Q&A with Mesha Maren

 

 

Mesha Maren is the author of the new novel Shae. Her other novels include Sugar Run. She is an associate professor of the practice of English at Duke University.

 

Q: What inspired you to write Shae, and how did you create your titular character?

 

A: For me, the first few years of drafting a new novel involve diving as deeply into a state of unknowing as I possibly can. So far, all my books have begun with images that stick in my brain like a song and refuse to go away. These images look like little film stills.

 

For Shae it was a young woman on a blue sofa, alone, watching the afternoon sunlight track across the room. For a long time, that’s all I had, just that image.

 

I spent the years from 2017 through early 2020 taking longhand notes about this young woman who turned out to be Shae. I watched her pass the afternoon on that sofa and eventually other people arrived; a car pulled up in the driveway outside and Cam and Donna came into the room.

 

When I am getting to know new characters, it feels a lot like trying to get a skittish cat to trust me. I had a lot of practice with this growing up. The house I was born in sits on top of a mountain, and people dump animals along the road there. Every summer there were stray kittens in the ditches, and I would spend hours coaxing them toward my hands.

 

Getting to know characters like Shae and Cam feels similar. I lay on my stomach for long periods of time listening to them.

 

Q: How would you describe the dynamic between Shae and Cam?

 

A: A big thing with Cam and Shae that I think Shae slowly begins to realize is that Cam came up against adversity early on in a really hard way. She was raised by a mother who was dealing with addiction, while Shae, even though she comes from a very working-class family, she never wanted for anything. She always had enough food and had everything that she needed in a physical sense, but also she never doubted that she was loved, and that has not been true for Cam. 

 

Q: The writer Garrard Conley said of the book, “Maren brilliantly gives voice to a New South, introducing us to two unforgettable characters whose journeys echo the struggles of queer people across the country.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: I had a conversation recently with my sister, she’s a mother of two teenagers, and one of the things she said was she felt like Cam and Shae’s sexuality and the ways that they talked about or didn’t talk about it were really true to what she has experienced from her teenagers and how they interact with their sexuality as not being something separate from other parts of who they are and also not being the defining thing about them.

 

For my generation, your coming out story was huge. Right, like when did you come out and how did it go?, and I’m sure that’s still a part of many people’s narratives, but I do have the feeling that things have shifted.

 

The fluidity of both Cam and Shae’s sexuality and the conversations or sometimes lack of conversations around it felt very real to my sister in terms of the conversations she has had with her teenagers, and I was glad that came across as being real.

 

Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?

 

A: I don’t want readers to “take away” anything. I actually despise the idea of “take aways.” Art should not have a message. I have always felt this way but I feel even more strongly about it now with the advent of AI because AI is all about boiling things down to “take aways” and summing things up, mining art for its “message” or “themes.”

 

AI can read a whole book and spit out some summary sentences but humans should be seeking something much more complex from the experience of reading. Readers should feel a dizzying array of things while reading, including confusion. 

 

Art should provoke an active interaction between the art and the viewer or reader, and in this way it should prompt a completely different experience from each and every reader.

 

In The Origin of the Work of Art Heidegger describes van Gogh’s painting of a pair of shoes; he writes about the “toilsome tread of the worker” and the “tenacity of her slow trudge” and “the loneliness of the field-path as evening falls.”

 

Thirty-some years later, Meyer Schapiro rather gleefully pointed out that the shoes were not even women’s shoes. He tracked down the “truth” of the shoes, bought in a flea market in Paris, but I don’t think that really matters.

 

What I care about is the fact that the meaning evoked in Heidegger’s mind—the loneliness of the female peasant, the push and pull of life and death and seasons passing—was created out of a relationship between van Gogh’s painting and Heidegger’s associations.

 

An entirely different meaning is created in the relationship between van Gogh’s painting and my mind. That’s the beauty of art.

 

In The Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger also says “In the midst of beings as a whole an open place occurs. There is a clearing, a lighting… Only this clearing grants and guarantees to us humans a passage to those beings that we ourselves are not, and access to the being that we ourselves are.”

 

I think that that clearing is the best description I’ve ever heard for the space in which something like van Gogh’s painting and the connotations that Heidegger brings to that painting can come together to create meaning. I respect this space, the space created by each reader and their interaction with my book, too much to fill it with take aways.

 

Q: What are you working on now? 

 

A: A novel about my aunt who was murdered by her boyfriend in 1975.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Mesha Maren.