ST: At your recent talk titled “Urgency and Momentum” you introduced a new theoretical framework you’ve been exploring, that you called “request moments.” You spoke about how much of the time, most if not all of us are doing not what we want to do but what other people ask of us either directly or indirectly. Your point was to arrive at a type of necessity, that creates, as you put it, “forces in narrative that make characters do what they do.” Clearly, from your new collection’s title, the trope has caught your attention.
CB: There’s too much emphasis these days on the singular ego, the singular self, both in fiction and outside of it. I’d like to think that the request moment is only one of many dramatic forms that we can discover when we think about social interactions; in fact, there’s an infinite number of ways that we place requests, conditions, blessings, and wounds on each other. Each of them is dramatic.
Urgency and Momentum: An Interview with Charles Baxter, Susan Tacent, Tin House Inteviews Online, May 2015
CB: There’s too much emphasis these days on the singular ego, the singular self, both in fiction and outside of it. I’d like to think that the request moment is only one of many dramatic forms that we can discover when we think about social interactions; in fact, there’s an infinite number of ways that we place requests, conditions, blessings, and wounds on each other. Each of them is dramatic.
Urgency and Momentum: An Interview with Charles Baxter, Susan Tacent, Tin House Inteviews Online, May 2015
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