The South Carolina Review

The SCR would like to sincerely thank all of the authors who contributed to Volume 53.2. Congratulations to the winners of our Ronald Moran Prize in Poetry and Fiction, Denise Jarrott for “Cash Tender Total,” (poetry) and Lauren Morrow for “Bodies of Water” (fiction). Make sure to check out these winning pieces!

Each recipient, chosen from authors included in each year’s fall and spring issue who have no more than one published book, receives a $250 prize.

SCR 53:2 will be here in a few short weeks! This issue features poetry by Diamond Forde, Stella Wong, and Sheila Black, with fiction by Marlin Barton, Tracy Lien, and Peruvian author Dany Salvatierra in a new translation. Secure your copy of 53.2 by subscribing to our journal. For more information on sample copies, institution rates, and individual sales, please visit the “Store” tab.

 “Toni Jensen is a writer of power dynamics, physical trauma and generational pain. She is a writer of human error and environmental impact. She is a writer of uncommon beauty in unexpected places. Jensen’s deeply personal essays also serve as dispatches from the frontlines of an America often willfully ignorant of its own crises. Her new memoir Carry is about gun violence, land and Indigenous people’s lives. The book’s prose is both stately and riotous as Jensen moves through childhood memories of hunting trips with her father into the adult dread of a violent American culture, one which continues to assault native bodies. An associate professor in Creative Writing and Indigenous Studies at the University of Arkansas, she also teaches in the low-residency  MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. On the last day of July 2020—amid the anxieties of a pandemic and the national outcry against police brutality—I was privileged to talk with Toni (over Zoom) about the language of violence, what it means to be American, and the bright, wholesome things that have sustained her writing process.” – Miriam McEwen

Miriam McEwen: I just wanted to start at the beginning, if we could, at the literal beginning with the title of Carry. Could you talk about how the prominence of that word signals to the reader its various meanings throughout the book? How did that materialize for you? I know sometimes titles can be suggestions that come later. Was that word really singular in your development of the book?

Toni Jensen: The book started with a couple of essays. The ones that were written before I necessarily thought of it as a book were “Women in the Fracklands” and “Carry,” a much different version of “Give and Go” and “The Invented Histories of Domestic Birds.” So the first handful of chapters—except for chapter two—mostly were essays that I wrote as individual essays. It seemed clear after writing those that I was headed toward a book. I think it was one of those rare instances where the title was my idea, and no one questioned it. Just the idea(s) of campus carry, concealed carry, carrying guns, carrying history, carrying witness, the different things we carry around in our bodies—those were some of the ways I saw Carry working.

MM: I think it works so beautifully and so powerfully. You say, “the different things we carry around in our bodies.” And in the book, you write about the distinction between the words survival and survivance. How did you arrive at a deeper meaning through—I’m not sure what to call it—this particular conjugation?

TJ: Survivance is a term coined by Ojibwe writer Gerald Vizenor. He and Diane Glancy were the editors of From the Hilltop, my first book. So I really love both of them, and I really love their work. But that word of Gerald’s is one so many of us have picked up. I think [survivance] is different from survival because survival implies that it’s in the past. It implies that you’ve gone through this process and you’re done, and survivance implies the process, the continuation. It’s ongoing. And I think survivance better describes the circumstance so many people are in right now.

MM: Right. This word is one that probably a broader population than ever can understand, given the rise of coronavirus. And did COVID-19 change the trajectory of the book, or did you kind of touch down in the same place of coming home, wanting to find home, meanings of home and family and land?

TJ: I wouldn’t say the pandemic changed the book because the book was mostly written when coronavirus happened. Just having a chapter called “Contagion” in the book made it feel necessary to integrate that, and also the fact that there’s more violence now. We’ve had more gun violence since coronavirus began. In the same way that back in March there wasn’t toilet paper on the shelves, there were also lines and lines at gun stores. And so, to address that trend was important because I think a lot of people in urban areas on the coasts are maybe unaware of what happens in the middle of the country. In Arkansas, where I live in Fayetteville, we’re just south of Bentonville . Everyone shops at Walmart. There are at least seven or eight Walmarts in Fayetteville (maybe more). All those franchises in a city with fewer than 80,000 people. This is Walmart country, so it’s common for people to also buy guns there.

MM: My geographical context here in Mountain Rest, South Carolina is only slightly similar. But I have witnessed how Walmart can often double as a gathering place of sorts, and I so appreciate the awareness your work has for rural consumer culture. All right! I’d like to talk to you now about birds, and please forgive the terrible transition. But the recurrence of bird images throughout the memoir reflects your principle themes really well. I kept thinking about the way a bird collects materials to carry back to its nest. The essays use the vocabulary of bird groupings so viscerally; these definitions almost train the reader to examine the ways in which a woman’s body is objectified. Was that use of language intentional from the very beginning? At what point in your writing process did you realize that you wanted to include that more scientific consideration of birds?

TJ: The first essay I think that would have started with is “Women in the Fracklands,” and it began pretty organically. I’m interested in the definitions of things: how we name birds, how we name animals, how we name each other. There’s a lot in the book about categories of violence, too: domestic violence, domestic shootings versus workplace shootings versus school shootings—how some [phrases] are considered escalation as far as terminology and also as far as criminal sentencing, and some are considered demotion. I guess how we name anything affects our perception of it, so I was interested in birds for a similar reason. But, also, the book is heavier content, and I’m keenly aware that heavier content needs balance. You have to have something concrete and beautiful, or something funny or both, as balance. So the birds are woven in as part of that consideration.

MM: You really challenge the reader to define for themselves what constitutes violence by using phrases such as “everyday violence” and “extraordinary violence.”  It’s that verbal act of demotion and escalation you just mentioned. I was also very taken with this refrain of “our America,” which appears throughout the essays. What do those words, presented as a whole, signify to you? And what do you hope the repetition of “our America” will instigate in the reader’s emotional consciousness?

TJ: “Our America” is really purposeful because mostly the only people I hear saying “in our America” are from an entirely different political viewpoint than my own. So we can find common ground in that, if we reappropriate it, if we take it back. It is all of our America. We all live here. And I think for Native people in particular—we like to be defined by our tribes, by our places, by our communities, by our nation’s first. Not everyone, but in many cases that’s true. But, also, we do live in this greater construct called America. We vote in national elections. We vote in local elections. We vote in city elections, if we live off-reservation. I think it’s important that we are considered in the framework of what it means to be American. Also, we were here first. It wasn’t called the United States then, but we were here. I think that’s very important. As far as “everyday violence,” I do think there will be people who find some of the things I consider everyday to be extraordinary. I know that, but I think that gets us questioning differences in worlds, right? And I think questioning is good.

MM: Yes, you report on the violent discrepancy between definitions of “normal.” And in the same way you talk in the book about groupings of birds, you also have kind of a master list of words that speak to hidden violence, or else words that convey troubling multiplicities. I’m wondering how it became apparent to you that so many common words (shooter, verge, off-season, in season) were in need of serious investigation.

TJ: Several of those words are related to sport. I knew that I wanted to have sports be in there because even the NRA was once a sporting organization. A sporting organization for outdoorsmen. That was true through the seventies, and I think that we forget that. It’s easy to forget that. Especially for a lot of readers of the book who will be younger than I am—they don’t have living memories of the seventies or eighties.

MM: Right. I know I always think of the NRA as this monster we have to combat, but having it put into a context of innocuous (for people, at least) sports living was just very educational for me. And I hope for others.

TJ: I hope so, yeah. I think that it makes the NRA seem like it can be changed. If, in my lifetime, it can go from a sportsman organization to what it is now—basically a political gun lobbying group more than anything else—it can change again. It can be taken back; it can be shifted back to what it once was. I’m not suggesting dismantling the NRA because I don’t think that can be accomplished in our lifetime, and because I don’t think [dismantling] would serve all of its members. There are a good many members who joined because their fathers or grandfathers were members before them. Or their grandmothers, in some cases. There’s still that population.

MM: Clearly so much travel and research and investigation went into the creation of this book, so I wanted to ask what you were reading, watching, and listening to during its development. What were some of the things that were most helpful?

TJ: In 2016 through 2018, there was a lot of back and forth travel. There’s a band called the Water Liars; the name comes from a Barry Hannah short story. I listened to their album Wyoming all the way across the country and back. I love that album. There were a few books of poetry I read and reread: Joy Harjo’s A Map to the Next World, Jamaal May’s The Big Book of Exit Strategies, Ada Limón’s Sharks in the Rivers, Louise Erdrich’s Baptism of Desire, Sherwin Bitsui’s Dissolve, Joan Kane’s Milk Black Carbon. Proxies by Brian Blanchfield is a book of nonfiction written by a poet, and it really opened up the lyrical possibilities of nonfiction for me.

MM: With all the places and histories this memoir represents as parts of yourself, do you feel at all that this book is its own sort of destination? What was the awareness or understanding you arrived at upon its completion, and what intellectual and/or emotional space do you hope your readers will find themselves in upon reaching the end?

TJ: I do feel like I’m certainly not in a unique position, having lived in all of these places. Many people have lived in a lot of places across the country, but I’ve lived in a lot of places that are considered particularly violent. And I liked living in most of them, at least to a degree. I had these experiences with violence, or people I love did, so I described those. But I hope that readers come away with a sense of the scope and history of a place, of each place. I think showing the beauty of the landscape and the tribal history of each place is important. It’s how I see the world.

We’ve made the switch! For consideration to be included in the latest issue of SCR, find us on Submittable. Simply search “South Carolina Review” in the search bar of the “Discover” tab. Current submissions for the Spring 2021 issue 53.1 are open until September 15, 2020.

We will no longer be accepting submissions through email, but we are excited to see you over at Submittable. SCR submissions are free and are accepted on a rolling basis. To create an account, visit submittable.com

No previously published work, work accepted elsewhere, or multiple submissions accepted. Please note that we cannot acknowledge receipt of manuscripts and that we cannot return manuscripts under any conditions. Contributors will receive two copies of the issue in which accepted work appears.

SCR publishes fiction and poetry primarily, but will also consider creative nonfiction, scholarly essays, and book reviews. The editors of SCR thank you for your interest in submitting a manuscript for their consideration.

The SCR would like to sincerely thank all of the authors who contributed to Volume 52.2. Congratulations to the winners of our Ronald Moran Prize in Poetry and Fiction, Isabel Duarte-Gray for “A Portion for Foxes,” (poetry) and Joshua Jones for “The Long-Distance Runner” (fiction). Check out both winning pieces in the 52.2 table of contents under “Recent Issues.”

Each recipient, chosen from authors included in each year’s fall and spring issue who have no more than one published book, receives a $250 prize.

SCR Assistant Editor Wesley Kapp interviews Sadie Hoagland on her story collection entitled American Grief in Four Stages. Hoagland’s story, “Extra Patriotic,” is featured in SCR Volume 51.2.

Interview with Author Sadie Hoagland 

WK: American Grief in Four Stages is described as a short story collection that explores the inability of language to capture traumatic experiences. I find this idea compelling, and I thought that each story in this collection revealed this truth in different ways. Can you tell us more about this concept and what inspired you to create this specific body of work?

SH: Our tendency as humans is to try to find a narrative that explains our lives, and yet some events defy the logic of a narrative. There is no story that can explain suicide, for example, and the language we use to comfort the bereaved is itself clichéd (e.g. “Sorry for your loss”). I was interested, and even frustrated by this failure in my own life, and so some of the stories in the collection engage this failure of language directly, such as the title story and “Warning Signs.” Both of the narrators of these stories are using extreme language posturing to try to bring the reader into their own state of shock: “If I knew why my little brother shot himself through the head then, man, I’d be rich.” They are also using language as armor; knowing that words can’t express their loss, perhaps they can at least use language to hide their pain. In other stories, the ineptitude of language is explored much more subtly. For example, in “The Crossword,” an old woman is using crossword clues as memory cues, and each word reveals a complex root system into her past, proliferations of meanings of the word known only to her. Pie is a three-letter crossword answer, but also a memory of the woman as a young girl, with her cousin, a tension in the air. Language, then, always conceals more than it reveals in this way; it connects us by what we say, while always reminding us of that which remains hidden within us, what we don’t say. I’m intrigued by this idea (which is probably why I am a writer). 

WK: I love the title “Cavalier Presentations of Heartbreaking News”, and I thought it described that story so well. It seems that everyone has their own way of giving and receiving bad news, and I found it interesting to see that play out in this particular story. Can you tell us a little bit about why you wrote this story? I’m also really interested in the concept of electric birds.

SH: Ha! I feel like you read right through this story straight to me. I do think people present bad news often very casually, and I never not feel it. Perhaps this a great weakness, or a strength that led me to fiction writing, but I do feel the empathy center in my brain is a tad large, and impractically so. I am often in the position of the narrator to a lesser degree, where someone tells me something that I process viscerally. Interestingly enough, when I was in my twenties, older women, strangers, would often tell me stories of almost brutal sadness and even more interestingly, several of these stories involved birds. This perhaps, on an unconscious level, is why I wrote this story. The electric birds were a starting point, that first line, “It was my birthday when I found out all the birds were electric…” came into my head and was too compelling a thread not to follow. But having the birds in the story also created a sense of tension between the possible and impossible that led me further into the plot. If it was possible that birds were electric, then maybe our narrator can find her way through the impossibility of a cancer diagnosis.   

WK: “Extra Patriotic” was published recently in South Carolina Review, and it has found a home in this collection. The story follows two characters dealing with PTSD. Similar to other stories in the collection, “Extra Patriotic” leaves the reader with an idea of what happens next but no sure answer. The characters press on, but we aren’t sure that happiness is in store for them. Each character responds to their situation differently. Why did you feel it was important to show these two different responses? Why can’t they make it work, in your mind?

SH: Our culture encourages people to be resilient, to “get over” whatever happens to them, and this is almost the only option. We don’t like to think about the people that can’t rise up out of their struggles, that’s not part of the American story. Yet we’ve learned through vets with PTSD, sometimes we’ve painfully and tragically learned, that this is not the case, we can’t always “get over it.”  And while some kinds of trauma are legible, or even have cultural currency, others seem to make people untouchable. Truly isolated. I wanted to think about two characters with two different kinds of trauma from life events that read very differently: one is a “hero,” a war vet, and one a “survivor” of her parents tragic and violent death. Both have different kinds of support systems. One is ready to move forward before the other can move forward, and this creates a distance between them. Perhaps it is surmountable, but not in the moment the story ends. I wanted the reader to remember, to feel, both the possibility of recovery through one character, but also the immensity of the task of recovering from trauma through the other character. 

WK: Your career has taken you from California to Utah to your current home in Louisiana. [Hoagland teaches in the PhD writing program at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette.] How have you seen your writing develop differently in each of these places?

SH: It takes me a long time to process space and place, and for a place that has affected me to make it into my writing. My novel, Strange Children, which comes out in Spring 2021 is about a polygamist community in Utah, where I grew up but didn’t write about until I had moved away. I haven’t lived in California for ten years, but I just finished a second novel that takes place in central California. So it seems that for me it’s almost easier to write about a place after I’ve left it. Perhaps there’s a certain clarity I get when I am no longer going about day-to-day life in a place, a distance that allows me to see the nuances of a “where.” Though I will say that even as I live here, Louisiana is starting to seep into my writing, mostly in the form of nonfiction as this place has a wild and strange heart that is almost too uncanny for fiction. 

WK: What are you working on now? 

SH: I am currently revising my second novel, with a working title of Upside Down in the Sky, about a woman grappling with a sexual assault in her workplace and the disappearance of her troubled mother the same week in California. As she searches and uncovers her mother’s story, she meets her estranged grandmother, starts tracking down a father she never knew, and also discovers that her mother has suffered things she could never have imagined. I am also working on a collection of nonfiction mini-essays about the female body as both a question and answer in various rhetorical spaces, like the medical community, and academia. Stay tuned! 

With fiction and poetry by Julianna Baggott, Jay Deshpande, Suzanne Paola, and James Ulmer, SCR Issue 52.2 will be released in a few short weeks! Secure your copy of 52.2 by subscribing to our journal. For more information on sample copies, institution rates, and individual sales, please visit the “Store” tab.

Sarah Blackman interviews Alix Ohlin on her new book, Dual Citizens, for the 51.2 issue! Ohlin’s story, “You Never Know,” is included in the issue as well.

Sarah Blackman: To start at the literal beginning of things, I’m interested in the provocations of your title Dual Citizens. Obviously, this is first and foremost a reference to the fact that your main characters—Lark and Robin—are citizens of both Canada and America and travel between those two national identities with varying degrees of fluidity. But I think that title also asserts an interest in duality that can be applied to many different areas of the book. Dual citizenship in the nation-states of gender roles, of sisterhood, of mother/ daughter roles. Dual citizenship in the roles of artists and muse, or artist and facilitator, or artist and tool of art-making (which identities I think apply equally to both sisters). Can you talk a little bit about your sense of duality in the book? Or about your sense of citizenship, actually, which I think is an equally assertive theme in the novel.

Alix Ohlin: Thanks for this great question. You’re absolutely right that I hoped the title and ideas of dual citizenship would have resonances and echoes beyond the literal question 0f which passport you hold or where you vote. I’ve found myself writing a lot, in recent years, about female dyads—friends, co-workers, sisters—and I’ve realized I’m interested in the ways that women define themselves in relationship to, in complement or contrast to, another woman who’s important to them. It’s a big part of identity formation for many of us. You see this intensity in a lot of families and also in a lot of “best friendships,” and the complexity of these bonds offers wonderful territory for fiction, one that’s perhaps been underserved in the history of the novel, which has often focused on narratives of romantic entanglement or of connection and conflict with our families of origin. I thought of my book from the start as a love story between sisters,  which would provide the container   in which to explore some of the other issues and questions of identity you mentioned (feminism, motherhood, what art-making and ambition can look like in women’s lives). When I think about citizenship, the questions that arise are both political and personal, such as: where do we belong? What responsibilities do we have to others? Where and how do we make a home? All of those ideas thread through the relationship between Lark and Robin, their connecting and diverging paths through life.

SB: I love the idea of a love story between sisters! I spend a good bit of time in my own work thinking about relationships between women that are not sexualized, or even romanticized, but occupy the complex territory of a platonic love. We deeply undervalue those connections in Western society, I think. Particularly in art, platonic love gets dis- missed as a method of character development—introducing a foil to the main character or a Mercutio to spur on the plot. Or, most frequently in the case of female characters, friends devolve into rivals as a way of upping the dramatic ante. It is as if we cannot, as a society, fathom a relationship that does not become a romantic entanglement or a romantic rivalry. Maybe that’s something to do with believing all resources, even emotional ones, can be translated into private property. Therefore all resources can be stolen or usurped or vandalized or horded. It leads to some provoking questions about the role of the artist as art-maker vs. the artist as art-producer. More on this later, maybe, but for now one of the many elements in your book I was so struck by is the way that Lark surrounds herself with l’enfant terrible artistic types: her lover Wheelock whose artistic genius exculpates him (at least in his own mind) from the social and domestic realties of adult life; her sister who will not seize the future her art opens for her but instead insists on the wild music of the ramshackle pianos in her barn (an excruciatingly lovely scene, by the way). Even Lark’s mother Marianne, whose artistic genius might be said to be in the realm of beauty or youth or irascibility. It would be easy to write a character like Lark as a doormat and yet she takes real and deep enjoyment out of the act of observing these personalities, even as it brings her pain. She is so very much a writer figure, even though she doesn’t write: the constant observer, the wry recorder of other people’s lives. Were you thinking of her as a stand-in for the act of authoring, if not for the figure of the author herself? Or does she occupy a different kind of archetype for you?

AO: I didn’t necessarily think of Lark as a writer figure, though I can certainly see how that interpretation would come to mind. She’s definitely an observer and a person who is more comfortable seeing others rather than being seen herself. In my head this is connected to all kinds of ideas around the male gaze. Marianne, Robin, and Lark all rebel against the male gaze and against the roles that gaze seems to assign to them, though the rebellion takes different forms for each of them. For Marianne, it means not conforming to traditional expectations of motherhood. For Robin, it means walking away from a career in music that would have put her on the stage. For Lark, it means receding behind the fame and reputation of a male artist. I’ve always been interested in ways that artistry and genius are gendered—the eccentricity and postures and liberties available to men are so often not available to women—and the female characters in my book are chafing against that, and struggling, not always successfully, to find an alternative path. When I was researching the book and thinking through ideas about film, I came across a lot of information about women who are editors. Thelma Schoonmaker, who has worked with Scorcese for fifty years, is perhaps the best known, but there’s also Dede Allen, Verna Fields, Dorothy Spencer, Margaret Booth. Of course none of them are household names, unlike the directors with whom they collaborated (D.W. Griffith, Eliza Kazan, and so forth). Movies are made in the editing room and yet the labor and talent of these women remains mostly hidden, at least to the lay public. It’s a whole invisible history of film. I saw Lark as a person who deeply prized her invisibility despite the complications and danger of it. She gets taken advantage of because of it and is alienated from others in some ways, and yet at the same time, she finds in editing a form of artistic expression that is deeply her own.

SB: Lark’s editing and her attention to its grace, as well as the films she makes on her own, also seem deeply intimate to me in a way that the focal point of Wheelock’s more Herzogian (can we allow that as a word?) films can’t or won’t. The scope is different. Lark films the changes in light as they filter through the elderly cat’s fur, or close-ups of her lover’s hands as he drives, or tight shots of her mother’s face as she talks about day-to-day grievances at the end of her life. She doesn’t do anything with those films other than make them, and that seems to be the point for her. It reminds me of the way Robin plays once she does divorce her art from the stage of the male gaze. The missing notes are a part of the making which is meant to exist only in its moment. This suggests an idea I was poking around with in an earlier question: the difference between art that must be made because it is a necessary part of the artist’s existence and art that is meant to distribute a message or an agenda—art that is conceived of as a product for its audience even if the goals of that product are selfless or beneficial to society at large. That seems like another polemic at work in your book, and in the world, perhaps. Making art because the act of making is a necessary part of being human versus making art because it creates an identity (the artistic genius) that can be distributed. Can you talk a little about the art-making impetus that your characters feel? It seems so nuanced to me the way you explore these through all the different vehicles of your plot.

AO: That’s a really interesting comment. There are a number of threads in the book about the space where art becomes commodified. Wheelock goes from being a sort of high-art filmmaker to making prestige television documentaries shown on PBS, and he seems quite happy about that change, as well as with the material comfort and stability and ac- claim that arrive with it. In contrast Robin records music that no one will hear, and Min, Wheelock’s daughter, makes art she destroys at the end of each day. Lark is somewhere in the middle—she often makes films for the experience of making them, not for an audience, but she also winds up working in (and enjoying) reality television. I guess I’m not really interested in putting forth an argument about the purity of art for art’s sake, or that any time art finds an audience or results in fame and fortune there’s something terrible about it. I don’t think that’s true. I am interested in how people construct identities as artists in a place that’s separate from audience, or the marketplace, because the marketplace is often driven by conservative ideas of success and/or replicates traditional ideologies. It made sense to me that Lark’s identity as an artist is going to be formed somewhere outside of the narrative of a traditional career—in a space that’s more interstitial, or more private, more particular to her. I was reading a great essay recently by Stacey D’Erasmo about Joni Mitchell, Roni Horn, and other women artists. D’Erasmo writes that if “the alienation that women and other Others often experience can be painful, it can also be liberating. It interposes a primal question mark between feeling and form, and it can kick off a lifelong quest to find a form that fits and/or inculcates a certain looseness and play.” She characterizes that looseness of form as a doubt, a shadow, a friction. All those words ring true to me in terms of the strangeness of Lark’s films and Robin’s music made with un- tuned, broken-down pianos. Both of them are outsiders, in ways both chosen and not, and whatever art they make is necessarily going to be reflective of that.

SB: Yes! I loved the part where Lark starts editing for reality TV and finds the artistry in evolving those human dramas. That seemed so smart to me and such an interesting way to engage the eternal high art/low art dilemma—by asking which subjects are worthy of artistic treatment, in other words. It’s always been hard for me to conceive of a subject that wasn’t worthy of artistic treatment since I think all subjects are merely different lenses through which to view the human experience—whether that experience happens on Keeping Up With the Kardashians or in Michelangelo’s Pieta. But I guess there are ways of treating those subjects with varying levels of integrity, and Lark’s focus seems to be in tune with the integrity of human emotion, even if the reality of that emotion is revealed through editorial manipulation. That kind of play with the high/low is pretty indicative of a lot of female or female-identifying artists. I think specifically of Laurie Anderson’s crossover art-world/pop star appeal, or Judy Chicago’s The Birth Project, which is not only collaborative (which feels very female to me) but is also expressed using the domestic or ornamental form of embroidery or needlepoint. I guess all of this is to say the continuum of women artists’ work and the way it intersects or elevates or just explores domestic/ popular/everyday culture is endlessly fascinating to me. And here you are: a woman artist writing about women artists! And here I am: a woman artist interviewing a woman artist writing about women artists! I confess, I’m very pleased by that sense of community. You clearly do a lot of research and related reading when you are writing; are there other writers whose work you feel like your own is in conversation with, even if they don’t share the same temporal plane with you?

AO: I feel like the writer who influenced the book the most is so obvious that it’s almost embarrassing—Elena Ferrante and the Neapolitan novels. So much of the discussion about those books focused on how they foregrounded the troubled complexity of female friendship, and that’s true of course, but there was so much else I valued in them, including the story of how women strive and sometimes fail to be taken seriously as intellectuals, how sex can both reward and complicate that identity for them. I loved her formal choices too—the short, numbered chapters, the energetic temporal movement across vivid scenes and capacious summary, the abruptness of some of her endings. I read those books hungrily, with a pure enjoyment that’s all too rare. Further back is someone like Elizabeth Bowen, whose book The House in Paris I love so much, especially the way she writes about children. James Baldwin’s classic story “Sonny’s Blues” was a touchstone for me, too, because it’s about siblings and has the most elegantly rendered descriptions of piano music I’ve ever read. Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson—my character of Robin owes a lot to the shimmering weirdness of Robinson’s Sylvie. And finally, The Future of Nostalgia by the late scholar Svetlana Boym, who was a distant inspiration for the character of Olga, Lark’s professor and mentor. The Future of Nostalgia is part memoir, part philosophy, part cultural criticism, and it mines Boym’s own experiences of immigration and exile as she discusses imagined homelands and constructed spaces. She describes nostalgia as “hypochondria of the heart,” which I really love. It’s a gorgeously melancholy book, full of longing, and I think parts of my book were written out of a feeling of connection to that mood.

SB: Do you have a new project you are working on now, or do you take some time off between books to recharge? I’m a constant fiddler between ideas so I’m usually in research mode for something or other. Is there anything you are currently finding fascinating?

AO: I have a tendency to break up novel drafts by working on short stories, which are really my first love—so right now I’m finishing up a collection of short stories which will be published next year, after Dual Citizens. It’s interesting to see, looking back, how the stories are working through similar thoughts and configurations as the novel. You never realize how transparent your obsessions are until after the fact. I don’t have a new novel project on the go yet; often I spend a year or two reading, picking up ideas and putting them down, before I figure out which one is going to stick. So in terms of research, I’ve been reading a lot about the life and work of the artist Eva Hesse, with whom I’ve always been fascinated; also reading the work of Jenny Erpenbeck, about the refugee crisis in Europe; and re-reading Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout, which is making me think about chronology and ordering of stories. It’ll be a long while before I figure out how any of this will coalesce for my own work, but part of the joy for me in finishing a project is becoming a reader again, sinking into one book after the next, welcoming any influence that comes my way.