Joyce Carol Oates in conversation with Robert Haas
Joyce Carol Oates is teaching Short Fiction at UC Berkeley this semester. She has brought out a memoir, The Lost Landscape, which she has been writing for 15 years. She wrote short pieces about childhood upon request for magazines and journals, and she added them to the pile.
It took her since the early 80's to write The Accursed. She let the manuscript sit for nearly 15 years and when she returned to it, she had new insights. She said all the biographies of Wilson show him to be a horrific person. He was inculcated into being a racist when he was three years old.
One of her personal favorite books is Wild Nights, where she imagines the life of authors in their final days. She started with Edgar Allen Poe, as he left a couple of pages of an incomplete story. She tried to write in the voice and style of each author. She wanted to finish his story, the story in his mind, when he was found dead on the streets of Baltimore. She included Emily Dickinson, writing ED like poems; she includes Henry James, as he turned into a hospital volunteer in his last days - a man so fastidious in his fiction - and yet, in his last days he became a hero; she includes Mark Twain, and Hemingway, who went to Ketchum Idaho, where he held up and committed suicide; he left Cuba to be alone, to die. She wrote about Robert Frost later...
Another book was an epihany. She sat down and wrote the whole story in a couple of hours...
It was on a bridge, where she and her husband walked in Delaware, near Titusville, and she recalled the bridge of her childhood. It was an accident. She did not seek the story or the bridge. It just happened...and it is central to the story. So one needs a landscape, a house, a place for the story to happen.
Then there was the "zombie", which was meant to be a monologue and has been presented in the theater in NYC. She said that she lived in Detroit for a period of time. When she lived there, there was a serial killer. They also kill ritualistically. He attacked girls between the ages of 9 and 11 and molested them, then killed them, and bathed them, and lay them out with their laundered clothes...in a parking lot. She tried to write it, from the view of one of the mothers, but it did not work, as it conventional. It was many years later that she realized that the voice had to be the killer's, the psychopath, who liked attention...and as he was male, it is a book in which she has a male voice.
As for the memoir, a guiding chapter was the one about a pet chicken as a child. She loved this pet chicken and used to pet it, and kiss it on the top. He, who was a she, a hen, was not like the other hens who were boring...always stayed apart, and was her pet. She could not attain the mind of a four year old, so she took the mind of the chicken, as that is more mythical...and he/she flies away...looking down on the homestead...and their lives...all the hens would gather to eat the seed, the chicken feed. She thought it was so warm, as it seemed like they came to see her, but of course, what they were interested in, was the chicken feed...they were producers as they went off and lay eggs. A rooster would come through all of them strut about and peck her knees drawing blood. She wanted to know why. Was he just the predatory male? She was curious as a child, as to why he hurt her. When she was interviewed, she was asked if the family ate her pet chicken. She said, "No," but then she thought about it. She believes children block out certain areas of their experience, such as divorce. They don't know what to think, and so they do not think about it. Her hen stories make me think of my own, my mother telling me she used to find me in the hen house.
Alice In Wonderland, given to her to read when she was 9 years old, provided a template for her to organize what was happening around her...adults were strange and cruel, like the figures in Alice. It helped her to interpret life from the viewpoint of a child.
JCO is now married to a neuro scientist, Charlie Gross. He has lots of books in his study. There is a famous case HM and a couple of women involved with that case...whom she read, in writing this book, but all the characters are fictitious....she represents the woman as coming in as an intern, of 23, and of the older mentor making her career for her...and she falls in love with the man who has long term memory, of 37 years, but only 70 seconds of short term memory. His 70 year old aunt dies and she becomes protective and falls in love with him. She insinuates herself into his memory, through a childhood friend, found in his books, who she resembles.
Oates' grandfather was a striking Irishman, with a full head of black hair...and married her grandmother a Jew(she did not know she was a Jew from Berlin, until she had died...she bought her her typewriters and her first books(the love of Jews for books) ; the grandfather was mythical, but tried to kill the family, but killed himself in the end.... he drank too much, was not responsible. Her father and mother met each other, having these terrible backgrounds borne of violence. She does not know if they spoke of it. Childhood is filled with mysteries. Adults talk not what children know of. I remember this, myself.
Oates makes a curious statement; how many of our lives are built on there being violence somewhere and how much is accidental... she went to a small one room school house. They went to the nearest school, and consider how competitive it is to go to school today. Then she got to go to a proper upper class school in Buffalo, and then to college; but what if she had not...her mother was one of 9 and when the father was gone, she was given to a couple who could not have children. They devoted themselves to her. Her father's family also had a murder in it.
A comment is made about their friends and aging. She says people's memories and stories remain fixed, and rigidly the same, even when corrected. They tell the same story 45 times and do not seem to know they have told the story before. Sounds familiar at Roberts family dinners!
Haas comments that her childhood memories are cited by a critic as being racks upon which the stories she has written all her life can be hung. She concurs.
When asked how Joyce knew about bars, and the people who frequent them, --for her book, MUD, she said that her father used to take her to bars when she was a child. She recalls the smells, the pinball machines and the atmosphere, which elicited nostalgic feelings when she wrote this book. She says her books about boxing were a homage to her father as well, as he loved boxing, and took her to matches. He used to fly a small plane.
Oates likes strangeness in stories. She was asked to read, "Where I have been, Where I am going", a short story she wrote along time ago, and she wondered at some of the strange things she has in it. Perhaps an editor would say, these details were distracting, but perhpas she put them into puzzle readers down through the years. She cites Flannery O' Connor who has one sentence which cites a person's response from the audience, to all that is on stage and that is unconventional, and she liked it.
Oates walks and runs, and thinks that she would not write, if she did not. She thinks about what she is writing, then. You have to think alot about what you are writing, and creating.
The new books are: Lost Landscape, a memoir of childhood,
and the new fiction is:
It took her since the early 80's to write The Accursed. She let the manuscript sit for nearly 15 years and when she returned to it, she had new insights. She said all the biographies of Wilson show him to be a horrific person. He was inculcated into being a racist when he was three years old.
One of her personal favorite books is Wild Nights, where she imagines the life of authors in their final days. She started with Edgar Allen Poe, as he left a couple of pages of an incomplete story. She tried to write in the voice and style of each author. She wanted to finish his story, the story in his mind, when he was found dead on the streets of Baltimore. She included Emily Dickinson, writing ED like poems; she includes Henry James, as he turned into a hospital volunteer in his last days - a man so fastidious in his fiction - and yet, in his last days he became a hero; she includes Mark Twain, and Hemingway, who went to Ketchum Idaho, where he held up and committed suicide; he left Cuba to be alone, to die. She wrote about Robert Frost later...
Another book was an epihany. She sat down and wrote the whole story in a couple of hours...
It was on a bridge, where she and her husband walked in Delaware, near Titusville, and she recalled the bridge of her childhood. It was an accident. She did not seek the story or the bridge. It just happened...and it is central to the story. So one needs a landscape, a house, a place for the story to happen.
Then there was the "zombie", which was meant to be a monologue and has been presented in the theater in NYC. She said that she lived in Detroit for a period of time. When she lived there, there was a serial killer. They also kill ritualistically. He attacked girls between the ages of 9 and 11 and molested them, then killed them, and bathed them, and lay them out with their laundered clothes...in a parking lot. She tried to write it, from the view of one of the mothers, but it did not work, as it conventional. It was many years later that she realized that the voice had to be the killer's, the psychopath, who liked attention...and as he was male, it is a book in which she has a male voice.
As for the memoir, a guiding chapter was the one about a pet chicken as a child. She loved this pet chicken and used to pet it, and kiss it on the top. He, who was a she, a hen, was not like the other hens who were boring...always stayed apart, and was her pet. She could not attain the mind of a four year old, so she took the mind of the chicken, as that is more mythical...and he/she flies away...looking down on the homestead...and their lives...all the hens would gather to eat the seed, the chicken feed. She thought it was so warm, as it seemed like they came to see her, but of course, what they were interested in, was the chicken feed...they were producers as they went off and lay eggs. A rooster would come through all of them strut about and peck her knees drawing blood. She wanted to know why. Was he just the predatory male? She was curious as a child, as to why he hurt her. When she was interviewed, she was asked if the family ate her pet chicken. She said, "No," but then she thought about it. She believes children block out certain areas of their experience, such as divorce. They don't know what to think, and so they do not think about it. Her hen stories make me think of my own, my mother telling me she used to find me in the hen house.
Alice In Wonderland, given to her to read when she was 9 years old, provided a template for her to organize what was happening around her...adults were strange and cruel, like the figures in Alice. It helped her to interpret life from the viewpoint of a child.
JCO is now married to a neuro scientist, Charlie Gross. He has lots of books in his study. There is a famous case HM and a couple of women involved with that case...whom she read, in writing this book, but all the characters are fictitious....she represents the woman as coming in as an intern, of 23, and of the older mentor making her career for her...and she falls in love with the man who has long term memory, of 37 years, but only 70 seconds of short term memory. His 70 year old aunt dies and she becomes protective and falls in love with him. She insinuates herself into his memory, through a childhood friend, found in his books, who she resembles.
Oates' grandfather was a striking Irishman, with a full head of black hair...and married her grandmother a Jew(she did not know she was a Jew from Berlin, until she had died...she bought her her typewriters and her first books(the love of Jews for books) ; the grandfather was mythical, but tried to kill the family, but killed himself in the end.... he drank too much, was not responsible. Her father and mother met each other, having these terrible backgrounds borne of violence. She does not know if they spoke of it. Childhood is filled with mysteries. Adults talk not what children know of. I remember this, myself.
Oates makes a curious statement; how many of our lives are built on there being violence somewhere and how much is accidental... she went to a small one room school house. They went to the nearest school, and consider how competitive it is to go to school today. Then she got to go to a proper upper class school in Buffalo, and then to college; but what if she had not...her mother was one of 9 and when the father was gone, she was given to a couple who could not have children. They devoted themselves to her. Her father's family also had a murder in it.
A comment is made about their friends and aging. She says people's memories and stories remain fixed, and rigidly the same, even when corrected. They tell the same story 45 times and do not seem to know they have told the story before. Sounds familiar at Roberts family dinners!
Haas comments that her childhood memories are cited by a critic as being racks upon which the stories she has written all her life can be hung. She concurs.
When asked how Joyce knew about bars, and the people who frequent them, --for her book, MUD, she said that her father used to take her to bars when she was a child. She recalls the smells, the pinball machines and the atmosphere, which elicited nostalgic feelings when she wrote this book. She says her books about boxing were a homage to her father as well, as he loved boxing, and took her to matches. He used to fly a small plane.
Oates likes strangeness in stories. She was asked to read, "Where I have been, Where I am going", a short story she wrote along time ago, and she wondered at some of the strange things she has in it. Perhaps an editor would say, these details were distracting, but perhpas she put them into puzzle readers down through the years. She cites Flannery O' Connor who has one sentence which cites a person's response from the audience, to all that is on stage and that is unconventional, and she liked it.
Oates walks and runs, and thinks that she would not write, if she did not. She thinks about what she is writing, then. You have to think alot about what you are writing, and creating.
The new books are: Lost Landscape, a memoir of childhood,
and the new fiction is:
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