MEET THE AUTOR / Interview

Claire Vaye Watkins: ‘How come nobody’s ever having sex in the apocalypse?’

Top 10 books of eco-fiction

The author discusses how growing up in the Mojave Desert informed her debut novel’s vision of an arid world – and why she hates dystopian fiction

Alex Clark
31 January 2016

Claire Vaye Watkins was born in California and brought up in the Mojave desert, Nevada; her debut novel, Gold Fame Citrus, uses this territory as the backdrop for a terrifying vision of a world without water. Watkins is also the author of the award-winning story collection Battleborn.

Claire Vaye Watkins

Gold Fame Citrus imagines a future US south-west enduring permanent drought, and cut off from the rest of the world. Where did the idea come from?
The way I went about writing was by looking to the past. I was born in an area of California called the Owens Valley, and the Owens Valley was the site of what was called the California water wars in the 1920s, which was when the city of Los Angeles built their aqueduct systems because they realised they didn’t have enough water to make this major metropolis happen, and this dream of manifest destiny, the paradise, the Eden of America, come true. So they built this aqueduct system and one of the lakes it drained was Owens Lake, near where I was born.

Meet the Author / Abigail Dean

 

Abigail Dean

Meet the Author: Abigail Dean

Five of the best crime and thrillers of 2021

Abigail Dean is the debut author of Girl A which is set to become one of the standout titles of 2021. Girl A was the subject of a fierce bidding auction with TV rights snapped up by Sony Pictures Entertainment. Girl A is published by HarperCollins and is also available from Suffolk Libraries.

 

Katie Kitamura

MEET THE AUTHOR

Interview

Katie Kitamura: ‘I still feel incapable of processing what’s happening’

The author of A Separation on being a writer in Trump’s America, accepting her father’s death, and inverting stereotypes in contemporary fiction

The 10 Best Books of 2021

Hannah Beckerman
Sunday 19 March 2017

California-born Katie Kitamura is the author of three novels, the latest of which, A Separation, is the story of a woman searching for her estranged husband.

Katie Kitamura

Is it right to say your novel is about people who don’t understand one another both literally and emotionally?

Absolutely. The narrator is a translator in a foreign country searching for her former husband and the starting point for the book was whether there’s such a thing as total transparency between two people. I think more often than not, there is some kind of persistent unknowability, even in somebody you’re very close to. And I suppose there’s an unknowability in ourselves. I’m always interested in a character who does something and doesn’t understand why they’ve done it. So in this book, it’s the narrator’s decision to keep her promise to her husband not to tell anyone they’ve separated.

Meet the author / Jonathan Lethem / 'I'd written three novels and several dozen short stories before anyone talked me into a book review'

 
 Jonathan Lethem: 'The internet is a Borgesian library.' Photograph: Valerio Pennicino/Getty Images


Jonathan Lethem: 'I'd written three novels and several dozen short stories before anyone talked me into a book review'

New Yorker Jonathan Lethem on his late introduction to non-fiction, defending plagiarism and the joys of Dr Seus

WILLIAM SKIDELSKY
SUNDAY 4 MARCH 2012

New Yorker Jonathan Lethem, 48, found success with the novels Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude. His latest book is a collection of essays, The Ecstasy of Influence.

In the preface to your new collection, you write of how, before starting an essay, you first need to "invent a character" to do the writing. Where does this unease with non-fiction come from?

I came to writing from a really particular angle. I grew up in a visual arts household – my dad was a painter – and I thought that was what I was going to do. At the same time, I loved stories and reading. By the time I was making the switch to stories, all of my way of thinking about art-making was from the plastic arts. I thought of stories and novels as these invented, conjured objects. None of it was about the personal, confessional, diary-keeping impulse, nor about the scholarly idea of writing about things to be accurate. It was about making up stuff. I'd written three novels and several dozen short stories before anyone talked me into a book review.

One of the pieces in the book is about the unhappy experience of being reviewed by James Wood. What was your beef with him?

That piece is not a comprehensive critique of Wood. It's really a memoir about what it's like to be reviewed by someone who everyone told me had awesome and comprehensive powers. Certainly the manner of his presentation – even putting out a book called How Fiction Works – has this implication. I had a glancing encounter with his notion of authority and it irked me. But I was really writing about my own confusion.

Much of your writing suggests an ambivalence about the internet. You see it as a democratising force but also something darker?

There's a real push and pull. The web exposes tensions that already exist: between egalitarian impulses and elitist yearnings for authority and control. It makes them very naked. Which can be useful, but also quite raw and uncomfortable – to have normally smoothed-over anxieties brought into such violent visibility as they are, for example, by internet comments sections.

A lot of your writing about culture concerns physical artefacts - record sleeves, books, comics. Isn't this aspect of cultural appreciation lost online?

Maybe. But you see the most amazing acts of curation and resurrection on the internet. It is a spectacular Borgesian library, and at the same time it represents a flattening of a tangible or a hierarchical life. I had to decide what record to own. Now I just own them all. It's very complicated.

What's most excited you recently?

My own sensors are in a disadvantaged state because I'm the parent of two very young boys and at the same time I've taken this big teaching job [as Disney professor of creative writing at Pomona College, California]. My ability to attend to stuff is very retarded in two ways: I'm constantly trying to figure out what to talk to my students about; and at the same time I'm reading a lot of Dr Seuss and getting up at three in the morning.

The first thing to go is my own optional appetites.

The only previous occupant of the Disney chair was David Foster Wallace. Ironic that two such anti-corporate writers should be given the post.

Yes, they'll probably have to go for Slavoj Zižek next!

THE GUARDIAN

Anne Carson

Meet the author

Anne Carson: ‘I do not believe in art as therapy’

The poet and classics professor talks about her new collection, Float, her love of volcanoes and the power of brevity

Kate Kellaway
Sunday 30 October 2016

A

nne Carson’s The Beauty of the Husband, published in 2001, made her name; she became a poetic guru, revered as an original. Her writing is a hybrid – a wayward mix of ancient and modern. She is an essayist, translator and dramatist. Born in Ontario in 1950, she has worked most of her life as a classics professor. She appears in the newly launched Penguin Modern Poets Series and has just published a new collection, Float.

Meet the author / Kerry Andrew on writing supernatural fiction: ‘I had to spook myself out’

Kerry Andrew: ‘Writing a novel is a bit like writing an opera: it’s a massive undertaking.’ Photograph: Urszula Soltys

Meet the author

Interview

Kerry Andrew on writing supernatural fiction: ‘I had to spook myself out’

The musician and writer on her debut novel, Swansong, inspired by a 17th-century ballad, her inspirations and the wisdom of Robert Macfarlane

STEPHANIE CROSS
SUNDAY 14 JANUARY 2018

K

erry Andrew is a London-based composer, performer, writer and educator. She has a PhD in composition, has won four British composer awards and is the current BBC Ten Pieces commissioned composer. In 2014 she released Hawk to the Hunting Gone, an avian-themed alternative-folk album under the name You Are Wolf. Swansong, her debut novel, is set in the Scottish Highlands, where a London student flees after a disastrous night out.

Swansong is based on a ballad probably originating in the 17th century. What appealed to you about it?

It comes from the same root as the Swan Maiden myth – or it might do – and the version I came across was more supernatural. It’s very dark and romantic and tragic. Quite often in ballads you get a woman who’s been left very sad, so the fact that this involves a male character who is left bereft – in a very beautiful way – made it stand out.

Going back to the novel’s supernatural element, was that hard to make work?

No, not for me, actually. I had to spook myself out sometimes – I would sit in the dark and try to put myself into Polly’s position. And then I read things like Evie Wyld’s All the Birds, Singing and I really studied how she did it. Some of my favourite books are those that feel contemporary and real but have that otherworldly element. I’m not interested in full-on fantastical: I like glimmers of it, interrupting the fabric of the real world.

You write beautifully about the Scottish landscape while staying true to Polly’s urban perspective. Did you want to develop the idea of “nature writing”?

I’m not like Polly: I know the west Highlands well and I love it there. But I don’t come from a rural background. What I was really thinking about was Romanticism – of the wild being wild and quite forbidding, not gentle – and Polly being very disdainful and it slowly working its magic on her. It was more fun to describe it through that urban lens.

What were your other influences?

I don’t think the novel’s turned out like any of these people’s writing at all, but I love Sarah Hall – she’s absolutely immense. I really like Sarah Waters, Ali Smith and Zadie Smith. And British art-house films that are often about rural landscapes: My Summer of Love, Shell and God’s Own Country, which is my favourite film.

What are the similarities – and differences – between writing fiction and music?

They’re completely different. Writing a novel is a bit like writing an opera: it’s a massive undertaking and you’re doing everything – you’re the librettist and you’re setting the scene and doing everything else.

Can you tell us about collaborating with Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris on The Lost Words?

It was very fortuitous. I tweeted Robert and he happened to listen to my music and asked me to do a piece for his “Wren” spell – he doesn’t call them poems. He’s said he wants them to “taste good in the mouth”, which is such a lovely way of talking about words. I think about that a lot because of setting words to music: they feel like they need to taste good when you’re singing them as well.

• Swansong by Kerry Andrew is published by Jonathan Cape (£14.99). 

THE GUARDIAN

MEET THE AUTHOR

2012

Joyce Carol Oates / 'I had a dream about a woman whose make-up was dried and cracking, she made a fool of herself'

2014

Esther Freud / I realised the book I'd been writing for 18 months was awful

2018
Carmen Maria Machado / ‘I’m interested in messing with genres’
Kerry Andrew on writing supernatural fiction: ‘I had to spook myself out’ 

Meet the autor / Carmen Maria Machado / ‘I’m interested in messing with genres’

Carmen Maria Machado: ‘I feel like the people who write the most sex scenes are straight white dudes.’ 

MEET THE AUTHOR

Interview

Carmen Maria Machado: ‘I’m interested in messing with genres’

The author of Her Body and Other Parties on the art of writing sex scenes, engaging with dead writers, and the readers who give her flak

Stephanie Cross
Sunday 7 January 2018

Carmen Maria Machado’s acclaimed debut collection of stories, Her Body and Other Parties, was a finalist for America’s National Book award. She is writer in residence at the University of Pennsylvania and lives with her wife in Philadelphia.

Women’s bodies – and what they are subject to – seem to be central to this collection…

It was something very personally important to me, which I think a lot about. It’s weird because people keep saying it’s so relevant right now, but our bodies have been oppressed for all of human history.

There’s a lot of sex in your stories, something that’s notoriously difficult to write about well. What’s the secret?

Letting some sex scenes be pleasurable, letting bodies be real. For me, it was important to have a lot of queer sex, because I never see it – I always tell my students you have to write the stories you want to see in the world. I feel like the people who write the most sex scenes are straight white dudes, which isn’t to say that’s wrong or bad, but if you’re getting the sex through the same perspective over and over, of course it’s going to be boring.

Your acknowledgements suggest that you don’t subscribe to the myth of the solitary writer. True?

The longest acknowledgements in the history of mankind! I think that [myth] is a very romantic and fake idea that people love for reasons I don’t quite understand. Some of writing is solitary, but first you should be reading as a writer and then you’re engaging with other people, even if they’re writers who have been dead for a long time. A lot of people on that list didn’t necessarily directly help me as a writer, but created a life in which writing my book was possible.

You also studied at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

To have two years where I was just letting stuff marinate and letting stuff take off was incredibly important to me. It wasn’t like I was “learning how to write”, because I already knew how to write, but I was finding my voice and that time was so valuable to me.

You were a finalist for the National book award, interviewed by the Paris Review... as a debut author, how have you dealt with that attention?

Trying to get as much as sleep as possible! It’s been very intense. On the one hand, I’m so glad that this book that I love, that I’ve worked on so hard, is getting all this attention. On the other hand, it feels like “I’m not worthy!” as there are so many good books in the world.

Your stories range across fantasy, fairytale, erotica, horror. Where does that variety come from?

It comes from what I love and what I read. I just picked things up as a child – Roald Dahl, Louis Sachar, Shel Silverstein, a lot of horror and thrillers, a lot of mysteries – and there was something very magical about it. Children don’t really have these questions about genres and play in this very organic way – they naturally have a narrative sensibility that’s untethered to traditional narratives. There’s something so wonderful about that, it really speaks to me as an artist.

Have you encountered any prejudice against genre fiction?

No, I actually get way more flak from certain kinds of genre readers – AKA very traditional genre readers – about how my work is insufficiently genre. I’m really interested in interrogating tropes and engaging with genres and messing with them in a way I find satisfying.

Which books would you press on people at the moment?

I’ve loved a lot of books this year, but the two I’d recommend would be Bennett Sim’s White Dialogues and Jenny Zhang’s Sour Heart, which are both short story collections.

What were your thoughts on the controversy surrounding Kristen Roupenian’s New Yorker story, Cat Person?

I don’t think it was a perfect story, but almost no stories are. I really liked it – it captured a very distinctive part of the female experience and that was why people responded to it so strongly. People didn’t seem to understand that it was a short story, which wasn’t the fault of the author. I’ve seen it before, this misunderstanding about the function of fiction: people want to read fiction for a clear moral lesson, which is not how fiction works.

• Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado is published by Serpent’s Tail (£12.99). 

THE GUARDIAN

MEET THE AUTHOR

2012

Joyce Carol Oates / 'I had a dream about a woman whose make-up was dried and cracking, she made a fool of herself'

2014

Esther Freud / I realised the book I'd been writing for 18 months was awful

2018

Carmen Maria Machado / ‘I’m interested in messing with genres’

Kerry Andrew on writing supernatural fiction: ‘I had to spook myself out’ 

Meet the autor / Esther Freud / I realised the book I'd been writing for 18 months was awful

Meet the author

Esther Freud: 'I realised the book I'd been writing for 18 months was awful'

The author of Hideous Kinky on her childhood memories of watching her father, Lucian Freud, paint, and how abandoning one novel led to another, about the architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh

Interview by Alice O'Keeffe

The Observer, Sunday 31 August 2014

Esther Freud at Edinburgh's international book festival earlier this month Photograph: Murdo Macleod

Esther Freud was born in London in 1963. Her first novel, Hideous Kinky (1992), was made into a film starring Kate Winslet. After publishing her second, Peerless Flats (1993), she was named one of Granta's best young British novelists. She has since written six novels, including Love Falls and Lucky Break, and teaches creative writing at the Faber Academy.

Your new novel, Mr Mac and Me, is about Charles Rennie Mackintosh's stay in Walberswick, Suffolk, during the great war, which ended in disaster when locals mistook him for a spy. What drew you to this material?

Someone told me about Mackintosh in Suffolk about 10 years ago, saying it was a good story. I thought it was a good story, but that it wasn't my story. In the end, I slowly found my way into it in the process of writing another book. There came a moment – one of life's worst, and best, moments – when I realised that everything I had been working on for the last year and a half was awful. It was a horrible realisation at the time, but it ended up leading me to this book.

Meet the author / Joyce Carol Oates / 'I had a dream about a woman whose make-up was dried and cracking, she made a fool of herself'

Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates: 'I had a dream about a woman whose make-up was dried and cracking, she made a fool of herself'

The American author talks about writing, widowhood and the dream that turned into her latest novel, Mudwoman


Interview by Tim Adams
Sunday 26 February 2012 00.01 GMT

American author Joyce Carol Oates, 73, published her first book in 1963 and has since written more than 50 novels as well as short stories, poetry and plays. She lives in Princeton, New Jersey, whre she has taught since 1978.

Your new novel, Mudwoman, is about a woman, abandoned on a rubbish tip as a young child, who goes on to become president of an Ivy League university. It has a kind of mythic, subconscious quality; is that how you see it?

Unusually, it did come that way. I was at the Edinburgh festival some years ago and one night I had this dream about a woman who had put way too much make-up on her face and it had dried and cracked and she made a spectacle, a fool of herself. She seemed to be someone at a university with an exalted rank. When I woke up the image seemed quite profound to me. I wrote five or 10 pages very excitedly. I always wanted to go back to find out who the woman was.