Maria Flook
Author
of
Invisible Eden talks with Robert Birnbaum
Writer Maria Flook has published two novels, Open Water
and Family Night, and a book of short stories, You
Have the Wrong Man, and two books of poetry, Sea Room
and Reckless Wedding, as well as a memoir of sorts, My
Sister's Life: The Story of My Sister's Disappearance. Her
latest book is a true crime story, Invisible Eden: A Story of
Love and Murder on Cape Cod. She has taught at Warren Wilson
and the Bennington College low-residency program as well as the
Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Currently
Maria Flook teaches at Emerson College. She lives in Truro, Massachusetts,
and her next novel will be published by Little, Brown in the fall
of 2004. She is at work at yet another novel.
Invisible Eden is the story of fashion writer Christa
Worthington's murder in the small Cape Cod town of Truro. And beyond
that it is the story of a woman escaping the glitz and glitter of
the fashion world to focus on the up bringing and nurturing of her
out-of wedlock daughter. As Maria Flook relates below, "I hadn't
had any previous impulse to write about Worthington, but already
I had felt very connected in many ways. Here was a resident of my
town, a woman, an independent woman and she was a writer. She wasn't
the same kind of writer I had been for the past 25 years, but she
had been a professional writer for the last twenty … Her family
background, her baby's dilemma, her career path, it all started
to interest me."
Robert Birnbaum: Where were you in your life before
you came upon the idea for this book?
Maria Flook: I didn't come up with an idea to
write a book about a murder. Like every resident of Truro, I woke
up one morning to hear on the local radio station that a woman had
been murdered in our town. I had broken my ankle a few weeks before
and I was just learning how to get around on crutches. I was beginning
a new semester at Emerson where I teach and just getting back and
forth to work was my biggest problem. I think my reaction to Christa
Worthington’s murder was at first quite typical, surprise
and curiosity. I had just completed a novel. I had just broken my
ankle. But I just reacted to a murder in our town with surprise
and interest. The more I learned about the event; certain things
started to feel familiar to me. Christa was only two years younger
than me. We’re of the same generation of women. New feminists
of the ‘70s. I learned she had been a single mother. I had
been a single mother with a little girl the exact same age as Christa’s
baby girl. I identified with that. Then, I learned about the father
of her out-of-wedlock baby. It was Tony Jackett. I'd known Tony
for years. So I was interested in that. I had no inkling that I
would write a book about Christa’s murder, Tony or not. Then
a couple of weeks passed and I got a call from Random House, from
an editor who I’d worked with on a previous book. He had read
a New York Times story. He told me, “I saw the heading ‘Truro
Author is murdered.’ I thought it was you!” Then he
told me that they thought I would be the perfect writer to investigate
the story and write about it. I hadn't had any previous impulse
to write about Worthington, but already I had felt very connected
in many ways. Here was a resident of my town, a woman, an independent
woman and she was a writer. She wasn't the same kind of writer I
had been for the past 25 years, but she had been a professional
writer for the last twenty years, and she started to interest me.
Her family background, her baby's dilemma, her career path, it all
started to interest me. I thought about it for about a week. I wrote
a proposal. Of course, I have never written a murder book, but they
didn’t seem to want a formula murder book. So I agreed to
do it.
RB: Where were you in your life? What were you
planning, had this book not come to you?
MF: I had finished a novel. This novel was actually
set on the outer cape. It was a Cape Cod novel, and so at the time
I agreed to write the Worthington book, I had already written my
first Cape Cod book. A publisher had interest in the novel and had
wanted me to write a new ending. He thought it too bleak. I wrote
the new ending, and I think it was, in fact, better. This novel
was inspired by Hardy’s Jude the Obscure—now
that’s a bleak book. That’s the one where the little
kid, ‘Father Time’ kills all his siblings then hangs
himself. Hardy stopped writing fiction because the response to Jude
was so negative. He’s one of my heroes, not just one of my
influences. I was still waiting to hear from that publisher about
my novel when I took on the Christa Worthington book. So it turned
out that Invisible Eden would be published before my novel,
I’m happy to say that Little, Brown is publishing that novel
next fall.
RB: You were asked to change the ending and lop
off a chapter.
MF: They asked me begin at the second chapter
instead of where I began. They asked me to do a lot.
RB: Where was your agent in this back and forth?
MF: She was very helpful. I agreed to reexamine
the ending of the book, which was very desolate. And, of course,
I didn't write a ‘happy’ ending. But it’s more
hopeful. Somebody joked with me when I said I had written a happier
ending. They said, "Happier? Your character is still on probation."
[laughs]
RB: What are the degrees of desolation?
My
characters are disenfranchised, usually. And they are also
the privileged who vacation side by side with the disenfranchised.
I don't write about the successful dynamic business tycoons
of our country, unless they are side by side with my real
fascination, the underclass. |
MF: I had a woman character that had been done
away with in a pretty violent setting. She had ended up institutionalized.
So in my revised ending she is back…
RB: Being given medication and…
MF: She is back and she is in a program or something.
Something more optimistic. It was very peculiar to write the nonfiction
Worthington book after writing a novel set on the lower cape. My
novel has a mysterious death in its central story and my characters
reflect certain aspects of the Worthington book. My characters are
disenfranchised, usually. And they are also the privileged who vacation
side by side with the disenfranchised. I don't write about the successful
dynamic business tycoons of our country, unless they are side by
side with my real fascination, the underclass.
RB: I am interested how this chess game is played.
This book [Invisible Eden] is a best seller.
MF: I think it’s very bizarre. Unbelievable.
I just got a call from my editor. It's gone into a tenth printing.
RB: So you have a novel that you are happy with
that you wrote. Does the success of the published book give you
juice with a publisher when you are trying to place a book?
MF: [sighs] I don't know. I don't know what it
gives me. I've never been in this position before.
RB: You'd think writing a bestseller would change
the power dynamics for the writer.
MF: I think it's all smoke and mirrors. I really
do.
RB: [laughs] Seriously?
MF: A little bit.
RB: You are a year writing veteran.
MF: Starting out as a poet. Yeah, in fact when
I sold my first book of poems to Houghton Mifflin editor there…
RB: When they were in that neat building at Two
Park Street?
MF: Yeah, it was great building. Little offices,
books stacked floor to ceiling, editors at rickety desks like Bartelby
the Scrivener. The offices in the new Bertelsmann building are decorated
with minimalist plastic textiles like Ikea furnishings. But at Houghton
Mifflin Robie McCauley was the editor-in-chief, when I sold my first
book of poems. They told me, "You are getting the biggest advance
ever given, bigger than Lowell, bigger than Anne Sexton.”
They named all these famous poets. I thought, "God, that’s
great!" But do you know how much that “biggest poetry
advance” was?
RB: $750
MF: Eight Hundred. Yeah. I don't know what they
are giving now. I have always been a non-earning literary writer,
at the far end of the spectrum—as far as financial gain, I've
been in the debit column.
RB: Is somebody going to write a book about you
and how your life has changed?
MF: No, no. It hasn't changed my life except it's
made my life…
RB: You've never been in this position before.
MF: Well, I don't really know what this position
is. I think it's great people are reading my work. I have been doing
some of these book events and the people who have been coming up
to me are people who haven't read any of my other books. They have
bought Invisible Eden in chain bookstores, maybe even at
Costco and Walmart, as well as the independent stores. These readers
say things like, "I really like your style of writing."
They've never read literary fiction or nonfiction. So I have not
only interested them with the story, but they suddenly started to
see that there is a way that some writers write that may be more
lyric or a kind of writing that has more introspection, a more literary
examination happening it its pages. And they are being indoctrinated
into that with this book. So I am very happy with that. Maybe suddenly
I'll get a readership.
RB: Maybe suddenly?
 MF:
With more people. Mostly, my readers are very egghead, literary
type readers. And these new readers are asking me about my last
book, which was the book about my sister's disappearance. That has
to be special ordered ‘print by demand’; hopefully that
book will go back into print. Back on the shelves.
RB: Maybe not, given the sudden discovery by big
retailers of the used book market. In which case, you wouldn't benefit
anyway.
MF: Benefit? I just like the idea people who want
to read a book can find it somewhere. My books can be found in used
books stores. But they are not where a new reader might necessarily
find them.
RB: I suppose I should trot out the old saw about
when Chou Enlai, the number two man in the Chinese Communist hierarchy,
being asked his thoughts on the French Revolution—he responded,
"Too soon to tell." I suspect this is a big thing in your
life, and who can know how big events change our lives until later,
if then?
MF: Right, right.
RB: Tell me about the title?
MF: Truro and the Lower Cape--to many people it’s
a place they go for sanctuary, for an ideal of life and, some people
might say, to escape. It's a wilderness paradise, which is what
I like about it. Even though it's almost reaching build-out, the
National Seashore owns so many acres of both coastal area and uplands;
it’s a secured paradise, at least for now. It’s Eden.
It's invisible in the sense that it is very remote and not too many
people who haven’t gotten a taste of it ever seek it. People
who are really die-hard lower Cape fans, who want to live here year
round or who at least want to come here every year, are still few.
In that sense, it has real technical reasons to be called “Eden”
and “invisible.” But, of course, in a metaphoric sense
it has many other weighted meanings. And, actually in one of the
selectman's reports, they pledge to try to keep “Truro the
Garden of Eden of Massachusetts.” And Men's Journal listed
the “Fifty Best Places to Live” with Truro at the top
of the list. They had interviewed a resident who had said, "Yeah,
it's just about invisible out here now and we want to keep it that
way." So that's where I really got the title but, of course,
it has that metaphoric wallop…You may search for Rome in Rome
but . . .
RB: There is this section of the book where Christa
goes to Morocco on assignment and speaks with various wealthy, uh,
types…
MF: Christa did go to many rarified resorts and
rich people's Edens, places that were full of moneyed people. She
wrote about islands and ski resorts. I love one article she wrote,
“Letter from Gstad," where she describes how they send
a helicopter up a mountain to collect a glove that some rich kid
had dropped from the ski lift. Of course, she lived in Gramercy
Park, which can be an urban Eden. But Truro was that one wilderness
Eden that she gravitated back to.
RB: What upsets people about this book? Is there
a non-fiction book that involves people that doesn't upset anyone?
MF: Serious non-fiction usually addresses issues
about the human grain and the human condition, events that have
volatility or some distress involved. We are not writing books about
people splashing in hot tubs after happy successes at work or full
tilt easy street scenarios. I write about human problems. Human
troubles cause distress. In this instance, there are very particular
reasons why there has been some negative responses to the book.
One, it's about a murder victim. And the victim’s loved ones
and some of her friends, even her friends manqué might react
to an outsider who comes in to talk about their loved one. Two,
a small town is often sensitive to any portrait a writer makes about
their tiny, insular world. Kidder’s Home Town and
Junger’s Perfect Storm suffered from the same reactions
from Gloucester and Northampton.
RB: You are considered an outsider?
MF: I've been living in Truro for twelve years.
But I took my first baby steps on Cape Cod. I am not an outsider
to Cape Cod. I have family from East Sandwich, who were here in
the nineteenth century. In 1980 I came to the lower cape when I
received a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.
I developed many friends, and I have my own community in the Lower
Cape who don't think of me as an outsider. But the Worthingtons
probably think of me of an outsider because I haven't been in town
for a hundred years like their family. But in New England a hundred
years is nothing. Let’s go back to 1620, remember? I didn't
know Christa personally. So in that sense I am an outsider. But
I think that after writing the book I know Christa in a completely
authentic way—I know her as no one else can know her. But
the family’s reaction has many legitimate reasons for distress.
They are still in grief, those who really did love her. Though I
will tell you I have talked to a number of Christa's close friends
who said she had a love/hate relationship with some her family members.
RB: Wasn't one of them selling a movie treatment?
MF: Jan Worthington. From the many people I have
interviewed, Christa and Jan did not have a hundred percent happy
relationship. There was some volatility, competition, some envy
and some ups and downs. Of course, all family members have ups and
downs. I'm the first one to say my family had serious ups and downs.
But I think there are a couple of reasons why I have a lot of trouble
from the Worthington family and from the town. I came in to this
book immediately after the murder. Too soon. How rude! How inconsiderate
for a writer to approach people right after a loved family member
had been murdered. I mean it was really horrible. I asked my friend
[writer] Tracy Kidder, "How do you approach people when they
don't want to talk and they are in grief?" He said, "You
try them a couple of times and then you have to let go and just
leave them alone." It was really hard to approach these people—within
four weeks of Christa being killed I was calling up the Worthington
family and writing them a letter en masse, asking for their cooperation.
In an early telephone conversation, very brief, with Jan Worthington,
I remember her yelling at me over the phone. She said it was none
of my business. It was private. Already wearing my journalist’s
visor my first reaction was to tell her, “A murder is not
a private matter. Murder is a public event in the community theater.”
It enters the frontal consciousness of our town and should be somehow
examined.
RB: What about Emily Dooley of the Cape Cod Times?
Wasn't she doing the same thing for her newspaper?
Serious
non-fiction usually addresses issues about the human grain
and the human condition, events that have volatility or some
distress involved. We are not writing books about people splashing
in hot tubs after happy successes at work or full tilt, easy
street scenarios.
But I think that after writing the book, I know Christa in
a completely authentic way—I know her as no one else
can know her. |
MF: Yes.
RB: What about the reaction she encountered?
MF: She had difficulty too. They weren't happy
with any of the press that was calling. They were turning away national
press, TV press. Their response was worse for a local resident that
was actually writing a book. They immediately assumed I was doing
it for monetary reasons. And, of course, I wasn't. Charlie Conrad,
my editor, was interviewed for a local Cape Cod paper when the book
made the best seller list. He said, "We’re surprised.
If we had wanted a best seller we would never have asked Maria Flook.”
Basically he said, "She doesn't sell." I would never write
a book unless I was interested in the story. My last book about
my own sister is an example. That story was the linchpin event of
my childhood. It shaped my whole life. In fact, my sister's disappearance
is probably what made me become a writer. Because it made me a witness.
From witness I went to becoming a writer. I have never written for
monetary gain but for deeper, even more compelling reasons than
just getting bread on the table.
RB: Do you still talk to Dan Frank who was your
editor at Pantheon?
MF: Yeah, I still talk to him. He was my mentor.
I was devastated when they let me go because I didn't make money.
RB: No surprise that it's become a harsher business.
MF: I'm telling you. You really have to pay out.
Even though I got really good reviews… so who knows. That's
always been my return, that my peers [respect my work] and the high
bar I set for myself and that maybe I leaped over that high bar
or at least crashed through it. So it's never been a monetary game
for me.
RB: You did a story about a murder, a real event.
People who are mentioned are upset because no one ever is portrayed
the way they think they should be portrayed.
MF: A lot of the people that are my sources in
the book are totally positive. They are not the ones that squeal
and squeak and squawk.
RB: Accepting that everyone's thresholds of sensitivity
is variable there was one area you covered that I questioned. There
is a couple whose sister Linda Silva was murdered and Nancy and
John Burch are still campaigning for a solution to this case. And
you suggest that Nancy had gotten her fifteen minutes of fame as
if her motivation for pursuing this case was personal aggrandizement
as opposed to purer motives.
MF: Nancy did gain a great deal of identity from
the death of her sister. She actually flowered in this identity
as someone who tried to keep it rolling and tried to always keep
it in the news. She constantly wrote letters to the local newspaper
about her sister's death and in memoriam poems and things like that.
I did get to interview her, and I talked to people who know her
well. For her, her sister’s death became an obsession that's
not healthy. Recently a suspect in that case has been arrested.
RB: How old is the case?
MF: Probably about seven years old. She was killed
seven years ago. So they actually arrested this guy and he is kind
of nut case, a guy who does concrete forms in Eastham. Now that’s
a detail that interests me. So saying that [about Nancy Burch] was
really based on a lot of information. And it was probably a little
tough on the character, but she is somebody whose concern seemed
to be very, very personal, making herself into a self-proclaimed
heroine of the tragedy. The funny thing is that the Worthingtons,
in their own ways, are finding little niches of their public face
and it's funny how some people, like her aunt Diana, who is totally
private and very disturbed by the murder and was closer to Christa
than the others, isn't coming forward with any remarks. Some of
the other ones are very aware that they are players in the public
media event. But it's been very difficult because if you ask anyone
who knows me and is actually my friend and compatriot they would
probably hopefully all tell you that I do not take any pleasure
in causing any distress to anybody. But being a writer, I wrote
about distressful things about my own family—they weren't
happy. My allegiance is to finding the truth that I can find about
the human problem that I am looking at.
RB: So you are a novelist who takes on a real
life situation. Putting aside the notion of the unreliable narrator
that is a mainstay of fiction, why should I as a reader accept the
things that seemingly are not directly verifiable, conversations
and events.
 MF:
I give verification, right and left in every moment of the text.
RB: Here's what I wondered about. She has sex
with a lover who is a married man, on a little train in a French
amusement park. Who reported and verified that? The lover?
MF: Not him but many of her friends corroborated
the details of that story. All of those events are facts. There
is nothing invented in the book. None of the events, none of the
step-by-step occurrences or moments in the book are invented. What
I did was I dramatized scenes, but the information in those scenes
are corroborated by the sources that I spoke to—which were
her childhood friends, her high school friends, her college friends,
her ex-lovers, many ex-lovers. I talked to eight of her ex-lovers.
Hours of face to face with Tony Jackett and Tim Arnold, too. The
only people who didn't speak to me were her family members. And
a couple of her professional associates who didn’t want to
come forward, and some of her “closest” friends. It
someone is unwilling to speak about a friend it leads me to believe
they are uncomfortable with their feelings about him/her, or about
themselves, about how might they appear?
RB: Early in the book Christa and Ava are at an
ice cream stand near town and Christa thinks she sees Tony Jackett
drive up. It turns out that it wasn't him. You follow that with
a lot of interior emotional description. Was that from something
that Christa reported to someone?
MF: This, of course, was from people telling me
what it was like for her living in a town with the man who abandoned
her with his baby. Tony Jackett had not seen the baby for the first
eighteen months of its life. Finally, he actually he did one day
meet his daughter, He stopped and said, "Cootchie cootchie
coo." This is from his own words, "Yeah, I stopped and
said, 'Cootchie cootchie coo'." He didn't see that baby for
eighteen months. So she was in that town taking care of her baby
and often seeing him around town. She was living in this funny situation
where she was mad at him. But she was not over him. So she had that
tension of when you see an ex lover, there is this anger and also
there is desire. And that's the moment where I decided to try to
evoke this confusion in a scene. I tried to create a scene as a
'felt moment'—instead of a dry reportorial moment where I
could have said, “Sometimes Christa would see Tony in town
and she would feel very uncomfortable."
RB: [laughs]
MF: Instead I dramatize critical events in a scene.
My own daughter asked me this question. She said, "Where did
you find out about the trapped bird in Christa’s upstairs
bedroom?" That trapped bird in the bedroom is a dramatized
instant. Every August barn swallows collect at the beach at Corn
Hill before they migrate. They flock and swarm for a week or two.
They are in and out. I had learned that Christa had collected all
this fashion attire she kept amassed in her upstairs rooms. Friends
had told me that she had racks of this weird couture stuff that
she had collected. None of it was really great stuff but it was
just what she had collected during her recent career, and it was
all in plastic, puffed up with issue paper. I wanted to explain
how she had some of these artifacts and so I created a scene with
a swallow trapped in her upstairs rooms, a bird flying around in
all this couture stuff. She releases it from a window. I wasn’t
watching this scene, but it’s authentic in every way.
RB: Does it strike you as possible that there
is an adverse reaction to the fact that you have this single woman
who had an active sex life and seemed unabashed in talking about.
Had two or three abortions…
MF: There is a weird moralism that has exploded
around this book. This moralism comes from the Boston media community
but a lot of it comes from the Worthingtons themselves. They are
the ones that bring up that they are displeased with how the DA
talked about Christa and about my evoking scenes and releasing information
about Christa's sexual life. Her sex life is only part of her portrait
in the book. There are no judgments made within the text; it’s
the Worthingtons who seem to be saying a single mother shouldn't
want to have an active sex life.
RB: But she did.
MF: She did. She had her relationship with Tim
Arnold and she was seen hanging out at the local heterosexual tavern
the Squealing Pig and she also had many relationships in her life
with married men. And that's another part of the moralism. Many
of her partners were married. She saw married men here and when
she was in Europe working in the fashion industry. Some of her friends
have told me that she might have gravitated towards married men
because they were less of a threat. She knew they were not going
to marry her so she couldn't feel rejected. They weren't going to
leave their wives.
RB: A friend of mine who is savvy and sophisticated
in many ways thinks that you painted Christa Worthington as a slut.
Where does that reaction come from?
MF: I never use that language or vernacular at
all. The moralism is coming from a weird area of response from a
certain kind of person. I have had a lot of responses from women
who recognize her as one of our generation. We are the women that
came of age in the late '70s. We were told that we could have it
all. Career, freedom, and family— all three of those things.
A lot of women I know have had many partners, many of us got married
and divorced and maybe remarried. Christa was unusual because she
never tied the knot. But the moralism is strange, almost period.
Not of now.
RB: Tony Jackett is not being castigated for his
life long playboy, Romeo character.
MF: I know. It's hilarious or annoying, depending.
They are calling Christa promiscuous but he is just a romantic rogue.
It is a double standard.
RB: I know you said that you have no interest
in hurting anyone. You close the book with a report of Ava's ongoing
and perhaps life long therapy. At any point in the writing of this
book have you thought about what effect her reading of this book
would have on Christa's child?
 MF:
When Ava reads this book she will see that Christa wanted her. Christa
loved her wholly. In the first two and a half years of that baby's
life Christa was there for her. Ava was her whole world. I think
that one reason Ava is doing so well now is not just that she is
in a very good setup with Amyra Chase and her husband. Amyra has
a whole monkey house of kids and she is a very loving woman as far
as I have seen. I don't know her personally, but I think one of
the smartest things Christa did was to name Amyra as guardian for
her baby. But even before her new mom, Ava had a fantastic start
in those first two and half years. One reason she is so strong and
doing so well now is because Christa immersed herself in that baby.
Ava will have to absorb and analyze the more distressing facts about
her mom, but I also think that she can admire a lot about her mother
when she reads this book. Christa was a savvy, individualist, not
a careerist but a woman who really loved to write. And I don't know
why she never stepped aside and tried to write her novel like some
of her friends suggested. That's a hard row to hoe and maybe she
didn't have the kind of commitment you need for that. Because in
fashion writing you have immediate return. A small return.
RB: Easy targets and pickings.
MF: I did admire a lot of her writing. Her approaches
and methods were a little more interesting than typical fashion
writing. One of her editors, Jeff Stone of Chic Simple, called her
a fashion anthropologist. He used to have to edit out all this extraneous
information that she'd find out about a textile—where it was
made and what the economic upheaval was in the country that made
it. Or the silkworms that
were endangered. Her interests were deeper than just the surface
Fashionista stuff.
RB: Is it too soon to ask you what now?
MF: I am writing a new novel. But my editor has
told me he wants to get together and talk about some new ideas for
a non-fiction book. You see this where it gets strange. I just can't
pull a non-fiction book out of my hat. If I have an interest in
a story that's a non-fiction story I might consider writing another
one, but I am not a non-fiction writer for hire who is going to
go and write something that somebody offers me unless I connect
with it. And the only reason I think I connected so immediately
with Christa, it was just weighted towards familiarity for me. I
had too much in common. We lived in the same town, around the same
age…writers, babies. She was a nursing mother—they made
a big thing about this nursing mother and "Oh should she be
nursing at two and a half?" I had two kids. I nursed a total
of six years.
RB: Are you still teaching?
MF: I am writer-in-residence at Emerson. I was
at Bennington low residency for the last seven years, but then last
year I came over to Emerson where I teach in their graduate program.
I teach fiction and I will be there again in September.
RB: Because you want to teach?
MF: Because I need the money.
RB: Another way of asking is, if you could, would
you write full time?
MF I do like teaching. I do like the connection with young people
and also with a forum, talking about what I love—which is
fiction and writing. So in my fiction workshops we just don't look
at student work. I always assign a couple of stories by writers
that I admire and I like to look at again. Teaching to me is a nourishing
thing. It's not nourishing when it's more teaching than my own writing.
I certainly found working in the low residency format where you
actually write...you are on campus twice a year, ten or twelve days,
but then you go home. And I would have five students send me their
work every month: a story and critical annotations of their work.
So it would be a packet of twenty-five of thirty pages. Which I
had to turn around and write a letter about. It was really exhaustive
work, and it is a great way to be taught because you are getting
a one to one from a teacher—if it's a good teacher like me
who send back five pages, singled spaced addressing their story,
its conceit, its carry through, all different aspects of stuff.
But after doing that for five students—and it would take me
a day per student, at least. By the time I put it all back in the
mail my eyes would be…whereas when you go into the classroom
you don't actually have to write it out and you are speaking and
all of your students at once. It doesn't distract you quite as much
from your work. But I like being in a classroom.
RB: Whose writing do you put into your curriculum?
MF: I am teaching, as I do every summer, at the
Fine Arts Work Center, I hand out a packet of stories and we talk
about stories in the first part of the class everyday. I always
hand out "Glissando" [in Living to a Hundred]
by Robert Boswell. It's this incredibly wonderful story. It's dead
ahead realism with all the aspects that I like in a realistic story.
Humor, tragedy and an undercurrent of desire and characters who
you can really sink your teeth into. I'll hand out a story by Annie
Proulx, a story by Edna O’Brien. Edna O’Brien is one
of my favorite writers.
RB: One of those damaged woman writers?
MF: Those are Christa's words. Edna O’Brien
is an exquisitist. That's my word. She is over the top in exquisite
writing. But her stories really connect with me. They're about the
female problem of matrimony and matriarchy and country and place.
That's what she addresses. Also, I'll hand out a Cheever story or
a Murakami story. I am always learning about new writers and if
I find a story then I use it class.
RB: You have published a collection of stories.
Do you still write short form fiction?
MF: In the past several years I haven't. I have
had a project in front of me for the last six years. I did the sister
book, then the novel I completed and then immediately into this
book. So I am not a writer who dabbles at stories. Some writers
will always be writing stories even when they are writing a novel.
I did publish a book of stories that I really worked on and believed
in and refined over a period of eight or nine years. And I will
l probably write more stories. I also don't write too many poems
anymore. I have written some love poems. You know I have published
two books of poems. I was a trained poet
RB: Have you read anything recently that you thought
was terrific?
MF: I read Austerlitz [WG Seebold] —I
like that writer a lot. He is new to me and interesting. And I mentioned
Murakami. When I read The Wind-up Bird Chronicle that took
my breath away. And then I went back and read Norwegian Wood,
which was a different and weirder kind of book. He's been around
a while but I was late to him.
RB: It is still fashionable to decry the state
of literary culture…
MF: I don't do that. Well I am always reading
something. What do I have on my…you know what I finally read?
After I did that big whirlwind media blitz I wanted to just relax
and be entertained. I read Atonement. I enjoyed as it as
entertainment. I don't think I bought it.
RB: I haven't read it yet. I loved Enduring
Love.
MF: Enduring Love was much better than
this. This was a really escapist little thing. I liked Amsterdam
too. What I liked was The Cement Garden. He [McEwen] had
a slow start and then he just exploded. You know, I mention him
in the book, because he was at University of East Anglia where Christa
went as a junior from Vassar. Small world.
RB: Well, let’s talk again when the novel
is published.
MF: Hey, you never asked me about the DA? (laughs)
____
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Posted:
September 26, 2003
