Who are you reading these days?
I just picked up Banana Yoshimoto the other day and fell in love. I started with Hard Boiled and Hard Luck. She has such a sense of freedom to her. The surreal and the whimsical flow through her work as naturally and as matter-of-factly as water.
What are some of your favourite books?
Top 3: Another Country by James Baldwin (Best sex scene ever written in my opinion.)
Moby Dick by Melville (I first read the chapter on white and thought: No way! You can do this? I was riveted.)
Pale Fire by Nabokov (Why is Nabokov so able to make me laugh? Even when I am miserable that strange, strange man just charms the shit out of me.)
What was the starting point or inspiration for Violin Face?
Well the starting point was really the idea of so many different voices. I wanted a concert of voices and language. I wanted something loud. I felt like I had so many people telling me their stories, telling me what life had done to them and what they had done to life. I didn't want a calm and collected 3rd person narrator to dispense meaning to these intertwined lives-- I wanted the people to be able to sing it themselves, to be as loud and as profane and as wrong and as right as they really were. I wanted to leave judgment entirely to the reader. I wanted to disappear, to just be the conductor and let them sing for themselves.
Do you watch TV? If so, what kind of show are you into?
You know, I can't afford cable anymore, but I do watch TV on DVD sometimes. I just started watching My Name is Earl. What a silly and delightful show! I like the earnestness of the premise. I like watching someone try to be good without a lot of sentimentality and swelling music.
Name the first movie that springs to mind when you hear the word "asparagus".
Jesus God. Well, the only thing that comes to mind really is the lobster scene in Annie Hall, which really has nothing to do with asparagus. But I do love that scene.
What are you working on right now?
Right now I am working on a collection of short stories called From The Land of Shells, but I've got my sights on a new novel. It doesn't have a title yet, but it is basically about a college age girl whose mother has died and who then must go home and fill her mother's role: caring for her hilarious and senile grandmother. It is a comedy but also a ghost story... I've always wanted to write a ghost story.
Give me a favourite adage or witticism.
I am neither wise nor witty, but I do love superstitions. Servers in restaurants are very superstitious people. I remember I was having a terrible time with a professor in graduate school, my self esteem was like milk-soaked bread, and I just didn't feel like I had the gusto to go on displeasing this woman. I showed up to work in a shaky mood and told my friend and fellow server, Tracy, about it. She rushed to the kitchen and started rummaging through the spice rack. She is about five feet tall and the spices were above her on a high shelf so she was really just knocking things down. The cooks started to yell at her.
"I'm getting her a nutmeg!" Tracy shouted back.
"Oh," the head chef said to me, "Someone giving you a hard time?"
I nodded. Tracy came over to me, holding a nutmeg, small and peaceful as a bunny turd in her palm. "Keep this in your pocket the next time you meet with her," Tracy said, pressing the nutmeg into my sweaty hand. "And if she starts to get mean, just reach into your pocket and give the nutmeg a little scratch so its smell will release."
I stared at the nutmeg. The head chef tapped his tongs on the food window that separated him from us. "It works," he said. "It really does."
"I don't want anyone being mean to my baby," Tracy said.
"Okay," I said. And then we went to work.
I did in fact keep the nutmeg in my pocket during my next meeting with the professor and she did in fact act nicer to me. I must admit, I am less interested in the nutmeg than I am in the ferocious love of the girl who gave it to me. But you should give someone a nutmeg sometime. It works. It really does.
What sort of music would be good to read your story to?
You know, I was listening to Eminem the entire time I was writing The Violin Face, so he might be a good place to start. Say what you will about him, both his anger and his humor fascinate me.
Do you cook?
I do and I am a splendid cook. I fish a lot and so I have the best trout recipes you have ever even heard of.
What, in your humblest opinion, is the best sentence you've ever written?
Jesus. Okay, here we go. Taken out of context and all: Looking into Artesia’s eyes was like stabbing them with a knife—you could not look at her without imagining yourself doing it, as though in a dream, without will but violently, the way hydrogen fuses to become helium in the core of the sun, and the way the energy of this violence floods out into the universe as light, and how things, plants, dinosaurs, bunnies, grow in the accidental warmth.
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