Leah Stewart is the author of the novels Husband and Wife, The Myth of You and Me, Body of a Girl, and, most recently, The History of Us. She teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Cincinnati, and she lives in Cincinnati.
Q: How did you come up with the scenario for your latest
novel, The History of Us?
A: It started with my desire to write something influenced
by George Eliot's Middlemarch, which follows three different couples affected
by conflicts between love and money, and idealism and reality. So I wanted to
have three couples of my own struggling with various takes on one issue—in my
case, location and identity. Cities like Cincinnati, where I live and where the
book is set, don't loom large in the national imagination, and I'm interested
in how that affects the citizens' sense of themselves.
Q: Do you have more sympathy for some of the characters in
this family than for others?
A: No. Readers certainly do! I'm endlessly fascinated by the
ways that people make their own lives more difficult, so characters who get in
their own way often seem poignant to me, where others might find them
frustrating.
Q: When you start writing a novel, do you always know the
outcome, or are you sometimes surprised?
A: I usually know where I want to land, but I don't know how
I'm going to get there. Sometimes my intention changes in the writing of the
book, but usually by a third to half of the way through I'm sure of the ending.
Sometimes I even go ahead and write it.
Q: As a teacher of creative writing, what advice do you give
your students about creating compelling characters?
A: They have to seem like real people to the author before
they'll seem real to the reader. There are different ways of getting to that
imaginative place—exercises that ask you to imagine every detail about someone,
or write a character's emails to his mother, or her dream journal. Sometimes I
suggest beginning students model a character on someone they know (without
telling the class who that is), as I find that students recognize interesting
details about their friends and relatives but struggle to invent those details
for a completely fictional character.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I'm working on a novel about a 91-year-old—a former nurse
and WWII veteran—who develops a fascination with her much younger neighbor, a
woman rumored to have killed her husband.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: How about good books I've read lately? Sea Creatures by
Susanna Daniel, Sisterland by Curtis Sittenfeld, We Are All Completely BesideOurselves by Karen Joy Fowler.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
No comments:
Post a Comment