Alethea Black's Nocturnal Habit

In the 39th in a series of posts on 2011 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, intern Phedra Deonarine interviews Alethea Black, author of I Knew You'd Be Lovely  (Broadway Books).

Phedra Deonarine: Is there a story collection you consider your ideal of what a collection
should be?

Alethea Black: An ideal collection would be one that surprises me and enlists my heart. I suppose I'm drawn to the same things in stories that attract me in people: charm, inventiveness, humor, compassion, intelligence. When I was first learning to write, collections by Lorrie Moore and Ralph Lombreglia moved me deeply. This year, I'm loving the new books by Jim Shepard and Steve Almond. My all-time greatest hits include Jesus' Son and The Things They Carried.

PD: Which story in your collection required the most drafts or posed the most technical problems?

AB: "Mollusk Makes a Comeback" It was one of the first stories I ever wrote, and it went through many, many drafts (and many bad titles, including "Doughnut Holes" and "Please Continue to Hold"). I don't save all the iterations of a story as I work—if I did, my desktop would be even more cluttered than it is—but the collected drafts of that story would almost be an archaeological record of someone learning how to write.

A story in the making: (L to R) dog, bone, dog

Conflict is the engine that keeps a story rolling—I sometimes tell aspiring writers that every story is about two dogs and one bone—yet "Mollusk" was a story about a woman in conflict with herself. Inner conflict is difficult to portray without committing any number of literary sins, and I struggled with a way to dramatize her paralysis and boredom without making the story itself boring and inert.

PD: What are you working on now?

AB: I'm still tweaking a short novel called The Key, even though it's officially finished and with my agent. (I think I've entered the editing phase Oscar Wilde described: "I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.") I also have notes for the next book, called The Lucky Brother, but I'm circling in the grass and have yet to lie down with it.

PD: Which writers were mentors to you as you worked on early versions of these
stories?

AB: I've had the most wonderful teachers, to whom I'll always be grateful: Lee K. Abbott, Alice Elliott Dark, David Gates, Joshua Henkin, Jeff Jackson, Thom Jones, and Meir Ribalow.

PD: What is your writing process like?

AB: I often write at night, in bed. I felt bad about writing in bed until I learned that Sid Mukherjee is also a bed-writer. I wish I could wean myself from the nocturnal schedule, but I suppose I should simply be grateful the work gets done. (I wrote about this habit recently) I have little method or ritual, and I confess I'm not a big self-disciplinarian. If I'm in the thick of a project, I might write all day for weeks, but there are also fallow weeks when I don't write at all.

PD: Were there any stories you wrote and wanted to include, but that didn’t make the cut for this volume?

AB: I have a triptych of short shorts that my editor and I briefly considered including, but we already had an Author's Notes appendix, telling the stories behind the stories; to have some sort of dim sum surprise as well felt too complicated. I'm now glad we didn't. I don't think flash fiction—my own, at least—provides as satisfying a narrative experience as longer stories. And I like to satisfy.

Story Prize Judge Breon Mitchell: On Stories That Embody the Familiar and the New

Breon Mitchell, one of this year’s three judges for The Story Prize (along with Sherman Alexie and Louise Steinman), is Professor of Germanic Studies and Comparative Literature at Indiana University, Bloomington. Professor Mitchell also serves as the Director of Indiana University’s Lilly Library, a repository for rare books, manuscripts, and other special collections. His critical interests span the fields of literary translation, Anglo-German literary relations, visual and literary arts, and the works of James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and Franz Kafka. His distinguished and prolific career as a literary translator has led to widely lauded English language editions of Franz Kafka’s The Trial, Heinrich Böll’s The Silent Angel, and Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum, among others. Recently, Story Prize intern Patrick Thomas Henry spoke with Professor Mitchell on the topics of literary translation, world literature, and the emotional effect of the short story.

Patrick Thomas Henry: You’ve translated the work of many writers—including such figures as Siegfried Lenz, Franz Kafka, and Nobel laureates Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass—into English. Could you share how you arrived at a career in literary translation, and what drew you to these (and other) writers?

Breon Mitchell: My life as a literary translator began at the Jayhawk Café in Lawrence, Kansas, eating peach pie and drinking Pepsi, translating Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Death and the Fool into blank verse with a friend. We were second-year German college students, just back from a summer in Germany in 1961, alive with enthusiasm for Hofmannsthal’s glowing language and with his message to live life to the full before it simply passed us by. Our translation filled almost every evening that semester, and when we were finished we did what most would-be writers did at college—founded a literary magazine and published the passages we loved best, along with translations by any other German students foolhardy enough to lift their eyes above their abilities. Happily, we knew enough to include the German originals, although I can’t say we always knew quite enough about copyright laws.

A past incarnation of the Jayhawk Café

In the coming years, while teaching at Indiana University, I had the luxury of translating exactly what I wanted, by those authors I most admired, and I relished the feeling that I was playing at least some small part in our nation’s cultural life by introducing German writers to American readers.

PTH: What challenges do you encounter when translating fiction?

BM: It’s said that our brains are constructed in such a way that our minds tend either toward poetry or toward prose, both as writers and as translators. Fortunately, my brain seems to lean toward prose. I say “fortunately,” because translating poetry is one of the most difficult linguistic tasks in the world. (Hence the well-known definition, “poetry is what’s left out in translation.”)

The overall challenge of translating fiction is generally capturing the tone and style of the original. (Conveying the literal meaning of the text is simply a matter of knowing the source language sufficiently well.) Other special challenges are presented by such issues as the use of dialects, where the translator runs the risk of making a Bavarian from Munich sound like he’s from Brooklyn, with resulting cultural confusion; or by an author whose grammatical innovations, when rendered in English, make the translation sound strangely awkward. Specialized vocabularies, arcane snippets of local color, and hidden quotations from famous passages in German literature unknown to English-language readers tempt the editor and sometimes the translator toward footnotes, which may disturb as much as they enlighten. These are just a few of the challenges literary translators face on a daily basis—and they are what make translating so much fun.

PTH: “World literature” has always seemed, to me, as a generic course title for a class focusing on literature written in languages other than English. That being said, however, I feel that this term—“world literature”—has one prime, pedagogical function: These stories must contain some elements that allow the prose to affect readers across cultures, across nationalities. What qualities do you think a work of fiction requires in order to be “world literature” in this sense, that the prose appeals to readers across nations?

BM: A work of “world literature” is generally thought to display universal human values and emotions familiar to all readers, of whatever nation. But when publishers ask “Will this work travel across the ocean?” they simply mean, is it tied too closely to the country of origin to be understood easily by American readers. Günter Grass felt his novel The Tin Drum contained too much local color to be successful abroad, yet it became the first major post-WWII German novel to reach an international audience. In the final analysis, “world literature” consists of those works, regardless of their difficulty and special ties to one nation or another, that have found their way into the hearts and minds of readers of all nationalities. What we should also remember is that “world literature” could not exist without literary translation, and that the most of the great works that move us deeply are read in translation.

PTH: As a judge, what qualities are you looking for in the three short story collections that will be finalists for The Story Prize?

BM: Samuel Beckett once said that most people could only enjoy a text if it reminded them of something else they had read. We enjoy hearing echoes of earlier texts in a new one, like musical motifs borrowed from compositions of another age. Yet we also set a high value on originality—we want to be surprised, not just by a turn of events, but by some element we may never have encountered before. We like the sense of comfort a short story provides by serving as one link in the long and complex history of the genre, while at the same time we wish to be jolted, even if gently, out of the groove of our expectations.

As a judge, I hope to be open to both the lure of tradition and the delights of innovation. It is impossible to predict reactions to a new text; that’s what makes reading so pleasurable and why I look forward so to the final three short story collections. Will I be swept away by the sheer excellence of the writing, will I be moved, or frightened, or uplifted? Will my emotions be aroused—will my mind be engaged at some deeper level? I’m certain of one thing—the problem will not be finding stories that meet my standards of quality. The problem will be choosing among them.

Story Prize Judge Louise Steinman: "Reading Is Crucial to My Life"

Story Prize intern Phedra Deonoarine recently caught up with Louise Steinman, one of this year’s three judges for The Story Prize (along with Sherman Alexie and Breon Micthell). Steinman is the curator of the award-winning ALOUD reading/conversation series for the Los Angeles Public Library, and co-director of the Los Angeles Institute for Humanities at USC. She is the author of the memoir The Souvenir: A Daughter Discovers Her Father’s War — selection of several all-city reads programs— and The Knowing Body: The Artist as Storyteller in Contemporary Performance. Her articles and reviews are published widely and her essays have been anthologized, most recently in The Devil's Punchbowl: A Cultural & Geographic Map of California Today. She is also a contributing editor at The Los Angeles Review of Books.

Phedra Deonarine: What led you to your role as a curator for the ALOUD reading and conversation series at the Los Angeles Public Library?

Louise Steinman: Many things! I studied literature at Reed College, wrote my thesis on poet Robert Creeley. The Beat poet Lew Welch was a mentor. Took a slow bus to Naropa Institute (Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics) in 1976-- studied (and later performed) with Meredith Monk. For ten years I co-directed a performance company, SO&SO&SO&SO, based in Portland, Ore. I explored my own family stories through a theater of images and movement. My first book, The Knowing Body, is subtitled “The Artist as Storyteller in Contemporary Performance.” My graduate degree is in interdisciplinary arts. I'm interested in thinkers and writers and visionaries of all kinds.

And then there’s the element of luck. The Library Foundation of Los Angeles was looking for someone to create and produce public programs back in 1993, when the (rebuilt) Los Angeles Central Library reopened after a series of disastrous arson fires. I was in the right place at the right time; though in the beginning, I didn’t think I’d last six weeks.

That was eighteen years ago this fall and now we’ve presented over 1,000 free programs.

PD: How does you work as a writer relate to your work as a curator?

LS: My own work as a writer frequently explores memory and reconciliation. That interest is reflected in some of my choices for ALOUD. We recently hosted Leymah Gbowee, the Liberian peace activist. That same week she won the Nobel Peace Prize. Last week we presented Karl Marlantes, author of the great Vietnam war novel Matterhorn. His crucial new book is called What It is Like to Go to War. My own memoir, The Souvenir: A Daughter Discovers Her Father’s War, was an investigation into my father’s experience in the Pacific War and how it shaped our family life in Culver City, Calif., in the fifties. Marlantes writes about how we need “ceremony and counseling to help returning veterans move from the infinite back to the finite.” I’m concerned with the issues our returning vets now face. I’ve led writing workshops for veterans at the library. As Marlantes notes, by writing a story, one can take oneself by surprise, get past the usual defenses.

Reading is crucial to my life as a writer and also as a curator. My idea of heaven as a kid was to take a book and climb the neighbor’s Chinese elm and hang out there reading for hours. Reading is also part of my job. I’ll spend a day reading Alexandra Fuller before I interview her; or immerse myself in the work of poet Adam Zagajewski or Joan Didion before writing my introductions. It’s tonic for my own writing.

PD: The Web site for the ALOUD series offers a wealth of author podcasts. Which ones stand out for you and why?

A recent ALOUD program with Alexandra Fuller
and Louise Steinman

LS: The program on "The Short Story and the Art of Unknowing," with Sarah Shun-lien Bynum and Yiyun Li—moderated by Bridghe Mullins—is excellent. Carlos Fuentes is another good one—his grasp of world literature is so wonderful. I loved the program with poet Jane Hirshfield and physicist Sean Carroll on "The Nature of Observation" because they're each both canny and open about the differences and possible overlaps in how they view the phenomenal world. Our recent program with Anita Hill on the 20th anniversary of the Clarence Thomas hearings was very moving. Howard Rodman's interview of John Sayles makes for great listening. Danzy Senza and Attica Locke talking about "Navigating History: Truth in Fiction" was excellent and Michael Silverblatt's conversation with Marilynne Robinson unfolds in surprising ways. If you listen to the Isabel Allende podcast you'll hear her erotic dream about Antonio Banderas in a tortilla. (There's guacamole involved as well.)

PD: What are you hoping for from the three short story collections that will
 be the finalists for The Story Prize? 

LS: I love that feeling of being so deep in a story that you don't want it to end. I love when I enter a world that is familiar and yet strange. I love when I love a sentence or a paragraph so much I have to wake my husband up in the middle of the night and read it to him. 
I love when a story haunts me for days on end.