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Category Archives: Interviews
Notes from an Interview: David Naimon on China Mieville
China Mieville - photo by Chris Close
David Naimon interviews China Mieville in our Winter issue. He sent us these comments on the experience:
I felt nervous before meeting China Miéville. He cut an imposing figure on the internet.–shaved head, multiple piercings, a prominent brow over eyes that I imagined didn’t blink. He often sported a tight black t-shirt shaped by the contours of his muscles, a shirt that only partially hid the huge skull tattoo spilling tentacles across his bicep. He did not look like any geek I knew, nor how I imagined a science fiction and fantasy writer. A mixed martial arts fighter, a bodyguard, a bouncer—yes—or like someone who would have beaten me up in Junior High School, the last time I was rolling ten-sided die, crushing out on Princess Leia chained to Jabba in her gold bikini, and regularly reading science fiction and fantasy.
We met in the studio of KBOO 90.7 FM, on an unseasonably cold spring day in Portland, Oregon, and to my relief, his in-person persona was much softer. Personable and polite he immediately put me at ease. When he spoke, he considered his words with a measured, gracious, almost formal tone, much as one might expect from an academic. And indeed Miéville studied social anthropology at Cambridge, received a PhD in Marxism and international law at the London School of Economics, was a fellow at Harvard, and even ran for the British House of Commons as the Socialist Alliance candidate in 2001. This dissonance, this defiance of categorization carries over into Miéville’s career in a big way. At the forefront of the New Weird movement, China Miéville is a self-professed geek, a lover of cephalopods, and someone who cites Dungeons and Dragons and comics (along with Jane Eyre) as influences. Miéville has risen to the top of the genre having won nearly every prestigious award in the field—some two or an unprecedented three times—along the way. Yet due to the depth of his imagination and the height of his erudition, his prose has caught the attention of non-genre publications from the New York Times to the Guardian, heralding him as a writer who has transcended the genre from which he arose. But unabashedly proud of his field, Miéville doesn’t what to transcend. He believes Weird Fiction holds distinct advantages over literary fiction, which to Miéville, is merely a genre like any other. He prefers to see himself as a conduit to a world of writing that, in his mind, is best equipped to address the issues of the day.
If China Miéville were to pick one of his books for someone who doesn’t read sci-fi he would choose his Hugo Award winning novel, The City and The City. And by chance, my first exposure to China Miéville’s work was this very book. I was hooked by the spare noirish prose, a style the Los Angeles Times described so wonderfully as if written by a love child of Philip K .Dick and Raymond Chandler who was raised by Franz Kafka. Just as Miéville would have hoped, The City & The City led me deeper into the genre, to his latest book Embassytown, a work both more fantastical and more philosophical, one that grapples with the nature of language, the power of stories, and starring a species who literally become addicted to words. Just like these creatures, I have become hooked on this Miévillian cocktail of philosophical insight and intergalactic adventure, as insightful and thought provoking as any literary fiction.
David Naimon
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New Books We Love: The Ruins of Us by Keija Parssinen
I first met Keija Parnissen last summer when she and her husband Michael stopped by The Missouri Review’s summer launch party. I can’t remember how the conversation started, but we talked for a solid half-hour about … well, a little bit of everything, with that effortless rhythm that happens when I speak to someone genuinely interesting. And it is also really wonderful to know that there is a writer here in Columbia not immediately connected to the university, and thriving with her own work.
Keija has just released her deubt novel, The Ruins of Us, on Harper Perennial. Calling her a local writer is only half-accurate: she’s lived in Saudi Arabia, Texas, New Jersey, Iowa, and now, right here in Columbia where, among other things, she runs the Quarry Heights Workshop. Between flying around the country to give readings and celebrate her book publication with her family and friends, she took the time to sit down and answer a few questions for TMR about her new novel.
TMR: When asked about his famous character, Emma Bovary, Flaubert said “Madame Bovary, she is me.” I’m sure you get lots of questions about how autobiographical your characters are. What elements of yourself do you see in Rosalie? In Abdullah? In Faisal? In Miriam?
Parssinen: While I find it irksome that people assume every work of fiction is autobiographical, Flaubert’s quote gets at the heart of the matter—obviously he’s not a housewife who embarks on a disastrous adulterous affair, but it is he who breathed life into Emma and established her emotional and psychological being. In that way, the author is every character in her book, for she is their creator. So while Rosalie, Abdullah, Miriam, Dan, and Faisal are removed from my biography by virtue of our differences in age, religion, provenance, and in some cases, sex, they are born of my imagination, cultivated from my knowledge of pain, joy, betrayal, love. They are, indeed, me.
TMR: How did you decide to expand your narrative outside the family to Dan Coleman? Why does Isra not also get her own storyline?
Parssinen: The novel actually began as Dan’s story because I felt most comfortable writing in his voice. He’s the battle-hardened expat living as a stranger in a strange world, and I’d known his kind, both within my family and without. I wanted him to serve as the novel’s Nick Carraway, to observe the family in turmoil and report to the reader from a distance. But of course, as Nick and Dan both discover, the observer inevitably becomes enmeshed in the storyline, and that’s where things get tricky. To me, Isra is the catalyst of the narrative but she is unimportant to it—she reveals the cracks in the façade, but she’s peripheral. And while I found her an interesting character—an educated, progressive Arab woman who agrees to become a second wife—there was no room for her voice in this already-crowded story. Much of the book dwells on what it means to be an outsider, and she truly is one, even down to her authorially-enforced silence.
TMR: What was the most difficult scene to write and why?
Parssinen: I nearly cry every time I read the scene between Dan and Rosalie on the dune, when they’re talking about their failed marriages and whether love is worth it. My parents divorced and it was immensely painful for me and my siblings; even though my parents are now back together, none of us kids has fully recovered from that early pain. It was my first real experience with loss, after leaving Saudi Arabia—and to imagine through Dan and Rosalie’s dialogue the pain of negotiating lost love was excruciating for me, but it also helped me understand my parents’ decisions and work towards forgiving them.
TMR: Often in novels, there are storylines and even characters that have to be “cut” in order to make the novel work. Would you please share one or two things that you had to make the hard choice on, and eliminate from the book?
Parssinen: Thankfully, I didn’t have to cut any of my major characters, but I did have to eliminate pages and pages of character rumination. My poor agent and editor, drowning in all those swirling thoughts and wondering how the devil to create a sense of pacing! They were both very honest with me—“Look, Dan is becoming a HUGE drag, could you please just pep him up a little bit, have him actually do something instead of just be sad and ponder his losses?” I probably cut 40 pages of Dan, pages where I really liked the writing and the mood created and had carefully constructed each sentence. It was incredibly tough but absolutely necessary to excise those parts.
TMR: Do you consider Rosalie and Abdullah’s marriage a “failed marriage”?
Parssinen: Yes, but not necessarily for the reasons you might imagine (his taking a second wife, etc). It failed for those most mundane reasons: they stopped communicating with each other and became complacent within the marriage. And while the second wife presents obvious problems (!) for the union, it had started to die before her emergence on the scene.
TMR: Writers read diversely. The books that are recommended in the back of The Ruins of Us are thematically similar. Take your readers in another direction: what is one book that you recommend and love that is completely different from your writing?
Parssinen: Great question! I love Yannick Murphy’s recent novel, The Call. In it, she experiments with form while telling the story of a Vermont veterinarian’s family living in a creaking old house in the countryside. She takes incredible structural risks, novelistically, and somehow manages to pull off a story that is emotionally resonant and incredibly funny. Though on the surface of things, it’s a domestic, pastoral story, it’s pure magic. I plan to read all of her earlier work, I loved it so much!
If you’re a Columbia resident, Keija’s book launch party here in town is free and open to the public: this Saturday, January 28th, at 7:00 pm, swing by Orr Street Studios and meet her, buy the book (what—you haven’t already?!), and hang out for a few hours. If you’re not in Columbia, skip over to Keija’s site to find out when she is coming to your town and, of course, snag a copy of her book.
Follow Michael Nye on Twitter: @mpnye
Word Missouri: Between readings and signings, Missouri authors recall how they found their voice
Sci-fi romance author J.C. Hay
Last week Word Missouri told the story of a group of bookstores in St. Louis supporting each other through events like bookstore tours and literary speed dating. These events aren’t only good for booksellers – they also benefit local authors who write in niche genres and don’t have the support of an academic setting or a big-name publisher. Fortunately, the realm of social media is good to genre writers. There may only be a handful of people who write space opera romances, as J.C. Hay points out, but they tend to stick together, and blogs are a great place for that. I talked to a few of those authors during the tour, and asked them how they found publishers and got word out about their books – and whether they feel like they’ve really made it.
Profiled in the video above:
Children’s book author and creator of Petalwink the Fairy, Angela Sage Larsen, interviewed at Rose’s Bookhouse in O’Fallon
Gothic fiction author John McFarland, interviewed at Rebound in St. Louis
Sci-fi / paranormal romance author J.C. Hay, interviewed at Get Lost Bookshop in Columbia
Word Missouri: Eliot, St. Louis and the river
Word Missouri is a series in partnership with KBIA, Columbia’s NPR affiliate. It examines Missouri’s literary heritage, present and future. KBIA’s Davis Dunavin is the series creator and reporter.
I’m a die-hard fan of Modernism. More specifically, I’m a die-hard Thomas Stearns Eliot-head. Not always a popular stance; he’s certainly got his detractors these days. Which is why I was so thrilled to meet Frances Dickey, a professor and Eliot scholar at the University of Missouri, who speaks about Prufrock’s creator with the same excitement I still feel when I pick up Four Quartets or his fabulous criticism. (For you other Eliot-heads – I know you’re out there! – go pick up Eliot’s letters, recently published by Yale University Press.)
But Eliot just isn’t seen as a Missourian. Did he see himself as one? Fans like me know he read his poetry in a crisp, patrician accent that hung somewhere between New England and Old England. References to his home state in his writings are sparse – as are tributes to the man here. I think it’s time we change that. Dr. Dickey and I spoke about Eliot’s connections to Missouri. Have a listen to the interview as it ran on KBIA.
(By the way, the photo above was taken in St. Louis’s Central West End; busts of Eliot and fellow St. Louisian Tennessee Williams represent the first half of a project neighborhood groups call Writers Corner. More on that soon…)
This interview originally aired on September 26, T. S. Eliot’s birthday, on KBIA.
Happy Celebration Day
We at TMR hope you’re celebrating the birth of a nation by combining fun with safety. In honor of the triumph of the will of the American colonies in the war for independence, take a moment and hear what Diane Seuss has to say, in the guise of an animated cartoon, about her poems that appear in an upcoming issue of our magazine.
Robert Long Foreman is the Missouri Review’s Social Media Editor.
Interviews with Animated People
In case you missed the last couple of installments in our series of interviews with interns, here are two of them, featuring fiction reader Hannah Baxter and poetry reader Tori Ricciardi, respectively.
It turns out that Xtranormal – the web site that has otherwise been used by an insurance agency to create insurance advertisements, by teenagers to make bad sex jokes, and by Dinty Moore to dramatize a controversy in creative nonfiction – is a useful tool for featuring the insights and house pet preferences of our smart and dedicated interns. The Xtranormal format invites silliness, but at the heart of these cartoon interviews is evidence of the talent and intelligence of those who read submissions for TMR and otherwise make this journal function.
Look tomorrow at our Facebook page for still another such interview, this one with staff member and textBOX engineer Nell McCabe.
Robert Long Foreman is The Missouri Review’s Social Media Editor.