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
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