July 29, 1805: Historian Alexis de Tocqueville born.
Tuesday, July 29, 2014
Monday, July 28, 2014
Friday, July 25, 2014
Q&A with author Rebecca Rotert
Rebecca Rotert is the author of the new novel Last Night at the Blue Angel. She is a singer and songwriter, and a teacher with the Nebraska Writers Collective. She lives in Omaha, Nebraska.
Q: Why do you tell the story in Last Night at the Blue Angel
from the perspectives of both Naomi, a singer, and Sophia, her daughter?
A: Sophia is the central character and we first come to
know Naomi solely from her point of view. In thinking about how children never
really know their parents, I wanted Naomi to “talk,” I wanted the reader to see
how Naomi was “constructed” emotionally, and to see the early seeds of her
compulsions.
Q: What kind of research did you do to recreate Chicago in
the 1950s and ‘60s?
A: I spent a lot of time in Chicago, particularly in its
research libraries. I read a lot, looked at a lot of photographs, talked to a
lot of people. I learned far more than I was able to employ in the book.
Research is beautiful. I found whole elements of the story accidentally,
during research.
Q: You also are a singer and songwriter. What was it like to
write about a character who’s a singer, and how did your own musical career affect
the writing?
A: Well, I had the vocabulary of that world at hand,
though my experience is very different from Naomi’s. There are certain
aspects of performers’ lives that are universal, of artists altogether – that
hungry return to the work no matter what it costs or how poorly it is going…I
think writing music informs writing prose in terms of rhythm and pattern and
certainly a deep love for music has informed my work across the board.
Q: Which authors have influenced you?
A: Michael Cunningham, Toni Morrison, Jim Crace, Jim Shepard, Zora Neale Hurston, so many poets from Emily Dickinson to Stephen Dunn,
Amy Hempel, Marilynne Robinson, Mary Robison, Joyce, Ondaatje. I could go
on and on.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: The next book. It will be a continuation of the
first. A darker continuation, hahaha.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Oh, just grateful to you for your interest.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
Q&A with poet and writer John Skoyles
Q: You call your book “an autobiographical novel.” What did you see as the right mixture of fiction and autobiography as you were writing the book?
A: I started to write a
memoir, a successor to Secret Frequencies, but once into it, I realized this
was a different kind of book, one with opportunities for invention. I saw that
I could better depict the experience I wanted to portray by collapsing scenes
and creating composites. I distilled the virtues and vices of several people
into single figures.
Q: How was A Moveable
Famine selected as the book’s title, and how would you compare your book to
Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast?
A: I took the title as a play
on Hemingway’s celebrated book but, actually, my “famine” was very rich in many
ways.
There’s not much similarity
between the two books except for the title, although in his preface, Hemingway
says, “If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction.”
Hemingway’s book focuses on
Paris, while mine lights on various places: Queens, Iowa City, Dallas, Saratoga
Springs, Bronxville and Provincetown.
Further, I intended my book
to be comic and so I’m pleased that readers and reviewers have seen it that
way. Booklist wrote, “It’s hard to believe a funnier novel will be published
this year.” Hemingway was not after that effect.
Q: You write, “We were
hell-bent to become poets.” What drew you to poetry?
A: That line is a satirical
statement about overly ambitious poets who were poets, but who put a lot of
energy into becoming known as poets. They
strove for fame in ways both minor and major.
What drew me to poetry was
probably the inability to express myself through other means. When I discovered
poetry as a child, and heard the voice of the speaker on the page, it felt
different from anything else, and I talked back to it in kind.
Q: In addition to your poetry
and this autobiographical novel, you’ve also written a book of personal essays
and a memoir. How is your poetry affected by your other writing, and vice
versa?
A: They are very separate,
although one gave rise to the other—I began writing prose when I found the
lines of my poems were growing longer and longer. And the poems began telling
stories in narratives I could not control; I felt they were more suited for
prose.
Q: What are you working on
now?
A: I have finished another
book, The Nut File, which has a strange history. When I worked at the
Associated Press in New York City as a graduate student, I typed feature
articles, answered mail, and filed documents. One day I found in a cabinet a
fat manila folder labeled “Nut File.”
It was a collection of
bizarre memos, crazy letters, and odd articles that the reporters gathered together
for their own amusement. On a slow news day, one of the writers would pull out
the file and read from it aloud, sending the office into laughter.
I began a similar file of my
own. With the additional of short fictional pieces in the same vein, the
manuscript is that collection. They range from the absurd to the grave, from
the ambiguous to the bombastic, from the ironic to the tragi-comic. Hopefully,
each is amusing in itself, and the completed manuscript is larger than the sum
of its parts.
I am also working on new
poems and preparing the Spring 2015 issue of Ploughshares, which will be guest
edited by Neil Astley, the publisher of England’s Bloodaxe Books. It will be the
first transatlantic, all poetry issue in the magazine’s 43-year history.
Q: Anything else we should
know?
A: I collect fountain pens,
mostly those from Italy (Stipula, Omas, Visconti) and Japan (Platinum, Sailor,
Namiki). For a time I wrote a column
called “Pen and Ink” for the Jetpens website. I also hold a license to carry should
it turn out that, in the end, the pen is not mightier than the sword.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
Thursday, July 24, 2014
Q&A with author Sam Kean
Q: In the book's introduction, you discuss your experiences
with sleep paralysis. What did you learn about the brain from these episodes?
A: All sorts of things. I learned how the brain produces
dreams and how it temporarily paralyzes our body during them, so that we don't
take swings at werewolves or whatever.
But mostly I learned about the interactions between
different levels of the brain. Sleep is controlled by pretty low-level brain
functions, sometimes called the reptilian brain, while dreams of course tap
into our higher brains and memories and language system. Sleep paralysis really
involves a malfunction in the communication between those parts.
It also showed me how a small disorder like this could lead
to pretty profound insights into how the brain works and is put together, which
is how neuroscience progressed for centuries.
A: The story involves a macho king of France named Henri II who suffered a massive concussion during a jousting match in the 1550s.
I chose it as the title story for a few reasons. First, we
usually don't think about people doing neurosurgery in the 1500s, but they
were! So it shows the genesis of the field, and how we can trace neuroscience
from practically medieval times straight to today.
Second, it shows that we're still learning the same hard
lessons today. Because Henri didn't have a skull fracture, he assumed he was
fine, as did his doctors - they couldn't conceive of the idea that the brain
might be compromised without skull damage.
We might laugh today, but football players do the exact same
thing - going right back out on the field despite taking awful blows to the
head. This shows that all the tales in the book aren't just entertaining
stories, but they really do have something to tell us today.
A: One big one is that we have one "spot" that
controls each faculty – a language spot, a memory spot, a math spot, etc.
That's totally wrong - for any complicated system, many parts of the brain work
together.
That also relates to another fallacy, the myth that we use only 10 percent of our brain. (I thought we'd killed that idea, but I see it's back now with that movie!)
Finally, one huge misconception is that we'll explain away
all the mystery of human beings or kill the joy of being human if we keep
studying the brain.
First, we're not even close to understanding the brain, so
people don't need to worry that we're going to run out of mysteries to solve.
Second, even if we did solve them, I don't see how that would lessen the joys
of being alive. I mean, we have a pretty good idea why cheesecake tastes good -
and it doesn't taste any less good for all the science that went into figuring
that out. Knowledge and experience are different things.
A: The breadth of things that can go wrong. I'm sure we've all heard about people being paralyzed on half their bodies or losing memory or the ability to speak, but there are thousands of other disorders as well, some of them startlingly specific.
Some people lost all fear of death or became pathological liars.
Parents suddenly couldn't recognize their own children. Some people lost the
ability to recognize any animals (even though they could still tell plants and
faces and other things apart.) Some people lost the ability to speak but could
still sing song lyrics or swear at you. And on and on.
In every article I read I found something new and amazing.
You really don't think about all the subtle things that go into thinking until
you see all that can go wrong!
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I'm working on a few magazine articles at the moment, but
my editor and I are batting around ideas for a new book. We haven't nailed down
the topic yet, but it looks like I'll be returning to chemistry for this one.
Stay tuned...
--Interview with Deborah Kalb. For an earlier interview with Sam Kean, please click here.
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