1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
The publication of my first book vindicated my conviction that I could do something unusual with the novel form and see this odd literary concoction enter the wider world. The Delphi Room mixes prose—much of it in the form of an epistolary relationship—with screenplay and is a nod to cinema. My most recent work, All the World’s a Wonder, is a hat-tip to the theatre and marries playscript with prose, some of the latter as diary entries and emails, but almost all as character monologues that speak directly to the audience. One of my aims with this book was to transform the novel into a stage performance, with the reader in the front row. A play within a novel.
The Delphi Room is a love story about two cinephiles trapped in adjacent rooms which they believe to be hell; it uses an insular setting to access the expansive internal realities of its characters. In contrast, All the World’s a Wonder traverses from Manhattan to Corfu, and from modern day to the Jazz Age; it likewise plunges into emotional abysses and psychological chasms, but through a broader scope of storytelling.
2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?
I’m an actor, and for me, fiction is a natural extension of performing. When I write, I’m channelling the characters the way an actor does, and for that reason my fiction is voice-driven and dialogue-rich.
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
I can be slow to commence and slow to proceed. My approach is careful and intuitive. I can also write scenes at a rapid pace once I’ve said to hell with it and stepped on stage, so to speak. I often have an opening scene in mind. Because I work by listening for direction from the characters, who frequently say surprising and inconveniently illogical things, I must make an epic pact of trust that what they say is leading somewhere, preferably not off a cliff. Although the editing process is invaluable, my early drafts look quite similar to the final result. Perhaps this is because I need to be loving the language and the voices and feel that the bones of the piece are strong to continue the journey.
4 - Where does a work of prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I began my writing life with short fiction, but now most of my prose begins with the idea that what I’m writing will become a book. That said, a novel is constructed scene by scene, and because my work tends to spring from the perspective of a dramaturge, I venture forth with a focus on the dramatic microcosm and let the macrocosm take care of itself.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
My novels are written for live performance. Storytelling is an oral tradition. I love to put on my actor hat and share the work with an audience.
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
When I began writing All the World’s a Wonder, I was musing on how one might go about bringing to literary life the mysticism and theatrics of the creative process, its devastation and exultation. My lens was on the artist as conduit, on the artistic impulse being dictated by deathless otherworldly characters.
All my work asks metaphysical questions, bends time and space while remaining rooted in realism, and probes the possibilities of the mind, love, and redemption.
Art is a call and response about the search for meaning. So, although the questions posed by a given work may be coloured by the details of the day, the answers we are striving toward are intemporal. An artist offers incomplete answers which are perhaps fragments of an ineffable completeness.
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
Art reminds us that what we refer to as reality is just one possibility plucked from an infinite spectrum of potentials. The writer opens the door to dimensions which are not already unveiled in the temporal world, and these dimensions would never be actualized here, were it not for the artist’s insistence on prying into shadowy corners.
It is through the stories we tell and the stories we read that the stories we live are revealed anew.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
A keen editor is the essential first audience member, and the editorial process is an extended dress rehearsal, to lean on theatre jargon. Is the performance playing to the back of the house? Will tomatoes be tossed?
Still, the process is delicate, and thus stepping into it involves a degree of trepidation. To feel protective of one’s creations is only natural; for the writer, a difficult balance of defensive vigilance and open-minded serenity is required.
9 - What is the best piece
of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (writing to acting to dance)? What do you see as the appeal?
Dance was an important part of my childhood and my introduction to performance. Acting also began early, as did making up stories and writing them down. Storytelling and self-expression were always essential, no matter what form they took. Writing and acting seem a natural pair to me, the internal and external versions of the same expressive imperative. With writing, I love that I can both become the characters as an actor does—even though no one can see me—and perch in the director’s chair, guiding the action.
11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
Morning, when the mind has just journeyed back from the other side of elsewhere and life has yet to pounce from all angles, is preferred. Tea, reverie, write, celebrate wee victories.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Years ago, I began dabbling with paint. It is a way to experience the pure freedom and joy of creation without the pressure of striving to excel. The art of child’s play.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
The scent of backstage, of a slant of spotlight streaming with dust.
My parents gave me the chance to taste the stage early on. Their support is my talisman. Even when I was a very young child in a ballet recital, the scent of an old theatre and the warm smell of bright lights felt like a second home and meant both a deep connection to my family and to grand unknown realms, soon to be born.
14 - David W. McFadden once
said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence
your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Books are sensory experiences that come from other sensory experiences. Henry, a character in All the World’s a Wonder, is a violinist. I was inspired by the singular transporting sensation of a solo violinist playing Ravel. Anais, from the same novel, is passionate about cuisine, her culinary creations paying homage both to her Hungarian grandmother and to the beauty of Greece.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I will read the gamut from crime fiction to haiku to stage play. I am less concerned with my taste and more simply curious about the possible majesty of words and story. Many of the writers I’ve long loved—Alice Munro, to name a beloved icon—have a style very different from my own. If anything, I am drawn to what is far departed from my favoured stomping ground. I love reading stage plays as it feeds my fondness for dialogue. I adored The Cripple of Inishmaan by Martin McDonagh when I saw it on the stage and recently loved it again on the page.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Travel the Silk Road. When I think of storytelling as a spoken-word tradition, I think of a caravanserai full of traders bearing tales. The chronicles collected and shared along these fabled routes doubtless served as spiritual lamps for weary travellers in the cold firelight, and likely influenced the world of then and now in far more ways than we can imagine.
As both the traveller and the storyteller know, and in the words of André Breton, “…literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything.”
17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
The healing arts. Words can heal, but if not words, then herbs.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
It is in writing the voices of others that I feel most myself.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I reread Lisa Moore’s short-story collection Open. A white napkin, marked with red lipstick and fallen to the ground, is a wounded dove. Arresting.
One of my treasured films is The Road Home, directed by Zhang Yimou. Simple, gentle, graceful, timeless.
20 - What are you currently working on?
There seem to be characters chattering in my ear, flinging themselves between Southeast Asia and New York, barking out another novel. Heaven forfend.
No comments:
Post a Comment