Timothy Schaffert is the author of the new novel The Swan Gondola. His other books include The Coffins of Little Hope and Devils in the Sugar Shop. He teaches at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and he lives in Omaha.
Q: How did you come up with the story of The Swan
Gondola?
A: The story evolved from the actual news stories
surrounding the Trans-Mississippi Exposition, or the Omaha World's Fair, of
1898. The daily news was an excellent, and distressing, portrait of America at
this transitional period, as people prepared to slough off all the
backwardness of the 19th century, and slip forward into the 20th.
Omaha was already full of crooks, prostitutes, and
drunkards, and the Expo just brought more derelicts to town. But the city
longed to be respected, and it had matured from its days as a frontier outpost,
and it wanted to promote its industry, and culture, and entertainers. It was
that conflict -- between the city's dreams and its realities -- that caught my
imagination.
Q: What kind of research did you need to do for the book?
A: At the Library of Congress website, I read issues of the
Omaha Bee, one of the city's dailies -- you read the news right off the actual
page, and you end up learning as much about the culture from the advertising
(mostly toxic remedies for long lists of ailments) as from the
articles themselves.
I also studied the Exposition specifically, and the
Spanish-American War; I read about medicine, spiritualism, ventriloquism,
vaudeville, health resorts. I tried to learn what I could about working-class
women. I pretty much looked everything up.
Q: You write that you've had a longtime interest in The Wizard of Oz, and that you've included allusions to that book
in your own. What are some of the ways in which it inspired you?
A: I liked the idea of imagining the Wizard as a turn-of-the-century
entertainer and humbug artist, living in the American West, and of his balloon
landing on a little corner of vast emptiness.
And I liked the idea of him building a kind of shrine up
from that ground, an alternative Emerald City. Once I started following that
line of thought, the connections between Baum's books and the world of my
story began suggesting themselves.
Q: Why did you select "The Swan Gondola" as the
book's title?
A: The gondola is a destination for Ferret; he finds the
boat to be both precious and genuine, but also a bit down on its heels. It's
unpretentious, a confection. And reflected in that boat is all the Exposition's
artifice and illusion.
For the most part, though, it speaks to Ferret's concept of
romance, and hope. He thinks that sort of thing is what he needs to
woo Cecily. And once the first days of their romance have past, it becomes
part of the nostalgia of their lives.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I'm working on a novel about a child vaudeville star who
becomes a silent-movie star.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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