Issue IX, Volume III : May 2012
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Circe by Nicelle Davis
 Stunning New Poetry From Associate Poetry Editor Nicelle Davis |
| Liza Wieland - Fiction w/ Q&A |
Page 1 of 6
--------- Lisa Wieland Interview, with Reneé Nicholson
“Some Churches” is a story written in sections. Can you talk a little bit about why you chose this structure for the story?
I had been working for a long time on a novel that roamed back and forth between Georgia and Pennsylvania in the 1930’s and New York City in the 80’s and contemporary Paris. The connections were tenuous, demanding a lot of intricate stitching in between. After some time (we’re talking years) and a lot of distillation, I decided to let the parts be, let the seams show. And in doing so, I figured out what connected the parts was not really a single character, but these structures—churches or church-like spaces—and also the act of falling or leaping--which the reader is certainly asked to do between sections.
The story also has a strong sense of language, with passages of lyric, almost poetic intensity. You have authored a collection of poems, as well as books of fiction. Does poetry influence the way you approach your fiction? If so, how?
When I began writing, I thought of myself as a poet; I wrote poems; I studied with poets in college and graduate school; I thought I would publish volumes of poetry, so making lines and images is sort of hard-wired in. But my poems were always narrative—one of my teachers called them “strange little stories.” I guess it was only a matter of time, then, until the lines went all the way out to the right margin and came back around as prose sentences. As a writer of fiction now, I’m still more interested in language than in plot or even in character, despite what I preach to my students. If the language of a piece isn’t doing something interesting, I don’t stay with it. I like prose that makes music, interior rhyme, a cadence. I still read a lot of poetry even though I don’t write it much, and I often read poems before I start work in the morning, as a sort of warm-up.
You have written both novels and collections of short stories. How do you adapt your writing process between the longer form and the shorter? Are there differences?
It seems to be the case that I produce a collection of stories after finishing a novel—as if to recover from the marathon. One difference is obvious: writing a story takes less time. I tend to think of stories (at least the first draft) in 1000 word increments. I write by hand, so this is about three pages on a college-ruled yellow legal pad. Very easy to count and feel that ground has been gained each day. When I’m working on a novel, I count time: “OK, you have five hours until after school pick-up. Pour the coffee and get in there.”
Thematically, the idea of your main character saving children from harm runs through the story from section to section. Later, however, this same character finds herself dancing with a stranger in Paris on New Year’s Eve. Do you feel these two threads are working together or creating tension within the story?
Well, I think there’s the idea of rescue there too: that little dance rescues her from a kind of incapacitating fear. Also running through the sections is the idea of people not being afraid for maybe the first time in their lives, as well as the ability or inability to interpret signs and gestures. At first she misinterprets the stranger touching her, but then it turns out not to be threatening, and she doesn’t feel so afraid. So this part both works with the other sections and creates tension.
The second section of the story focuses on what is called a “leap of faith” by the mother—both literally jumping from a moving train, and figuratively looking for a sign to keep her baby. How do you think the backstory influences your main character as we move from section to section in the story?
The backstory is maybe about faith in all its senses. You might say that churches are the embodiment of faith—the building literally contains the faithful and their ways of keeping faith.
Who are your influences as an artist—other authors, or other kinds of artists? Which artists do you admire? What other things influence your work?
Poetry is an influence, as I’ve said. Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Sharon Olds, Louise Gluck, Alice Fulton, Mark Strand, Philip Levine, Derek Walcott, Richard Wilbur, to name only a few. As for other fiction writers, I always reach back to William Faulkner, Alice Munro and Lorrie Moore (speaking of saving children from harm), Jayne Anne Phillips’ stories, Michael Ondaatje, the Irish writer Colm Toibin for understatement. Henry James, believe it or not. People give me all kinds of grief for loving Henry James, especially the later work, when he was dictating, and so the sentences roll on and on and on.
Song lyrics too: I know the words to every song Darrell Scott has written (and my daughter knows them too; we sing them really loudly on the way to school), Steve Earle, Serena Ryder, Aimee Mann, a group of women (from the DC area) called The Four Bitchin’ Babes, Bruce of course, and Bob Dylan, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Jackson Browne. The first poetry anthology I ever owned was a slim paperback, Richard Goldstein’s The Poetry of Rock. Inside the crazy psychedelic cover are (I still have it) song lyrics—Dylan, Lennon and McCartney, Arlo Guthrie, Leonard Cohen, etc.
I’m just beginning a novel about a painter, so I have an odd collection of paintings in my head right now: the Native American artist Fritz Scholder, Raoul Dufy, Jean Miro, Mary Cassat, Pierre Bonnard.
And then there’s daily life. A big influence. My previous novels and stories have taken shape out of the Atlanta (where I grew up) child murders, now almost thirty years ago, the Unibomber, the so-called “pregnancy pact” among high school girls in Gloucester, MA, a story I heard from somebody who worked for the Resolution Trust Corporation in the 80’s. Bits and pieces of stories are happening all around me, all the time. They tend to arrive in my head as lines of poetry and then blossom, like those sponges that come in a capsule, and when they melt in the bathtub, you’ve got an elephant, a lion, a raptor floating there, waiting. --------- |
