Q: Your fiction--with its interplay between the mundane and the fantastic--seems to be a counterpoint to the realism that's so popular today. What lies behind many readers' reluctance to distrust writing that strays from the recognizable? And what are your feelings about realism in writing? KJF: My main objection to much of what I understand as realism is that it's not very realistic. A little quiz by way of illustration: In the following list, separate the real from the unreal: cloned sheep, alien abductions, Elvis sightings, immaculate conception, repressed memory, Lisa Marie Presley's brief marriage to Michael Jackson, chronic fatigue syndrome, Martian bacteria, the search for the real killers, and the Ken Starr report. For many among us, even our quotidian lives have become the stuff of science fiction, strung between the two chimerical poles of e-mail and Prozac.
In my opinion, realism became an outmoded literary mode when no one, from the Warren Commission to Oliver Stone, was able to provide us with a plausible account of the assassination of President Kennedy. This freed us to notice that no one had ever given us a plausible account of World War I either. Or of much else.
Even science, which promises the slow accumulation of predictable results, has produced the uncertainty principle and chaos theory and quarks as well. I have only a tenuous and outdated grip on the scientific implications, but clearly the social sciences should make no better claim to certainty than the physical sciences do.
In short, real life is so lacking in plausibility that fiction must be more concerned with the plausible than the real. Anything in our real lives that makes sense has probably been artfully crafted to do so and often by ourselves.
Yet none of this diminishes our desire for stories in which hard work, self-sacrifice, and courage are rewarded; love triumphs; and God listens. I, myself, am a particular sucker for the love triumphing sort of story, although I find it almost impossible to write one.
Q: Your mention of artifice, order, and understanding reminds me of Virginia Woolf's essay, "A Sketch of the Past," in which she discusses the pattern she perceives during "moments of being" beneath the cotton wool of existence. Writes Woolf, "...the whole world is a work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself."
KJF: I believe Virginia Woolf was also talking about shocks, the shocks or revelations from which fiction flows. The revelation is both the genesis and the hoped-for result of a story. It's the moment at which something begins to make sense to us.
Woolf's particular truth is not one I've seen yet, but I have a suspicious mind. I look for motive, I look for opportunity. I ask questions about the eye of the beholder. I ask myself how can we know true pattern from perceived pattern, which may be another name for created pattern? The real world is certainly repetitious, but I'm not sure it's artful.
Yet I'm not sure it's not. And I wouldn't quarrel with Virginia Woolf for the world.
Q: Though the absurd often surfaces in your short stories, the fanciful seldom strays from recognizably human concerns, in particular, dialogues with one's self and our relationships with others.
KJF: I've often been accused of harnessing genre strategies to mainstream ends. I do concede that relationships, characters, and introspection are my primary interest. The fanciful is of a secondary order of importance; I usually use it to approach the large issue of perception, so that my fantastical elements, while intended as real within the stories, occupy some borderland between reality and psychology.
Q: What do you see as having the upper hand in your work, imagination or experience? What connection do you perceive between the two?
KJF: I depend mostly on experience, but you have to understand that the experience is not my own. I do a lot of research; I spend a lot of time in the library. Somewhere in some nonfiction book is something far better than anything I could make up. I just have to find it. Reference librarians are my personal heroes.
Fortunately, I love research. Reading beats writing any day of the week.
Q: Discussing Einstein, the narrator of "Lieserl" tells us that "all his life he tried to free himself from the chains of the merely personal." In your own relationship to your work, do you find writing a means of confrontation or escapism?
KJF: I take it as axiomatic that the more strongly I feel about a moral or political position, the more likely it is to be an area of difficulty in my personal life. When I wrote "Lieserl" I was thinking very explicitly about my own relationship to my children, and the way my writing often took me away from them. Very canny of you to notice! If it's not all right for Einstein, I was asking myself, how can it possibly be all right for me?
Q: How do you approach the apparent conflict between the linear logic of language and the seeming cyclicality of time?
KJF: Matching form to function, I go around and around about it. Deciding on the sequence in which to relate events is frequently the hardest part of telling a story. Things may happen simultaneously, but you can only relate them sequentially. It's very limiting. It's very distressing. It sends you to the movies.
Q: What lies behind our desire to invest our experiences with symbolic import, to turn our lives into narratives?
KJF: I can't answer beyond the obvious. Something in the human spirit craves beauty and pattern. It's one of our more endearing features. Although it can obviously lead us astray.
Q: "Go Back" and other stories address the central role of memory in our lives: the extent to which our thinking about the past shapes our present and focuses or distorts our tomorrows. Comment on the role--or lure--of the past in your writing. Is the writer's gaze necessarily a backward one?
KJF: I can't speak for other writers, I only know that my own face points persistently to the past. I had a happy childhood; it's been crippling.
This makes me in many ways the most annoying kind of reader for science fiction writers. Someone has set a book a hundred years in the future, and ornamented it with all kinds of imaginative and seductive advances. I pay no attention, I'm too busy trying to determine what things this writer thinks will not have changed in a hundred years.
One of interesting things about today's thinking is how memory has become a landscape of such shifting sands. We come back to my earlier statement--anything in our lives that makes sense has probably been crafted to do so. I frequently meet people who tell me they couldn't possibly write; it's just not a talent they have. But if you remember any incidents from your childhood, in any sort of detail, then you've written it. You just haven't written it down.
Q: Replete with metaphor, symbolism, and incident, your short stories share in the spirit of classical mythology and, in particular, Ovid's Metamorphoses. Do you acknowledge a debt to that tradition? Or to such twentieth century writers as Franz Kafka, Ursula Le Guin, or Jorge Luis Borges?
KJF: This answer is more likely to illuminate my ignorance than anything else. I had a good high school education--sometime during it I read Kafka's "Metamorphosis," but I never got as far as Ovid. In college I studied political theory, so I'm more familiar with Plato than with Homer. I only took one English class in the whole four years--Modern British. Borges I've only started to read recently. I've read a lot of Le Guin, but I don't think I resemble her much as a writer. I'm all tricks and stratagems and surface dazzle, cheap stuff that she doesn't need. I think she's quite wonderful.
As a child, two of my favorite books were a collection of fairy tales called Castles and Kings and a book of tales and legends from other lands, which included Greek and Roman myths as well as Irish, Nordic, and Arabian ones. I'm sure I was deeply imprinted by those books.
Q: You author a brand of prose that eludes easy classification. Tags such as "magic realism" and "science fiction" fall short. What connection, if any, do you acknowledge to these genres?
KJF: I see myself as blissfully free from any obligation to classify my work. It's a question of little interest to me artistically, although I have to be concerned with it as a professional issue. Certainly it's followed me doggedly through my career so far.
But I would argue that science fiction has always been strongest in the short form and continues to produce exciting stuff. There are a number of writers being published in genre magazines with whom my own stories are sometimes in conscious dialogue. I always hate to provide a list since this invariably leaves people out who should be in, but among the short story writers with genre credits to whom I've addressed myself would be Carol Emshwiller, John Kessel, Michael Swanwick, Howard Waldrop, Maureen McHugh, Jonathan Lethem, Jim Kelly, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Ursula Le Guin.
Q: In her last collection of poetry, Louise Gluck reimagines The Odyssey as told from the perspective of Penelope or Telemakhos. In Black Glass you, too, endeavor to give voice to the familiar but oft voiceless. What motivates such an approach? What does it say about the state of fiction today?
KJF: I've long, often, and loudly expressed my dissatisfaction with protagonists. By their very fictional existence they suggest that some people are more important than other people. But I haven't yet figured out how to tell a story without them.
I read a lot of history and any historical account must make the same calculations: Who is worth remembering and for what? Who will we ignore until they are forgotten? Who will we remember but only in the context of someone else's story? The historian may be the most fair-minded person alive, but the account cannot possibly be. It drives me nuts.
Since I can't figure a way to dispense with protagonists entirely, I try to find them in unlikely places. I suffer from the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Syndrome, a condition expressed as an excessive concern with peripheral characters. This first manifested itself when I was taken along with the rest of my high school English class to a performance of Prometheus Bound. The protagonist spent the whole play tied to a rock and there was no ending. "This is a really great play," our teacher told us. "Who was that cow who kept wandering through?" I remember asking myself. "That Io character--what was her problem?"
Q: The title work of this collection, as well as a number of tales within, display your affinity for satire. Often we regard the satirist as the voice of sanity in a mad world, trying to prod a seemingly indifferent or too-comfortable public. Do you agree?
KJF: I don't mind being considered a satirist; I rather like it. I would love to be Garry Trudeau or Gary Larson. But I'm not. To me, the satirist says things clearly, refuses to waffle. This does not describe me.
To use "Black Glass" as an example: I think the war on drugs has been a disaster, an ineffective exercise in the violation of human rights. As a satirist, perhaps I thought I could throw this into some relief by drawing the parallel between the DEA and the temperance workers. Doesn't everyone now agree that the temperance workers were humorously humorless and dangerously fanatical?
But when I began to write the story, a bit of admiration for Carry Nation snuck in, in spite of me. And then more admiration, and suddenly I'm quite fond of her, suddenly I'm thinking she's remarkable. We don't see her like today, I'm thinking sadly.
So, the more I think, the less I know, and I don't picture the satirist working this way.
Q: Are we at risk of moving beyond the reach of the satirist, given the premeditated irony with which we do everything from selling cars to saying I love you?
KJF: I feel sorry for the satirist, because I do feel that society has moved far beyond satire. (See previous quiz.) This is probably not because the age we live in is any more ridiculous than previous ages, hard as that is to credit, but simply because our methods of disseminating information and misinformation are so efficient. The satirist also had a publicity function, which has disappeared. We get our satire raw these days.
Q: The flotsam and jetsam of pop culture dot the surface of many of your narratives. What motivates you to make use of these things that clog our days and to render them lasting?
KJF: Is it fair just to say that I like the flotsam and jetsam of pop culture? That I value the thing itself? A thousand years from now the salad shooter will be a rare and valuable artifact. I'm just farsighted.
Q: How is Black Glass a departure from your novels?
KJF: Since I began by writing short stories, it's more natural for me to think of my novels as the departure. I'm still a reluctant, tormented novelist. My short stories are great fun for me; in them I feel freer, lighter, less eager to please. And the length is a better fit for my particular attention span.
Q: Explain your thinking in organizing this collection. Do you see the individual narratives creating a larger narrative or revolving around particular themes?
KJF: The stories were written over a period of many years, when I had no thought of collecting them. They represent perhaps half of the stories I've written. So my persistent themes must be attributed to psychology, rather than artistic deliberation, and any larger narrative must be understood simply as a matter of the sequence we chose for the stories and not of the stories themselves. I fussed a lot over sequence, all the time bitterly aware that I never read a book of short stories front to back that way.
Q: What themes evolve into motifs in Black Glass?
KJF: From the text as a whole it's obvious I have an intense interest in fairy tales, both the lighter and the grimmer versions, in the difficulties men and women have with one another, and in the family. One might almost get the impression that I have some unresolved issues around my father! But my most tenacious and overarching theme I would identify is the problem of distinguishing what is real from what is not. But I'm no analyst and not even a trained literary critic. Ask a professional.
Q: What possibilities did you locate in the genre of the short story that were not available to you on the larger canvas of the novel?
KJF: As a reader, the thing I value most is surprise, and surprise is what I work hardest to produce when I write. In a novel, I attempt this by minimizing my planning. I try to let things evolve as they occur to me; I try to achieve surprise merely by leaving space for it. This is a slow way to write, where plot is clearly an issue left to the second draft; thus I see myself much as I see the reader, as along for the ride.
I feel much more in control in my short fiction. I know what I'm doing and I know why. As a reader of more than forty years, it's harder and harder to surprise me, and I assume the same to be true of my readers. So I'm often reduced to cheating. I have no patience with foreshadowing, which is explicitly designed to lessen surprise. I have no compunction regarding my contract with the reader, to use a phrase I hear often in writing groups.
A good friend told me once that I was attempting to master a particular form he called "the story you have to read twice." His suggestion was that this might not be the most viable form, what with life being fleeting and all. But I see myself as the helpless victim of my own tastes. The kind of story I like best is the one that produces a short, sharp shock.
Q: Describe this shock. Is it one of recognition, horror, or something else?
KJF: It's one of revelation. I'm not interested in horror; the daily newspaper contains more than enough horror for me. Perhaps this question goes to my love of science fiction and the fantastical. There are readers whose literary appetite is for affirmation and recognition. When your identification with a character is very strong, when you see your own thoughts and desires in a text--this can be a wonderful reading experience.
The shock to which I refer, however, is the shock of the unfamiliar. Science fiction does a good job at looking at ourselves from the outside, of putting humanity into a larger perspective. What the science fiction short story can do so well is to give you, for brief moment at least, an entirely different way of looking at something. It can make the familiar unfamiliar.
Q: In his essay "On Writing," Ray Carver suggests that "every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications." He speaks of worlds according to Flannery O'Connor, Ursula Le Guin, and John Cheever, among others. Describe the world according to Karen Joy Fowler.
KJF: It's not a very tidy place.
Q: What will be your next addition to this untidy place?
KJF: I'm working on a secret women's history of San Francisco. If I told you any more, it wouldn't be a secret.
Excerpted from Black Glass © Copyright 2008 by Karen Joy Fowler. Reprinted with permission by Ballantine. All rights reserved.
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