Steven Millhauser! Yes, I know that news broke last week. But Anne and I attended the event on behalf of FWR – quite the literary crowd, Hannah Tinti further down our row, spotted Paul Vidich in the aisle. Here are some highlights:

• Don Delillo described going back to stories he’d written in the late 1970s and early 80s and not changing anything. Oh, wait, he took out all the semicolons, colons, and commas that magazine editors had introduced. He said it best: “I was a free man.” Cormac McCarthy, eat your heart out.
• Steven Millhauser, white floss of hair aglow in the stage lights, read like a man at the height of his power. His lovely-creepy story “Snowmen” would have been enough, but he ended with a thingamajig (his own term) about the dissolution of a marriage called “He takes/She takes.” Positively incandescent. I hope to Zeus someone filmed that on their smart phone.
• Edith Pearlman’s dry riposte to some of Larry Dark’s questions about why the short story: “I was told as a child not to take too much of people’s time. I’ve been obeying it.” She seemed 1 part Edith Wharton refinement, 2 parts Dorothy Parker’s withering wit. Oh yeah, she’s also published – published - around 250 short stories.
• The take-home message? It’s difficult to earn a living with short stories. The Story Prize comes with a $20k award (plus $5k to each of the other two nominees). Prestige is a wonderful thing, but money gives a writer room to, well, write.

HUGE congratulations to friend of FWR Jesmyn Ward, who just won the 2011 National Book Award for fiction for her novel Salvage the Bones!

In reviewing Ward’s novel, Ron Charles wrote in the Washington Post,

When the finalists for the National Book Award in Fiction were announced last month, I’m embarrassed to admit that I was among those critics grumbling about the obscurity of some of the authors (Andrew Krivak?), even some of the publishers (Lookout Books?). [...]

I’m happy to eat my words. And my spinach. I’ve just read another one of the so-called obscure finalists, “Salvage the Bones ,” the second book from Alabama writer Jesmyn Ward, and it’ll be a long time before its magic wears off.

You can read an interview with Jesmyn right here on Fiction Writers Review. Congratulations again, Jesmyn!

Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Credit: Linus Sundahl-Djerf

We have barely sat down at Smooch Café in Fort Greene, and Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Swedish author and playwright, preempts my opening line: Should we do the interview in English?

The question seems inevitable coming from an author whose work has centered around language in one way or another since his debut novel One Eye Red took Swedish critics and readers by storm in 2003. A master of words who has created his very own language: Khemirish – a playful mix of Swedish, Arabic, French, English – has now been carefully translated by Rachel Willson-Broyles in Montecore, his first novel to be published in the US. So specific is his language that he doesn’t think his first novel can even be translated for the American market.

Now, however, we decide on English, despite our common nationality and the fact that Jonas Hassen Khemiri isn’t so fond of his English self. As he put it at a reading in Dumbo earlier this year: “I always feel a little bit like a nerd when I speak English.”

Nerd or not, since then he has received not only a write-up in the New York Times for Montecore, but also an Obie Award, the prestigious off-Broadway prize, this May for his play Invasion!, which had its U.S. debut in February. (It has also premiered in South Korea.) Directed by Erica Schmidt of The Play Company, Invasion! had an early fall revival in New York at The Flea Theater in Tribeca. We spoke in September, during this run of the play.

Invasion! The Play Company production, Photo Credit: Carol Rosegg

Interview

via Folkteatern Göteborg

Katarina Matsson: Since your name is new to most Americans, let’s start from the beginning. Who is Jonas Hassen Khemiri?

Jonas Hassen Khemiri: I’m a 32-year-old granola-eating, theater-thinking Swedish writer who’s here because Invasion! re-opened at The Flea Theater – and to do some talks after the show, to sit in the audience and be very nervous, and to meet with people like you to do interviews. Then I’m going back home to Stockholm for the premiere of my new play, Apatiska för nybörjare (“Apathetics for beginners”).

It sounds like your attention is a bit divided?

It feels like my brain is in Sweden and my body is here. Hopefully I’ll make it through the day brainless! But I like to be reminded that there’s always this phase of nervousness before an opening. I remember when I had that with Invasion! – even though it was quite a long time ago.

Invasion!, your first play, premiered in Sweden in 2006. It deals with identity and the power of words. At the center is this elusive, almost magical name – Abulkasem – that takes on different meanings throughout the play. Is Abulkasem a playwright, a contradictory fundamentalist, a dorky guy in a bar, a hiding refugee – or all of the above? How do you think the piece has translated to English and specifically to an American context?

It’s difficult for me to say, because I’m not American enough to be the judge of that. According to the reactions of some of my American friends it seems like it has translated quite well, or very well, into an American context. We had some doubt whether or not to move [the play’s setting] from Sweden to the States. Now it’s set in the States. We felt that we had to do that in order to make the play immediate. This is a play that moves very fast. We did readings trying to keep it in Sweden, and it’s interesting because people had a much easier time to just laugh off the questions of fear and inequality that the play deals with, and not realize that it’s actually a play about their country also.

But when you won the Obie Award in May, the award committee said your play had “help[ed] us see ourselves, as Americans, more clearly.”

That sounds very nice. I’m happy, because it is a play mainly about fear and about how identities, individual and collective, are being constructed through vague senses of threat. [It’s also] about language and how language is used to manipulate people. That is a subject that has kept coming back in my writing in different forms.

Where and when did your interest in language start?

I think it comes from my background. Growing up in a multilingual family, and being around people who’ve been discriminated against because of their lack of language, you realize the power that a language gives you. I’ve always been in a luxurious position. My Swedish is perfect; I’ve always been able to choose between different levels of Swedish. I think that’s why these themes interest me.

What I’m doing now is quite different from what’s going on in Invasion! – or from anything I’ve done before. It’s difficult to talk about, because I don’t really know what it is. But in my new play, Apatiska för nybörjare, these themes of language and manipulation also play a big part. It begins with a national trauma in Sweden. I guess it’s even more related to the construction of a national identity. It’s actually a comedy about these apathetic refugee kids, a dark comedy. It deals a lot less with the kids than with how a national identity is constructed through the use of external elements.

One similarity between Invasion!, the new play, and a lot of things I’ve written is that they’re all trying to investigate the speed of words; how words can be transmitted very fast and how words can change meaning.

There’s a recent example that I find very interesting. Qaddafi in Libya used to call his opponents “rats,” and Assad in Syria called them “germs.” When the rebels gained power there was a tweet from Syria saying: “We the germs of Syria, salute the rats of Libya.” That tweet got a huge spread in a matter of minutes. But I also thought it was interesting that “rats” and “germs” were the terms being used to de-humanize, because they’re also something that’s extremely difficult to stop. They can spread anywhere and they will definitely outlive us. That sense, that we live in a contemporary time where words are being spread and manipulated so quickly, is something that I find a lot of inspiration in.

Yes, linguistic change is a very big part of our society. Speaking of national trauma, the ten-year anniversary of 9/11 recently passed. The consequences of the attacks are apparent in Invasion!

Yes, in some ways. But I think that reading is more defined in the American version than in the French or German ones. I was never thinking explicitly of 9/11 when I wrote it. But that’s also what’s cool about writing theater, that my words can be amputated from me and put in a new setting. I’m not even in control of the actual translation, these are Rachel’s words, the translator’s, my words have been transmitted through her. And all of a sudden they start meaning something that I can’t pick up on. I’m very happy that people seem to like them, but I’m not sure I understand the reasons why people like them.

Sometimes the audience laughs at very peculiar places and I don’t understand what that means, especially politically. It wasn’t until I was here the first time that I realized it was literally performed in the shadow of the World Trade Center. And that added something to the play. The loss of that power I, as a playwright, have is actually something I really like. The feeling that “wow, I’m not in control of my words anymore, they can just mean anything,” that’s what the play is about. How a magical name is just being amputated and moved, almost like a relay baton.

These themes of language and names are also very present in Montecore, your second novel, published by Knopf in the US this spring. You constructed the story like an e-mail correspondence between a son and a man claiming to be his missing father’s best friend. Together they try to write the father’s life story, which becomes as much a clash between realities as between languages. The result is both humorous and heartbreaking.

That work is a lot more personal. It’s about the trials of writing the story of a missing father. And that story is quite, well, reminiscent of my life, to say the least. It’s a book that plays around a lot with the biographical facts of my life and then tries to show the fictionality – and the impossibility – of summarizing a life in a book.

There are definitely links between Montecore and Invasion! because both projects end in a situation where the real, authentic person – be it Abulkasem in Invasion! or Kadir in Montecore – is very hard to capture. There’s something very fleeting and impossible in the ambition to capture a life. Another similarity between the two is that the emphasis [placed] on the way that people fantasize about the missing person actually tells the story. The fantasies that they use in order to conjure an image of this missing person tell the story of who they are. So we’re never in a position where we get to know their real selves, but through their fantasies we get the contours of who they are or who they would like to be.

A lot of your work also centers on racism and a sense of in-between-ness. Growing up in Stockholm, with a Tunisian dad and a Swedish mom, did you feel any prejudice?

It’s one of those things that is difficult to talk about, because it easily becomes very victimizing. But I think that Sweden, despite a lot of Swedes’ feelings, is a country like all other countries. We have problems with discrimination and racism and homophobia and whatever. Growing up, it was much easier for me to try to put myself in an eternal underdog position. But things didn’t get interesting until I realized the [number] of situations where I was in a power position, where I was in fact in line with the power structure. Be it reading feminist thinkers, or my perfect Swedish, or growing up in Hornstull in Södermalm in Stockholm, an area that is typically middle class. The realization that I, in many settings, am enjoying privileges that I hadn’t seen before. I think my writing changed a lot when I realized that it wasn’t the underdog position that made me a writer; it was the interest in what these structures make of people.

Then came questions on how to deal with that power, what to do with it. The feeling of being powerless is something a lot of my work centers on. How can we use language to manipulate ourselves out of a world where we feel powerless? I think that’s one of the red threads through all my work. The way a lot of my characters use language to block out the real world is very similar to what I’ve been doing my whole life. Words have been my comfort zone. But there’s also a kind of sadness to that. It has always been easier for me to write about life and politics for example, than to actually take part in a more practical way.

Yes, you’re very good at standing on the outside, looking in. But writing about life is also a way of taking part.

Yes, I’m hoping to show the complexities of life. I like a lot of writing that’s completely different from mine too, but this is my way of attacking things. I’ve never been very Brechtian, you know, it’s not my style to try to inspire class struggle or give an easy answer.

How did you find your language, your voice?

I’m not sure I have. I keep wanting to find new voices. I think that at one point it would be lovely to feel like I found a voice that felt like mine. But that’s based on the idea that I would have this authentic voice inside me, and I don’t believe that’s true. I think I consist of the sum of the multiple voices I’ve invented so far, and hopefully I will be able to invent more voices as I go along.

When you started writing Montecore, you heard the voice of Kadir, the missing father’s friend who employs a very special language, a mix of French and Arabic directly translated into Swedish (with a lot of laughs as a consequence!). Is that often how your writing project starts, with you hearing a voice?

Yeah, it’s quite audio-related. It feels like I hear voices. Which also sounds like I’m crazy. I remember when I was a kid and I heard writers say, “you have to listen to the voices.” I thought they were crazy and bullshitting me. But everything that I’ve written, that I’m remotely happy with, is something where the voices have taken over and made it work. With the new play, too, the voices took over. For me, the most enjoyable phase of writing has always been to just lean back and listen to what the voices are telling me.

With that in mind, it makes perfect sense that you’re a very good playwright and that you would find playwriting easier than writing a novel.

Definitely. I didn’t think about it until recently, but a lot of writers that I find inspiring are often writers who change back-and-forth between writing prose and plays. Cortázar for example and P.O. Enquist, they are both very voice-driven. One can argue that all writers are voice-driven, but I think that the writers that I really like are more concerned with trying to find rhythm or an internal order to a certain voice, rather than to transmit a certain story.

Someone asked me if a good memory is important to becoming a good writer. I think a lot of writers that I like tend to be more focused on having a good rhythm than on having a good memory. I’ve never been very impressed by writers who try to impress me with their good memory. You know what I mean?

You’ve told me before that you’re sort of face-blind. Do you think that has made you more audio-centered?

What I’ve heard is that a lot of people who have a really bad sense of faces are really good readers. I don’t know if I’m just saying this to comfort myself and if my source for this is Fox News or something … Maybe it’s just a feeling that if you’re bad with faces you need to read a lot of words for things to make sense. Or maybe it’s the fact that you read so many words that you become obnoxious and uninterested in people’s faces, haha. I don’t know what it means.

But I’ve always been very audio-focused. I dare you to one day meet me without these (he lifts the headphones that hang casually over his shoulders). You will never have seen me without my headphones since I was maybe 12. I literally don’t think I’ve stepped out of my apartment without them; I always, always have them.

Why?

Because I constantly feel the need to add something to boring, everyday life. It’s not enough to just walk down DeKalb Avenue and enjoy the sunshine. I need to have that perfect “enjoy the sunshine”-song to make it, you know, extra. It’s very internal. It’s my feeling of being in the very right position, of being where I’m supposed to be.

But it’s also a way of putting a filter, a distance, between yourself and the world.

Exactly. In a way it’s making the outside world count less. You can say that you add something to life by adding a soundtrack, but at the same time you’re also blocking a lot of things out. Maybe that’s what I’m kind of doing in writing. You have to block out certain things in order to be able to continue with this strange job.

I understand that your writing process is also very intense and solitary?

In periods, yes, but they’re also the phases I enjoy most in life. Every time I enter a phase where I know that “Wow, I’m going to be just writing the next couple of months,” that’s one of my happiest moments. I’m very happy now too, but I think those moments are the reason why I keep doing it. Like at the beginning of the summer when I realized that I had four months of just entering into my brain and trying different weird stuff out.

You also distance yourself geographically. You write a lot about Stockholm and Sweden, but you travel to all these big cities – Paris, Berlin, New York – to do it. How come?

I see myself as a very provincial writer. I’m not the kind of writer who has social, anthropological ambitions to go somewhere else. My memories and my background are extremely important for my writing. I think I was reminded of that when I came home from Berlin after spending two years there. I realized the amount of inspiration that I always get from memories. I used to have this strange idea that I could go anywhere and just make stuff up, but I don’t think I’m that kind of writer.

Further Links & Resources

credit: Linus Sundahl-Djerf

• Visit Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s website – Khemiri.se – for more information on his plays, fiction, lectures, links to what inspired the work, and more.
• Interested in exploring Khemiri’s writing further, but your Swedish is a bit rusty? Consider picking up a copy of the English translation of Montecore from your local indie bookseller.
• Watch a short video about the original English debut of Invasion! at The Play Company in New York, here.
• Read the New York Times profile of Jonas Hassen Khemiri from September, which describes the Obie-winning play in these terms:

If Caryl Churchill, Franz Kafka and Ali G were to goof around one night and play their music too loud until the Department of Homeland Security came knocking on their door, they might emerge (eventually) the next morning holding something like the script to Invasion!

PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize ($25,000): To a fiction writer whose debut work, published in 2010, represents distinguished literary achievement and suggests great promise. This year, the judges have chosen two winners to share the award.

• Susanna Daniel, Stiltsville (FWR interview here)
• Danielle Evans, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self (FWR interview here)
• Runner up: Teddy Wayne, Kapitoil
• Judges: Susan Cheever, Paul Harding, and Yiyun Li (FWR interview here)

PEN/W. G. Sebald Award for a Fiction Writer in Mid-Career ($10,000):To an author who has published at least three significant works of literary fiction.

• Aleksandar Hemon (FWR reviews of Hemon’s novel Love and Obstacles here, and of Best European Fiction 2010, edited by Hemon, here)
• Judges: Jill Ciment, Salvatore Scibona (FWR interview here), and Gary Shteyngart.

PEN Emerging Writers Award for Fiction ($1,660): One award to writer who has been published in a distinguished literary journal, but who has yet to publish a book-length work.

• Fiction winner: Smith Henderson (nominated by Hannah Tinti of One Story; FWR interview with Tinti here, and FWR review of Tinti’s novel The Good Thief here)
• Judges: Reif Larsen, David Lehman, and Robin Romm.

On Wednesday, Anthony Doerr was awarded the 2010 Story Prize for his collection Memory Wall. The ceremony also honored two finalists, Yiyun Li and Suzanne Rivecca. Reports the Story Prize’s blog:

Anthony Doerr, for instance, in answer to a question about the preponderance of older women in Memory Wall, talked about how his grandmother, who had Alzheimer’s disease, came to live with his family when he was in high school and how, in his teenage self-absorption, he had been somewhat oblivious to her condition.

Yiyun Li discussed how her characters stubbornly resist being swept along by the tide of history—even though that often results in loneliness and isolation rather than the easy gratification and happiness that conformity can bring.

And Suzanne Rivecca revealed how a PBS show about Walt Whitman’s first-hand experience of slavery when he traveled to New Orleans in 1848 and a trip her father had taken to the South in the 1960s, together spurred her to write a novel about Whitman’s sojourn.

Want to learn more about the winning writers and their work? Here are some resources:

• Read Prayer, Inquiry, Memory: An Interview with Anthony Doer on FWR
• Read Talking with the Dead: An Interview with Yiyun Li on FWR
• Check out Doerr’s advice in our Flipbook on “Research,” Li’s in our Flipbook on
  “My Writing Process,” or peruse the Flipbook on “Inspiration,” which features both writers for a double-whammy of Story-Prize wisdom

The reason O’Connor might find these stories appealing is because they are not about lesbianism any more than “Everything That Rises Must Converge” is about racism, not about traveling the world any more than “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is about traveling to Florida. In her best stories, Ostlund, like O’Connor, pushes beyond mere subject matter to describe deeper aspects of the human condition, aspects all of us can recognize, and she does it by employing O’Connor’s “two qualities that make fiction,” as she famously describes in her book of craft essays, Mystery and Manners, the title of which gives away the two qualities she means.

Just as O’Connor’s characters are mostly Southern and have corresponding manners, both good and bad, Ostlund’s characters are mostly Minnesotans, and they have correspondingly Midwestern manners. They are reticent, restrained, practical. These manners are important not because they indicate politeness but because they establish patterns of behavior, standards for the way the characters engage with the world. Without knowing those standards, it would be impossible for readers to interpret the shifts and alterations that come over the characters.

Image Credit: Flickr

In “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” for example, O’Connor shows us again and again how shallow the grandmother’s ideas are, how empty and hysterical her words, so when she touches The Misfit’s shoulder and murmurs, “Why you’re one of my babies,” it breaks the pattern, showing us that something in her has shifted, that she has experienced a moment of profound and genuine connection. This wouldn’t be the case if she was always touching people and speaking in a low, controlled voice, or if she sometimes did and sometimes didn’t. A pattern has been established through manners that lets us see the character’s action more clearly.

Ostlund does the same thing. In the title story, for example, the narrator tells us about the woman who used to babysit her and her brother:

We were not used to adults who cried freely or openly, for this was Minnesota, where people guarded their emotions, a tradition in which Martin and I had been well schooled. Ilsa, while she was from here, was not, as my mother was fond of saying, of here, which meant that she did not become impatient or embarrassed when we occasionally cried as well.

In this passage, Ostlund establishes two behavior patterns, the guardedness of the narrator’s family and the relative emotional flamboyance of the babysitter, Ilsa. These traits are dramatized elsewhere in the story and therefore confirmed for the reader. The narrator’s father, for example, wanting his children to understand the nature of his work, hands over his business card, then stares at them impatiently. Ilsa, on the other hand, weeps during her daily walks and belts out Chinese opera.

Snail Crushed, via Flickr

Knowing the manners of both characters becomes important later in the story, when Ilsa walks the children back to their house, where their father waits for them. During this walk, the children point out a crushed snail, “waiting for her to cry out, ‘Death, be not proud!’ and then to squeeze her eyes shut while allowing us to lead her safely past it.” Because the reader has seen this sort of thing from Ilsa before, the children’s expectations seem reasonable, and so when she “glanced at the crushed bits with no more interest than she would have shown a discarded candy wrapper,” it’s an indication that something is amiss, that something in her has shifted. It also lends gravity to the scene, so that when Ilsa explains that she will “be setting off very soon—really any day now—on long journey,” the reader understands there is more to this statement than it seems. Likewise, when the father greets the children with some bad news and then breaks into tears, the shift from his normal stoicism heightens the scene’s emotional power. If these actions had each belonged to the other character—Ilsa sobbing at the table, the father showing no interest in a crushed snail—the effect would be much different. Only by understanding the characters’ manners can we glimpse their depths.

What makes many of these stories so enjoyable is that Ostlund’s characters bring their Midwestern manners with them to New Mexico and Belize, Spain and Morocco, Indonesia and Malaysia. In “Bed Death,” two women in Malaysia must, on their way to their hotel room, regularly pass a man recovering from a stabbing, and they argue about whether or not they should greet him. “As I prefer to pass my own illnesses without interference,” the narrator explains, “I maintained that we should not ask him to engage in unnecessary politenesses when he so obviously needed his energy for mending.” In “Nobody Walks to the Mennonites,” two women in Belize find a café that is really a private kitchen, and they sit there for hours, afraid of offending someone by leaving. Later, when they’re served dishes of fried rice, they suspect the small chunks of food are recycled from other customers, so they remove them, working through the rice “as though they had lost something of great importance amid the grains.”

Image Credit: Flickr

Besides the obvious humor, another of O’Connor’s staples, these displaced Midwestern manners create some interesting dynamics. Ostlund’s characters are careful, conscientious people, the type who live in dread of offending anyone, and yet they are continually forced into the possibility of culture clashes. They are also caught between geographical expansiveness and personal hermitry, their willingness to observe the world complicated by an unwillingness to fully engage with it.

The best stories, however, are the ones in which the characters stay home in Minnesota. By comparison, many of the travel stories, though deft and intriguing, don’t seem to amount to much. They are compilations of strange but transitory experiences, and when something meaningful happens—a breakup with a lover, a moment of empathy for a stranger—it is often abrupt and enigmatic and seems similarly transitory, which reduces its impact. But these are minor imperfections that might not even be noticeable if they weren’t stacked alongside stories as stunning as “The Bigness of the World,” “Talking Fowl with My Father,” and “All Boy,” the last of which was selected by Richard Russo for Best American Short Stories 2010.

Vintage Postcard, by naslrogues

Part of what makes these stories so successful is that they render what O’Connor calls “mystery.” She never does us the favor of defining this term, but it’s clear from her many references that she’s talking about the fundamental truths of human nature, the laws of existence we can’t explain, the point in a child’s game of why?-why?-why? at which we can only respond, because that’s the way it is. She calls our position on earth a mystery, and free will, and giftedness: Why are we here? What controls our whims? Why do some people possess talents others do not? Certainly there are philosophies that address these questions, but the fiction writer’s job, O’Connor says, is not to explain such mysteries but to make contact with them:

If the writer believes that our life is and will remain essentially mysterious, [. . .] then what he sees on the surface will be of interest to him only as he can go through it into an experience of mystery itself. His kind of fiction will always be pushing its own limits outward toward the limits of mystery [. . .] Such a writer will be interested in what we don’t understand rather than in what we do.

For O’Connor, who describes her faith as “the light by which I see,” these mysteries have a decidedly religious tincture, but she doesn’t pretend her faith holds the solutions. It’s the unexplainable she’s concerned with, the most basic elements of the human nature, and that’s why she transcends her subject matter and touches “mystery.”

We can see this dynamic at play in the climax of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” when the grandmother recognizes a bond with The Misfit, a man who has just murdered her family. The scene leading up to this moment is unequivocally religious—the grandmother is trying to save herself by invoking Jesus while The Misfit expresses his deep frustration that he can’t witness Jesus’s miracles and therefore believe in his divinity. He is so frustrated that he is on the verge of tears, and this vulnerability allows the grandmother to see “that she is responsible for the man before her and joined to him by ties of kinship which have their roots deep in the mystery she has been merely prattling about so far,” as O’Connor explains in Mystery and Manners. This is the moment she touches his shoulder and murmurs, “Why you’re one of my babies.”

This is an incredibly complex story, and there’s a lot more going on in this moment than I can describe here, but primary among them is the grandmother’s demonstration of basic human empathy, the ability to feel someone else’s pain, and human interconnectedness, the sense that we are all responsible for one another. These elements can certainly be interpreted along religious lines, but they don’t have to be; they are universal mysteries all of us can recognize. Why do we suffer when we witness the suffering of others? Why does it feel as though we’re all in this thing together? Well, that’s just the way it is, isn’t it? O’Connor isn’t attempting to explain the phenomenon, just to render it accurately.

Image Credit: Flickr

Same goes for Ostlund. If we return to the title story, we see that when Ilsa tells the children she’ll soon set off on a long journey, she’s most likely euphemizing her impending death, which means that Ostlund, like O’Connor, has placed her character on the very brink of that great mystery. It’s in this context that the protagonist asks Ilsa if she’s going to see the ocean on her journey, because “I could not imagine anything more terrifying than the ocean.” The child doesn’t understand Ilsa’s euphemism, but we do, so when Ilsa answers yes, the ocean “accumulates meaning,” as O’Connor would put it—we recognize the metaphorical implications, the association the author is making between the ocean and death, the vastness and emptiness and, for a Minnesotan, foreignness of both, and the terror these qualities can evoke. Ilsa afterward encourages the children to see the ocean so that they can understand the bigness of the world, and when they ask why they must understand such a thing, she replies, “there have been times in my life when the bigness of the world was my only consolation.” Because the ocean has taken on larger associations, this line of reasoning lends larger associations to “the world,” the definition of which can be “everything that exists; the universe; the macrocosm,” according to Webster’s. This may seem to smack of religion, but it’s only because Ostlund is pointing us toward ultimate questions: How big is the world? How can we comprehend such a thing, let alone witness it? Why must we die, and why must we lose the people we care about? How can something so terrifying also console us? Ostlund’s purpose isn’t to answer these questions, it’s to let us experience them, to carry us toward their mysteries.

Image Credit: Flickr

She carries us that direction again in “All Boy.” She renders an eleven-year-old boy, Harold, who is proper and curious, and again, she does it with manners, showing us a character who reads widely and looks up words in the dictionary and asks if he may watch—he’s careful to use “may” rather than “can”—while the babysitter has her toenails shorn off with a device that resembles industrial-strength wire clippers. These manners give the impression of a boy who trusts that life has only innocuous and rewarding secrets to reveal, even as the action turns darker. When a babysitter locks him in the closet, he doesn’t mind, using the opportunity to read by flashlight and eat Life Savers, enjoying the discovery of each new flavor. When an acquaintance uses the word “fag,” he looks up its definition and promptly uses the new word at the dinner table.

At the end of the story, however, Harold’s father leaves the family, and through this action Harold stumbles upon the world to which he’s been blind, one that contains sadness and even menace. This is what Harold reacts to, asking his father if his departure means that nobody will check the windows and doors before bedtime anymore. The thought terrifies him, and the story ends with Harold longing to be locked in the closet, in the dark, both terms having metaphorical resonance here, “in the closet” referring to undisclosed information, especially about sexuality, and “in the dark” to ignorance. Harold now longs for these, preferring innocence over curiosity, because the unknown, which was at first something he believed he could conquer with safety and amusement, has become sinister.

This is where the story touches mystery, where Ostlund makes contact with a basic, unexplainable truth: why must knowledge spoil innocence? This is territory the Bible covers, too, of course. Adam and Eve eat from the tree of knowledge and are cast out of Eden, but does that story answer the question any better Ostlund’s? Because God said so, the Bible story teaches, which is really just another way of saying, Because that’s the way it is. We don’t know why. It’s a fundamental truth, a mystery, and therefore something anyone can recognize and appreciate, no matter what her religious bent. That’s why these stories deserve O’Connor’s laudation, even if it can come only in the form of the award that is named for her.

Further Links and Resources

Lori Ostlund, via her website

Virginia Woolf, via Flickr

AROHO’s Orlando Prizes for unpublished poetry, short fiction, flash fiction and nonfiction celebrate Virginia Woolf’s title character’s liberation from the restraints of time and gender. AROHO’s new array of competitions is an invitation of women writers to manifest their own escapades “in gardens running down to the river, and a pleasant grove of nut trees to walk in.”

Award: $1000 and publication for the best unpublished work by a woman in each of four genres—Short Fiction, Flash Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry. Winning entries will receive print publication in the Los Angeles Review and AROHO’s website.
Deadline: 1/31/2011 for all genres. Fee: $15 per entry

AROHO is also featuring an August Retreat, with keynote speaker Marilynne Robinson, as well as a number of other wonderful women writers – Mary Gordon, Bhanu Kapil, and Kate Gale to name a few. Completing this triumverate of good things, an Artist in Residence Award for an artist who also takes an interest in writing to attend the Retreat for Women Writers.

Whatever projects you’re working on this weekend, may you be filled with inspiration and discipline.

United States Artists, the five-year-old philanthropic organization known for the fifty $50,000 fellowships it awards each year to “America’s finest artists,” has gotten into the Kickstarter business.

Propelled by their mission to “invest in America’s finest artists and illuminate the value of artists to society,” United States Artists has started a Projects portion of their website, designed to help several of their fellows launch projects.

The new initiative caught my eye when Wesley McNair, a Maine-based poet whose work I greatly admire, announced “Letters Between Poets.” McNair himself was a USA Ford Fellow in 2006, and is much-revered for penning poetry that addresses “the realities of small-town New England, the strains of family bonds, and the underside of American dreams.”

The “Letters Between Poets” project would build an educational resource from the exchange of letters between McNair and the former US Poet Laureate Donald Hall, who mentored McNair during his early struggles as a poet. The goal is to put the letters online in a digital archive so they might give encouragement and guidance to other poets and writers.

As with the Kickstarter model, the project’s success depends on gathering $7,100 in pledges; the money will go directly to programming, design, and tech support. Again, as with Kickstarter, pledges of a certain level receive thank you perks such as signed copies of McNair’s books. To date, 47 percent of the support needed to fund this project has been pledged. But there’s still time! You have until 11:59pm on Sunday, January 30th to make a contribution. Donations can be as small as $1.

While the United States Artists site features scores of projects in the visual arts and music fields, there are just a handful of literary projects like McNair’s. So I’m calling on writers everywhere—be you a poet or prose stylist—to consider supporting one of these literary projects. Let’s give United States Artists a reason to launch more of these great fundraising endeavors.

Anne shared an interesting piece from Salon that posted on Monday. In the aptly-titled essay, “Who will win the National Book Award for fiction?“, Tom LeClair breaks down the five books in the running – Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey; Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon; Great House by Nicole Krauss; So Much for That by Lionel Shriver; and I Hotel by Karen Tei Yamashita. LeClair plumps for Nicole Krauss and Great House. Who’s your favorite to take home the award?

Yiyun Li grew up in Beijing and came to the United States in 1996 to study immunology at the University of Iowa, with no intentions of being a writer and no knowledge of the Iowa Writers Workshop. Fortunately, for those of us who believe that words have at least as much power to save us as medical science, Li discovered her true calling in Iowa. As a result, she’s has already given us three books. Li’s debut collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, PEN/Hemingway Award, Guardian First Book Award, and California Book Award for first fiction; it was also shortlisted for the Kiriyama Prize and the Orange Prize for New Writers. Her recent novel, The Vagrants, takes place in China in the late 1970s and chronicles the local impact of a young woman’s politically motivated execution. The Vagrants was chosen as an American Library Association Notable Book. Her second story collection, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, which she wrote simultaneously to The Vagrants, released in September of this year.

Li’s stories and essays have been published in the New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, and the O Henry Prize Stories, among others. She has received fellowships and awards from the Lannan Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, and the MacArthur foundation. She was selected by Granta as one of the 21 Best Young American Novelists under 35 and was recently featured in the New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 Fiction Issue. She is a contributing editor at the Brooklyn-based literary magazine, A Public Space. She lives in Oakland, California with her husband and their two sons, and teaches at the University of California, Davis.

I had the genuine pleasure of speaking with Li when she visited Ann Arbor, Michigan, this past spring as part of the Zell Visiting Writers Series. We discussed what it means to be an American writer; the elusive process of revision; the art of transforming stories into screenplays; the act of talking aloud to famous dead writers; and how to balance writing alongside parenting, teaching, and all of life’s myriad responsibilities.

Interview

ANGELA WATROUS: You initially came to the United States to study immunology at the University of Iowa, and took a writing course to improve your English. How long was it before you shifted course altogether?

YIYUN LI: Oh, a while. I stayed in immunology for three more years.

Did you write during that time?

Yes, I was writing, just all by myself.

Were there signs earlier in your life that you might become a fiction writer?

I was always a big reader, and I read a lot of things that I did not understand. So I had not read many children’s books; from the time I started reading, I read grownup’s books. Also I have a very good memory; that’s actually very helpful. But I did not think about writing at all at the time.

Do you have your kids read children’s books?

Well, they do. I mean, I buy a lot of children’s books for them. When they move into chapter books…I can’t bear to even look at the chapter books. Because some of them are so horrible, and I cannot stand them. I would be all for them reading books they don’t understand, but they haven’t started. I mean, they’ve started a little.

How do your early scientific studies impact your approach to writing, in terms of process or content?

Image Credit: Flickr

Discipline is one thing you learn from science. That’s probably the biggest gain from my science career. You do your thing, and you do that every day. You have to dedicate a certain amount of time. Back then I used to be more interested in the shape and the mathematics of stories and novels; now I have overgrown that stage. When I first started writing, I thought a lot about the shape of the stories—do you have a triangle or a rectangle, or do you have a mirror image? Is one character a mirror image of the other? What variation did you do with the characters to make that interesting? All these really geometrical and mathematical questions I did with stories. And now I don’t do it anymore.

Do you think that is because it’s more intuitive for you now?

Yes, I think so. I think in the beginning, I used to be able to say, I want to write a fifteen-page story, and on page seven, something would happen—you know, I’d figure a number out. Now that I’ve written so many years, I don’t feel that I need to do that anymore; I’m just writing, sentence to sentence.

And it comes out the way it needs to?

I also think maybe I’m less afraid of making mistakes now, because I used to be unable to revise really well, so the stories the first time had to come out very right. Otherwise there’s no way for me to fix a story. I do think I’ve learned to revise a little bit more than before. So now if a first draft doesn’t come out absolutely right, it’s okay, I will just go in there and fix it.

Is that to say that some of your early stories are first drafts? Or just that the general shape of them is how they came out?

Most of my earlier stories are one-draft stories.

The ones that have been published?

Yes. I would do a little work on the line, but nothing really got changed. I used to say, “Oh, you can only write one draft, and if that draft doesn’t work, you cannot revise on that draft, you have to start all over.” Which was what I did. But now I’m glad I have matured a little, to know how to revise.

So when you were writing those one-draft stories, were there ever ones that you wrote a draft of, weren’t happy with it, and ditched altogether?

Yes.

You didn’t try again with the same story?

Oftentimes if a story did not work, I would rescue one character or two characters—or one paragraph—from the story and start all over. Which actually was very efficient for me, I think. You can spend so much time revising.

Did you then spend a lot of time thinking through the stories beforehand?

Yes.

So in a sense you were almost revising before you were writing.

Yes. I think, especially earlier, when my children were younger, I did not have much time to do real writing, so I suppose I was constantly writing in my mind, and then revising, and then when I got to the page, I think they were pretty much there.

I’ve read that you write in English, but that you think through things a lot in everyday life in Chinese.

That has been constantly changing. Now I think about a lot of things in English. But I do my math in Chinese. I count in Chinese. Those things you learn very early in life.

Has your native language impacted your use of the English language and your style of English prose?

Image Credit: Flickr

When you did not grow up with a language, for me I feel I never will have the intimacy with English as you would have, because you grew up with it. There’s always this distance between me and the language. To me, that’s a good thing, because you’ll always be pushing to get closer. You know you’ll never get there, you’ll never get a perfect story, but you’re trying. I would not want to do a lot of tricks with English. On a language level, I’m just interested in telling stories with clarity, and some decent rhythm.

Do you consider yourself an American writer or a Chinese writer? And how would you define what you think an American writer is?

No, I don’t feel like I can call myself an American writer. I mean, I’m American-trained, I would say. Definitely, I’m not a Chinese writer. One thing, I don’t live in China, and second, I don’t write in Chinese. I would love to be called an international writer, because that’s the only thing I can fit myself in. I feel like my writing is very removed from your everyday American life, the life I have not lived in this country. On the other hand, really anybody could be an American writer. So if I write about America, I think I could [whispers] pass as an American writer.

For instance, in A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, your characters are living in the United States, and really grappling with the idea of what America means, and in some ways that seems to me like an American sensibility.

Right, right. I think that’s true. Yes. [Laughs.] I agree with you.

Speaking of being an American, in 2006 the United States government denied your application for permanent residency. What is the update on that?

That has been resolved.

So you’re a permanent resident of the United States?

Yes.

Are you a citizen?

No, I have to wait for five years before I apply for citizenship.

Is that your intention?

I think so. Yes, there are reasons I’d like to become a citizen.

I ask because you write so much about China, and yet you live here. I’m curious how that impacts your identity as a writer, your experience.

It’s so funny, because I’ve never had an identity crisis. I don’t think about my identity much. I think when you think about identity, you’re thinking about your relationship with the world, you’re thinking about where you’re positioned in the world, or where you’re positioned in America or in China or between the two countries. To me, writing is a very private thing. Writing is really what I’m sitting in my house and doing. I guess my real writing self doesn’t go out to the world, so that self is not bothered by my identity.

How has your work been received in China?

The books are not translated into Chinese. English copies are available, but only a limited [number], so I don’t know.

Has your family in China read your work?

My father reads English, so he has. My mother doesn’t read English.

What was his response?

He will not say, and also I would not want him to read.

You wouldn’t want him to read, or to say?

No, I don’t want him to read. But he reads. I cannot help with that. But I also don’t want to hear, I guess, what he has to say.

What initially sparked the idea for The Vagrants?

Image Credit: Flickr

That was in the news on the Internet about these two women. The first woman was executed, and, pretty much as the book says, her body was raped, her kidneys were taken out, and there was a protest on her behalf, and the woman who led the protest was executed. When you see something like that, and you’re a novelist, you think that’s the shape of a novel. It’s a story you cannot really tell within twenty pages. And that book ends with two executions, which is perfect for a novel. That’s where it started.

In a Publisher’s Weekly interview last year, you talked about walking around your neighborhood with your mother, reading about who was going to be executed, and also about going to see a denunciation when you were five or six. At the same time, you’ve said in interviews that your work is not autobiographical. How do you define autobiography, and how often does your writing relate to your experience?

I imagine autobiographical writers are writers who write about their own lives and their life stories. There’s a difference to me between your life and your memories. Of course I have memories about my own life, my own family, but a lot of memories I carry with me are about the world. And those are not—I don’t think those can be called—autobiographical. Those are really observations. I remember these things, but you have to make sense of these memories by writing other people’s stories, rather than your own stories. Does that answer your question?

Yes. You had talked about how, in particular, you had known a girl who had a disability, similar to one of your characters. How often does that come up for you? How often are your characters based on someone you’ve met?

Some of the characters—I wouldn’t say many—some of them are based on people either I’ve met or stories I’ve heard about. But most of the time they’re people I really did not know well. To me that’s very helpful, because if you know someone very well, you’re taking a lot of shortcuts. You’re not imaging their lives. So even though I take, say, the girl who was disabled or had birth defects, even though I took these things from life, they’re only seeds of these characters. The real characters don’t come from these people. The real characters really just grow out of your imagination.

In their review of The Vagrants, Elle magazine said, “Familiarity with Chinese history isn’t at all necessary to relate to the grief, pain, confusion, fear, loyalty, suspicion, and love portrayed by the characters in this deeply affecting story.” It seems like a good number of these reviewers feel the need to reassure American audiences that they’ll be able relate to your stories.

That’s why we write, right? There’s a difference between fiction and the news report. You can report something about another world, but you don’t really have to go inside the characters’ minds. I feel there is a difference between presenting the surface to the readers, and presenting the internal to the readers. If you take ethnicity and nationality and skin color, these things are like clothes. You may have different layers of clothes. But then if you take all the layers off, when you go really into people, I think people really feel and think very similarly.

You’ve said this novel is a way for you to question heroism. Can you talk more about that? Do you think of your own work an act for or against heroism?

Image Credit: Flickr

I’m not for heroism, because heroes are pretty much glorified, like martyrs. You have to put them into a position where they’re not human anymore, they’re beyond human. I’m not interested in the black and white of the world; I’m interested in the different shades of grays in between. I think that’s what fiction does. To me, that’s what you do as a fiction writer. When you are interested in the grayness of human beings, or human situations, that means nobody can be a hero, because that’s absolute. It’s so absolute it’s not possible. I grew up in this culture where heroism was a big thing. If you think the book was a rebellion, the only rebellious thing about that book was that I really wanted to question that and say, “Really, there’s no hero.” Nobody was really the hero in the end. Nobody was purely evil, either.

While you were at the University of Iowa, you earned MFAs in both nonfiction and fiction. Why both? How has that informed your work in both genres?

Oh, I got into the nonfiction program because I really needed a student visa to leave my job, and I applied to both fiction and nonfiction and I didn’t get into the fiction. So that’s why I took one year of nonfiction. My inclination was not to write nonfiction, but what I got from nonfiction was that I can write nonfiction. Because I hate to write about myself and talk about myself, but I realized there are ways to write nonfiction that’s really not about yourself, but about the world. That makes me very happy.

Speaking of different forms, you wrote the screenplay for A Thousand Years of Good Prayers. How did writing the screenplay differ from writing the story?

You know, at first, it felt very different. But after so many drafts, I realized that writing a screenplay is actually very close to a story. It’s different from writing a novel, but I think a screenplay is very close to a story. But I’ll give you sort of the little history of that. I’d never written a screenplay, and Wayne [Wang], the director, gave me some software after I asked, “How do you write a screenplay?” He said, “Well, here’s the software, go home and figure out.” Which is really ridiculous, but also was very helpful. The software gave me the format—day, night; inside, out. The software really provides that scaffolding for your story. But after I wrote a draft and showed him, he said, “Agh, this is not a screenplay! It’s a regular play. The characters talk all the time.” He said, “I need to be able to direct. And when your characters talk all the time, actors cannot act, directors cannot direct.” Which was illuminating to me. I realized it’s the same thing. When you write fiction, you’re always told to show not tell, which I strongly disagree with. We say “storyteller,” we never say “storyshower,” because stories are told, not shown.

In any case, I went back to the screenplay. Wayne was very helpful. He said, “I want forty percent of silence in your script. Forty percent of silence—they cannot talk.” I realize that when they don’t talk, you’re actually writing about real things. You’re doing a lot of summary, too, and that’s a very important skill in fiction. You don’t have to show everything. I know that’s what a lot of younger writers would say. They would give you dialogue to give you information, which is the most inefficient and artificial way to give information, right? You can just tell your readers. So I did a few drafts of the screenplay, and I thought, Oh, this is so easy. This is exactly as when you write a story. You choose what to show and what to tell.

When I watched the film, I noticed there were certain things that happened that were quite different from the story. For instance, the father interacts with many more Americans.

Yes. That’s one thing about the story and movie–the story is very internal, so internal. When Wayne said, “I want to make a film out of this story,” I just told him, “It’s impossible, nothing happens in this story. Nobody moved. You’re just there, just sitting there. It does not make a movie.” He said, “No.” He wanted to see the world from the father’s point of view. And what you do is actually push him into the world to interact.

You’re also the contributing editor of A Public Space: how and why did you get involved with that project, and what is your role?

Brigid Hughes, who is the Editor in Chief, used to work at Paris Review, and she published my first story. She published two of my stories when she was at Paris Review. And when she started the magazine, she asked me if I’d like to work with her. I said yes only because I really like her and I like how she reads fiction. Now we’ve been working on the magazine for five years. The first year was all just talk and preparation, and the magazine has been around for four years. I read things she sends to me, and we will discuss the strengths or the weakness of the stories, and sometimes I do edits for her, because we will probably see different things. Recently we edited the same story—we both edited it and compared edits, and it was really close. Whatever I cut she cut, too. So it’s good that way, to know we agreed on certain things. And then there are things we disagree [about]. It’s really important to have someone to disagree with. I think that’s why I like to work with her, because we’re trying very hard to find things to disagree [about]. When you can disagree really well, you’re trying to explain yourself, and things get clearer when you disagree. I like that.

Does editorial work impact your own writing?

Yes, actually. I just started to be more active. Before, I would read for her, and I would not do the real editing, and we would bounce ideas back and forth. But now I do more editing. I think it’s good to learn how to cut. I’m actually getting better at cutting my own stuff, and I realize now I’m also getting better at cutting other people’s stuff [laughs], because most stories you read just need cutting.

You’ve said that you write to talk to your literary heroes. How does your reading process interact with your writing process?

I really feel like I read to talk to people, because I don’t go out often. When you really go out to the world, you’re talking to people in the grocery store, or you’re talking to parents at school, but you don’t talk about writing. Apart from talking to a few writer friends and editors, the real talking you do with writers is actually reading. So I always read with a pen. I will disagree or agree and say, “Wow” or “So what?” I have an ongoing discussion with whoever I’m reading, and sometimes I yell at the writers. I was yelling at Iris Murdoch the other day. I was reading her and yelling [in high-pitched voice] “I really disagree with you!” Exclamation mark! “I strongly disagree with you! I don’t agree with you at all!” I love that. That makes me feel that I am not lonely, or alone. So I feel like my reading becomes a very important part of my writing. Because some of my reading is to have that ongoing discussion with these writers. I remember what Iris Murdoch said that I disagreed with. She said, “It’s immoral to love someone you don’t even like.” [Laughs.] Of course this is so Iris Murdoch. And of course I strongly disagree. So I was just yelling at her, in my mind. And I’m not doing it now, but at some point, that discussion will come into my story. Maybe I’ll write a story about loving someone you don’t even like, and how it’s so moral. [Laughs.]

I know that William Trevor is one of your literary heroes. What about his work captivates you, and how has your admiration of him impacted your writing?

William Trevor / copyright: Penguin

It’s very interesting. When you explain why you like someone’s work, it’s all very intuitive. I cannot say I like this person’s face, or I like that person’s hair. I mean, sometimes you do that. But when you like someone’s work that much, it just feels like he’s writing about my own world, or I feel about the world that way he feels about the world, and I write about the world as he does. So it’s a very strange connection. [Reading Trevor] really explained to me that whatever country you come from, or where you grew up, really it didn’t matter. I think just his way to look at the world and his sympathy for his characters. And he’s melancholy. All these things, he’s very sad. It’s so funny…someone said to me last night at dinner, “Your fiction is so sad.” [Laughs.] And I said, “Well, that’s true.” I do write about a sad world, I think. Sad might be the wrong word, but I’m looking at things that probably are not very uplifting. Because I’ve read him for so long, and I also read Trevor very closely, more closely than any other writer, reading him becomes intuitive. I don’t argue with Trevor as I argue with Iris Murdoch. Because with Iris Murdoch – or with a lot of writers, even Graham Greene, who I love – it’s more like you have to find things to disagree [with], or you have to find things to at least have that conversation going. But with Trevor, it’s more like that’s how the world is for me, so the process is more intuitive.

Have you met him in person?

I have, a few times. Our meetings are all very brief, and I really think I talk to him mostly in my stories. I’m sure he understands that, because I would send my stories to him, and he would like them, I hope. Things you say in the end don’t matter in those situations, because really it’s the things you write, because you’re talking to a writer, and you really talk through your writing.

Do you do research for your stories?

I’m not a very good researcher, but I think I’m getting better. One thing you do, when you grow as a writer—this is something I’ve learned from teaching and editing—every sentence I write, I’ll ask, “Is this sentence right?” Not just in an artistic way, but even just the basic information. Would someone fifty years ago be named…even names, you name a character, and the name represents an age and a time. The Internet is very convenient—I’ll just get online and say, “What are the popular names in the 1950s or 1920s?” That’s research to me. Those things you just do quickly. If you’re talking about a disease, you have to make sure that you know all the symptoms. Research is for you to have confidence in your material. Sometimes you don’t have to do any research if you have that confidence. But I’m worried about making mistakes, so I still do research.

Edward P. Jones famously didn’t research The Known World.

Yes! I love that. He’s sort of my hero about not researching.

You wrote a second collection of stories as a side project while writing The Vagrants. What was your process like working on both projects simultaneously?

You cannot always just have one project. I get bored. And if you get stuck you get stuck, so I always try to keep a side project. Also I just love writing stories. If you write a novel for three years, it’s going to be a very long and lonely three years. I have to go write some stories. So I did write most of the stories while I was working on the novel. I thought, “Oh, let me finish a story, just to distract myself.”

In addition to being a fairly prolific writer, you’re also a teacher of creative writing at U.C. Davis, and the parent of two young children. How do you balance these roles, and how does each role impact the others?

Oh, gosh, I don’t balance well. I mean, I know I probably balance okay, but practically, you never have enough time writing. I sort of accept that I will never have enough writing time, because children get sick, schools have field trips, or you have to do some presentation about Chinese culture. These things constantly interrupt your writing life. I used to write from midnight to four in the morning, because that was the only time that I could write uninterrupted. But it’s not a very healthy thing to do. You get sick. You get tired. So now I’m giving myself less pressure. I used to really push myself to write at least a thousand words a day in these four hours. Now I have to work, I have to travel, I have to be a parent. So if I write two hundred words, I’m still happy.

You’ve adjusted your expectations?

You really have to adjust them. Otherwise, I would always be grumpy, because when I was with my children, I’d be thinking about those eight hundred words I hadn’t written. Just lately I learned, “Well, it’s okay, those 800 words will come.”

Do you enjoy teaching?

Image Credit: Flickr

I enjoy teaching, but it takes too much time and energy. Writers always say, “Oh, teaching takes so much time.” But then there are moments that are really satisfying—when you see a student grow and learn things, that’s satisfying. Also, because I read all these dead authors. When I was at dinner last night, I was talking to someone and said, “Oh, I want to introduce you to my new friends. And I had a long list of dead people.” You’re just trying to overwhelm your students with your passion.

Do you read writers who are alive, besides William Trevor?

Not as much as I want to, but I would love to do more.

Who are some of your other favorites?

Graham Green, Elizabeth Bowen, and Molly Keane, who is this person no one is reading right now. And I read some really odd people, who sometimes people don’t know. I like Dickens, I love Dickens, and I like most of the Russian masters.

What projects are you working on right now?

I’m working on a novel. I’m working on it very slowly.

Can you say at all what it’s about?

No. [Laughs.]

That’s a little jinxy.

Yeah.

Further Links and Resources:

- Along with Jane Ciabattari’s review of Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, NPR offers an excerpt from the collection.

- At Random House’s website, read excerpts from A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and from The Vagrants.

- Read some of Li’s essays: For the New York Times, she reflects on Tiananmen Square and the end of her desire for a “Tangy life.” And for SFGate.com, she writes about the decision to limit her time online to fifteen minutes a day.

- Watch Li read in November of 2009, as part of Colgate’s Living Writers series:

- At the University of Iowa, Kecia Lynn speaks with Yiyun Li: