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The Question of Home: An Interview with Nicola Waldron

December 4, 2012 Interviews

MELODY NIXON interviews NICOLA WALDRON

In this month’s author Q&A, Melody Nixon speaks with Nicola Waldron about finding and feeling at home, the American Dream versus the British Dream, and wanderlust. Waldron’s essay “The Land Up North” appeared in Issue No. 04 of The Common.

MN: In your essay “The Land Up North” you write about the sense of security and possibility afforded you by the land that you and your husband bought in the Catskills. The essay is poetically written, highly evocative of place, and has an appealing lightness of language. Who are your influences? Do you read mainly nonfiction?

NW: That essay was written when I was reading a lot of nonfiction. Dinah Lenney, the author of “Bigger than Life,” was my teacher at Bennington and is one of my great hero-mentors. She recommended to me Abigail Thomas’s work, especially her book “Safekeeping,” and my essay was written in response to that book. I’d also just been reading Jo Ann Beard.

Q&A with Robert Earle

November 13, 2012 Interviews

S. TREMAINE NELSON interviews ROBERT EARLE

SN: Your short story “Doleo Ergo Sum,” which appears in Issue 4 of The Common, features several characters from The Brothers Karamazov. When did you first read Dostoevsky?

RE: I first read Dostoevsky when I was seventeen. Crime and Punishment was on my high school’s summer reading list. I’ve been reading him ever since. He was an extraordinarily complex literary genius, a man of great flaws, great faith, and great energy. When you go into his world, you’re there from the first page to the last.

SN: Would you consider your story historical fiction or an homage to Dostoevsky? Or perhaps literary fan-fiction?

RE: I think of everything I write as literary fiction, whether it has roots in historical events or literary phenomena. I use history extensively but don’t feel excessively tied down to it. For me, literature possesses its own reality, and that’s what literary-minded writers seek to explore. We don’t write “about” things; we use words and stories to create unique experiences for readers of our work.

Ten Questions on Writing and New York City: An Interview with Phillip Lopate

October 12, 2012 Interviews

MELODY NIXON interviews PHILLIP LOPATE

In this month’s author Q&A, Melody Nixon speaks with Phillip Lopate about public art and communal spaces, his relationship to cities, and New York City as a “place that encourages wit.” Lopate’s essay “Above Grade: New York City’s Highline” — about the public park built on an elevated freight rail line in Manhattan that opened in 2011 — appeared in Issue No. 02 of The Common.

MN: At the end of the Brooklyn Book Festival this year, you read outdoors on the Brooklyn Bridge Park waterfront before the illuminated lower Manhattan skyline. You read a short piece of your own and excerpts of other writers who have taken the place of Brooklyn as subject, such as Paul Auster, Truman Capote, and Hart Crane. Each piece related somehow to the changing scene: the moving East River, the lights of the skyline as they switched on, the rattle of cars through Brooklyn brownstones. I found the hyper-awareness of setting, in relation to the reader and the text, very satisfying. How important is place to your identity as a writer?

PL: In terms of my identity I think of myself as a writer first, a New Yorker second, a Jew third, and an American as (probably, a distant) fourth. But certainly my identity is very bound up with this particular place. New York City is in all my works — novels, poetry, nonfiction — whether as a backdrop or a character. In a sense I’m what you might call a “regional writer,” and I feel very positive about cities in general. I don’t want to apologize about cities — I like cities, and I think the rhythm of being in the streets or being indoors works into the sentences. There’s a sort of New York speech, which is compounded of Jewish, black, Hispanic, and Irish, and so on, that percolates into one’s syntax and one’s way of forming sentences. All of that makes me very much a writer of a certain place.

Interview with Norman Lock

July 2, 2012 Interviews

LINDSAY STERN interviews NORMAN LOCK

1. You are a self-described fabulist. In your opinion, what can a fable do that other literary forms cannot?

The fable can be said to be a metaphor or figure so ambitious that it has annexed unto itself the entire fictional space. Like all symbolic language, it possesses extraordinary power to render a particular notion of reality – an idea – with absolute simplicity and efficiency. By simplicity and efficiency, I mean the reduction of complex thought into a unifying field of imagery in order to understand and convey unseen connections between objects or phenomena. The abstraction needn’t be stark. On the contrary, it can be as highly colored and intricately wrought as a Persian miniature or a poem by Wallace Stevens. But however rich in complications and implications, the metaphoric reality (can I call it a “truth”?) is vastly less vexed than what surrounds and oppresses us – by day and by night: our conscious and unconscious, public and private lives.

By fabling, I can explore ideas – treat them playfully – while satisfying my need to make things and to produce beautiful surfaces created entirely of sentences and their syntactical relationship. And I will confess this much: that for a writer like me, no other literature is possible than that whose source is his own imagination and his art. As Stevens wrote, “Poetry is the subject of the poem.”