lion.mouth

This is how it all began. Some of you will get some­thing in the mail, but don’t be fooled: it dete­ri­o­rates from here.

Hello.

Her face could heal a man.

The only principle.

It’s a trick. I rec­og­nized my gift for the first time lis­ten­ing to the radio.

In the begin­ning, every­thing was ugly, but you’re right, the truth is get­ting prettier.

How does it go? The only cer­tain part?

Now hold its knees, and hum.

That’s advanced.

I am glad it wasn’t beau­ti­ful, and then it was.

What you lost, and what you had.

And say, Mama, don’t you know I love you?

When God closes a door, you should start to talk about sailing.

Do you remember?

Prac­tice rank­ing a set of given possibilities.

Tues­day, Fri­day, Sun­day, Thursday.

For­get about oars and sails, you can add them later.

It could have been at any time.

There are so many songs now, and they’re get­ting gentler.

You can only name the parts after, if you have to.

For some­one who is less than fully aware, but more than blindly igno­rant, it makes it eas­ier to accept the prob­a­bil­ity of unfold­ing events.

What do you tell peo­ple always?

Do what your birds have pre­dicted would be possible.

Stand back. Far­ther. Say, What you lost, and what you had.

Com­pare every­thing to desert air.

That would be stupid.

Not by chance.

She was drag­ging her oars.

I’ve mem­o­rized it perfectly.

All told, I haven’t read or seen very many plays. Over the last few months, I’ve started brows­ing shelves marked “Drama,” “The­atre,” and “Play­wrights.” Gen­er­ally, these shelves can be browsed in a minute, and that’s if you’re being thorough–reading each title and tug­ging every spine, one by one. The Santa Bar­bara Cen­tral Library, heavy on melo­drama and moral­ity, left a lot to be desired (not that I could tell you what was miss­ing). Still, no mat­ter how lim­ited the selec­tion, these shelves are unnav­i­ga­ble to me. My nar­row com­pass is use­less out­side the land of High School Musi­cal Theatre.*

This is why I’ve jury rigged a new com­pass to keep me from walk­ing in cir­cles. It has only two car­di­nal points: plays other peo­ple expressly rec­om­mend, and plays by peo­ple I am already famil­iar with. In place of mag­netic pre­ci­sion, my com­pass offers safe bets. More often than not, this means play­wrights who were orig­i­nally, or pri­mar­ily, poets. I keep mean­ing to read Pin­ter and Albee and Labute, but when I see an e.e. cum­mings play, hot damn! How can that not be good?! It’s led me to some inter­est­ing reads, and even more inter­est­ing ques­tions, which keep me brows­ing those shelves.

Nat­u­rally, I’ve spent some time think­ing about what dif­fer­en­ti­ates a play from a poem, and how the medi­ums inter­act. I want to know if there is such a thing as writing-a-play-as-a-poet, and writing-a-poem-as-a-playwright, and whether the writ­ing would be dis­tinct as such. “Poem” and “Play” are con­structs, but they’re ingrained and oper­a­ble; we know which one we’re look­ing at, and I think it’s safe to con­tinue talk­ing about them.

Cer­tain poetic dis­ci­plines are also the build­ing blocks, in my opin­ion, of a strong dra­matic piece. For me, poems require close atten­tion to structure–planned or unplanned, for­mal or informal–and a care­ful reduc­tion of images. A poem places you in an elas­ti­cally bound space, hands you the essen­tial objects, then leaves. Plays do the same, only lit­er­ally. Poets are delib­er­ate with every syl­la­ble, treat­ing lin­guis­tic minu­tiae like volatile genetic mate­r­ial. Sim­i­larly, play­wrights are respon­si­ble for each word, con­sid­er­ing how it reveals or masks a character.

Play­writ­ing, in my very lim­ited expe­ri­ence, is like step­ping inside a poem and mak­ing its inter­nal argu­ment appar­ent. Any implicit ten­sions or ques­tions are ani­mated. The tran­si­tion from poem to play is like tak­ing a puz­zling piece of machin­ery, sep­a­rat­ing all its parts, and lay­ing them out so their rela­tions to one another become obvi­ous, if not explicable.

It’s pretty stu­pid to talk about poems because they are what they are. Lyri­cism, non­sense, play­ful­ness, still­ness, descrip­tion, inti­macy, ambiguity–in a poem, any­thing can be an end. You know how when you read a poem, you kind of hear it in a voice that’s com­ing from the place where your ribs join? Or how this knot­ted aware­ness forms in your stom­ach? I want to know how this can hap­pen in a play with­out sac­ri­fic­ing nar­ra­tive or always suc­cumb­ing to sur­re­al­ism. In other words, I want to write some­thing acces­si­ble, relat­able, easy to fol­low, and con­vinc­ing, yet retain that feel­ing that it’s all being spo­ken by a very beau­ti­ful voice inside you.

Maybe that’s not the point of a play, though. Maybe the point is to make you face up to oth­ers and give equal atten­tion to sev­eral incon­gru­ous voices at once. Can a poem do this? Prob­a­bly. What is a poem again? A play? Fuck, maybe it’s not safe to talk about this, after all. Form is impor­tant and inescapable (it all comes back to archi­tec­ture), but as soon as you inhabit one, it yields itself.

I would be wise to give you an exam­ple before we all evaporate.

<a href=“http://www.undermilkwood.net/prose_undermilkwood.html“Under Milk Wood, by Dylan Thomas

This is tech­ni­cally “a play for voices,” and was orig­i­nally per­formed for radio. It was later made into a film fea­tur­ing Eliz­a­beth Tay­lor and Peter O’Toole, which, I must admit, is dif­fi­cult for me to envi­sion. Under Milk Wood is like music. It is writ­ten in the dialect of a small, Welsh, sea-side town–a dialect that was in Thomas’ blood. It’s rhythm is pro­nounced, and Thomas indulges–no, luxuriates–in con­so­nance, allit­er­a­tion and rhyme. I would love to hear it per­formed; even in read­ing the lan­guage is enough to carry the play with­out plot or content:

FIRST VOICE

Veg­eta­bles make love above the tenors.

SECOND VOICE
and dogs bark blue in the face.

FIRST VOICE
Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard belches in a teeny hanky and chases the sun­light with a fly­whisk, but even she can­not drive out the Spring: from one of the finger-bowls, a prim­rose grows.

C’mon, I could lis­ten to lines like that on repeat, no con­text necessary.

Under Milk Wood presents a cycle, open­ing and clos­ing at dawn. The day we observe (hear?) could be any day at all, the lim­ited cast going about their chores and repeat­ing well-worn gos­sip. This gives it a mythic qual­ity; the town may as well be the only exis­tence, and its peo­ple eter­nal. The lan­guage sup­ports this qual­ity, remind­ing us of ora­cle and, well, poetry. Even when you’re not sure what’s hap­pen­ing, you can remain present with each line, and sense the earthy magic of the town and people.

FIRST VOICE (very softly)

Lis­ten. It is night in the chill, squat chapel, hymn­ing in bon­net and brooch and bom­bazine black, but­ter­fly choker and boot­lace bow, cough­ing like nan­ny­goats, suck­ing mintoes, forty­wink­ing hal­lelu­jah; night in the four-ale, quiet as a domino; in Ocky Milkman’s lofts like a mouse with gloves; in Dai Bread’s bak­ery fly­ing like black flour. It is to-night in Don­key Street, trot­ting silent, with sea­weed on its hooves, along the cock­led cob­bles, past cur­tained fer­n­pot, text and trin­ket, har­mo­nium, holy dresser, water­colours done by hand, chi­nadog and rosy tin tea­caddy. It is night ned­dy­ing among the snug­geries of babies.

The story is nar­rated by these Voices, but spe­cific char­ac­ters also speak, reliev­ing the heavy flow of third-person descrip­tion. Peo­ple with names like Mrs. Ogmore Pritchard, Gos­samer Beynon, Willy Nilly and Polly Garter often speak in play­ful, rhyming stan­zas. This acts like a cue for the listener–someone is speak­ing now. The pol­ished, plain verse of the char­ac­ters stands in con­trast to the detailed, near-stream-of-consciousness nar­ra­tion. The Voices immerse the lis­tener and build like waves, then break against a per­son. The effect is that these per­sons feel crisp and real.

SECOND VOICE

The lust and lilt and lather and emer­ald breeze and crackle of the bird-praise and body of Spring with its breasts full of river­ing May-milk, means, to that lorldly fish-head nib­bler, noth­ing but another near­ness to the tribes and navies of the Last Black Day who’ll sear and pil­lage down Armaged­don hill to his double-locked rusty-shuttered tick-tock dust-scrabbled shack at the bot­tom of the town that has fallen head over bells in love.

POLLY GARTER
And I’ll never have such lov­ing again,

SECOND VOICE
Pretty Polly hums and longs.

POLLY GARTER (sings)
Now when farm­ers boys on the first fair day
Come down from the hills to drink and be gay,
Before the sun sinks I’ll lie there in their arms
For they’re good bad boys from the lonely farms…

Isn’t it beau­ti­ful? You can lis­ten to the full thing here and here.

* If you’re unsure if what you’re look­ing at is a musi­cal, ask your­self, Does the title end in an excla­ma­tion point? If yes, you’ve got a musi­cal on your hands. For­tu­nately, there are many other obvi­ous indi­ca­tors that should tip you off before you even look at a title. Also, nobody reads musicals.

Spring is here. I feel it dis­tinctly. Even though I live in Santa Bar­bara, with its per­pet­u­ally mild clime, Spring still makes its annun­ci­a­tion. I don’t have any­thing to write. I just keep think­ing about the equinox; this stillness.

A cou­ple weeks ago, he took me up Figueroa Moun­tain in his new, white truck. There, and there. The first lupines; some lit­tle yel­low ones; no pop­pies, yet. Green rocks and cop­per moss, acorn caps and pink sed­i­ments. From the top, every­thing was a ruf­fled val­ley. There’s Michael Jackson’s ranch, and there’s where rich kids learn to chop wood. There’s the stone house with the cold pool, built on slop­ing land. I used to throw my keys in so I’d have to go after them.

I keep think­ing about cold keys, the taste of rust. I don’t believe in ghosts or in ani­mal emo­tions. I don’t have the energy to explain myself. Even sci­en­tists know that bad things stay in the ground. Bad things, good things, whistling a tune–molecules are altered. My jeans smell like rust and my ankles are cold. It’s been so long since I’ve held someone’s hand.

Adel­bert and Johann were best friends. Adel­bert named the Cal­i­for­nia poppy for Johann. Johann named the Sun Cup for Adel­bert. The coastal hills were there so long before them, but their nam­ing had a retroac­tive effect. It’s like they lived their lives in reverse and took their ances­tors into their wombs, or loins, I sup­pose. They claimed the lin­eage of another species, of another King­dom. They joined an expe­di­tion and did not apol­o­gize for their diaries. The one-upping–naming flower after insect after shrub for the other–went on until the first one died. By then they’d inher­ited 4.7% of the earth and took it with them, hav­ing already bro­ken the rules.

4.7% of the earth is so much more than a sin­gle Spring seen too early from a sin­gle moun­tain. Right now, there are hill­sides itch­ing with pop­pies. I wish I could wear such an obvi­ous sign of growth and be stinky with self-propagation. I wish that writ­ing (and lots of other things) didn’t require such a long, hid­den process. I want to go explor­ing and point to things and make up names for them and be fully con­vinced of my own author­ity, or at least pretend.

Spring is defi­ance. Every­thing I am work­ing on right now is about defi­ance. Lit­tle things, absurdly seri­ous, soon to be made avail­able, boldly tak­ing on mean­ing just because they exist, and threat­en­ing every­one else like badges that read “I did not waste my time,” even though I did, decid­edly, waste my time. I threw my keys in the water so I would have to get in, even though I was alone and I got right back out.

I don’t have any­thing for you now. Not even soon. I find it weird and sat­is­fy­ing that Adel­bert the Botanist is the same Adel­bert who wrote gloomy poetry and loved the tale of the man who sold his shadow to the devil. The Bikini Atoll was pre­vi­ously named after Johann. Grave-robbers got it. I like these men. What were they like as friends? Was it any­thing like the con­fes­sional of the lit­tle truck, wind­ing its way up the mountain?

I can’t form a coher­ent thought from all the stuff in my head right now. Sorry.

Part One
I want more myth in my life. I want to think of myself as liv­ing inside a myth. I want to read myths that involve peo­ple and places that are famil­iar to me. I want talk­ing ani­mals, too, or ani­mals with all the answers. I know myth can be defined many ways. I know that just about every­thing con­tains some myth, or con­veys a lit­tle myth, or oper­ates upon a myth. But I want the kind of myth that is very obvi­ous, that is not inter­ested in ratio­nale or sub­tleties. It could be a mythol­ogy of sub­tleties enlarged. This would be very good.

When I think of myth, I think of large, well-spaced objects and lit­tle peo­ple wan­der­ing between them. A lit­tle me rub­bing my cheek along the side of some piece of large plas­tic machin­ery. There is a kind of myth that pre­tends to be art­less and ‘nat­ural.’ That, to me, is the ugli­est of myths. I want the implau­si­ble to parade around, root­less and proud. Hell, I just want parades. I want myth that hides noth­ing and doesn’t hide and char­ac­ters that stake their claim. I want sur­face mean­ing; an iconog­ra­phy with­out mem­ory. Things do not ‘fall where they may’; I want to see the set builders.

Part Two
I have been read­ing Mytholo­gies by Roland Barthes. It con­tains a series of essays he wrote, one a month, about the myths he saw at play in France dur­ing the 1950s. In a few pages each, he cleanly dis­sects images, prod­ucts, events and per­son­al­i­ties that fre­quently go unex­am­ined. He goes after the fierce lit­tle myths, the lit­tle bur­row­ing insect myths that you don’t think about liv­ing on your skin. Things like Garbo’s (he leaves off first names) face, Einstein’s brain, mar­garine, hol­i­days, the sweat on a Roman’s brow, beards, steak and chips, anthro­pol­o­gists and orna­men­tal cook­ery. He’s funny, too.

My favorite essay is on the hair­cut of Abbe Pierre, a French priest who devoted his life to the home­less (and who, by the way, died only last year). The essay begins, “The myth of the Abbe Pierre has at its dis­posal a pre­cious asset: the phys­iog­nomy of the Abbe.” One aspect of this phys­iog­nomy is the “Fran­cis­can hair­cut,” which he describes as “half shorn, devoid of affec­ta­tion and above all of def­i­nite shape…[It] is with­out doubt try­ing to achieve a style com­pletely out­side the bounds of art and even of tech­nique, a sort of zero degree of haircut.”

Okay, I just have to keep tran­scrib­ing here because it’s all too funny: “One has to have one’s hair cut, of course; but at least, let this nec­es­sary oper­a­tion imply no par­tic­u­lar mode of exis­tence: let it exist, but let it not be any­thing in par­tic­u­lar. The hair­cut, obvi­ously devised so as to reach a neu­tral equi­lib­rium between short hair (an indis­pens­able con­ven­tion if one doesn’t want to be noticed) and unkempt hair (a state suit­able to express con­tempt for other con­ven­tions), thus becomes the cap­il­lary arche­type of saint­li­ness: the saint is first and fore­most a being with­out for­mal con­text; the idea of fash­ion is antipa­thetic to the idea of sainthood.”

He goes on to talk about how this hair­cut is the “label of Fran­cis­can­ism.” So, if a saint actu­ally wanted to go unno­ticed, they would choose a dif­fer­ent ‘do. I love when peo­ple take jabs at our notions of saint­li­ness. I love it even more when peo­ple art­fully reveal that there is no such thing as a per­son who doesn’t care what they look like, or doesn’t pur­pose­fully and out­wardly con­vey a cer­tain self-image. I’m not say­ing that Abbe Pierre con­sciously wore his hair a cer­tain way so peo­ple would think of him as a saint, but he may have done so in order to con­vince him­self. Regard­less, there is a rea­son (prob­a­bly a wor­thy one) that he didn’t have hair like Elvis. Although, to be fair, he’s bald in most of the pic­tures I can find.

Part Three
Any­way, the point I’m get­ting at is I think my desire for out­right myth is related to my love of shame­less and ridicu­lous fash­ions. I want bright geo­met­ric pat­terns, color-block dresses, hats that could break your neck. If I ever met this man or this woman I would kiss them. I have this idea that peo­ple who dress like that would never tell a lie. There is no ques­tion that they care what they look like and devote time and money to mate­r­ial things. This is my own myth–that indul­gence is a form of honesty.

Why must we apol­o­gize for mak­ing up mean­ings? Why do we deny our­selves things that don’t have any util­ity? My entire life and recent edu­ca­tion has been steeped in the myth of mar­tyr­dom. How can we ever know the true value of sac­ri­fice if we are always equat­ing it with good­ness? I want some obnox­ious, scream­ing good fun for the health of us all, and big screen, sat­u­rated, prop-enhanced myths for our enter­tain­ment. All I know is when I think I might die from the seri­ous­ness and truth-talk of home, pop music and prod­uct place­ment save my soul.

I inter­viewed Stephen Dixon by mail. My let­ter to him is ner­vous and inde­ci­sive, try­ing to ask good, bold ques­tions and then apol­o­giz­ing for ask­ing them. His response, in gra­di­ent type­writer ink, melted me down and then stabbed me in the best way. I read Meyer, loved it, won­dered what Stephen Dixon would really be like. Then, in the space of a cou­ple days, I got all these very per­sonal and un-flashy flashes of him. A voice­mail to let me know he’d put his let­ter in the mail; the let­ter itself, with frag­ments of a novel in progress typed on the back (“he does think there was a light fall of snow”).

I’ll tell you what I think you need to know about Stephen Dixon, and then let you read his let­ter. It’s so good on its own, unclut­tered by my think­ing. Stephen Dixon has writ­ten 27 books, taught at Johns Hop­kins, won awards for his fic­tion, and become a McSweeney’s beloved. He retired last year and he’s around 70 years-old. He’s racked up lots of praise, all of which notes how guile­less and read­able his work is despite being exper­i­men­tal and “avant gardist.” He’s got a gen­tle kind of humor we can all relate to and, bot­tom line, he just writes a lot, doggedly, and peo­ple are fas­ci­nated by that.

Meyer tells the story of a aging writer who is try­ing to plow and cir­cle his way out of writer’s block by sim­ply writ­ing what’s in his mind (“Let’s see, he thinks; maybe something’s in there”). What results is like a story cycle, with mem­o­ries told and retold, feel­ings exam­ined and reex­am­ined. A whole life stands before you on wob­bly legs. Yet, the book is supremely digestible, I think because it is inti­mate and true to the way peo­ple think; in other words, his form is unique but he’s not just mak­ing stuff up.

Jan 7, 08

Dear Alisha:

Firstly, let me say I’m par­tic­i­pat­ing in this inter­view more because my pub­lisher wants me to than that I want to. I feel that way because I’m not very good at explain­ing myself and work habits and why I write and what I write about, and I’m absolutely ter­ri­ble at explain­ing or deci­pher­ing any one par­tic­u­lar book.

Yes, it’s all in the book, all of what I wanted to say and how I went about say­ing it. Each chap­ter is linked, and the book shows how much I’m more inter­ested in struc­ture and time and tenses than in telling a story. I tell a story, or Meyer, per­haps my stand-in, tries to tell a story, and per­haps the story is that there is no story and he finds no way of telling it.

The last chap­ter sort of grabs up the pre­ced­ing chap­ter and if my ways and non­story aren’t evi­dent by then, it empha­sizes it now.

But don’t be dis­cour­aged. You sound very intel­li­gent and astute and your ques­tions are very good and I’m sure your work will go well and I won’t end up feel­ing I’ve embar­rassed myself in writ­ing once more. What’s wrong, in other words, is not the inter­viewer but the inter­vie­wee. Also, know that although I’m retired as of July 1st of last year, I have less time to work on my work because of a num­ber of per­sonal cir­cum­stances at home, one of which isn’t that I’m more fatigued with age. I feel good; it’s other things.

The novel might, in part, be about aging. But that’s not it at all. What I wanted to do was tell a story and bring forth a life and his­tory of that life by writ­ing around it all. Things slip in, what he was like when he was much younger, his work, his rela­tion­ship with his wife, his inter­est in sex and cre­ativ­ity and his frus­tra­tions when he finds he’s not work­ing on any­thing, or hasn’t for a week or more.

The lat­ter is some­thing how I’ve felt, but I don’t know if I feel that way any­more. I am still an obses­sive writer but not as much. I love writ­ing and it is the time when I am most happy and con­tent with myself. I love mak­ing up things or retelling things or going ever deeper into things with each work, and what bet­ter activ­ity for that than fic­tion writing?

The rep­e­ti­tion you speak about is more a deepening.

I think your take on my novel is fine and sharp, but I’ve heard a num­ber of takes on it and they’re all good. We don’t all see the same thing in a work of fiction.

Ques­tion two; no, I don’t have that urge. I just don’t enjoy answer­ing ques­tions about my work. It takes time, the tak­ing of time away from the lit­tle time I have–not life­time but worktime–to write. But I’m answer­ing your ques­tions, or cir­cum­vent­ing them, and not dis­lik­ing the expe­ri­ence. What sort of ques­tions do I like to be asked? None, about my work, although if I were forced at gun­point to cite one it would be “the mechan­ics of how I work.”

Ques­tion 3; the plain speech is some­thing I’ve grav­i­tated to as a writer. My writ­ing used to be com­posed, in part, of a lot more com­pli­cated and even tricky speech. I am very spe­cific as a writer. I tell my sto­ries mostly through dia­logue or para­phrase. I love plain speech and very acces­si­ble writ­ing. Clear, unpre­ten­tious, gen­uine writ­ing. I hate flow­ery writ­ing, arti­fi­cial writ­ing, famil­iar writ­ing. It’s why I can’t read most fic­tion, con­tem­po­rary fic­tion. I usu­ally feel I’ve read it before, the story and the writing.

Now, I repeat myself con­sid­er­ably in my fic­tion. But as I said, its eas­ier to relive in fic­tion an expe­ri­ence I’ve already writ­ten about in my fic­tion, because then, to repeat myself, not only can I go deeper into the expe­ri­ence but by repeat­ing myself it shows how impor­tant that expe­ri­ence is in my fic­tion. Meet­ing for the first time his wife is an exam­ple. In my work in progress–I really call it a page in progress, since some pages take a 100 takes and a week to write. But that meet­ing, that first meet­ing, which some­times repli­cates the first meet­ing with the woman who was, three years later, to become my wife, is the most impor­tant meet­ing of my life. I am telling it in a dif­fer­ent way this time, in my new novel, His Wife Leaves Him, where they meet at the ele­va­tor after the party, rather than at the party. But I love that expe­ri­ence and will prob­a­bly be writ­ing about it the rest of my life.

The writ­ing of Meyer, Q 4, wasn’t effort­less. It was ardu­ous at times, almost always plea­sur­able, and the trick was to make it seem as if it were effort­less, writ­ten effort­lessly. It some­times isn’t easy to sim­plify and con­nect chap­ters. To go deeper while mak­ing it look easy. I wanted Meyer to be a good effort­less read and a funny emo­tional story. If you noticed, the wife is almost never shown but his feel­ings for her are evident.

You men­tion I go from past to present; but you for­got to allude to the con­di­tional. A lot of my writ­ing is about the con­di­tional. What if and so on.

What avenues did Meyer lead me to in my writ­ing? Noth­ing much. Once a novel or story’s fin­ished, I for­get it and start some­thing else, usu­ally the next day, and find out what I want to write about. One word leads to another; one line to another line. One long para­graph to the next. One chap­ter to the fol­low­ing chap­ter, and finally, one book to the next. But I try to make it all new and fresh and original.

Best and thanks,

Stephen

I have a lot of thoughts about some of the things he touches on, espe­cially “plain speech” and being “more inter­ested in struc­ture and time and tenses than in telling a story,” but I think its bet­ter to just leave it at this for now: read his book(s). Also, what’s your favorite part/line? This let­ter is ripe for some found poetry.

What fol­lows is my let­ter. Read if you’d like, but its wholly unnecessary.

Dear Mr. Dixon,

Thank you for the oppor­tu­nity to inter­view you, and for the plea­sure of read­ing Meyer. Meyer is my first expo­sure to your work. What a lucky gig–I get a free copy of a good book mailed to me and then I get the author’s address so I can con­tinue the con­ver­sa­tion begun in my head while read­ing. What­ever ques­tions I have can go imme­di­ately to paper and into the mail, with some promise of an answer. I have to admit that I feel a bit stumped by all this free­dom. I don’t know how one should struc­ture a let­ter like this. Do you need to know some things about myself? I should think so. I am a 22 year-old girl, recently grad­u­ated from col­lege, liv­ing with my par­ents and one of my two broth­ers in Santa Bar­bara, Cal­i­for­nia, the town where I was born. I work in the box office of a the­atre com­pany and try to spend my free time writ­ing and read­ing. I have a blog, which is where this inter­view will end up. I think about aging way more than a 22 year-old should, so Meyer had my attention.

The thing I really liked about Meyer is the way you pre­sented old age–if that’s what you were doing–as a sort of rhythm rather than a par­tic­u­lar image or expe­ri­ence. Aging, as medi­ated by Meyer, is pri­vate and full of rep­e­ti­tion. It’s this rep­e­ti­tion, and his need to com­mu­ni­cate, that also pushes Meyer to invent. Aging is the process that both threat­ens and invig­o­rates his cre­ativ­ity. What do you think of my take on your novel? I guess I’m just gonna come right out and ask, is Meyer an account of what get­ting old is like, or is it say­ing some­thing about what get­ting old is, what it means. (This is prob­a­bly not the kind of ques­tion you like to be asked, you can just say some­thing unre­lated if you prefer.)

Fol­low up ques­tion: Do you have the urge to answer every ques­tion about your books with, “Read the book”? If yes, how do you deal with this? If no, or some­times, what sort of ques­tion do you like to be asked?

If we are get­ting to know Meyer through his writ­ing, then it’s the anx­ious yet delib­er­ate pace, the cir­cu­lar pat­tern of revi­sions, and the stub­born attach­ment to plain speech that are most telling. Is this the per­son that you wanted to show? What does his writ­ing conceal?

Tell me some­thing about the process of writ­ing Meyer. While read­ing it, it’s hard to imag­ine that it could’ve been any­thing but effort­less. At the same time, it shows a great deal of restraint. Was it very dif­fi­cult or very easy? Was it hard to bal­ance writ­ing about the past while mak­ing the story about the present?

What’s next? What avenues and new ideas did Meyer lead you to in your writing?

I’m done ask­ing ques­tions. Of course, feel free to add to or sub­tract from this inter­view as you see fit. It’s dif­fi­cult to ask ques­tions about a semi-autobiographical book with­out mak­ing approx­i­ma­tions of the ‘truth.’ Cor­rect and clar­ify as needed. Again, thank you so much for your time. I really can’t wait for your response, and to read more of your work.

Sin­cerely,

Alisha Adams