a slug. The head that feels like a slug inevitably discharges liquid, which is gross and smells terrible, but these are the risks the brilliant head must out-maneuver.

Why are there so few collaborative pieces?

Oh, no. I think the definition of collaboration is too strict here. A book is a collaboration between the author, the publisher, the editor, the designer, and the list goes on. Movies are collaborations; theatre performances are collaborations; orchestral symphonies are collaborations. But if we’re talking about literature, about two or more authors coming together to make words, then I imagine the possible reasons are those that were mentioned above, in the answer to the “risks” question. Writers like to believe in originality, genius, self-aggrandized brilliance, all of which lead to depression. Better to collaborate and be happy, if you ask me.

Guadry and Hoang’s playful answers made me laugh.

Look again at that “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” video. I defy you to tell me that those four slugs (five, if you count roadie Mal Evans, who’s pounding the anvil) aren’t discharging something gross and terrible.

I also totally get what Guadry and Hoang say about writers clinging to the belief of “originality, genius, [and] self-aggrandized brilliance.” While we all hope to claim those traits, they trap us, making us resistant to the influence of others. To enter into collaboration can be a de facto admission that, well, maybe we need to latch onto another writer’s brilliance.

During those January 1969 rehearsals (though sadly not included in the LET IT BE FILM), George Harrison introduced his song, “Something,” to the other Beatles. Harrison was clearly influenced by James Taylor’s “Something in the Way She Moves,” which was released the previous year by The Beatles’ Apple Records.

Harrison’s song was far from complete during these rehearsals. Though the melody is fully formed, the opening lyrics were “Something in the way she moves / attracts me like a pomegranate.”

As ugly as some of the placeholder lyrics were, there’s a beautiful recording of his rehearsal that’s partially embedded in this video. What makes the recording beautiful is the loving care in which John Lennon is trying to help George write the song. Neither of these great songwriters are clinging to ideas of originality or self-aggrandizing brilliance. It’s nothing short of spectacular.

Stéphane Hessel & Indignez-Vous!

2/15/2011

The other day, Jenniey Tallman and I were interviewed by Ariana Lenaciela about our story, "The Boy and the Palm Reader," which appeared in their January issue.

[Speaking of Jenniey, her excellent story, “Truths about Suicidal Women,” was published yesterday in Alice Blue.]

The interview was fun, more of a conversation than the kind of Pull up your sleeves and let’s talk about literature! talk I expected—and I always find it flattering when someone asks my opinion about anything.

At a certain point, I brought up the new Stéphane Hessel booklet, Indignez-Vous!, which has sold over a million copies in France since its October release. When I heard of it through this Christian Science Monitor article, I was amazed. Hessel is a former Nazi prisoner, leader of the French Resistance, and the last surviving author of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I didn’t think heroes like Hessel still existed in this world—to put this in an American perspective, it’s like discovering Samuel Adams and Thomas Paine are still alive and rabblerousing just down the road.

By all accounts, Hessel remains remarkably spry, yet he begins Indignez-Vous! as if he were on his deathbed:

“After 93 years, it is almost the final act. The end for me is not very far off any more. But it still leaves me a chance to be able to remind others of what acted as the basis of my political engagement.”

After helping to liberate France, he is now indignant. The French spirit of Liberté, égalité, fraternité has eroded. Corporate interests now outweigh civil interests. Income gaps are widening. Like in this country, social safety nets are unraveling.

“Some dare to say to us that the State cannot afford the expenses of these measures for citizens any more. But how can there be today a lack of money to support and extend these conquests while the production of wealth has been considerably augmented since the Liberation period when Europe was in ruins? On the contrary, the problem is the power of money, so much opposed by the Resistance, and of the big, boldfaced, selfish man, with his own servants in the highest spheres of the State.”

His prescription is indignation, which he pegs as “[t]he basic motive of the Resistance.”

Yet indignation, he says is hampered by “the consumption of mass trivia, contempt of the weakest and the culture, a generalized amnesia, and the hard competition of all against all.”

To this, I’d add that celebrity culture is now the opiate of the masses.

“Look around you, you will find topics that justify your indignation… You will find concrete situations that lead you to strong citizen action. Search and you shall find!”

However, it is scarily hard to get people to look, to search, to question—and when questions are posed, the default response often seems to be tautological defeatism: the world is how it is because that’s how the world is.

As Hessel wryly says, “Search little, and that is what you are going to find.”

Despite the difficulties that in the path towards mass indignation, I am buoyed by Hessel’s conclusion:

“To those who will make the 21st century, we say with our affection:

“TO CREATE IS TO RESIST; TO RESIST IS TO CREATE.”

Of course, I’ve heard such sentiments expressed elsewhere before, but this time it really spoke to me. And it also made me think again about the “purpose” of writers and artists.

When I first began writing, I liked to say that I wrote to understand—but back then, what I mostly wrote were taut little exercises to display to the world what a wonderful person I was. I wanted people to note my appropriately evolved socioeconomic political beliefs. Really. I wasn’t looking or exploring or even understanding—I was just saying sweet nothings to myself.

Sad to say, but it’s only been in the last few years that I’ve finally allowed myself, both as a writer and as a citizen, to exhibit the kind of indignation that Hessel demands. I guess we all have to crawl before we can walk, right?

I’ll add more about Hessel and his “TO CREATE IS TO RESIST” ethic, which I’ll do tomorrow. Friends have already chided me for my overly-verbose blog posts. If you’ve gotten this far, I thank you for your attention :)

[An English version of Indignez-Vous! was released earlier this month as A Time For Outrage by Quartet Books. According to Amazon, the first printing may have already sold out.]

A Question of Influence

1/29/2011

The question of “influence” (for lack of a better term) has been much on my mind these last couple of days.

Last week, I read a fantastic story online. For the sake of this post, let’s call that story “Body.” The story was sooo good that I emailed the link to a friend, Jenniey Tallman. Jenniey and I share the same literary sensibilities. We trade story links all the time and even wrote a story together, which is now up on The Collagist, one of my truly favorite magazines. Jenniey liked “Body” so much that she started sending links to other friends, etc.

On Friday, I went to a Kyle Minor reading here in Blacksburg, VA—which was seriously awesome. He read “The Truth and All Its Ugly,” a story which appeared in 52 Stories and in a Surreal South anthology. But the funny thing was that when he read the story’s first line, my head exploded.

“The year my boy Danny turned six, my wife Penny and me took him down to Lexington and got him good and scanned because that’s what everybody was doing back then, and, like they say, better safe than sorry.”

I thought, wow! I wonder if this’ll be anything like a story of mine that appeared online a few years back? I mean, wow, how cool would it be if, like, maybe, he might have read my story and in some way was influenced to write a futuristic child story too! Man, how my mind races. Of course, it was an irrational reach to think that, but for just those few seconds I felt seriously cool.

Needless to say however, Minor’s story was wonderfully unique and wholly original; it had nothing in common with mine.

Afterwards, during the Q&A, he explained its genesis: Pinckney Benedict, editor of the Surreal South anthology, asked him to consider writing a story that featured robots. Minor had been thinking about people that he knew who had gone through a very traumatic situation. He had wanted to write about that situation but couldn’t figure out how to effectively grapple with the subject matter in a fictional context until Benedict mentioned robots. That was the push (influence?) that Minor needed to write a damn good story.

As he read, the voice of his story reminded me a lot of two other writers I admire (Donald Ray Pollock and the seriously under-read Keith Banner). So much so that I was tempted to ask him during those few seconds when he was autographing my copy of IN THE DEVIL’S TERRITORY if he was ever influenced by those writers. But I held back, worried that given the usual clumsy way in which I pose questions, he might misconstrue my question as suggesting his voice was perhaps, um, “derivative” of those writers. Also, I think some writers might prefer that their influences be kept quiet, that perhaps Minor might hold his influences close to the vest, intimate-like.

I’m right now shopping a novel that was born after reading the first line Girija Tropp’s “Advent: A Traveler’s Tale,” which appeared online at Agni in 2008. The story’s first line:

“In the factory where I’d been sent to design a new brand identity, tired workers leant on broomsticks.”

It was strange. Something about that line, “tired workers leant on broomsticks,” just propelled me to write. And write and write, 400+ pages. The resulting novel has nothing to do with broomsticks or factories or workers, but that one line sorely influenced me in such an unimaginable way. The first line of my novel is kinda constructed like Tropp’s, but I just don’t see it as “stealing” or “plagiarizing.”

Who knows? Perhaps a jury of my peers would think differently.

I’ve been wondering what debt I might owe Tropp. There’s no doubt in my mind that that single line sparked my creativity.

As writers, we’re constantly influenced by everything we read. I look at the literary community as something like an ecosystem. Don’t we all influence each other?  Isn’t that how we communicate and advance our art? We speak and respond to each other.

Last year, I read a Dave Housley story about tigers that appeared in PANK and was spurred to write my own tiger story (as yet unpublished). Sometimes, I read an image (or even a single word) and my mind just races off to entirely new directions. Am I stealing?

Yesterday, I started reading Cynthia Ozick’s FOREIGN BODIES. Although her work is much different from mine, I adore her.   Her new novel opens with a description of a heat wave that baked Europe in the summer of 1952. Coincidentally, I’ve been writing a story set during a California heat wave circa 1986. While reading Ozick’s descriptions, I was saying to myself, damn, that’s the kind of tight language I ought to use. Somewhere in her description, she uses the word “miasma” and I immediately saw how I should insert that word into my own description. Of course I had seen and used that word before, but yesterday it just gripped me. Sometimes, there’s no accounting for the power of a single word in one’s imagination. But is stealing a single word, absent from the other words in her string of sentences, stealing?

So I was out most of Saturday doing things with Sebastian, my nine-year-old. When I came home, I saw an email from Jenniey. She had read a blog post via a Facebook link alleging that elements of “Body,” the story we both liked so much, was “stolen” or in some way “borrowed” from a story (let’s call it “Salt”) that was published last year. Plagiarism, of course, is a very serious allegation—an allegation that could derail the career of any emerging writer or would-be writing professor.

I was shocked. And I also felt swindled. The mere allegation immediately dampened my enthusiasm for “Body.”

But then I looked at the two stories and I just couldn’t see the similarities. Both stories are of the fabulist variety. They concern strange epidemics and end with really strange births. The first sentences are kinda similar: the protagonists learn of the epidemics via media reports, which is actually a common convention within the sci-fi/fabulist genres. Oh, and in the second paragraph of both stories, “scientists” are invoked to offer opinions about the epidemics.

Maybe the similarities are a bit deeper, but the plots, voices, and paragraph constructions just did not compare.

“Salt’s” author was deeply offended. Out of all the thousands of stories that were published last year, she was positive that the woman who wrote “Body” would have known of her story and consciously stolen from it. Isn't that presumptuous? Moreso, she wanted credit for its “structure.”

[Plot-wise, the stories were dissimilar. When pressed, even “Salt’s” author conceded that much.]

But structure? Geeze.

Don’t we owe structure to that ancient Greek dude, Aristotle? Or if not him, Gustav Freytag?

But I guess my larger concern reverts back to this whole question of influence. When is it appropriate? When is it inappropriate? Does George Saunders own the rights to every story that features a crazy-ass theme park? Does the Kafka estate, if it exists, own the rights to every story in which a man is transformed into another kind of being? Or of a man who must stand trial when falsely accused of a crime? How about Harlequin? Must every romance writer owe them acknowledgement for perpetuating the genre?

David Shields will likely think differently, but my hope is that the lifting of longer chunks of texts should always be acknowledged. But can Cynthia Ozick sue the pants off me if I dare insert “miasma” into my story?