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Poet Susan Ramsey and I have been corresponding for years, since she worked as a bookseller and I actually had time to answer my email, and she’s been urging me to read her friend Bonnie Jo Campbell almost that long. When I finally do crack the spine on American Salvage, I’m sure I won’t be disappointed. Ramsey is basically never wrong.

The National Book Awards judges might agree. Last month Campbell was named one of the 2009 fiction finalists.

Below, in advance of the final prize ceremony, Campbell talks with Ramsey about writing, mathematics, obsession, Flannery O’Connor, killing characters, drinking the Eastern European equivalent of Everclear, and untrustworthy chickens.

When nominations for the National Book Awards were announced in October, there was a double-dark-horse contender, Wayne State University Press’s nominee Bonnie Jo Campbell — a university press nominating a little-known writer. Though reports of her rookiehood have been greatly exaggerated (her collection Women and Other Animals won the AWP award and her novel Q Road was published by Scribner), A.S. Byatt hasn’t been sitting up nights worrying about her.

Still, the six-foot tall blonde in the Carhartt coveralls is, as Mel Brooks almost wrote, world-famous in Kalamazoo and when Maud invited me to interview her for the blog I jumped at the chance. I’d pulled garlic mustard with Bonnie Jo, I’d de-stemmed elderberries with her and argued books with her, but I’d never interviewed her. We met at  Eccentric Café, usually a quiet place on a Sunday evening, but that night we’d hit their All Stout’s Day, and it was standing room only. We managed to score a couple of caustic red wines and huddled at a picnic table in the beer garden to talk about writing.

N.B. In order to shorten the transcript by half I have usually omitted the aside [laughter]. Imagine it preceding and following most questions. Tone is a truth like any other.
 

SR: You got a B.A. in philosophy followed by an M.A. Mathematics. How did an M.F.A. in Creative writing slip in there?

BC: Well, I always wanted to write, but writing is one of those fields where you come up against a lot of obstacles, and it seems like the writing isn’t going to pay off.

As opposed to mathematics?

Mathematics can pay off, actually — good jobs in mathematics. I always wanted to do creative writing, but I was just insecure about it, because everybody wanted to do it. It was like the handsome guy everybody wanted to have for a boyfriend — that was creative writing. And if they all wanted him, I didn’t want him. So I decided I would do math; that would show how smart I was.

But I always wrote, and I wrote all the time. I wrote essays, I tried different things. But after a couple of years in graduate school mathematics — I was in a PhD program, I took my preliminary exams and I did okay, I was in good standing, but I found I was just weeping all the time. Just weeping — every time I sat down to do some proofs I would just weep. So my PhD advisor told me maybe I should take a writing class, and that would make me feel better. And it did! My PhD adviso

Stephany Aulenback and Pasha Malla are two extremely talented writers I met years ago, when the literary Internet seemed smaller, after finding and enjoying their work online. Now Pasha’s The Withdrawal Method, a story collection highly acclaimed in Canada, is out in the States.

Below Steph (who posts an occasional Babies in Literature series at her site) admires Pasha’s depictions of children and childhood in fiction and asks him some questions. Pasha, being Pasha, asks some back. The conversation ends up being one of the best I’ve read on the subject.

At the end is a bonus video of the author reading from a poetry anthology he wrote in the 8th grade.

Pasha Malla does not write about generic children. His child characters are very vivid, very fleshy and real, if you will, and very different from one another. In some ways they are more vivid and individual than his adult characters, even when they make only fleeting appearances. In “The Past Composed,” a story mostly about the adult narrator, there is a very memorable secondary child character who is described as looking like “a mini-Richard Nixon.” There’s another very memorable secondary child character, Trish, in “Long Short, Short Long”:

Miss wasn’t really marking. Sort of, but more she was waiting to look up sharply and order some loud kid: “Out!” She hoped it was Trish. Trish in those stirrup pants like an acrobat, prissy, too eager with her head of perfect blonde curls and private voice training and hand shooting up fluttering to correct Miss on something Trish had learned at the Conserva-tree (like the Queen, she said it). “Miss, Miss!” and then, “Actually…” Doing harmonies when the class sung “Happy Birthday” even.

And when his children are the main characters, well, they are, in my opinion, his most memorable characters.

He places them in extremely truthful situations — it’s as if he remembers how dark, disturbing, and confusing being a child is. “Big City Girls,” for instance, features seven-year-old Alex, his older sister Ginny, and several of her fifth grader girl friends acting out rape scenarios (using Alex as the rapist) on a snow day from school. There’s a lot of that in these stories, actually — children acting out on each other adult behaviours, sex and violence for instance, that they don’t quite understand:

After a minute or so came the whisper of socks along the hall’s parquet. Alex waited, waited, and just as the footsteps neared the closet he swung the door open and pounced and grabbed the girl standing there and hauled her back into the closet, slamming the door behind him.

Alex was on top of the girl. He held his hook [ed: a toy plastic pirate hook] to her throat.

Can you be Jordan Knight when you rape me? said Heather’s voice in the dark.

Okay, what do I say?

Just be slow and nice, she said.

Okay, said Alex. Okay.

This kind of thing is common behavior for kids, of course, but it’s usually done in a very secretive way, and it’s the kind of thing that adults prefer not to see and not to remember. In the story “Pushing Oceans In and Pulling Oceans Out,” this taking on of an adult role happens in a different way — a fifth grade girl whose mother has died of breast cancer tries to act as a mother figure for her “slow” little brother. The strain of it all seems to be causing her to develop obsessive compulsive tendencies. This story is written in the first person, from the little girl’s perspective, and her voice is beautifully captured, something that is very difficult to do. In “Big City Girls” and “Long Short, Short Long,” Pasha uses a childlike close third person, and this works very well, too.

Yet while Pasha is relentlessly unsentimental in his treatment of childhood, he’s also hugely, hugely empathetic. When a child character behaves badly — as does Bogdan, a fourth grade immigrant from Bosnia who is both bullied and bullies — there is no blaming distance from the author, the way there often is when an adult character behaves badly. Instead, the character and the story are so carefully built that the reader, while certainly disturbed, also feels compassion and understanding –- I should note, here, that Pasha taught elementary school for at least a year or two.
 
 

Some people seem to maintain a connection to childhood, and others simply don’t. There are some writers whose work, whether or not they are actually writing about children, seems somehow childlike in the best possible way — I think it has something to do with the freshness of their vision and also with a refusal to try to be sophisticated, with language, with plot, with ideas, simply for the sake of sophistication. And yet their work often turns out to be more imaginative, more nuanced, more risky and therefore, in these ways, more truly sophisticated, more truly new, than the work of writers whose work you would never describe as childlike.

I don’t think retaining a connection to childhood and having a “childlike” quality are necessarily linked. In Lawrence Weschler’s Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, Robert Irwin comes across as curious, relentlessly inquisitive, easily delighted by simple things (like a good Diet Coke) — all characteristics I think we’d associate with some ideal of a “childlike sense of wonder.” But, despite being able to recall entire days from high school, Irwin claims to have no memories of his childhood. None. And it’s not because he’s repressing anything either; apparently he was a pretty happy kid.

Maybe part of it is that associating any particular characteristic with children is false; it seems to assume that kids are a homogeneous species. If someone has a “childlike quality,” it’s generally meant to insinuate a sort of wide-eyed innocence in the way, say, William Blake wrote about kids — 250 years ago. It’s one of the big mistakes we make in thinking about childhood: we’ve idealized one aspect of it, which is limiting. Being a kid is much more emotionally complex than that.
 

Well, I agree and I disagree. I think you can assign a few, a very few, qualities to children in general. But great fiction doesn’t come out of generalizations, does it? So yeah, I do agree that every child is as different from every other child as every adult is different from every other adult. And it’s clear from the variety of kids in your work that you recognize this. I started to count up all the children in the thirteen stories that make up your book — there are a lot of them, and they are very different from each other. Why are you so committed to writing accurately, truthfully, about children in your work?

Well, there’s just so much going on when you’re young, and kids feel everything so deeply — mainly because, I think, their understanding of time is so different from ours. If there’s one major difference between adults and kids it’s that as we age it becomes increasingly difficult to live in the present: we’re either working our way through the past or thinking about the future, how our decisions and actions now will either reflect upon things that have already happened or things that are still to come. (In Annie Dillard’s Teaching a Stone to Talk there’s an amazing essay, “Aces and Eights” about exactly this.) With kids — and this is one generalization I feel pretty comfortable in making — there’s only now. Think about how, when you’re young, you can fall in and out of hopeless, desperate, gut-wrenching love in the span of a week.

There’s this fantastic, perfect story of Graham Greene’s, “The Innocents,” which is maybe the best thing about first love I’ve ever read. Check this out; the kids he’s writing about are 8 years-old: “I remembered the small girl as well as one remembers anyone without a photograph to refer to… I remembered all the games of blind-man’s bluff at birthday parties when I vainly hoped to catch her, so that I might have the excuse to touch and hold her, but I never caught her; she always kept out of my way… I loved her with an intensity I have never felt since, I believe, for anyone.”

And that to me is why I want to write about kids: if “childlike” means anything to me, it’s a heightened state of experience, whether that manifests in joy or fear or happiness or shame or whatever. This is why childhood makes such amazingly fertile ground for fiction. And I think I’m still close enough to it and have decent and vivid enough memories of being a kid that I can do a decent job of writing about it – or I try to, anyway!
 

That really resonates, that you tend to feel things more deeply and more fully when you’re only there, in the present, and not projecting yourself into the past or the future by worrying about it. Except maybe the emotion of fear, actually, which is often requires a projection of the self in time. And kids do seem to feel a lot of fear. I know I did. And I’ve noticed it in my own little boy, Luke. What is fear but a kind of anticipation? So while I generally agree with the notion, I think it might be too simple to say that for kids there’s only now.

But here’s another thing about being a kid that’s rather at odds with his or her experience of the passage of time as slow – kids change more, and more rapidly, than adults do. I mean, you can feel pretty certain that a two-year-old experiences only the now – but eight years later, when the two-year-old is ten, that’s no longer as true. There’s such a distance travelled in those eight years in pretty much every way. Whereas I feel as if I’m pretty much the same person, with the same perceptions, I was eight years ago. So there’s this weird juxtaposition of slow time with rapid change.

Right, and in that tension is a world of possibilities for any writer who’s willing to think about it. What I’m wondering, though, is how writing for kids differs from writing about kids?
 

Wow, that’s a difficult question and I think you’re in a much better position to answer it than I am. Aren’t you working on a novel for adults right now and also on something for children? What do you think?

The YA book is on hold for now — and, with that said, Brian Doyle, a great writer of books for young people, told me this: never say you’re writing a YA book; let readers decide who the audience is. It’s good advice.

I think in fiction for adults about childhood there’s always this shared nostalgia that the author is trying to tap into; the stories are told from an adult perspective, with an adult’s knowledge and experience. That results in dramatic irony, which, even if not made explicit in the text, can create realizations that are shared between writer and reader about childhood or how the kids in the book are experiencing the world — I guess a subtle sort of winking over the heads of the kids. That sounds exploitive, but I think the best books about childhood are the ones where this is least obvious, where the reader is swept up into the children’s world and forced to keep up. Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy is one (albeit horrifying) example of this.

I don’t really know what writing for kids is like, since I’ve done so little, but I’ve been thinking lately how unimportant the details and logic of narrative were to me when I was young. When I rewatched Star Wars as an adult, for example, I was completely astounded to discover that the movie had a plot — even though I could remember exactly what happened in every scene, and even entire passages of dialogue. And think about popular kids’ books like Goodnight Moon and even Where the Wild Things Are — so often the story, if there is one, is peripheral to mood, tone, imagery, and feeling. Those seem to be the things that attract and stay with kids about a book, far above what actually happens.

Has having a kid changed your experience as a reader and writer?
 

For the first seven months or so, Luke didn’t sleep. He cried around the clock and fed constantly. So initially, in my case, having a kid meant I didn’t have one spare minute to read or write. After that horrible time passed, I started reading again — like a starving woman. Writing didn’t start to happen again until Luke turned three, really, and then, soon after, I got pregnant again.

I must say that I am much more drawn to depictions of both motherhood and childhood in literature now and that I am much more sensitive to the tragic/traumatic, particularly if the trauma or tragedy has something to do with childhood. I’m absolutely blown away if it’s done well and I’m much more disgusted if it’s done poorly — for example, if I think it’s done to be sensationalistic. I guess I’m more emotional as a reader.

What are some books you’ve read that depict childhood honestly and truthfully?
 

Last year I started trying to compile a list of books that remind the adult reader what it’s like to be a child, classics not of childhood but about childhood. Rebecca West’s The Fountain Overflows was the book that started me thinking about that. And I’ve always loved A High Wind in Jamaica, a book that is certainly not for children but beautifully evokes childhood for the adult reader. How about you?

I love “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner,” but that’s a story, and more about teenagers. I think Robert Cormier is one YA (sorry, Brian Doyle!) author with an unbelievably astute sense of what being young is all about. I reread The Chocolate War, a book I loved when I was younger, recently; it totally held up. The Butcher Boy, as I said, is another amazing portrayal of a certain type of youth, and so is Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Time of the Hero, although it’s completely different. The first section of Portrait of the Artist is pretty amazing in how it uses language to capture childhood experience – and then there’s Joyce’s story “Araby,” which does the same thing without so much linguistic experimentation.

Lastly, back to thinking about people as children: I find child stars the most difficult people to think of as kids – or at least normal kids who might have been students at the school where I used to teach. There’s this weird performance of childhood that goes with that territory, I think, and it feels so false – they’re like these odd little reversed Victorian versions of kids, like adults playing kids.

Which makes me think, somewhat digressively, about aging in the public eye. Those 7-Up films are interesting for that, and I know a few of the participants have dropped out because as adults they’ve found the experience too invasive. It must be impossible to be yourself when your childhood is so easily accessible: millions of people want to see Drew Barrymore at 9 years old, they rent ET. I wonder if instead of feeling robbed of your childhood, as people seem to say of child stars, this fabricated version of your childhood feels inescapable. It’s not so much that they didn’t have a childhood, but that they had one created for them.
 

I agree about the child stars – you’ve put your finger on it exactly. They’re just like adults playing children. I love those 7-Up films with a passion but I don’t think I would’ve wanted to be in one or have one of my children as the subject of one. The directors have done a terrific job of imposing a narrative structure on the lives of each of the children — but that’s the kicker. I think a proper narrative structure can only ever be imposed on a real life — real lives are too complicated, inexplicable, messy to be pressed tidily into a story — and I feel it’s up to the individual to decide on his or her own narrative structure. There’s something that feels a little dangerous, a little wounding, when it comes from outside.

I feel like I’m heading into the direction of pseudo-psychology here, and I don’t really know much about psychology. But your dad’s a psychiatrist, isn’t he? Does he talk about his work with you and do you discuss yours with him? Has he, or his field, influenced your fiction? How about your mother?

My folks are great readers (and writers — they’ve both been threatening to write books for years), but I think if I inherited anything from what they do professionally it’s a sense of inquiry and a deep, abiding interest in people. Both my mom and dad are also very excited about discovering new things, and — to return the conversation to childhood a bit — that was something instilled in me from the time I was very young. So I guess all that’s mirrored in my fiction, or I hope so, anyway.
 

I’ve praised Greg Ames’ short story “Physical Discipline” so many times, with so little specificity, it’s become embarrassing. Even more embarrassing: the fact that his first novel, Buffalo Lockjaw is out, and I have yet to read it (unlike Aimee Bender and Sam Lipsyte, whose quotes appear on the back cover).

Ames is featured tomorrow night at Beatrice editor Ron Hogan’s Mercantile Library Center for
Fiction series, alongside Emily St. John Mandel. I’ll be away, but please go if you’re free: 5/13, 17 E. 47th St., 7 p.m.

Below Hogan talks briefly with Ames about, among other things, Buffalo, Iris Murdoch, and oral histories.

Greg Ames’s Buffalo Lockjaw is an emotionally riveting story — a young man goes home for a holiday weekend, wrestling with his conscience about whether to perform an “assisted suicide” on his mother, whose dementia is already in a severely advanced state — but the author doesn’t jack up the drama with artificial tension. His protagonist, James, muddles his way through the situation the way a real twenty-something male fumbling towards maturity might be expected to; when the family can’t dance around the subject any longer, what happens isn’t TV-movie bombast (raised voices, wild gestures, slammed doors) but a series of quiet, awkward conversations… after which James retreats right back into himself.

All of this takes place in a Buffalo where the landscape and the residents, like the Icelandic capital in the film 101 Reykjavík, become an extension of the main character’s psychological state while still maintaining their own vibrancy.
 

You’ve been living in New York City for about a decade now, but in addition to this novel, several of your stories have been set in Buffalo. How has the distance of time and space affected your memories and your imagined version of the city?

I still write about Buffalo, I think, because I’m lazy and don’t want to do any research. It’s my hometown and I know the streets, but I think that “Buffalo” is just a word that comforts me. I’m never trying to be factually accurate. Anybody who reads my work for an idea of what Buffalo is like will be sorely disappointed. To be honest, I don’t really care much about place in fiction. A city name is just a word to me. I know that’s odd. But I never read a novel to “see” New York City or Paris or London. As a reader, I’m far more interested in character than place. I am only speaking for myself here. Like, say, when I read James Agee’s Death in the Family, there’s that gorgeous, bravura opening about Knoxville, Tennessee. It’s great, great writing, but personally I don’t care any more for Knoxville than I care for Chattanooga, Tennessee, or Boulder, Colorado. As a reader, I mean.

Agee’s sentences are so poetic and perfect and true — you can just eat the language — and in some ways I think the setting, the place, is just an excuse for Agee to riff and show off his skills. The word “Knoxville” is a pi&numl;ata that the writer smashes open and all the goodies fall out. I don’t even know what I’m talking about anymore, so I’m going to stop there.
 

At one point, James tells us that “Iris Murdoch’s the greatest writer in the world when you’re in the mood.” When he says that, he isn’t actually in the mood, but can you tell us about when you were in the right place to make that discovery?

Maybe he’s overstating the case a little, but I do think Murdoch’s a much better writer than she’s often given credit for. I mean, Under the Net is a delight, and even though she never does that again, never just lets you off the hook with a pure entertainment, she’s definitely a much more playful writer than most critics allow. She’s dark, brainy and playful, everything I want out of a writer. But James says he is not in the mood to read her at that moment because timing can be all-important when approaching a book. In my own life I can think of a number of times when I tried to read a novel and couldn’t get into it, and then years later I came back to it and found an entirely different book waiting for me. The first time that happened was with A Confederacy of Dunces. Everybody told me it was hilarious and perfect for me. Twice I tried to read it and — nothing. It just didn’t do it for me. I tried a third time a few years ago and it blew me away. I was finally ready for it. Recently I had the same experience with Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts. I couldn’t penetrate it the first time I tried. It kept evicting me. Now I think it’s one of the tightest, most heartbreaking and perfect books I’ve read.

Anyway, unlike some of my friends, I feel no guilt in abandoning a book, even one that’s considered great. The book is fine; the problem is I’m not ready for it. I understand this. And rather than soldier through something without joy, I dump it and pick up another book. I won’t read something out of a sense of duty or obligation. There’s too much at stake. I don’t have as much free time anymore. If I’m slogging my way through some piece of shit because I’m “supposed” to, I’m not doing anybody any favors. So I put it down and move on. There is always another book calling my name. After all, the abandoned book will survive with or without me; it’s not going anywhere. Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for myself. I’m in a greater hurry. Every time I open a novel I hope it will rip the top of my head off. I want to become ecstatic.

Where do the oral histories that James listens to on his car stereo fit in the timeline of Buffalo Lockjaw’s development? And how many more “tapes” are there that didn’t make it into the final version of the novel?

I inserted the oral histories after my agent agreed to represent the novel. I felt that Buffalo Lockjaw was somehow incomplete, and I was excited when I came up with that idea. I think there are a few extra “tapes,” but I didn’t like them as much as the ones you see in the book.

Oral histories are so much fun to read. Studs Terkel’s Working and Legs McNeil’s Please Kill Me are two books that I re-read with pleasure. You get a sense of a person very quickly in an oral history. I wanted to try to do that with fictional characters. I had never seen a novel with an oral history component, so I was under the impression that I was doing something unique, even though I know that nothing is unique. Buffalo Lockjaw can get a little heavy at times, if you consider musing on matricide heavy, so I thought of the oral histories as palate cleansers, like: Here’s a little sorbet for you, reader.
 

In a recent interview, you discuss how novel writing has “taken over my imagination in the same way the short story did for much of my 20s and early 30s.” How are things progressing in that vein these days?

Pretty good. I’m writing the second novel now, and I think it’s the best work I’ve ever done. I mean, it’s kicking my ass and there’s a part of it that I still can’t solve, but I’ve never had so much fun writing anything before. I might not end up where I think I want to go, but I am heading in the right direction. Anyway, I’m lucky that I even get to try to do this. I’ve always wanted to write books and it’s happening for me. I appreciate my good fortune. A lot of my friends don’t seem to have a guiding passion in life and it frustrates them. Every morning I know exactly what will bring me joy. That’s not bad.

At one of our first dinners — or was it during an early marathon phone conversation? — I discovered that Marie Mockett shares my admiration for Colson Whitehead’s work.

I figured readers of this site would enjoy someone else’s perspective on his writing for a change, so I invited her to interview the author (who’s become a friend) about his new novel,

Her thoughts, and the discussion with Whitehead, are below.

Colson Whitehead can subvert expectations with a single sentence. When Maud asked me to interview him in conjunction with the publication of his marvelous new book, Sag Harbor, I was excited; I’ve been a fan since I stayed up all night devouring The Intuitionist years ago. But I also prepared myself for the unexpected (as you will understand once you click on the Silence of the Lambs Lego opera link he sent to me).

With Sag Harbor, Whitehead leaves the surreal and abstract worlds of The Intuitionist and Apex Hides the Hurt for a vividly captured summer of 1985 on the very grounded Long Island. Sag Harbor is hysterically funny, as Whitehead’s novels have always been, with plenty of observations about popular culture and race, and scathing social commentary. Benji (or Ben, as he would prefer to be called) is an upper-middle class African American fifteen year old caught between multiple worlds, including the delicate boundary between childhood and adulthood. He’s old enough to wonder about his sister’s absence from family gatherings, but young enough to make sure he has mastered the lingo of his peers. “You could also preface things with a throat-clearing “You fuckin’,’ as in ‘You fuckin’ Cha-Ka from Land of the Lost—lookin’ motherfucker,’ directed at Bobby, for example, who had light brown skin, light brown hair and indeed shared these characteristics with the hominid sidekick on the Saturday morning adventure show Land of the Lost.”

With each page of Sag Harbor, I marveled over his virtuosic prose, and deadly wit. But Whitehead is a serious artist, and the story is not purely a light and airy read. While he has always demonstrated compassion for his oftentimes isolated characters, Sag Harbor is infused with the anxiety of adolescence and a new warmth wrought from nostalgia.
 

An Esquire review of Sag Harbor contained this line about your work: “He seems post-conflicted, awfully comfy in whatever skin he’s in.” Is the adult Benji, looking back on his teenage years, post-conflicted? How do you feel about people wanting you to stand as an author who works out conflict for them? (Note: the reviewer did say he is jealous of you).

The Esquire writer was a bit weird, since he seemed to be reviewing his idea of my persona, as opposed to the book. It was a bit too “it puts the lotion on itself for me.” (Have you seen this, by the way?) I’m the Coolest Writer in America? – I spend 95 percent of my time in my house padding around in pajamas covered in dried minestrone. (The Coolest Writer in America is obviously Mr. Freeze, DC Comics villain and author of the memoir Early On I Made A Decision To Incorporate A Cold Motif Into My Crime Sprees: A Life). Of course Benji is conflicted, confused, disassociating, plodding along. To confuse his adult self’s ordering of his teenage self’s experience with “post-conflicted” is a bit dense.
 

In rereading your other novels, I was reminded once more of how deftly you handle the subject of race. The Intuitionist can be enjoyed as a slightly disturbing mystery with a sly sense of humor; it can also be read as an allegory. Apex Hides the Hurt has this fascinating abstract quality to it and is terrifically funny; it is also, as you have said, about race. Were you consciously aware while writing that your novels work on a variety of levels, and did you intend for them to work this way?

I can’t say if how I present my pet preoccupations – race, the City, pop culture, waffle cones – make it easier for people to relate to, or inhabit, my stories. Generally the metaphors evolve over the course of the planning and writing of the book. I didn’t know I was going to be able to tease out so much about race and architecture when I started the Intuitionist – the symbols and rhetoric revealed themselves the further I got into the book. And once you figure out a new aspect, that leads you to another, and so on. As for the allegory/fabulist tale/parable part – I grew up on comics and sci-fi, so the tweaked/heightened/absurdified/mythologized rendering of reality is part of the toolkit from way back.
 

In a New York Magazine interview, conducted when you were still drafting Sag Harbor, you are quoted as saying: “I’m still trying to figure out how to write about stuff that’s more directly from my experience.” Is this something that you want to be able to do or feel you should do, and if so, why?

So long ago. Looking back at my notes, I was only 4 — a whopping 4 — pages into the book, so I’d say yes, I was definitely still figuring out how Sag Harbor was going to work. Do you have to figure out how to use stuff that comes directly from your life? No. If you want to write GilagaTech: The Robot Chronicles, a 7 volume (projected) series about a race of warrior robots and the spunky human child who leads them, and there’s nothing from your everyday in it, go for it. It depends on what you’re working on. For this book, definitely — I had a set of disorganized life experiences, and needed to discover how to shape, spindle, and mutilate them into an interesting story. Drab piece of cheap bond manipulated into gorgeous origami crane, that’s my motto.
 

The parents in Sag Harbor make brief but pretty memorable appearances. Benji’s father comes across as particularly forbidding. How did you go about shaping the father character, and did you feel sympathy for him? Do you empathize more with the father’s background than Benji is able to?

I have a hard time figuring out how much empathy Benji has for his father and mother, as I see him as in so much denial about the larger family forces around him. I didn’t want to him to process; it takes years and years to understand what’s going on around us in our houses, and I wanted to depict that. (Hence no tidy resolution on Labor Day; life is not that neat.) Did I feel sympathy for the father? At the end of the day, they’re constructs. When I read back over stuff I’ve written, I have a more sentimental response, based on the day to day progress: “I remember when I figured out the sister’s cameo, I went out and had a good steak”; “God it was hot when I wrote the Afro scene, I was listening to Jay Reatard and sweating like a pig.”
 

Are you surprised by the ways people from all backgrounds see themselves in your fiction and respond to your characters, and how does it make you feel? Or are you used to this by now?

I’d have a very narrow audience if it consisted of skinny black guys from Manhattan; not that we don’t buy books. We do. Occasionally. It makes me very happy that anyone wants to read my books, and it’s kind of the point to make that big bad Other of everyone else understand what you’re trying to do. I do find it a bit strange when people say, “I’m a 55 year old lady lumberjack and I could relate to your story.” Do you only read books by 55 year old lady lumberjacks? Why are you so surprised?
 

You’ve mentioned that prior to Sag Harbor, your protagonists have been writers in one form or another. In Apex Hides the Hurt, you describe the nameless nomenclature consultant’s “process.”

He pictured it like this: The door opened up on a magnificent and secret landscape. His interior. He clambered over rocks and mountain ranges composed of odd and alien minerals, he stepped around strange flora, saplings that curtsied eccentrically, low shrubs that extended bizarre fronds. This unreckoned land of his possessed colors he had never seen before.

This is the sort of passage that makes me feel that you have tremendous empathy for your characters, even as some critics have called you “detached.” As for the passage above; is writing ever this emotional and acid-trip-like for you?

There, I’m trying to describe what writing is like, as well as in the opening Inspection/Bribery scene in The Intuitionist, and in Lucien’s bizarre PR meditations in John Henry Days. But you’re using the thing to describe the thing itself — which is probably very complicated according to some school of philosophy or critical discourse that is over my head and anyway I’m too old for new tricks –- so you can only fail. Is Benji a writer? I don’t know.
 

I have this impression that your mind works very quickly, and that perfect sentences and deadly phrases just roll out of you fully formed. Your Twitter feed, for example, seems effortless and precise. How much tinkering do you have to do on a sentence level as you edit, or do lines and observations like this come out of you in perfect shape?

You know — sometimes they come out right the first time, but usually they take years to get right, which is why it’s good that novels take years to write. You have some time to work on them. If there’s something I don’t understand how to do — fix a sentence or get a character’s voice down — I’ll wait. Eventually I’ll get it — I have to, because I can’t hand the book in until I do. “He stood” generally comes out perfect. “He leapt to his feet and ejaculated, ‘We’ll do it for Joey!’” can take years before it is transformed into “He stood.”
 

Has having a child changed your writing habits?

Things were fine until she learned to walk. Then she started barging in with “Daddy!” and that’s so beautiful that it’s hard to pretend that getting back to work is important. But I didn’t work for two years, and I had to get an office. Now that she’s in school, I have the house to myself again. If only I had something to work on.
 

Marlon James set his magnificent second novel, The Book of Night Women, on a Jamaican sugar plantation at the height of 18th century Caribbean slavery.

The story centers on Lilith, one of several female slaves who plot to overthrow their masters and take over, and is told in a dialect that in other hands would be difficult but here somehow rushes by like water.

“I don’t consider myself a historical novelist,” the author has said. “But I am obsessed with the past. And I am obsessed with stories that weren’t told, or that weren’t told in a good way.” When writing, he keeps in mind an African proverb: “Until the lion’s story is told, the story will always belong to the hunter.”
 

James and I got to know each other before the book came out, but I’d been anticipating it since picking up his first novel, John Crow’s Devil, in 2006, and I read Night Women, through jetlag, in a single sitting.

Below we discuss his choice of narrator — or the narrator’s choice of him — and much more. You can hear the author read at Housing Works on May 1, at Powerful Women, an event also featuring my friends Marie Mutsuki Mockett (author of Picking Bones from Ash, forthcoming later this year from Graywolf, and Letter from a Japanese Crematorium) and photographer Stephanie Keith.
 

Your narrator’s voice is incredibly nuanced but also relentlessly candid — a tricky balance that a lesser writer could never maintain — and the result is a perspective that feels completely authentic. The dialect could be difficult coming from another mouth, but her strong point of view overrides all of those concerns so that the language enriches rather than distracting from the story. I hope I’m not giving too much away by revealing that the narrator is a teenage girl. What was the evolution of that voice? Did you start the book from her perspective, or work your way into it?

She is a teenage girl, but also one force-fed brutality and tragedy, which made her grow up fast. Not just the narrator, but the character Lilith as well. I knew she could not be naïve and silly because that kind of childhood was a privilege, not a right. And yet she’s still just a girl in the sense that she has no wisdom from experience. But I’m jumping. I have to say that I did not start the book with her voice at all. I thought this would be a Standard English third person novel and thought so for the first 50 pages of the first draft. When I realized who was supposed to tell the story, even my professor at the time was convinced before I was.

I was the last person to trust her voice, not because there wasn’t a precedent for dialect in storytelling, but because I’m from a background that still looks at dialect as inferior speech whose only place in fiction is to draw attention to itself or make fun of itself in a sort of lyrical blackface. But this narrator would not leave me alone, not until page 50 where I realized that the book as it was could go no further. In desperation I set up a scene where a character, an ex-slave, was interrogated. The interrogation scene, which was supposed to be just a diversion, went on for 500 pages! And even then I wasn’t sure I had a novel.

I had to get over my own prejudices about language. Re-reading Huckleberry Finn and The Color Purple certainly helped. And when I realized I had a novel, I still did not know who was telling the story and would have left it at that until I realized that the novel is also a book about books. Somebody is telling this story, writing this story, somebody, like me, is fated to be witness. After that it was, not easy, but clearer. That resulted in a stronger narrative than those 500 pages, as well as a sense of focus. It was still very important to me that the voice felt true, if not always historically accurate. Jamaican critics are already calling me to task on certain things but they miss the point. My job was to create people who refuse to leave your room even after you’ve closed the book.
 

Many of your reviews have emphasized the brutality and deprivation of the characters’ lives, and rightly so, but what is even more extraordinary about The Book of Night Women, to me at least, is the tormented romance that drives the last third of the story. Two characters fall into a twisted and passionate affair that sometimes seems like love, but never really can be. The relationship is at least as gripping as what happens between Mr. Rochester and Jane Eyre but fundamentally doomed. Was it difficult to write?

Oh my god it was the hardest thing I’ve ever written in my life. I remember calling friends shouting, “I just wrote a love scene! All they do is kiss!” to which they would respond, “. . . and are they then dismembered?” and I’d go, “No, after that they dance!” It was hard. I resisted it for as long as I could because I didn’t believe in it at first, and even when I did, I couldn’t figure out how to write it. Not until Irish novelist Colum McCann gave me permission by giving me the best writing advice I’ve ever gotten from a writer: Risk Sentimentality.

There’s a belief that sex is the hardest thing for a literary novelist but I disagree: love is. We’re so scared of descending into mush that I think we end up with a just-as-bad opposite, love stories devoid of any emotional quality. But love can work in so many ways without having to resort to that word. Someone once scared me by saying that love isn’t saying “I love you” but calling to say “did you eat?” (And then proceeded to ask me this for the next 6 months). My point being that, in this novel at least, relationships come not through words, but gestures like the overseer wanting to cuddle. Or rubbing his belly and hollering about her cooking, or teaching her how to dance or ride a horse — things reserved for white women.

But is it love, though? Lilith and the overseer have wildly different views. For one, Quinn thinks they have common ground, that the treatment of the Irish has much in common with slavery, when really the two things weren’t even close. But he sees it as a point of connection, a common bond through suffering and prejudice despite his being the kind of person that causes hers. But Lilith knows more than anybody that prejudice comes in varying shades and intensities. It may have been love, I leave that final judgment to the reader, but it’s important that not even Lilith knows what it is.

I think, as a writer, the important thing was to layer the relationship with complexity and contradiction. There were situations where I could have left certain storylines one-dimensional and gotten away with it. I think the relationship is gripping not because they love each other, or think they do (or not) but because even with such a horribly skewed dynamic, hearts do what they want. And people don’t always fit in the roles that have been assigned to them. But of course the relationship is doomed; any slavery love writes its end in its very beginning.
 

Lilith is not only passionate, but incredibly powerful when moved to anger. Unlike the other women she doesn’t rely solely on strategy and the supernatural to exact revenge, but can assert herself by force when necessary. Afterward she sometimes struggles with the full implications of what she’s done. I know you’ve said that you looked to Toni Morrison and other female writers for help developing her character. Did they help you feel your way toward this aspect of Lilith?

I think so in the beginning. In many ways Morrison’s Sula was a bigger influence on my first novel [John Crow’s Devil] than my second. I re-read Sula recently and was struck, again, by how contrary these women were, how they defied what was expected of them, even by other women, and how especially in that novel, they assumed the right to be everything and nothing at once. That much I think spills over into Book of Night Women. But it did not take me long to realize what a stubborn, self-willed person Lilith was and how she wasn’t about to take any shit, least of all from some male writer.

The best thing I could do for a character like Lilith was to get out of her way, to the point where it felt at times that she was writing me. I don’t think I’ve ever listened to character that way. John Crow’s Devil had strong characters but they never really got out from under the stamp of the author. With this book I sometimes felt like a stenographer taking notes. Or at least an eavesdropper stumbling into conversations and secrets. I think that’s what Toni Morrison and Alice Walker understand, the secret language of women. That it’s not a secret at all; men just don’t know how to listen. And when the men are mostly white and the women mostly black then it’s all the more so.

As for Lilith’s violence, some of that may have also come from reading Sula and Song of Solomon, The Color Purple and Alias Grace, but ultimately it was more from listening to the character. It’s not enough to give Lilith a terrible temper; the writer has to show the consequences of such a thing, good or bad. It would have been too easy to write a one-note character in a slavery novel — the topic is so contentious that I would have gotten away with it. But that would have been dishonest and if it’s one thing I’ve learned from women writers it was to be brutally honest with female characters at the risk of people dismissing them as the very stereotypes they defy.

I’ve heard people call Lilith a bitch and I’m not surprised. But they don’t know her stakes or the stakes for any black woman in the 18th century. It was still hard, or rather it would have been easy, to fall into any of the traps with female characters; they become too good or too bad or too noble or just plain unreal. Morrison taught me that it’s not the actions that must be grounded in gut truth but the emotions behind them.
 

At a Girls Write Now event last month you had everyone riveted and laughing as you read one of my favorite sections of the novel, in which Homer teaches the teenage Lilith to read. Their text is Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews. Did you choose the book because it was prevalent on Caribbean plantations then? Because you foresaw that the juxtaposition would be so hilarious? Some other reason?

At one point, draft five or six, that novel was Fanny Hill, which led to many tedious passages about women owning their orgasms, which they should of course, but it made for some horrible Sex and the City–pon the massa land! kind of fiction.

Sugar estates were male-driven places so Fanny Hill made sense. But so did Fielding, especially Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews, which would have excited younger men and scandalised older. My reason was also personal. The first time a book ever drove me to write fiction was Tom Jones. For one, literature has never had a greater plot before or since, and two, the book is hilarious.

It’s important to remember that even though these books were instrumental in the night women gaining a sort of independence, they were there originally for the enjoyment of men. I like the proto-feminist subversion of that. My original intent was merely to provide a distraction and add some book pages, but then I thought about what reading did for me and for others, people whose stakes were so much lower than Lilith’s. I also began re-reading these books myself and wondered what happens to a woman who sees these men in books but no such man in a real world overrun by men. All these fictional angels being read by real life devils.

Lilith’s second crisis about men is a literary one — none of the men she reads about seem to be true, but they seem so real that she mourns their non-existence and is enraged by the men she ends up having to bear with.
 

After we met last year, I pestered you every month or so about your progress on the book. When you’d turned in your final draft, you mentioned that it took two exorcisms — I had the impression you might mean literal ones, and having undergone some myself as a child at the hands of a religious mother I was fascinated, horrified, and deeply curious — to get there. Do you want to talk about that?

I’ve heard women say that as soon as the baby is born they forget all the pain of childbirth. Dare I say that it’s kinda like the same thing?

I’m sure I went through an exorcism or two, but I can’t remember now. It’s hard staring in the face of atrocity. More so for the writer, who has a duty to all his characters, even the ones he doesn’t like personally. Writing about any cruel event costs you. You can write about slavery, or the holocaust or the Armenian genocide but it will cost you. You can get lost in all that death and live a sort of death yourself. Or you can get so caught up in history that you forget that the world you just wrote about is behind you. I do know that I had to say goodbye to these characters and that was profoundly depressing. But I had to, especially when I found myself acting as if I was from that time and started giving some of my white friends hell, which now seems funny.

Writers should speak truth to power but it’s easy to get lost in your mission, so much that you forget that not everybody is either ally or adversary. I was at the panel discussion with some friends and a woman came up and started lecturing us about the plight of women in Muslim nations. Of course the situation in these countries is horrendous, but she had no interest in inviting us to share her view, but solely in beating us over the head with our collective male guilt, something I’ve never had the slightest trace of. So I asked her about the women who were being beaten to death in America, and what was she doing about that. And what was up with the culturally imperialist tone of her message, which seemed eerily similar to George Bush’s — that at the core of it was yet another first world person poking the “look who’s backward now?” stick, to show how culturally superior she is. Let’s just say that no friendships were made that night.

Here’s my point. You have to be careful when you declare that you’re on a mission. Sooner or later the mission becomes you and you become nothing. When you’ve said what you need to say, you have to let that go and trust that your words will resonate. Everything I’ve needed to say about slavery, every issue that I’ve wrestled with, is in the book. It’s not that I’m now going to shut up and never speak of these things again, but the book stands as my argument and now I’m free to speak about something else. Look around you. There’s an awful lot to talk about.
 

With the election looming, I’m too jittery to do much other than hit reload on FiveThirtyEight. Judging by Granta’s U.S. election feature — with contributions from writers and critics including Daniel Alarcón, Lionel Shriver, Dinaw Mengestu, and Ruth Franklin — I’m not the only one.

Below Haitian-American writer and activist Edwidge Danticat answers some questions about voting in Miami, my hometown, where the 2000 election debacle unfolded. Danticat’s most recent book, Brother, I’m Dying, centers on her father and his brother, Joseph Dantica, who fled violence in Haiti for the safety of Miami, only to die in Homeland Security custody after his tourist visa was disregarded and his medication was seized. She voted for Obama.
 

Last week you waited for two hours, with 200 other people, to cast your vote. What was that like?

I am lucky I didn’t actually have to stand on line. I went to vote early at a public library in Miami’s Little Haiti/Lemon City neighborhood and when I got there they gave the voters numbers and we could go inside and sit down until our number was called. It took about two hours for me, but thank goodness I was sitting down because I am eight months pregnant and though I really wanted to show up in person to cast my vote in this historic election, if this facility hadn’t been available, I think I would have voted absentee, which would have lacked the sense of history I actually felt casting my vote. Speaking of history, there were new voters there of all ages. It was quite inspiring to see. Middle-aged men and women who said they were voting for the first time.
 

On Tuesday, Governor Crist extended early voting hours due to massive lines in Miami-Dade and Broward Counties. Do you have the sense that all communities in South Florida are now being equally and fairly served?

There are unprecedented numbers of people voting and in some places very few machines. I am surprised that the people in charge of elections had not anticipated that. Imagine if there had been no early voting and all the voters showed up at the polling places on November 4th. The place where I voted for example had very few machines. You could easily see how voters could get discouraged and staff could get overwhelmed, especially if you add to that broken-down machines and inclement weather. I thought all of these problems would have been foreseen and fixed after the 2000 and 2004 elections. People should not have to wait six, eight hours to vote, especially if they also have to work that day.

I am not sure all communities are being equally served. I think the number of voters expected in African-American or Afro-Caribbean communities for example might have been underestimated. We’ll have to see on Election Day. I am glad the Governor decided to extend the early voting hours last week though. I know he took a lot of heat from some in his party, but this was a truly good example of putting country first.
 

I’ve been worried about the voting facilities in Little Haiti, Liberty City, Overtown, and other communities that Miami has a history of, let’s just say, not making a priority. Seeing Laura Paglin’s No Umbrella, about the missing ballots and broken machines in an African-American Ohio community during the 2004 election, didn’t help.

As a naturalized citizen, born in Haiti, where elections are often monitored and contested and their results sometimes outright overturned by the United States government, via regime change, I am still puzzled that we don’t have smoother and more transparent elections here in the United States.

For people around the world, who are always told by the U.S. how to prepare for and hold their elections, the fact that the Bush/Gore election of 2000 (and to a certain extent the election of 2004) was such a mess was really troubling. I hope this year we have a transparent and clear election with uncontestable results, because how can we tell the Iraqis and others how to democratically choose their leaders when we still seem to have so much trouble with it ourselves?
 

You wrote earlier this year that a woman at a South Florida shopping center, on seeing your Obama bumper sticker, pointed and shouted, “The horror!” And earlier this week, two Cuban-American Obama supporters were surrounded outside a McCain rally by an angry mob that was shouting ‘Terrorist!’ ‘Communist!’ ‘Socialist!’” Although Miami’s demographics are shifting, and many younger Cuban voters have broken ranks with the older members of the exile community, several friends in South Florida tell me the “socialist” meme has legs — and the AP photos of all the protest signs tying Obama to Castro are evidence of that. Are things getting even more tense as Election Day approaches?

This election has been so emotional for some people that anything gets said. Now there are a whole lot more open Obama supporters around, so the hostility has lessened since say, last year. But still the other night outside my house, a guy who was putting up banners on the street around eleven o’clock shouted a slur at the Obama sign outside our house and tried to take it down until I flicked the lights to show him I was watching. We’ve had one other Obama sign stolen — we like to think they’re too cool to pass up — and another picked up and thrown into our yard. And we live in Little Haiti, where only one treasured neighbor that I know of openly supports McCain/Palin.

We can’t help but assume that there are people who dedicate themselves to cruising different neighborhoods for sign removal. So it’s all raw nerves and of course it’s sad when people are calling out the terrorist, communist, socialist labels, perhaps instead of what they really want to say, which might be a whole lot worse. Here in Miami though, these kinds of accusations of socialism and communism are closer to the surface given how emotional the issues concerning the Cuban exile community are. Some of the Republican politicians and surrogates have been saying the word “socialist” a lot louder here, I think. They know that if they say to someone whose family is still living in Cuba and can’t visit, or someone whose relatives escaped Castro’s regime, that we’re going to become a socialist country, it will be taken extremely seriously.

I worry no matter how this election turns out that there are people who many never speak to one another again. I have friends who say I don’t think I can ever speak to so and so again on the other side. I hope when this is all over, that after we all recover, we can figure out (forgive my inner Pollyanna here) how to rejoin each other in a civil way.
 

I tend to be pretty pessimistic about presidential elections, but I think — I hope — Obama will pull this one out nationally. I’m not so sure about Florida, though. Care to make a prediction?

I’m keeping my fingers and toes crossed, but I’m pretty superstitious myself and I want to wait and see. I just hope everyone who wants to, and is eligible here in Florida and elsewhere, gets to vote on Tuesday, and hopefully every vote will be counted.
 

Tonight at Housing Works, I’m hosting Witches, Demons, and Thieves, a Puritan Halloween celebration (costumes optional) featuring authors Hannah Tinti (The Good Thief) and Kathleen Kent (The Heretic’s Daughter), and artist Michael Aaron Lee, a friend whose magnificent forest paintings I first praised here a couple years ago.

Last month I posted a mini-interview with Kent, and now here’s a short talk with Hannah Tinti, whose book Junot Díaz has called “a lightning strike of a novel — beautiful and haunting and ever so bright.” The author is, he says, “a 21st century Robert Louis Stevenson, an adventuress who lays bare her characters’ hearts with a precision and a fearlessness that will leave you shaken.”
 

The Good Thief opens in an orphanage in 19th century New England, where a one-handed orphan named Ren knows he has little chance of being adopted, and that he will eventually be sold into the military. He consoles himself by stealing small objects — a priest’s book, a wishing stone — and tucking them away. But the charismatic Benjamin Nab turns up, claiming to be Ren’s brother, and adopts him.

The charade lasts only till they’re far enough from the orphanage that Nab doesn’t deem it worth bothering with. “‘I’m not your brother,’” he tells Ren, after they’ve stolen a horse and wagon from a farmer who fed them and put them up for the night. “‘I know,’” says the boy, who’d still been hoping. Soon Ren is embroiled in a series of increasingly sinister criminal schemes that culminate in digging up bodies for medical research, and have the boy despairing for his soul.

The story is pure fiction, but Tinti grew up in Salem, Massachusetts, where reminders of the sins of the past were ever-present. And although the author says she realized intuitively while writing that Ren was missing a hand, she also traces his disability to something that happened to her in kindergarten. This being New England, recess was held in a church graveyard. One day, while playing, Tinti tripped and fell against a fragile slate headstone. A shard went right through her wrist.
 

In interviews you’ve spoken about growing up in Salem, where Hawthorne was born, witches were sentenced to death, and the Puritans’ legacy lived on not only through memory, but concrete things: the graveyards, the witch museum, the pieces of china you’d dig up in the yard. “One of my first jobs,” you told New York, “was working at the witch dungeon, basically a basement filled with torture devices used on witches. So my book doesn’t feel that morbid to me.”

Despite your natural desensitization over time to the darker aspects of New England’s history, I wonder if as a child you were frightened by the Puritans’ vision of God, or at the thought that so many people were found guilty of consorting with the devil and sentenced to death. I ask because Ren’s fears about sin and damnation are so complex and immediate.

I was raised as a Catholic, and went to Catholic schools, so God was a big part of my life. Particularly when I was a small child, my relationship with God was very close and personal. I definitely drew on this to write Ren’s character. I was taught by the nuns that God saw everything I did, read all of my thoughts. That to even think of committing a sin, was a sin — whether or not you acted upon it. But I must say that when I prayed to God, I really felt like I was having a conversation with him. I also suspected that God was a lot more understanding than the nuns and priests were making out. This spirituality fell away as I got older.

Regardless, I completely understood where the Puritans were coming from. My parents had explained the history of the witch trials, and that most of it was spurred on by land disputes and old family grudges. When I was a little girl, what frightened me the most about the Salem witch trials was that God stood back and let innocent people die. I’d been taught that God would always deliver justice, and so I had to alter my understanding. In my mind, I rationalized it, and compared God to my own parents. Sometimes they caught me doing something bad, and punished me, but more often than not, they were distracted and I got away with it. In The Good Thief, Ren describes God as a benignly neglectful gardener, pruning His roses and ignoring the weeds, and then one day He notices an encroaching tendril, and His anger comes down mighty and fierce, and He pulls the whole bed out, weeds and roses together.
 

I’ve read that you set out to write an adventure story that you yourself would want to read — one that, among other things, would keep the reader wanting to know what was going to happen next. Robert Louis Stevenson was one of your childhood favorites, and of course The Good Thief has been compared with his work, and with Dickens’. Donna Tartt has also named Stevenson as a formative influence. I know your tastes are eclectic — recently you mentioned Northline, a favorite book that you called “completely spare and beautiful” — but what are your thoughts about the value of plot, an aspect of the novel that is often dismissed as shallow in literary circles nowadays?

As the editor of One Story, I read a lot of wonderful pieces of writing where nothing happens. In fact, sometimes the writing is so good that it almost tricks you into thinking that something did happen.

I have wide tastes as a reader, but these days I find myself drawn to more traditional story-telling. The kind of books that made me fall in love with reading as a kid, staying up late at night with a flashlight under the covers. So although the concept of The Good Thief was an existential one - exploring death and resurrection, through body, spirit and storytelling — the only way I could think of going about it was a straightforward narrative style. I didn’t know that about Donna Tartt, but I love her work, and can see the influence.

Call me old-fashioned, but there is a reason why these “classic” books have held up. Last year I re-read Stevenson for the first time since I was a kid — Treasure Island, Kidnapped and David Balfour — and was surprised by how incredibly tight the language was, and completely gripping the scenes were. Stevenson was a master at building tension and creating characters with only a few strokes of dialogue. I was just as engaged in the story at age 34 as I’d been at age 6.
 

Your title evokes the thief who’s crucified at Jesus’ side. He repents, is forgiven, and receives salvation before he dies. Ren, too, is ultimately redeemed. What other resonances did you intend with the parable? And what relevance do you think these ancient stories have for us now?

The story of The Good Thief is one of redemption at the very last minute, and this holds true in my book — most of the characters find ways to make amends for past wrongs that they’ve committed, one way or another. I also meant to draw on the theme of sacrifice and resurrection. In a more straight forward interpretation, there is quite a bit of thieving in The Good Thief. Ren takes many things — books and stones and food and toys. Benjamin Nab cons money and horses and jewelry and also other people’s trust. All this stealing is really trying to fill up the enormous emotional holes of the characters, and also reflects the other things that have been stolen from them — for Ren, it is not only his physical hand, but also his history, his parents, and any kind of family or love.

As for the relevance of ancient stories — the Bible, myths, Shakespeare or fairy tales — I think that if you want to live an examined life, they can be incredibly important. They are there to help us reflect, and to continue to grasp at those slippery moments of revelation.
 

Sad news on the family front, so I’ll have to introduce this mini-interview with Kathleen Kent by repeating what I’ve said: Her first novel, The Heretic’s Daughter, evokes the fears, diseases, and petty grudges of the witch trials era with an eerie, visceral concreteness. The book was inspired by Kent’s ancestor, Martha Carrier, who was jailed, tried, found to be a witch, and hung. To her dying breath, she refused to confess, or to beg for leniency.

Below Kent answers my questions about the book and Carrier’s legacy.
 

I read in the Dallas Morning News that you first heard of Martha Carrier as a child at your grandma’s house, when she and your mom were gossiping about relatives. Was there a sense that Martha and her cruel treatment resonated in the present?

What I mean is: In

I think one of the most remarkable aspects of the family stories about Martha Carrier was how present she seemed to me growing up. There was hardly a family gathering when her name wasn’t brought up. My mother’s family was very much interested in American history, as well as personal family history, and so there was a great awareness of the events leading up to the Salem witch trials.

Even though it was my grandfather who was the Carrier, my grandmother was the repository of all the generational legends and she was not only fiercely proud of the courageous stand Martha took against her accusers, but very gleeful of the fact that her outspokenness earned her the moniker “The Queen of Hell,” the name given to her by one of the most famous theologians of the day, Cotton Mather. There were quite a few ferocious, independent women in the Carrier family including my grandmother, who smoked at a time when it was considered scandalous, rode wild horses (and a few cows), and was a dead shot with a rifle.
 

There’s nothing like a ferocious Texan woman. (One of my most cherished photos is of my Dallas-born grandmother saluting with a double-barrel shotgun — and she wasn’t even the one who shot my mother’s father in the stomach.)

In

It was always my intent to write fiction. In the first draft, the narrative was in the voice of Martha, but, as there was so much of the family story left to tell after her death, I decided to shift it to Sarah’s point of view. I felt it would give the story greater emotional tension to see the horrors of the witch trials from a child’s perspective. I also felt that the struggle for understanding between a mother and daughter is a universal theme. Sarah’s character is based, in part, on my grandmother’s reckless and unconventional personality.
 

Early in the book, shortly after the family moves to a new town and is, after some debate (and intervention by the town elders), allowed to stay, one of the children is felled by smallpox. Sarah and her baby sister are shipped off in the night to live with their kind aunt and their entertaining, but falsely pious, drunkard uncle.

This section of the story is crucial, both structurally and thematically, because it immerses the reader in a more conventional Puritan household — where fears of God and disease determine so much of the way days are spent — and presents this alternative way of life from the young Sarah’s idealized perspective. When the girls are thrust back into their mother’s care, the reader feels as uncertain and unsteady as they do. Did you do much research, or mostly rely on instinct, in differentiating these households?

What a lot people are accustomed to imagining about Puritans, I believe, is a result of the idealized and romanticised influence of the Victorian ideal; the prim and proper settlers of New England who were industrious, God-fearing and righteous. And they were these things, but they were also, according to the local records, contentious and libelous, full of supersitious dread and malicious gossip. The biggest surprise for me in doing the research was in realizing that the Puritans in character were closer to the Elizabethans than the Victorians.

From this stew of religious repression, fear of the native people, and their mistrust and intolerance of their own neighbors, I built up the two families, the Carriers and the Toothakers. In contrasting the day to day life of these separate and distinct families, I hoped to reveal Sarah’s growing understanding of the harsh and difficult life into which she was born.
 

At the end of the novel, Sarah learns a secret about her father. I was surprised by this plot twist and am still digesting it. Did you know his background from the beginning? Is it, like Martha’s, based in fact? And is this the set-up for a sequel?

Thomas Carrier according to family legends was over 7 feet tall, died at 109 years old, and fought for Cromwell’s army during the English Civil War. Ben Franklin’s paper “Poor Richard” reported in 1735 that two coffins has to be fit together to bury Thomas as he was so tall. These, and other legends about the patriarch, were told with as much enthusiasm as the stories of Martha. I am currently at work on the second novel, which is a prequel to “The Heretic’s Daughter, and it explores the life of Thomas and his involvement in Cromwell’s army and the execution of King Charles I of England .
 

It’s amazing that these legends have been handed down intact through the generations. Julie Barer, your agent and a friend of mine, told me that the girls in your family weren’t allowed to dress up as witches for Halloween because the awareness of Martha’s persecution was ever-present. Do I have that right?

As my mother made most of my Halloween costumes, she had the final word on what I got to wear. It’s not that she forbade me, or was humorless about it, but she actively discouraged it. She felt it trivialized the suffering of innocents and promoted stereotypes of the Salem witches as evil Devil worshippers.
 

A principled and well-reasoned objection. (At my house there was no Halloween, only “Hallelujah.”) Many thanks, Kathleen.