THE CHIRON REVIEW INTERVIEW Summer, 1991 LYN LIFSHIN INTERVIEWS JANICE EIDUS Lyn Lifshin: In an interview, Sharon Olds was asked if the persona in her most raw, startling poems is really her. She was also asked how she deals with being asked that question so often. It seems that intense, explicit, seemingly personal writing is—especially by women—supposed to be confessional, to be "true," to be about the writer, herself. Are you asked this in interviews or after a reading? How do you respond? Does it bother you when people confuse you with your subjects, seem more interested in your life than in your characters? Janice Eidus: Well, I'm rarely asked that question these days. I take on so many diverse voices, so many characters, in my fiction. My narrators are male, female, rich, poor, urban, rural, etc. Occasionally, I do meet up with readers who seem frustrated that I'm not more overtly autobiographical. What I love is the challenge of transforming the real, of making it more real, in a way. Writing is definitely social for me: I observe the social scene. My writing isn't necessarily my experiences, but I transform what I see, and then I make it mine. The title story of my collection of stories, VITO LOVES GERALDINE, takes place in the real world of the northeast Bronx during the real decade of the 1950s. It's filled with very real allusions to teenage love and doo-wop music. At the same time, it's rather mythical, in that it retells—and playfully subverts—the age-old story of the woman who waits years and years and years for her man to return to her. And while it isn't autobiographical, it is an homage to the neighborhood I grew up in, in the northeast Bronx. The story is also my homage to the kids who were a generation older than I was, who were teenagers in the fifties. I idolized those kids, the girls with their teased and sprayed hair and their skintight Capri pants, the boys with their pompadours. My idol was Dion of Dion and the Belmonts, who was a Bronx rock n' roller. So the story is also my homage to Dion, and the rock n' roll of the fifties, which I still love to listen to. And the initial impulse for my novel, FAITHFUL REBECCA, came from what happened to me and my childhood best friend. We had met in grade school, we grew up together, and then in our early twenties we had a very dramatic parting of the ways. She went off to India and became a follower of various gurus, and she denounced the arts and became extremely critical of the way I was living. This happened just when I'd become most intense about writing. I was very angry at her. I also felt as though I'd lost her, and I was grieving. So eventually, I wrote a novel about two women who've been best friends since childhood and who come to a dramatic parting of the ways. However, in FAITHFUL REBECCA, the parting took on unusual, surreal dimensions, which then led me into certain artistic directions. And the personal experience became transformed, almost unrecognizable. I'm honestly not sure that if my childhood best friend were to read FAITHFUL REBECCA, she would realize that she had any part in my initial artistic impulse. So, since I'm not writing the story of my life, there's no obvious autobiographical continuity at work. My concerns are somewhat different. I'm interested, first of all, in telling a good story. But I'm also brimming over with all sorts of "big" ideas, you know—the nature of passion and obsession, of good and evil. If something interesting happens to me on Monday, I'm never motivated on Tuesday to sit down and just write ab-out it. I don't keep a journal these days, either. I'm never motivated to write, literally, about events in my own childhood. But, clearly, it's all in there, if transformed. LL: The dreamlike, the fantastic, and the quirky and surreal are a mark of your work. Do you ever use dreams in your writing? Do you have any idea where that fantastic quality comes from? In my own work, at times, the surreal gets into the writing more than at other times. Yet, I can't quite put my finger on where it comes from. For me, the "mad girl" poems often allow the strange and fantastic in more than the narrative poems. Are you drawn to surreal-ism in the visual arts, as well? In general, are there any particular kinds of paintings you like most? Music? Films? JE: Well, I'm drawn to a movie like Blue Velvet, by David Lynch, for instance, which looks at the dark underside of this supposedly sweet, lovely small town. I like to look at the undersides of things, at what goes on beneath the surface, the subtext beneath the text. I'm interested in the unconscious, in characters who aren't always fully aware of why they behave or think the way they do. I find that provocative for the reader, because then the reader has wonder, too. I feel very much a part of a historical tradition of artists. For instance, one of the things I love to do in my fiction is to subvert myth and yet honor it too, simultaneously. By working with a vampire theme—something I've been doing recently—I'm carrying on a dialogue with all of the writers—and filmmakers, too—before me who have worked with the myth. We're all, over the centuries, playing with, subverting, and honoring the same myth, and that's extraordinarily thrilling to me. I'm responding to Bram Stoker, and Sheridan LeFanu, and Anne Rice, and to Roman Polanski and Andy Warhol, too, all at once—really, to anyone who's worked lovingly with it. In much of my fiction, there's a major theme of the triumph of the imagination, about characters transforming themselves. Rebecca, the main character of FAITHFUL REBECCA, and Vanna, the performance artist in my story VANNA, both obsessively try on all of these stereotypical female "roles" in order to figure out how to live in this crazy world—sort of the way Cindy Sherman does in her photographs. There's an enormous sense of play—serious-but-fun play—in my writing, and I'm frequently drawn to that kind of play in the work of other writers, and other artists, in general. I love Manual Puig's fiction, for instance. And the music of people as diverse as Diamonds Galas, Luciano Berio, the Rolling Stones, and Loretta Lynn...I love The Ridiculous Theater's drag/camp/serious version of Camille, and Greta Garbo's exquisitely beautiful version, and the original novel by Dumas... LL: What are your biggest fears involving writing? JE: Many of my fears are about the conservative times we're living in, and the way the arts are so devalued, and artists so feared. These are hard times artistically and intellectually; there's a repressiveness, a fearfulness in the atmosphere. There seems to be a dark cloud hovering over artistic expression. I'm constitutionally set up to question authority, and that means artistic and social conventions of all sorts. Questioning takes the willingness to provoke and probe; I strive in my work to celebrate the removal of limits, the end of repressiveness for women, and men—for all people. I'm less concerned with specific doctrines than that I embrace a freedom to explore one's self, one's needs...I hope to "raise consciousness" by posing questions rather than by providing absolute answers, by looking at alternative lives, and by taking big risks. My story, THE CELIBACY CLUB, which appeared recently in THE VILLAGE VOICE LITERARY SUPPLEMENT, is a very satirical story, very funny, I hope, about a group of people who form a Celibacy Club. They celebrate their celibacy by consuming enormous quantities of cookies and cakes and discussing how horrible sex is. But the main character ends up dropping out of the Celibacy Club and having wild, wild sex with a gorgeous man, and adoring every moment of it. I wanted to write a story against repression. So I wrote this funny, quirky, and, ultimately, defiant, story celebrating sexuality for sexuality's sake—about the pleasures of uninhibited, expressive sexuality on its own terms. LL: You've written book and film reviews, plays, poetry, and nonfiction—do you feel they interfere with fiction writing? Or do they provide a different way of looking at—and dealing with—the same subjects that you explore in your fiction? Do you ever find, doing so much writing in such a variety of forms, that you need to take extended breaks from writing? JE: For me, writing—in all its forms—is a very playful activity, even when I'm dealing with painful, or potentially, painful subjects. I love what I'm doing. I have fun writing. Some writers I know tell me that they're in agony when they write, that the act of writing for them is painful. But for me the act of writing is pleasurable. When children play, for instance, they're quite serious. The image of a child playing with a rubber band, for instance, testing her strength, pulling it every which way, using it as a prop in a gam... that's what writing is like for me, it's always a challenge, it's always stimulating, always a test. I'm also interested in writing as a sensual act, and that's invigorating, not enervating. Language—the sounds of words, the juxtapositions of words, the rhythm of words—is an absolutely sensual experience. In FAITHFUL REBECCA and VITO LOVES GERALDINE, I try to deal with sensual experiences in a way that will be erotic for both women and men, that won't exclude either sex from the pleasure of the reading. LL: It seems to me that the characters in your fiction develop, wholly, by themselves, without there necessarily being a concrete plot, or a definite direction for them to move in. It seems, often, to be their conversations, their inner monologues, that create them, more than action. Can you comment on this? JE: Yes, "voice" is central to my work. Sometimes I juxtapose elegant, exotic images with a very ordinary, colloquial voice. I often began writing a story because a character's voice comes into my head and won't go away. But, nevertheless, plot is crucial to me, and it comes pretty easily to me. It's just that my "plots" aren't very conventional. And, of course, some of my very shortest stories aren't driven by plot. I don't necessarily want my readers to identify with my characters in the most traditional way —"oh, my mother said those very words to me when I was a child!"—or "I buy the same designer jeans!" I want my readers to identify more with the processes that my characters go through, in their feelings and explorations of the way to live. I don't want to tell my readers how to live; instead, I want to present questions, and suggest alternatives. I find my non-traditional characters very sympathetic. Their redemption is often in their imagination, in their aspirations, in their dreams. They're complicated. I like characters who don't let me, or the reader, off the hook easily. LL: How do you balance time writing, publicizing your work, and living day by day? I find myself spending less time working these days on any kind of publicity—for me, it's easier to burn out doing publicity than writing. Though I teach workshops on publishing, which include the topic of how to publicize one's work, those are my least favorite workshops to teach. How do you answer beginning students who seem more interested in achieving instant fame than in writing? Do you think too many writers encourage beginning writers without letting them know about the difficulties and frustrations involved? What do you advise beginning writers to do? JE: I've been writing ever since I was a small child, but it was in college that I made the formal decision to make writing my life. I took a couple of writing workshops with Joseph Heller which were very inspiring. And then I went to graduate school at Johns Hopkins and studied with John Barth. For me, writing workshops with teachers who were "in the life" were helpful. They were enormously validating, providing me with a sense of community, and exposing me to books I might never have heard about otherwise. So when I teach writing to apprentice writers, I don't impose my own writing style or interests on them. I try to help them to be brave about developing their own literary ideas, world views, and styles. I do counsel them about the harsh realities of the publishing world, while at the same time, I keep reminding them that the "art part' is the part that will ultimately be their greatest joy. About publicizing my own work—well, I like doing book tours and giving interviews and readings. I'm basically a social, gregarious person, and I like traveling and meeting lots of people—writers and nonwriters. LL: With all of the frustrations involved in the writing life—publishing, making a living, rejections—have you ever thought seriously about abandoning writing for something else? Have you fantasized a totally different kind of work you could be devoted to? And how do you deal with the frustrations, isolation, disappointments, etc., that are so intrinsic to a writer's life? JE: Unfortunately, whenever I do indulge in fantasies about doing something other than writing fiction, I never fantasize about doing something practical, like going to law school, or running a business. Instead, I have recurrent fantasies about becoming a champion long distance swimmer or bodybuilder. So then I realize I'm just destined to live the life of an idiosyncratic, obsessive "outsider" one way or another. And I do thrive on the arts. I embrace the life of the writer/artist. I value integrity in the arts with a passion bordering on the fanatical. I'm very old-fashioned in this way. Many readers perceive my fiction as on the "cutting edge," but the way I view literature—and the life writer—is really terribly old fashioned. LL: In New York City, particularly Manhattan, where you live, in an apartment, there's so little storage space for you, as a writer, to keep your correspondence, your notes, manuscripts, etc. How do you manage keep what you want to, and yet not be overwhelmed by paper? Even with a house I feel I'm being buried in boxes, files, bags of notes, things I might need later on. Have you ever gotten rid of things you needed or were sorry not to have later? Do you store your notes and other papers outside your apartment? JE: In an ideal world, I could continue to live in Manhattan, and have an enormous house in which I could store every single item I wanted to (not just my writerly accouterments, either, but, for instance, items of clothing with sentimental value, my cat's favorite-but-destroyed toys, etc.) But it isn't an ideal world. So I save what I need to survive. I give away lots of things—clothes, books, magazines...There are people who need them more than I do. Essentially, I'm a non-materialistic soul. This is due in part, I'm certain, to growing up in a politically progressive, extremely non-materialistic, unconventional, "left" family. And what I really thrive on, what I really need, are (the many, intangible treasures—the things that no worldly closet could ever contain— which New York City so graciously provides for me as a writer, and a person. Read the next interview... 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