Otium

A Conversation with Karl Iagnemma

by Terry Huang
31 January 2007

But I’m not at all interested in writing stories that are trying to describe some aspect of science. There are some writers who try to do that. There are some really good writers, I think—there’s not a lot, but there’s a few.

I don’t think fiction’s first purpose should be to try to explain anything. I hope that after reading the book, no one has learned anything. If I have instructed or given any kind of information, that would be terrible. Because what I really wanted to do was just tell a story about these people.

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A Conversation With David Auburn

by Zachary Werner
13 January 2006

The story needs Chicago, I think. It needs the melancholy atmosphere that I often felt in Hyde Park. In coffee shops, wandering around the bookstores, you’d often see these people—usually men, middle aged, clearly not students, not faculty either; it was hard to tell what they were—they were these sort of perennial campus ghosts haunting the place. You got the sense that they’d slipped off the tracks somehow. Sometimes there would be little legends attached to them—you’d hear that this guy or that one was a brilliant prodigy who cracked up spectacularly. I suppose any big University has these figures, but it feels like a particularly Chicago phenomenon to me.

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A Conversation with Joan Silber

by Sarah Adair Frank
13 January 2006

SF:

“Hot and heavy” is a pretty good phrase for many of the relationships in your fiction. What does it mean to write sexy, but also keep your language spare? Does this have anything to do with the “paragraphs laden with treacle and gravitas” you have said that you had to cut when trying to get at the longing in the “My Shape” story?

JS:

The key thing about sex scenes (I decided some time ago) is to keep them linked to character. The mechanics don’t have to be explained step by step (any adult can guess the rudiments).

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A Conversation With Felicia Rosshandler

by Sarah Adair Frank
14 October 2005

SF:

I understand that you have an extensive Barbie doll collection. I’m curious if you connect this hobby to the American dream and/or your photographic work.

FR:

…I have been criticized for using an idealized version of beauty, one that no woman can live up to. Yet the history of art has been dominated by the unobtainable; the Renaissance virgins and the Pre-Raphaelite beauties are as much an ideal as Barbie, yet no one questions them because they are established and consecrated.

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A Conversation With Neil Gaiman

by Terry Huang
Lee Wang
27 May 2005

Dream-logic isn’t story-logic. You’ll be explaining it to somebody, “You’re walking down a corridor and you know that you’re being followed by something but you don’t know what it is, but it’s really really troubling you and then you go into the kitchen, and you’re just trying to figure out what that thing was when you notice that there’s a swimming pool in the kitchen that nobody every told you about,” and you’re trying to explain this to them and that’s not really story logic.

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A Conversation with Elif Shafak

by Sarah Adair Frank
Alison Macdonald
11 April 2005

When I came to this country it was like a relief. Here you hear the word chutzpah from someone who is not Jewish. I love that. I love that the word has traveled to another community. Or I learned this word that was perhaps read by the Irish four hundred years ago and no one is saying "this word is old, let’s take it out." So that multi-layered aspect of the English language is fascinating for me. And in that sense maybe Borges was right in saying that English is the language of precision. If you’re looking for the precise word, with this vocabulary, it is amazing.

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A Conversation with William Veeder

by Jenny Gavacs
9 March 2005

Beauty is good, I mean, look at the responses to Millenium Park downtown, that jelly bean or whatever the hell it is. People just love to be in the presence of the jellybean. They love to look at Frank Gehry’s band shell, they just stand there and look at it. People who are not trained in art history. People who don’t know anything about Frank Gehry… but they know that they like to be around it. There’s a wonderful feeling down at the park. I think we’re starved for beauty.

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