Interviews

Jennifer Cody Epstein On Asia, WWII, and Her New Novel

March 12, 2013 Interviews

Jennifer Epstein’s new novel The Gods of Heavenly Punishment (See Review) follows her acclaimed 2008 debut, The Painter From Shanghai. Epstein, a former journalist, is also adjunct professor of writing at Columbia University. She lives in Brooklyn. We met when our children were in kindergarten together at PS 29. We began this conversation over borscht and pelmeni in a neighborhood restaurant February 21 and continued via email.

Progress on the Subject of Interview, with Leslie Ullman

March 5, 2013 Interviews

MELODY NIXON interviews LESLIE ULLMAN

Leslie Ullman is a fluent, effervescent poet and author of the award-winning collections Slow Work Through Sand, Dreams by No One’s Daughter, and Natural Histories. She teaches poetry – although she considers that all of us, including her students, are “interdisciplinary beings” – at Vermont College of Fine Arts and is professor emerita at University of Texas-El Paso. Melody Nixon saw her read on the last day of 2012 in Montpelier, Vermont. Taken by the lyrical language of her poetry, she invited Ullman into an email dialogue about the light of New Mexico, absence, and the experience of being interviewed.

Melody Nixon (MN): Your book Progress on the Subject of Immensity will be released in August 2013. The poems in this book are highly lyrical, invested in the sounds of language and in the rhythm of words, while they also maintain a tight focus on subject. Can you talk about your relationship to rhythm and word sound?

Leslie Ullman (LU): My relationship to sound is so instinctual as to lie at some remove from my conscious grapplings with craft while I’m writing, though it does find a place in my intellect when I’m teaching. I dutifully have read and talked about meter without feeling much excitement beyond the satisfaction of fulfilling an obligation to my students. Other aspects of sound, however, such as the subtle harmonies achieved by repetition or near-repetition of vowel or consonant sounds, have interested me more, especially as they underscore meaning.

Jennifer Haigh on Updike, Aging, and Desert Island Books

February 5, 2013 Interviews

S. TREMAINE NELSON interviews JENNIFER HAIGH

Jennifer Haigh is the author of Baker Towers, Faith, The Condition, and Mrs. Kimble, which won the Pen/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. Her short stories have appeared in, among other publications, The Atlantic, Granta, and The Saturday Evening Post. S. Tremaine Nelson met Haigh at New York City’s Center for Fiction in December 2012, during The Common’s “Beyond Geography” panel; post-event, Haigh and Nelson discussed their feelings about the bone-withering winters of Massachusetts (Haigh lives in the Boston area; Nelson’s family on Cape Cod), and continued their exchange via email. Jennifer’s latest collection, News From Heaven: The Bakerton Stories, published this February by Harper, features a story originally published in Issue No. 04 of The Common.

S. Tremaine Nelson (SN): Have you always wanted to write?

Jennifer Haigh (JH): I’ve always written, but turning thirty gave me a sharper sense of purpose. I decided I couldn’t keep thinking of myself as a promising young writer, that it was becoming comical and would soon be pathetic. I concluded that I needed to fail at it quickly so I could get on with my life and devote my energies to something else.

SN: Was there a teacher who first encouraged you?

JH: Even as a child I was reluctant to show what I’d written, so my teachers never really got the chance. But my mother, a librarian, was always putting the right book in my hands at the right time. I think that’s the best sort of encouragement.

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.”

“The World Upside Down”: Lindsay Stern interviews Teresa Villegas

January 15, 2012 Interviews

LINDSAY STERN interviews TERESA VILLEGAS

The Common contributor Teresa Villegas and intern Lindsay Stern discuss Villegas’ recent projects, her choice of medium, and the influence of place and the environment on her work. Released in October, Issue 02 features a selection from “El mundo al revés/The World Upside Down,” a suite of 10 prints by Villegas alongside bilingual folktales by Ilan Stavans.

Report from China: Poets in Chongqing, Friday, April 29, 2011

January 8, 2012 Essays, Interviews

By STEPHEN HAVEN

Near the end of six weeks teaching at Chongqing University, I met off-campus with three “young” poets, Fan Bei, Bai Yue, and Zhou Bin, all of them in their late thirties or early forties. Li Yongyi set up the meeting in a Chongqing bookstore. He studied American poetry with me during my 1997-1998 Fulbright year at Beijing Normal University. In spring 2011 he was my Chongqing University host professor. The bookstore was as new and modern as any in America—coffee, over-stuffed lounge chairs, hardwood floors, ice cream, pastries, floor-to-ceiling wooden bookshelves. Prices at the coffee bar were through the roof—as high as in America. Outside there was the usual chaos of traffic around the edge of a pedestrian mall. A riot of people pushed through the open square. Inside was an oasis: Li Yongyi’s favorite reading spot. We could have been in any of the smaller American Barnes and Nobles.

Fan Bei is a Chinese literature professor at Chongqing University; Zhou Bin teaches at Sichuan International Studies University; Bai Yue works in some position outside academia, so that she could be free, she explained to Li Yongyi, to write whatever she chose. Bai Yue’s name means White Moon. She had just published a book of poems with Chongqing University Press and brought copies for the other poets. Despite Bai Yue’s beautiful new book, handsomely printed, Fan Bei and Zhou Bin claimed that their generation is no longer interested in book publication. The poetry of the younger generation is entirely web based. China made the transition to cell phones long before they were popular in the U.S. Maybe in this area China was ahead of us again, embracing more fully the way technology was changing poetry.

I asked Zhou Bin, Bai Yue, and Fan Bei their opinion of Duo Duo’s poetry. Zhou Bin did most the talking. The conversation was going 90 miles per hour. Li Yongyi translated for me. The fellow who ran the coffee bar repeatedly came over, with greater annoyance each time, asking us to keep it down. There were other people reading quietly, sitting at the bar or in other parts of the café. Zhou Bin repeatedly apologized to the coffee guy and then went on talking with as much force and volume as before. All three poets agreed that Duo Duo is the best living poet in China, but Zhou Bin felt strongly that his poetry is not quintessentially Chinese. Zhou Bin claimed that there are three essential branches of Chinese poetry—Daoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. He argued that in working from a Chinese poetic tradition, contemporary Chinese poets should not worry about the differences between these three poetic branches. They had a common root and were part of the same tree. Zhou Bin asked me what I thought of Bei Dao’s poetry. I told him that I once had drinks with Bei Dao and liked him and sensed his poetry in Chinese was far stronger than what I had read in English. In English translation, Duo Duo seemed to me the more engaging poet. Zhou Bin said, yes, that’s because you are a Western poet and love Western modernism, and Duo Duo writes like a Western poet. When I arrived back in the States Li Yongyi sent me an email explaining in greater detail Zhou Bin’s position that Bei Dao represents more fully than any other poet of his generation the tradition of Chinese poetry. Here is Li Yongyi, paraphrasing Zhou Bin:

“Bei Dao, even in his overtly political works, usually focuses on the emotional experiences and responses of individuals. His realm is the personal, the lyrical, yet it is always haunted by the ghost of some threatening political presence and by a pessimistic sense of some hostile cosmic force, against which the hero, usually a man, fights with dignity enhanced by a knowledge of tragic fate, defending his love, his private world and the purity of his beliefs. So there is a beautiful tension between, and fusion of, the personal and the social, and his language, in its graceful, natural, smooth texture, has more affinities with ancient poems than that of any other contemporary Chinese poet. Bei Dao, in this regard, is like a Du Fu in the 20th century.”

Then Li Yongyi added:

“I largely agree with Zhou Bin’s judgment on Bei Dao and his description of the core Chinese poetic tradition. To my understanding, classical Chinese poetry is spiritual, not in an other-worldly, religious sense, but in a fusion of the individual, either with history or with nature; essentially it is an awareness and a feeling that an individual’s experience is always connected with that of other fellow human beings, other species, even with the whole cosmos.”

On the far side of the Pacific, where Pound is more famous than Eliot, I loved the idea that the privacy of poetry might open always to the wider “ghosts” of politics, history, and cosmic force.