REVISTA LITERÁRIA ADELAIDE 243 Warnings mother warned me you’ll end up all alone I was in my early 20s & the warnings grew as I passed 30 you don’t want to be all alone when you’re old you don’t want to die alone I adopted a cat, rented a studio apartment microwaved Boca burgers for dinner sometimes my mother mentions grandchildren sometimes she just stares like I’m a hopeless case Erin Jamieson holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Miami University of Ohio. Her writing has been published in over eighty literary magazines, and her fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is the author of a forthcoming poetry collection (Clothesline, NiftyLit).
ADELAIDE LITERARY MAGAZINE 244 BATHING BEAUTY by Sandra Kolankiewicz Archeology Two old men with trowels and a permit dig a strategic trench from just beyond the base of the tulip poplar to the edge of the mound, where an old etching now suggests something lies undiscovered. They often spent their Saturdays at the town’s little museum examining the locally-collected artifacts brought to them for identification, worked pieces of exotic pink flint unearthed with plow or grader, until they came on a drawing in the archives unlike all the others sketched by surveyors from the hills looking down over the plain more than three hundred years ago, before any settlers even arrived, an image not reproduced afterwards in a book or collection, just waiting to be found on the shelf. Though the artist’s swirled letters prohibit determining whether a symbol’s some commentary made to mark a spot or indicates an entrance or appears the sunken roof of a tomb, they think they’re on to something never revealed. They’re here at dawn with their shovels, bottled
REVISTA LITERÁRIA ADELAIDE 245 water, digging. Of course settlers buried themselves here too, around the conical mound, their illegible headstones all in rows, so what’s to find is what’s left behind in this wrought-iron-fenced graveyard with more Revolutionary War soldiers than anywhere else but New England. Broken arrowheads, clay effigies will mix with the clay pipes and mother-of-pearl buttons they’ll unearth, the buttons carved of mussel shells collected from the shoals where creeks met the Great River, now submerged after the damming. Up the state two lane, at the edge of the county, hill slides have exposed an intact precursor to the dinosaurs, wanderer of this same old dried ocean. My One-Eyed Bear Now that the world’s opened up again, jobs on every corner, major grants awarded to address poverty and inequity, the drum beat against guns gaining decibels, our foeti commanded to appear, the world’s about to become perfect. What do I do with my old rage, embraced since childhood, the only I’ve ever known, in order to move on to a new kind of anger? Shall I lay it down like a one-eyed stuffed animal, rubbed to the weft, in order to preserve its memory for my personal history?
ADELAIDE LITERARY MAGAZINE 246 Toss it in the trash amidst bits of the material world I’ve sloughed off, as one disposes of fingernail parings? Continue to carry it until there’s nothing recognizable remaining of more than I can possibly imagine? The new fury of today rises out of compost-laced soil still flecked with lead and arsenic, fueled by hope in spite of odds, growing through invisible links and codes in the digital dimension, bringing people together to rally and claim their square foot on the sidewalk when they’ve never worked a field. This new kind of hating means a new kind of loving though I adore my one-eyed bear, once shrieked when he was misplaced, used him as a pillow, companion, punching bag, possession.
REVISTA LITERÁRIA ADELAIDE 247 As Long As They Can When you can’t find slumber for thinking, keep rolling over, flipping your pillow to its cool side, keep seeing that rectangular pit in the ground where the overflow of bodies was laid. If for hours you’ve found yourself covering and uncovering with the blanket, get up, step out of bed without the light. Find your slippers. The dog will click behind you to the kitchen, cats blinking surprised at you from the chair. You have laundry to do, a few dishes. The toilets need scrubbed, the sinks having taken on that waxy look they get in the home of bachelors. Start there and move from one end of the house to the other, room to room, on your knees if you have to. No music, no television, nothing but the silence you’re tired of. Let the rest sleep as long as they can.
ADELAIDE LITERARY MAGAZINE 248 Communique #9 The ride was easier than expected, the road having held up through the winter, and the drought, they said, kept all from turning to mud, faces on the other side of the window like in those stories I heard as a child except they were real, while our truck kept moving, the stunned gazes slow to acquire understanding, hundreds of them becoming thousands on the road when we closed our eyes and imagined the outcome, privilege making us see the future. Bathing Beauty The days pass like tiny ripples that bump across the horizon in August when there’s no wind, frigates too high overhead to be seen, waiting for low air currents, webbed feet never touching land, signal of clear skies and a relentless sun, the hope of updrafts. I stumble in, the sandy bottom planed like pavement, its slope toward the continental shelf unnoticeable, the ocean cool, rising to envelop until little by little I arrive at the place where my chin meets the water, unable to venture further without making effort, salt making me buoyant, more graceful in the ocean than on land.
REVISTA LITERÁRIA ADELAIDE 249 Most recently Sandra Kolankiewicz’s work has been accepted at Fortnightly Review, Consequence, Hoxie Gorge, and Free State Review.
ADELAIDE LITERARY MAGAZINE 250 MEDITATIONS by Alan Altany Septuagenarian Memoirs No. 7 “Music is the doctor of my soul,” eminent healing of a day’s dregs by reversion to a primal heartbeat, immediate submersion in sounds streaming through the blood like a sacred river of strange currents, from a steadfast beating of drums to Mozart, Elvis, Doobie Brothers & Bob Dylan’s always rolling stone; music is edged with eternity’s marriage to the full measure of the moment, releasing the monkey-mind from itself & raising the soul to obvious ecstasy. Without music, angels weep at dawn & hearts suffer attacks of melancholy from irredeemable distraction noises, but music is my radical muse from a mysterious silence where all music is born in particular infinities.
REVISTA LITERÁRIA ADELAIDE 251 Distractions (2) Distractions measure out our lives with unredeemable plastic spoons that break, splitting open tongues with blood drooling from openly catatonic mouths until the next distraction is up and ready to serve. All very surreal, very sophisticated. Homo Distractatus is our name, distracting from distractions our game. When did life itself become a distraction? Why are we addicted to everything but silence & solitude, preferring to vulture the carrion of our cravings? What happened to vision quests and fasting from deprivations of soul? Where are the crones and sages guiding us through rogue waves and the spiritual sloth of the frivolous? How has wisdom lost itself in deviations from the ancient ecstasies of life? When we weary of ever-circling the brazen-bright laser lights, will we just lay down & die? Why the malingering fear of living naked without the numbing shielding? Where are the poets & earthy saints to take our breaths away with their spirited geographies impervious to deadenings?
ADELAIDE LITERARY MAGAZINE 252 Imagination Imagine there is imagination, forming what does not exist, seeing what exists as strange, a surreal dive into possibilities where old mysteries and new potentials converge in crucibles compounding elixirs into fathomable insights surprising all the more for their bizarre beauty. Imagination as knowing with the soul’s blood, remembering what never was, receiving whatever could be, soaring in divine winds into the heart of wisdom, finding peculiar revelations creatively disguised as ordinary absurdities. Alan Altany is a partially retired, septuagenarian college professor of religious studies and theology. He has been a factory worker, swineherd on a farm, hotel clerk, lawn maintenance worker, high school teacher, small magazine of poetry editor, director of religious education for churches, truck driver, novelist, among other things. In 2022 he published a book of poetry entitled A Beautiful Absurdity (https://www. alanaltany.com/).
REVISTA LITERÁRIA ADELAIDE 253 DRIPPING by Noee Spiegel I stare right through the glass Right through it’s layers of transparence and it’s nuance of azure Lips ever so plump, filled to the brim with senseless idioms A glass so full it’s contents drip over it’s edge Pathetically one might say Brave another may reply The faucet’s incessantly trickling, chunks of rust flowing through its current Embraced so sweetly in an earnestness only summer can breed Lips that have whispered devotion in a quiet prayer To ears that never did more than relish In the honey poured by my solstitial diction Lips who’s cardinal attire is long gone Fluttering to another’s beat that I’ve grown deafened to They now lay bare in the blankness of winter Split from the frigid adjourn Amidst precipices that never seem to replenish Lips that still rouse at dawn echoing the ghost of a phrase Pondering where you’ve gone Apprehensive of the day the drip will cease Noee Spiegel is a young author from Montreal Canada. Her first language is English and she is currently majoring in poetry.
ADELAIDE LITERARY MAGAZINE 254 GRAVITY by Miranda Clarity HAUNTED ONE I sleep with fairies while dreaming the truth of my soul, eyes closed, staring. Magic within, rooted inside; scarce without; abundant, once I am found. Outside, the dark haunts me but inside mind’s eye, light of truth abounds and… darkness becomes the haunted one.
REVISTA LITERÁRIA ADELAIDE 255 EMPTY AGAIN grief grips my eyes spills rain down my cheeks pain locked within gnaws scratches aches explodes down my eyes from friendship lost beauty brutalized warmth frosted in ice flame burned out in yesterday leaving empty holes to fill again
ADELAIDE LITERARY MAGAZINE 256 GRAVITY The wheel keeps turning. The car drives forward. A rose unfolds touched by sun’s ray, then sinks out of sight replaced by yellow moonlight, vanishes all too soon replaced once more by licking light as flame of sun dries the morning dew. The world turns, spins its axis. Gravity pulls… inward, downward— friction to those… outward upward. A burden pulling heart strings for the Heavens. Touch the sun, kiss the moon, dance with the stars. Earth is a magnet calling me home, gravity begging always left wanting ‘til I return her golden embrace.
REVISTA LITERÁRIA ADELAIDE 257 ENFOLDED WITHIN THE NIGHT The mysterious night enfolds me in quiet contemplation, eyes lingering over each star wondering what stories they hold and have seen from their vaulted throne above. I’m curious how long they have been enshrined in light, piercing this Earth’s dark nights. Each one must have its own story— its own origin—going back before time was even counted. The stars were after all the original keepers of time. Time might be an entirely different thing if we had no stars…It’s an interesting thought. I wonder how much loss just one star would accumulate during its time, seeing so many things get destroyed, pass away or blink out of existence, no longer illuminated by the beauty of its light. How much charge of pain would be stored, locked deep within, behind the bright shell of their skin? And I delight at the idea of all the joys they must have known—gathered up and bursting from within. Perhaps their joy is what lights their way? I imagine a star getting drunk on red wine of happiness, exploding out from its inner core with exuberant flame.
ADELAIDE LITERARY MAGAZINE 258 Theirs are eyes which would have observed all the stories of happiness here on Earth since time immemorial—all the joys we have known and all those joys we can only imagine, and in some cases, joys we now cannot even fathom. Yet if time did not exist, would then all these things be missed? What would happen if there were no stars? No beauty of light to gaze upon in the night. No signposts for sailors or travelers lost in the dark. Earth would be a lonely planet indeed if it were alone in the galaxy. There would not even be a galaxy. Just Earth—cold, dark and lonely. And what about hope? Stars have always been omens of hope. For ages, we’ve wished upon a star for our dreams to come true. How dark it would be without that. And how very much alone we would feel. For me, as I sit here and wish upon a star, it is to always have their beauty looking down on me from afar, to always have their light cutting through the dark, to always be able to “count my lucky stars,” to always have the hope for the possibility of other life out there in this vast universe of ours.
REVISTA LITERÁRIA ADELAIDE 259 AWAKENED Heart awakens from silent nap— artist in me reborn. Tree of inspiration dripping sap; seed within sprouts forth. Works of art escape me— vibrant saplings of truth, sharp blades of creativity— shining bright in new youth. Images spill over old snow as a new season dawns. Canvas now colored in creative flow, breaking free monotony’s yawns. Words of poetry adorn the page— truth of my soul laid bare. My thoughts free of old cage flock to new destinies they dare. Inspiration for a new world springs from inside my soul, feeds the world without until Earth once again feels whole— awakened to its own soul. Miranda Clarity has been writing poetry since the age of 12. She is now, at age 39, working to get her poetry published to spread messages of truth, peace and beauty during these turbulent times in the world.
ADELAIDE LITERARY MAGAZINE 260 PRISCILLA, LET’S DANCE by Michael Lee Johnson I Age Arthritis and aging make it hard, I walk gingerly, with a cane, and walk slow, bent forward, fear threats, falls, fear denouement─ I turn pages, my family albums become a task. But I can still bake and shake, sugar cookies, sweet potato, lemon meringue pies. Alone, most of my time, but never on Sundays, friends and communion, United Church of Canada. I chug a few down, love my Blonde Canadian Pale Ale, Copenhagen long cut a pinch of snuff. I can still dance the Boogie-woogie, Lindy Hop in my living room, with my nursing care home partner. Aging has left me with youthful dimples, but few long-term promises.
REVISTA LITERÁRIA ADELAIDE 261 Crypt in the Sky Order me up, no one knows where this crypt in the sky like a condo on the 5th floor suite don’t sell me out over the years; please don’t bury me beneath this ground, don’t let me decay inside my time pine casket. Don’t let me burn to cremate skull last to turn to ashes. Treasure me high where no one goes, no arms reach, stretch. Building for the Centuries then just let it fall. These few precious dry bones preserved for you, sealed in the cloud no relocation is necessary, no flowers need to be planted, no dusting off that dust each year, no sinners can reach this high. Jesus’ heaven, Jesus’ sky. Note: Dedicated to the passing of beloved Katie Balaskas.
ADELAIDE LITERARY MAGAZINE 262 Priscilla, Let’s Dance Priscilla, Puerto Rican songbird, an island jungle dancer, Cuban heritage, rare parrot, a singer survivor near extinction. She sounds off on notes, music her vocals hearing background bongos, piano keys, Cuban horns. Quote the verse patterns, quilt the pieces skirt bleeds, then blend colors to light a tropical prism. Steamy Salsa, a little twist, cha-cha-cha dancing rhythms of passions, sacred these islands. Everything she has is movement tucked nice and tight but explosive. She mimics these ancient sounds showing her ribs, her naked body. Her ex-lovers remain nightmares pointed daggers, so criminal, so stereotyped. Priscilla purifies her dreams with repentance. She pours her heart out, everything condensed to the bone, petite boobies, cheap bras, flamboyant Gi strings. Her vocabulary is that of sin and Catholicism. Island hurricanes form her own Jesus slants of hail, detonate thunder, the collapse of hell in her hands after midnight. Priscilla remains a background rabble-rouser, almost remorseful, no apologies to the counsel of Judas wherever he hangs.
REVISTA LITERÁRIA ADELAIDE 263 Willow Tree Poem Wind dancers dancing to the willow wind, lance-shaped leaves swaying right to left all day long. I’m depressed. Birds hanging onbleaching feathers out into the sun. Michael Lee Johnson lived ten years in Canada during the Vietnam era. Today he is a poet in the greater Chicagoland area, IL. He has 275 YouTube poetry videos. Michael Lee Johnson is an internationally published poet in 44 countries, has several published poetry books, has been nominated for 6 Pushcart Prize awards, and 6 Best of the Net nominations. He is editor-in-chief of 3 poetry anthologies, all available on Amazon, and has several poetry books and chapbooks. He has over 453 published poems. Michael is the administrator of 6 Facebook Poetry groups. Member Illinois State Poetry Society: http://www.illinoispoets.org/.
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INTERVIEWS ENTREVISTAS
REVISTA LITERÁRIA ADELAIDE 267 An Interview with THOMAS RICHARDS, author of Mrs. Sinden 1- In the late 1990s, you were awarded the prestigious Guggenheim fellowship. How did that help shape your writing career? In my observation, the people at the Guggenheim try to find people who are in a crucible of development and support them at just the right juncture in their creative life. This was the case with me. In my academic work with literature I had reached a turning point. The great freedom given to me by my Guggenheim year enabled me to pivot and write Zero Tolerance, my first novel, which was published by FSG in 1997. 2. You also lived in Hong Kong for 11 years, and your new novel, Mrs. Sinden, is set there. What experiences and observations during your time there contributed to the inspiration behind Mrs. Sinden? Going through the SARS epidemic in 2003 was the experience that really bound me to Hong Kong. Many fled as the epidemic spread. My wife and I did not. We stayed. We were living on the Peak, and I remember thinking of Boccaccio’s Decameron at the time—a book about people in enforced isolation trying to escape from the plague by telling lots of love stories. Love and death seemed very close at that time in Hong Kong. Families huddled together in their apartments. From time to time
ADELAIDE LITERARY MAGAZINE 268 you would look out the window and see someone being carried off in an ambulance to the hospital. The streets were mostly empty. There was a different kind of fear in the air than with the COVID epidemic. With SARS, you didn’t have governments striving mightily to find a vaccine. No, it was more like the Middle Ages. People were more or less on their own. You went into hiding and waited for the disease to abate. I tried to capture this sense of SARS in Mrs. Sinden. A sense of people helplessly watching the disease do whatever it does, then disappear. In this sense, the novel is closer to Camus’s La Peste or Defoe’s Journal of a Plague Year than anything written now about COVID-19. 3. In Mrs. Sinden, you zoom in very closely to main character Jessica Sinden’s mind and heart, progressively revealing new aspects of her as seen through the eyes of other characters as the story unfolds. How did you, a man, channel her voice and essence in such vivid and credible detail? Through her use of language, and through a careful building of interiority. Language first. Her husband uses language evasively and is preoccupied with little puns. Her son uses it for idle amusement. Her lover is prone to aesthetic abstraction. But Jessica Sinden has a woman’s ability to accommodate speech to facts and emotional realities. This does not mean she is good at relating to people. She begins the novel is a severely unconnected state. But it means she is open to experience and what it will teach her. From the very beginning, she has something about her that very few people have, a strength of seeing that serves her well and a precision of expression, which, though not wholly accurate, has the virtue of being unerringly precise—which is the very wellspring of her development in the book. As to her inner life. I tried to give Jessica Sinden an almost alarming self-consciousness. She has a strange and severe purity of self-
REVISTA LITERÁRIA ADELAIDE 269 examination, the sense of an intelligence examining itself with an an almost embarrassing directness. Cold as she may be at first, Jessica Sinden has the immediate appeal of absolute honesty. It’s what makes her so appealing to Philip Nye, who, right away, when he meets her in a hair salon, senses the sharpness and unerring accuracy of her self-image. She sees everything she sees with a force that is a kind of inerrancy. Part of why people think of her is cold is that she is so honest with them, though, for the most part, she saves her most ruthless honesty for the people closest to her, her children, her husband, her best friend, and her lover. 4. What interested you about writing from a woman’s point of view? I wanted to show a human being changing. I think that women are better at this than men. My father became more rigid as he got older. My mother opened her mind and became more liberal, more loving, more inquiring. This is a pattern I have seen many times over, and since I wanted to take a 59-year-old as the subject for my novel, I knew my central character would have to be a woman. Usually the central character in a novel changes in some way. Not completely, which would not be realistic; but just enough. I wanted to show realistic change, not the unrealistic sorts of complete transformation you often see in certain fiction and films. Jessica would become warm and kind, but only in her own voice and register. She would change considerably, but still, that change would be hard to interpret for those outside her. And this is just what makes her change seem all the more real to a reader. You end the novel feeling, not a false euphoria, but with a quiet sense of a life that has shifted in fundamental ways. I also deal with her gender in part by having her play nearly all of the conventional gender roles very badly. She is a failure as a wife, a mother, and at taking on the conventional attributes of femininity. This does not at all prevent her from being concerned with how she looks, how she dresses, OR how her hair is being done. But it shows you what kind of woman she is by being unafraid of breaking the usual stereotypes of the feminine. She acts as a woman but not like
ADELAIDE LITERARY MAGAZINE 270 a woman. 5. Did the process of writing a female main character change you at all? How? I began to get much better at hearing and appreciating ambivalence. One of the sentences in the novel I like best is not a sentence at all, but a look at ambivalence as an experience and the hesitancy this can lead to: “No, well, yes, I mean, still, somewhat.” I’d often heard women I know express themselves in similar ways,, but it took me some time to inhabit the richness of this kind of statement. Think of it: all at the same time, the person saying this—in this case, my character Jessica Sinden—is disagreeing, agreeing, expressing uncertainty, qualifying herself and changing her mind! I love the multiple layers of thought and emotion statements like this reveal, and I hear women making them often. What you take away is not so much a thought as a sentiment about a state of mind. Going after the vagaries of those states is what I learned most from working with a central woman character. Through the process of discovering this, I also learned to be a better listener and pay much closer attention to women—and to men. 6. Mrs. Sinden is also a powerful story of love and self-discovery set against the backdrop of the SARS outbreak in China and widespread death—including that of Jessica Sinden’s oldest daughter. How do you see love and death as intertwined? Eros and thanatos—love and death—they’re always very near to each other. Love is the only thing we have against the building presence of death in our lives. Love is always social, whereAS death, as William James says in a wonderful passage in his Varieties of Religious Experience, is utterly individual: “Our civilization is founded on
REVISTA LITERÁRIA ADELAIDE 271 the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.” In Mrs. Sinden I always see a lonely death creeping up on life, and pushed away in various ways by people being social, sociable, or in love. Jessica does both. Her lover dies, but then she finds another temporary stay against death in the small family that she creates, along with Aspidistra, at the end of the novel. 7. In Mrs. Sinden you also zoom in closely to the perspective of the expats—or, more accurately, the colonists—still living in Hong Kong after its transition from British to Chinese rule in 1997. What interests you about their mindset? With a few notable exceptions, the large forces of history do not make great novels. The first and second world wars were bigger than the minds of writers. It takes a smaller nest of activity for a writer’s mind to encompass it fully. It’s usually little random pockets of intense social activity that are small enough for a writer to create a complete and rounded world. Bronte’s Thornhill, Rhys’s Dominica, Lowry’s Quauhnahuac, Camus’s unnamed city in North Africa, Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County. Hemingway was right to say that “the best kind of war for a writer is civil war,” precisely because a civil war is a kind of extended family affair that pits brother against brother, sister against sister, in just the kind OF contest for inheritance that the novel specializes in. A postcolonial novel often takes place in a fairly small place in a smaller country. The Dominica of Jean Rhys or the Mexico of Malcolm Lowry, the South Africa of Alan Paton. Given this intense concentration of historical energy, But right from the beginning the postcolonial was defined, by Frantz Fanon, as a psychological state as much as a historical one. The distinction is crucial. The colonial situation makes for what Fanon calls the “ineffaceable wounds” to be seen represented Rhys’s Antionette, Lowry Geoffrey Firmin, and Faulkner’s Thomas Sutpen. The postcolonial is thus always not just a history but a pathology and a trauma, and in a
ADELAIDE LITERARY MAGAZINE 272 very real sense, as seen again and again in postcolonial fiction, a kind of madness. This is because the postcolonial again and again confronts not just the domination of one society by another, but the active superimposition of one society on other, resulting in a variety of strange fusions to be seen all over the world, whether slavery, apartheid, caste systems of various sorts, or the strange ghettos of the the leftover colonizers themselves (the subject of Jean Rhys’s wonderful Wide Sargasso Sea), one of which I take as my subject in Mrs. Sinden. I lived in Hong Kong for eleven years. I came to know a lot of expats quite well because we all lived in the same places and spoke the same language. The majority of English-speaking expats I met were British, which put them more completely in a postcolonial mode than I was, as a newcomer, an American. But it also put me in a position to be a good observer. Many of the British families I knew in Hong Kong had been there a long time. Many had only tenuous connections to Britain. And many, like Jessica Sinden, preserved attitudes that are no longer characteristic of contemporary Britain, but of the time they left Britain and even well before. These people, and their lives, were my starting point. 8. You’ve suggested that colonialism will never truly end. Why? I think I said this more clearly in a book of mine called The Imperial Archive. There I said, "An empire is partly a fiction. No nation can close its hand around the world; the reach of any nation’s empire always exceeds its final grasp” That is, an empire is always partly an imaginary entity, and many colonists are quite capable of living inside the imperial imagination even after an empire is over. All the Sindens live in an imaginary world in which they are still part of a white upper class in Hong Kong. Little pieces of it are real, but most of it is in their minds. And so colonialism goes on and on, even though it’s no longer there, diminishing but not entirely disappearing. This is part of the tragedy of which Fanon writes so compellingly in the The Wretched of the Earth. It is also what I saw
REVISTA LITERÁRIA ADELAIDE 273 when I was there, in family after family, which I why I was able to render it in such concrete terms in Mrs. Sinden. 9. In addition to novels, you have written several screenplays. Tell us about the experience and how it helped you as a novelist. Writing screenplays gave me a clarity of visualization. My descriptions in Zero Tolerance are extremely concrete but they tend to have the blurred character of memories. That is, the things seen and remembered have a completely individual quality to them. Basing setting on memory makes setting a function of individual perception, and makes seeing always seem somewhat unreliable. But in screenplays, everyone sees the same setting. There is an establishing scene that gives you, say, the White House, then a sense of moving in closer and closer on whatever is going on in the White House. The setting of Mrs. Sinden is very stable in this way. The reader sees Hong Kong, or a place in Hong Kong, then the camera moves in plane by plane to the scene of interest. Writing screenplays both gave me this clarity of movement into the scene, and a sense that the book is, in some basic way, a book about Hong Kong. 10. Mrs. Sinden is structured around three “hook” chapters. What does that mean, and what effect does it have on readers? This is the formula of the action movie. In Hollywood they call it “three disasters and an ending.” The hero has to survive the disasters, of course, but it is the fact of all these disasters coming at the hero that creates the fast pacing of action movies. I used this formula, not for the overall structure of my novel, but as an opening gambit. In quick succession you get three crises and a sex scene: Jessica and her dying lover, their first sexual encounter, Jessica’s daughter committing suicide, and the Inquest about the suicide.
ADELAIDE LITERARY MAGAZINE 274 Each scene is intrinsically important to what follows, but each scene also sustains interest in and of itself. After the first burst of scenes I can then slow down a bit with a series of chapters that show Jessica interacting with the other main characters of the novel, her children, her best friend, her lover, his ex-wife. Through these the reader has a sense of what is coming, which pressurizes the middle of the novel by creating a framework of expectation. Novels tend to go soggy in the middle, which, though usually slow, is nevertheless essential developmentally for the exposition of character. Once the reader cares about the characters, there is a much greater stake in the story as it builds to its climax. 11. You’ve mentioned Tolstoy as one of the most important influences on your writing. Why? I can’t do without Anna Karenina and War and Peace. I can’t remember how many times I have read them, and each time, I have taken away what the great critic Erich Auerbach calls “the unqualified, unlimited, and passionate intensity of experience of the characters portrayed.” How Tolstoy does this has been endlessly debated. His characters have an immediacy of experience that make us feel like we are seeing them through a clear pane of glass. Tolstoy manages to have this directness without falling into the trap of being too literary. I love Tolstoy, because, in reading him, HIS novels seem almost styleless. The style is in the characters and the characters live through the style rather than because of it. Everything about a character hits you at once, as if there is no mediating prism of representation between writer and reader. Here it must be remembered how much of literature is mannered. Every style has a rhetoric embedded in it. Even Hemingway has one, too, once you begin to see his plain speaking as a manner. But Tolstoy seems almost mannerless; no matter what he writes, he never sounds literary. He seems to be able to write as if no other literature before him had ever existed, unblunted by influence of any kind. The form and the content are so perfectly matched that
REVISTA LITERÁRIA ADELAIDE 275 you lose all consciousness of his art. I knew I would never be able to make my writing influenceless. I had been far too carefully trained for that. But I tried to give my narrations transparency and objectivity, by which I mean, not a groundless impersonality, but a capturing of her eyesight in any given moment. The sophistication I was after is not in style (which, as a writer of English in these latter days, I can hardly avoid) but in a complete phenomenology of access to the mind and sensorium of Jessica Sinden. What I took from Tolstoy is the effort to GIVE naturalness to this access. I didn’t want to use standard literary techniques like interior monologue. So I softened the technical edge of a literary style to give the sense of ease of access to the mind I so admire in Tolstoy. The novel is written in what is called close third, a third person style of narrative in which the narration is rarely or never omniscient. Some of the chapters open with large blanket statements, but then they go right away into the world as it is seen and felt by one or other of my characters. Part of doing this well is being disciplined about whose consciousness you are in. It’s easy to let yourself drift from perspective to perspective, but what you LOSE from these glimpses is the coherent building of character than can only take place in one mind. This is definitely something I learned from Tolstoy, though of course there are other writers who do it as well. It’s just that I admired how effortlessly his prose moves along. It seems devoid of literary artifice, which can shed a sudden ray of illumination on a character, but is rarely good at keeping the light of the narrative fixed, clear and stable. Stability is certainly something I love in Tolstoy’s prose, and I wanted to give Jessica Sinden a sense of solidity in the mind of the reader. 12. Which of Tolstoy's books stand out as having most impacted you? Anna Karenina. Anna is of her class without seeing to be a paralyzed representative of it. In literature, typology is paralysis. Virginia Woolf came every close to typifying a bourgeoise with Clarissa
ADELAIDE LITERARY MAGAZINE 276 Dalloway in The Voyage Out, where she is a type, but broke the mold in Mrs. Dalloway. Tolstoy himself began Anna Karenina with an idea of Anna as a type of woman—the adulteress—but soon began to find more in her. Even her husband, Karenin, surprises us at times. I know what this is like. I began with Aspidistra Benning as a sly appendage of her mother, and in the end she became one of the central characters of the novel. So, like Tolstoy, I let myself find unexpected things in my characters. My feeling is that he was often surprised by what his novel was becoming. I was, too. 13. You have several sex scenes in the novel. How did you decide to handle them? We all know the classic shot: a dress drops to the floor and the camera follows it. And we all know exactly what happens next, even though the camera cuts away to the next scene. This convention, a staple of old black-and-white movies, largely leaves sex to our imagination. Although it censors a sex scene, it does one thing right. It does a good job of maintaining the integrity of the characters. For sex scenes all too easily can become generic. In fact, the more explicit they are, the more generic they become. A limited amount of nudity in film is much easier to handle than a sex scene, which always carries the danger that it might extend into pornography. Partial sex is how most writers have come to deal with sex between their characters. In modern literature, the integrity of a character is usually well established before there is much sex between them. The form of pornography invariably flattens character, offering flat characters almost by definition. But the form of the novel draws out character, rounding it out, and folds sex into the mix only gradually. Read D. H. Lawrence, James Salter, James Joyce, or John Updike. Their mastery of these scenes is that the characters remain fully themselves instead of shading into the generic territory of the sex act. Though they at times might be explicit, they are rarely complete in showing a sex scene from beginning to end.
REVISTA LITERÁRIA ADELAIDE 277 I worked with several of these partial sex scenes in my latest novel, Mrs. Sinden. Mrs. Sinden is a middle aged woman who has never had much experience of sex, and this hesitancy is the mark of all the sex scenes in the book. My aim throughout was to have her remain fully herself while doing something that, after all, nearly everyone else does. 14. Mrs. Sinden is written in a very different style than Zero Tolerance. Why is this? How did you change? When I was younger, I liked complexity for its own sake. I became interested in literature because of encyclopedic novels like Ulysses. I liked that to read one book I had to carry around a glossary that was bigger than the book itself. And I liked that you couldn’t just read the book once and be done with it. You always needed to be reading the book. But writing with that kind of complexity did not come easy to me. I had to add the complexity layer by layer and character by character. The complexity of Zero Tolerance turned out to be a complexity of plot in which the characters are all trying to figure out what the plot of the novel actually is. They all have some kind of connection to the Bureau of Reclamation. They all know that it is not just a faceless government agency. Each chapter probes a secret history of the Bureau in a different way using a different character with a different set of memories and perceptions. Everything about the novel is realistic except for what they find. Is what they think happened what really happened? Different characters in the novel have different degrees of certainty about this. But, as a writer, I always come back to one thing in my mind about Zero Tolerance: a high degree of complexity is always fairly uncertain. The novel ends with the narrator quite uncertain if any of it was at all like what he has been told, or has been telling. I still like complexity, but now it is psychological. I like the complexity I find rather than the complexity I create. I’ve found that the world is large and varied enough that I do not need to make it
ADELAIDE LITERARY MAGAZINE 278 any more complicated than it is. In literature, stylistic complexity tends to lead writers away from the real world. I wanted the complexity of a psyche in a real setting. I had evolved to a point where I didn’t want any more than the world I saw in front of me. Once I had arrived at that point, I was at last in the world I lived in, which at the time was Hong Kong. At last I was able to look around me; observe people; become open to my own experience, which I never use in Mrs. Sinden, but which is something like the datum of the novel. Thomas Richards was raised mostly in Minnesota. He went to Carleton College, the University of California at Berkeley, and Stanford University. He taught literature at Harvard for many years, and won a Guggenheim fellowship. He then moved to Hong Kong, where he lived for eleven years, receiving a degree in the Geological Sciences from the University of Hong Kong, going on many geological expeditions in Asia and Europe. He moved back to the United States in 2011 He lives in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, with his wife and two daughters, both adopted from China. He has written six books. Two novels, Zero Tolerance (FSG) and Mrs. Sinden. Three cultural studies: The Commodity Culture of Victorian England (Stanford and Verso), The Imperial Archive (Verso), and The Meaning of Star Trek (Doubleday). And one on higher education: Admit One (Johns Hopkins).
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