Interesting Problems: An Interview with Brad Watson
“Memories can open up the idea for a story, but they can just as easily shut down the imaginative journey into it”: Brad Watson on process and craft in his work.
“Memories can open up the idea for a story, but they can just as easily shut down the imaginative journey into it”: Brad Watson on process and craft in his work.
Watson was born and raised in Meridian, Mississippi. And the Mississippi of today, and of the not-too-distant past, is the setting of much of his fiction. In Airships, Barry Hannah wrote that “In Mississippi, it’s hard to achieve a vista,” but Brad Watson does just that in this new collection. Not only is there a breathtaking sense of the Gulf Coast and the Delta in his writing, that geography is given depth—a hardscrabble social landscape inseparable from the place itself.
There are no zombies or vampires in Brad Watson’s new collection, Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives (W.W. Norton, 2010), but there are plenty of folks who act like they’re either dead or from another planet. And, yes, many of Watson’s characters are “aliens”—not green creatures with large heads, but alienated, isolated. They are people who wander through life without an anchor, who don’t feel the pull of gravity.
