{"id":1818,"date":"2009-06-02T00:01:51","date_gmt":"2009-06-02T04:01:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/?p=1818"},"modified":"2018-02-12T13:48:46","modified_gmt":"2018-02-12T17:48:46","slug":"interview-with-jayne-anne-phillips","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/2009\/06\/02\/interview-with-jayne-anne-phillips\/","title":{"rendered":"Interview with Jayne Anne Phillips"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Interview with Jayne Anne Phillips<\/p>\n

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I am thrilled today to post an interview with Jayne Anne Phillips, whose novel Lark and Termite<\/em> I enjoyed thoroughly and reviewed earlier this year here<\/a>.\u00a0I mention all of the critical acclaim the novel has received.\u00a0It has since been featured in several places, including the New York Review of Books<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

I want to thank her for answering these questions!<\/p>\n

\"jayne-anne-phillips\"<\/p>\n

Q:\u00a0 I am curious about how the idea for Lark and Termite <\/em>came to you. Did the first ideas come after the news of the No Gun Ri massacre\/incident broke in 1999?\u00a0Was No Gun Ri integrated into an already developing idea?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I have actually been “working” on Lark and Termite<\/em>, somewhat consciously, for nearly thirty years.\u00a0That long ago, I was visiting a high school friend in my hometown; she’d rented a small apartment over a detached garage behind a residential house.\u00a0Her window overlooked a grass alley, beautiful, quiet, tire tracks full of white stones or gravel. Several small houses fronted on the alley. There was a 1950s style lawn chair, metal, in front of the house just opposite. In it sat a boy, nine or ten, his legs folded up under him as though he couldn’t feel them; he was holding up to his face a long strip of a blue dry cleaning bag, and blowing on it,\u00a0looking through it.\u00a0He was clearly in his own world.\u00a0I asked my friend, “Who is that, and what is he doing?” “I don’t know,” she said, “but he sits that way for hours.”\u00a0The image really burned itself into me.<\/p>\n

Years later, I went to a birthday party hosted by the American artist Mary Sherman — in Cambridge, for her boyfriend, who happened to have the same birthday as me.\u00a0I was looking at her sketchbook and admired a particular drawing, and because it was my birthday, she ripped the page out and gave it to me. The drawing is the one that appears in the American edition of Lark and Termite<\/em>, opposite the title page.\u00a0She had written “Termite” across the top, with some illegible writing; the drawing reminded me so of the boy, and he became Termite in my mind at that time. I wasn’t really thinking of a book, but I carried the drawing, framed, around with me, moving it house to house.<\/p>\n

The novel began with my question of so long ago, and incorporated birthdays as part of its mystery. Lark’s first words, first section, were the beginning, and she begins with the chair, the alley, the town; she says who Termite is, what he’s like, what she knows and doesn’t know.\u00a0I consciously set the book in 1959 so that he would not be “diagnosed,” labeled, figured out.\u00a0The chair I originally saw suggested that time, and the silence. Lark tells us that his father was killed in Korea, which was the war of the 50s, and she tells us they “never got his body back.” She goes on to describe how Termite loves big sounds, storms, the double railroad tunnel by the river, when the trains go over on the tracks above, the train yard. I had a strong sense of the look of the tunnel, which is a common sight in West Virginia — those stone structures, bridges, tunnels, built during the Depression by the WPA.<\/p>\n

This novel was kismet <\/em>from the beginning.\u00a0I had written at least Lark’s and Nonie’s first sections of the book before September 1999, when the AP broke the story of No Gun Ri.\u00a0A large color photo on the front page showed the tunnel, from above, over the should of a survivor in a pale pink suit. I just wish I could meet that woman some day. At any rate, I recognized the shape, the space, the tunnel, immediately, and knew that was what happened to Leavitt, Termite’s father.\u00a0The parallel worlds of the book began building and layering.<\/p>\n

Q:\u00a0 In my review I make note of what looked like the obvious influence of William Faulkner, particularly his The Sound and the Fury<\/em>, whose elements — <\/strong>the overlapping narratives, the sound and the fury going on in Termite’s inert body — <\/strong>you use in your own unique way.\u00a0What other authors do you feel influenced by?<\/strong><\/p>\n

James Agee.\u00a0Katherine Anne Porter. McCullers.\u00a0Authors who articulate childhood, time, from deep inside.<\/p>\n

Q:\u00a0 Your last novel, MotherKind<\/em>, was published in 2000.\u00a0Did writing Lark and Termite<\/em>, published nine years later, take longer to write than your other novels?\u00a0Was writing it a particular challenge?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Each novel is a particular challenge in its own way. I blame my constant multi-tasking, and it’s true that I can’t write if there are other things to be done — but, in some way, I write the way I do because I live with the material of the books for so long.\u00a0They become alternate worlds, and they must be compelling enough that I can come back to them, despite time and distraction, trauma, loss, life (!) in its goodness as well — and sometimes the distance even seems to solve problems, or advance my understanding, when I enter the book again. It’s always been five to nine years between books for me.<\/p>\n

The challenge with this one was the immense problem of all it encompasses, sustaining parallel worlds, really through language and mystery.\u00a0Language is, I think, a layered mystery that encompasses history, and dimensions beyond the physical. Language is consciousness itself, which, like music, prayer, thought, is more than physical, and bridges time.<\/p>\n

Q:\u00a0 On your website you have a page called “The Secret Country” which contains many photographs, letters, and other items from various time periods in which your books are set.\u00a0In Lark and Termite<\/em> you begin each day’s section with a picture from a variety of angles of the bridge at No Gun Ri.\u00a0What role do these visual elements play in your writing?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I often build up a sort of artifact collection around the book I’m writing, private things that help me hang on to the work, enter the work, get inside the world that is still unknown to me.\u00a0Some of the photographs on the website I discovered in hindsight.\u00a0For Lark and Termite<\/em>, I had a movie\u00a0that I took, many years later, of the alley — it looked exactly the same, except that the house where he lived was gone, replaced by a garden.<\/p>\n

And when I was researching No Gun Ri, I depended heavily on the AP series, which won a Pulitzer for Martha Mendoza, Charles Hanley, and Sang-Hun Choe, and did further research — including emailing various travel book companies.\u00a0Robert Nilsen, a writer for Sun Moon guide books, happened to be in South Korea when I reached him, and he generously volunteered to go to the tunnel and photograph it for me.\u00a0The black and white, cropped versions, the color translated to black and white, are the photographs he sent me, and allowed us to use in the novel.\u00a0They get tighter as we enter into Leavitt’s mind, into what’s happening to everyone in the tunnels.\u00a0The post cards of Main Street (that Lark collects), the small moon pitcher Termite loves, are all things, real things, that were part of the process.<\/p>\n

Q:\u00a0 You are also an acclaimed short story writer.\u00a0Your first compilation, Sweathearts<\/em>, was published in 1976, followed by another, Counting<\/em> in 1978, and then Black Ticket<\/em> in 1979. Since then you’ve written five novels, interspersed with collections of short stories.\u00a0Is there a different sense of fulfillment when completing a novel than when completing a short story?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Well, yes, if only because a novel has to be sustained over such a long period, and the arc is so much longer and more complex.\u00a0I loved writing stories, but I feel as though my stories and poems are inside my novels.\u00a0I often publish excerpts along the way, that work as stories or focused excerpts.\u00a0My books are mysteries to me — for me, material dictates form, meaning that the material teaches me how to write the book, what form the book will take.<\/p>\n

Q:\u00a0 Has your work become more focused on novels?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I find that the novel, as I conceive of it and write it, gives me the long arc of time I need in order to really enter the work.\u00a0I want that long, familial form — which is never a given, and always a gamble.<\/p>\n

Q:\u00a0 This might not be a fair question, but what is your favorite short story you’ve written?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I don’t play favorites! To me, the work is a continuum.\u00a0Everything I’ve written had to precede what came next.\u00a0It is one body of work.<\/p>\n

Q:\u00a0 What are some of your favorite short stories?<\/strong><\/p>\n

“Pale Horse, Pale Rider” comes to mind, as perfection in itself, but there are dozens of stories I love.<\/p>\n

Q:\u00a0 This book was set in your native West Virginia.\u00a0Now that you are the director of the MFA program at Rutgers Newark, can we New Jersey residents hope to see a book set in or around this area?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Hmmmm, well, in some way, perhaps. Perhaps when I write my “academic” novel!<\/p>\n

Q:\u00a0 And finally, what are three novels that you recommend we all read?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Here are four.\u00a0You’ll love them. I live by them.<\/p>\n