Lisa Gornick is the author of the new novel Tinderbox, and also of another novel, A Private Sorcery. Her writing has appeared in various publications, including AGNI and Prairie Schooner. She has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, and she lives in New York City.
Q: How did you come up with
the idea for Tinderbox?
A: The emotional kernel of Tinderbox
comes from a story I once heard about a young woman who fell apart in the
context of her work for a loving family -- her buried longings for mothering
stimulated by the love she witnessed the parents bestowing on their child.
After that, everything else was
transformed and fictionalized: where she came from, the family, what
transpired.
Part of the great fun of
writing a novel is spending time learning and thinking about topics that
fascinate you. After all, if I were a weaver, I would be spinning with the wool
and colors I love.
In Tinderbox, the skeins
include the Jewish diaspora, the ecology and politics of fire, the interplay of
compliance and rebellion between generations, the centrality of class, Werner
Herzog, psychoanalysis.
Q: You have a degree in
clinical psychology, and your character Myra is a psychotherapist. How did your
own professional background help you write this book and better understand your
characters and their relationships?
A: Freud was wrong about a
lot of things, but the aphorism attributed to him by Erikson -- “lieben und
arbeiten,” love and work, are what a healthy person can do well -- strikes me
as absolutely right.
In novels, the work that a
character does too often feels tacked on -- either superficially portrayed,
like a handbag being carted around, or dutifully researched so that the details
are correct but the integration into who the character is and how he or she
sees the world is lacking.
In both my first novel, A
Private Sorcery, and Tinderbox, it was natural for me to have central
characters who are psychotherapists: it’s work that I love and know in my
bones. As with most psychotherapists, my training changed me and is part of who
I am.
Although I don’t interact
with people outside my office in the same way I do inside (that would be a
mistake on many levels), I still see and understand the world through an
analytic lens -- most centrally, a belief in the unconscious, in transferences,
in symptoms created by compromises between desires and prohibitions.
Because as a novelist my
characters are real to me, I think about them in this way, too.
Q: Fire is a major theme in
the book. Why did you choose that as one of the topics to explore?
A: I was in Montana and Idaho
in 2000 while horrific wildfires were blazing. It was my first experience with
nature overpowering man, and it was both shocking and eye-opening about the
precariousness of our place on this planet and the damage we intentionally or
unintentionally cause.
The Smokey Bear policy that
dominated mid-century wildfire management was, we now understand, deeply misguided.
By eradicating small blazes, we create an overgrown underbrush that can set the
stage for out-of-control conflagrations.
In Tinderbox, both my title
and the theme of a tragedy of good intentions grew out of my experience that
summer.
Q: What research did you need
to do to write the book?
A: Like many writers, I find
that there’s a fine line between research as inspiration and a necessity to
accurately depict a subject, and research as resistance to writing.
For Tinderbox, I did
extensive research on Iquitos, the history of the rubber trade, Moroccan Jewish
communities, the Jewish community of Lima, Werner Herzog and Fitzcarraldo, John
Ford and The Searchers, wildfires, the history of smokejumpers, burn treatment,
skin grafts, Frank Lloyd Wright and the tragedy at Taliesin.
Q: What are you working on
now?
A: I have a collection of
linked short stories, Louisa Meets Bear, coming out in early 2015, also with
Sarah Crichton Books/ Farrar, Straus & Giroux. And, I’m at work on a new novel.
Q: Anything else we should
know?
A: For the rest, you’ll have
to read Tinderbox!
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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