TRAMBLINGS. . .

Hope you all had a nice week. We survived FOURTH OF JULY, or the Assault on Tramble House, as I like to call it. Our neighborhood sounded like a war zone. The dog was a puddle of nerves, so much so that he slept with me and the Crown Prince. Neither one of us are what one would call "petite" and Kobe is a solid seventy pounds. But, drum roll-please, I MADE MY DEADLINE. I climbed in bed at 7:45 a.m. after working straight through the night and it felt good to hit my mark. I'll keep you posted.

Now, on to the good stuff. EMILY RABOTEAU, author of THE PROFESSOR'S DAUGHTER, is our guest today and I cannot tell you how much I admire this woman as a person and a writer. Enjoy!


1) To borrow a question from NOVEL IDEAS: CONTEMPORARY AUTHORS SHARE THE CREATIVE PROCESS, how did BERNIE AND ME - the short story that introduced the characters in THE PROFESSOR'S DAUGHTER "gather" for you? What was the seed of that story and how did you pull it all together?

BERNIE & ME was the first story I wrote in graduate school. I was taking a workshop with the novelist, PAULE MARSHALL. The story drew a lot from my own experience growing up as a person of mixed race. I wanted to write about the burden and blessing of my perspective and I wanted to write the thing that wasn't there for me to read at the time I was struggling with issues of identity. At the heart of the story is the love the main character has for her older brother, with whom she feels a connection she doesn't feel with anyone else. In fact, her identity is completely wrapped up in him. He suffers a freak accident and by the end of the story she is left alone to come into herself. The ending of that story felt like a beginning to me in that she is left ripe to come of age, but I didn't really want to expand it into a novel (although Paule Marshall suggested I do just that). I wasn't sure I wanted to write so nakedly about myself. But I needed to write it. In some ways, writing this book was my own coming of age. My own public articulation of self. I felt invisible beforehand, you see.

2) What is a question that you've never been asked in interviews that you always wanted to answer in regard to your writing?

"Why do you write?" I recently heard WALTER MOSLEY say at a reading that he writes because he wants to be a writer. He likes the lifestyle. He has a persona - the trenchcoat, the hat. According to Mosley, the people who write because they have something to say are in trouble, because what happens after they've said it? They might become bankrupt of ideas. I panicked when he said that because I thought momentarily I might be in that camp. Then I thought hard about the matter. There are probably as many different reasons why people write as there are writers. Some people write to be seen. Some people write to be famous. Some people write because they find it fun. I think I write to figure out things I don't understand. To grow myself through problems. This means I am writing for the same reason I dream.

3) Is there a single book that has influenced you more than others?

When I was writing THE PROFESSOR'S DAUGHTER, W.G. SEBALD'S book, THE EMIGRANTS, had a big impact. He writes beautifully about the crippling effects of the Holocaust on the generations that follow. I wanted to do something similar in relation to a lynching, but I didn't want to write directly about the event because I knew I'd be diminishing its horror. So I went at it sideways, like he did, by describing the ripples in the pond, rather than the stone that created the ripples. I've been resistant about being called a black writer, because that is not all I am. I mean to say I am a writer and that my book is about more than race. But I think there is something common to a lot of writing by black folks, which is the testimonial impulse to write about the effects of history upon the present moment, a history which is largely ignored, or as TONI MORRISON says, about which we have a kind of "national amnesia."

4) Did becoming a published author turn you into a different kind of reader? How so?

I wouldn't say that publishing changed the way I read, but I would say that writing has. I am very conscious now about craft. This is also because I teach writing and I have to be articulate about the writing process. I coach my students to do what I do, which is to pin down what and how the author has pulled off a successful effect in an impressive piece of fiction and then to steal that effect. Not to plagiarize, obviously, but to mimic. For example, I just read CHRIS ABANI'S beautiful new novella, BECOMING ABIGAIL. It impressed me. I read it in one sitting. I couldn't put it down. It made me cry. It educated me. I thought, how did Chris do that? I realized he had focused exclusively on one narrative. He wasn't telling a story from multiple perspectives. Just one - Abigail's. This made the book, which was short, move like a bullet instead of a web. In terms of structure, he alternated chapters between Abigail's recent past in Nigeria, and her present, in London, where she has been enslaved in the sex trade. This made me understand the course of events. There was a very clear sequence, a tragic turning point, mounting tension and conflict, a liberating turning point. The language was poetic. Words and phrases were repeated like motifs in music. This made the book musical. I could go on, but I won't. What's important is that when I put it down I thought, I can do something similar. I can improvise on this theme. Being able to see the strings for what they are doesn't make the experience of reading any less magical for me. It makes me want to work harder on creating magic tricks of my own.

5) Do your dreams influence your writing? If so, how?

Yes. I have a very charged relationship to sleep and I take a lot of naps. I dream in narrative. There is a voice-over in my dreams. This voice is telling the story as the images spool out. For example, the opening of my short story, "KAVITA THROUGH GLASS," (included in BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES 2003 came to me in a dream. "Now that he had won a lifetime supply of colored glass, Hassan Hagihossein felt he could endure the vagaries of Ramadan."

Don't ask me where that came from. But I wrote it down with the image of colored glass in my mind and went from there. I also keep a dream journal. I notice that certain images and settings come to me again and again and again. Bakeries. Traffic cones. The ocean. I try to use these in my writing because I know they have some significance to my subconscious mind. And the extreme emotion of dreams - jealousy, bliss, terror, anxiety, confusion - that's the interesting stuff. That's where story resides.

6) What other artistic mediums influence your writing? Music? Film? Art?

I write to jazz. It helps free up my thoughts. In fact, I have a hard time writing without listening to jazz. My favorite artist is THELONIOUS MONK.

Thelonius Monk
Visitor from outerspace
Piano revolving

That's a HAIKU I wrote about him. It's obvious from his playing that he experienced time and space in a unique and bizarre fashion.

7) Talk about the differences in process when you craft a short story versus a novel.

Lately I have been thinking that I need to approach writing novels the same way that I approach writing short stories. My first novel was really assembled out of short stories, like a quilt. It could just as easily have been marketed as a book of linked stories but the publishing industry believes novels sell better, so it was marketed as a novel. It had myriad perspectives and points of views, it skipped around in time and place. I had a few books in mind as I was putting mine together in this way - LOVE MEDICINE, GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN, THE SOUND AND THE FURY. Those books are all comprised of linked stories. But I think this is a common approach for the novice. When we are new at this craft we don't trust yet that one narrative line can hold the reader's attention. We don't have the confidence yet to focus on one story. We also want to show all of our magic tricks at once, perhaps to make a big broad sweeping splash. Maybe we bite off more than we can chew.

I am proud of THE PROFESSOR'S DAUGHTER. It was the best book I could write at the time that I wrote it, and I was very young when I wrote it. But I recognize now that it's an uneven mess. It's six novels in one. I knew next to nothing about plot and the only reason the book hangs together at all is because I had a good editor. The novel I'm working on right now is also a mess. But I'm trying to keep it simple. I don't mean lacking in depth, obviously, just in possession of a clear narrative arc. Writing a children's book helped me with this process. I spent a year and a half writing THE BIRD WHO SWALLOWED THE MOON, a picture book for 5-7 year-olds.

There is no room to hide behind lovely descriptive language in a book for children. They will squirm right out of your lap if you don't capture their attention. The conflict must be obvious and lead to action. The action must be swift and precise. This was hard for me to execute because I love language so much. I could write fifty beautiful pages about an ashtray but who would that serve? What I am driving at is that in a short story, the story is paramount. It should be so in a novel as well. Plot matters.

8) GRACE PALEY said, "Write what you know about what you don’t know." Have you ever applied that? Give an example.

She also said that dying was an art SYLVIA PLATH new absolutely nothing about. Which I think is true. Perhaps I've applied her advice in this way: I don't write from a place of wisdom or understanding, but from a place of questioning and compassion. For example, THE PROFESSOR'S DAUGHTER was born out of my desire to understand my father, who had been something of a mystery to me, and to forgive him for being emotionally absent. I turned my father into a little boy. I imagined what it might have been like to grow up in Mississippi under JIM CROW in the 1950s. Soon I stopped thinking of this character as my father. I started thinking of him as my son. Someone I wanted to protect. Then, something magical happened. He became his own character. He had his own life, which was beyond me.

I was writing a chapter in which he was being severely abused at the white school he'd been sent to integrate. The little white boys kept beating him up. They were merciless. And after awhile he told me, I don't want to be pitied. I'm not a victim. At which point he began to manipulate his situation to empower himself. I was barely writing. He was telling me what to write. He was that real.

9) Have you ever been "given" a story by another writer? Have you ever given one away?

Not consciously, no. But I take notes all the time. When people tell interesting stories, I write down details, expressions, snatches of dialogue. My journal is full of things like: "little girl with cracker crumbs in her pockets" and "In my days of hedonism I woke up on my fire escape covered in white ash without knowing how I got there."

10) Do you have a writing ritual? If so, tell us about that.

I try to write for at least three hours every day. I find I can't focus longer than three hours, though. On a very good day I do two three-hour stints with a break in between. I'll take a walk, meet a friend for lunch, take a nap, cook, quilt, see a movie or correct student work. On an amazing day I write for three three-hour stints, for a total of nine hours. Those days are rare. Usually they only transpire at an ARTISTS COLONY. I've done residencies at a few of these. They're a blessing. I'm able to be ten times more productive because there are absolutely no distractions. But if I'm working on something emotionally difficult then a nine-hour writing day, even with naps, is tough.

11) Have you read anything lately, specifically fiction, that just knocked your socks off? Share with us and give us the name of a writer whom you think has been ignored.

Folks should pay more attention to PERCIVAL EVERETT.

# # # # #

THE EYE OF HORUS, a Raboteau short story published in STORYQUARTERLY.

An EXCERPT from THE PROFESSOR'S DAUGHTER.

Until next time. . .