Susan Tacent
  • Home
  • Events/Workshops
  • News/Publications
  • Project
  • Reading
  • Contact

Come in over my head

11/29/2018

 
Picture
Angelou: Years ago I read a man named Machado de Assis who wrote a book called Dom Casmurro. Machado de Assis is a South American writer—black father, Portuguese mother—writing in 1865, say. I thought the book was very nice. Then I went back and read the book and said, Hmm. I didn't realize all that was in that book. Then I read it again, and again, and I came to the conclusion that what Machado de Assis had done for me was almost a trick: he had beckoned me onto the beach to watch a sunset. And I had watched the sunset with pleasure. When I turned around to come back in I found that the tide had come in over my head. That's when I decided to write. I would write so that the reader says, That's so nice. Oh boy, that's pretty. Let me read that again. I think that's why Caged Bird is in its twenty-first printing in hardcover and its twenty-ninth in paper. All my books are still in print, in hardback as well as paper, because people go back and say, Let me read that. Did she really say that?

Maya Angelou, The Art of Fiction No. 119, 1990 interviewed by George Plimpton on the stage of the YMHA on Manhattan's Upper East Side, in Women At Work Vol. II, Interviews from the Paris Review

Come to me. I love you.

11/28/2018

 
Picture
Angelou: Of course, there are those critics—New York critics as a rule—who say, Well, Maya Angelou has a new book out and of course it's good but then she's a natural writer. Those are the ones I want to grab by the throat and wrestle to the floor because it takes me forever to get it to sing. I work at the language. On an evening like this, looking out at the auditorium, if I had to write this evening from my point of view, I'd see the rust-red, used, worn velvet seats and the lightness where people's backs have rubbed against the back of the seat so that it's a light orange, then the beautiful colors of the people's faces, the white, pink-white, beige-white, light beige and brown and tan—I would have to look at all that, at all those faces and the way they sit on top of their necks. When I would end up writing after four hours or five hours in my room, it might sound like, It was a rat that sat on a mat. That's that. Not a cat. But I would continue to play with it and pull at it and say, I love you. Come to me. I love you. It might take me two or three weeks just to describe what I'm seeing now.

Maya Angelou, The Art of Fiction No. 119, 1990 interviewed by George Plimpton on the stage of the YMHA on Manhattan's Upper East Side, in Women At Work Vol. II, Interviews from the Paris Review

Photo taken in the Wilbury Theatre, Providence RI

The middle of a sentence

11/27/2018

 
Picture
Interviewer: Is the space series going to continue?

Lessing: Yes. I haven't forgotten it. If you read the last one, The Sentimental Agents (1983)—which is really satire, not science fiction—you'll see that I've ended it so that I've pointed it all to the next volume. The book ends in the middle of a sentence. In the next book, I send this extremely naive agent off to... What's the name of my bad planet?

Interviewer: Shammat?

Lessing: Yes, to Shammat, in order to reform everything. It's going to be difficult to write about Shammat because I don't want to make it much like Earth! That's too easy! I have a plot, but it's the tone I need. You know what I mean?

Doris Lessing, The Art of Fiction No. 102, 1988 interviewed by Thomas Frick, in Women At Work Vol. II, Interviews from the Paris Review

A kind of wavelength

11/26/2018

 
Picture
Lessing: ...I do think that sometimes I hit a kind of wavelength—though I think a lot of writers do this—where I anticipate events. But I don't think it's very much, really. I think a writer's job is to provoke questions. I like to think that if someone's read a book of mine, they've had—I don't know what—the literary equivalent of a shower. Something that would start them thinking in a slightly different way perhaps. That's what I think writers are for. This is what our function is. We spend all our time thinking about how things work, why things happen, which means that we are more sensitive to what's going on.

Doris Lessing, The Art of Fiction No. 102, 1988 interviewed by Thomas Frick, in Women At Work Vol. II, Interviews from the Paris Review

Almost anything

11/25/2018

 
Picture
Interviewer: In your preface to Shikasta you wrote that people really didn't know how extraordinary a time this was in terms of the availability of all kinds of books. Do you feel that in fact we're going to be leaving the culture of the book? How precarious a situation do you see it?

Lessing: Well, don't forget, I remember World War II when there were very few books, very little paper available. For me to walk into a shop or look at a list and see anything that I want, or almost anything, is like a kind of miracle. In hard times, who knows if we're going to have that luxury or not?

Doris Lessing, The Art of Fiction No. 102, 1988 interviewed by Thomas Frick, in Women At Work Vol. II, Interviews from the Paris Review
<<Previous
    Picture

    Archives

    March 2023
    February 2023
    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

bbe