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This interview with Susan Neville was conducted by phone, in the spring of 2003, by Avon Waters, the managing editor for the MLR.
MLR: You've been very successful in creating works that are regional. Did where you grew up play any role in what you are writing today?
Neville: A major role. When I go to writer’s conferences I'm almost always the only person who is living within two miles of where she was born. So it plays a major role. I'm living within the same material that I knew when I was a child, so it affects my fiction in a lot of ways.
MLR: There's a big gap of time between your book in 1984, “The Invention of Flight,” and your book “Indiana Winter.” What happened in those ten years, as far as your development as a writer?
Neville: Two things happened -- I had two children. I found out the day that “The Invention of Flight” was to be published that I was pregnant. And, so, I kept writing during that time, and I published stories but it's harder when your children are very young. I don't know if you have kids, but each is like a freight train and you have to kind of stand back up again
MLR: They change your life.
Neville: They do. Quite a bit. That accounts for the ten-year gap. I was teaching full-time and I remember that during those years I made myself a vow. I mean it was kind of a little vow I kept, I would publish six things a year. So during that time I published stories in a series of essays and I never drew them into a collection. One thing to start happening was I began working on “Indiana Winter” about three years before it came out. I suddenly got this idea I could do journalism. When you're used to writing fiction and you're in the house with your kids and then in your office with your students. It felt like there wasn't as much material. So what I did was change genres for a while and went out into the state driving around. It was, I think, about seven years after my daughter got into school, then I had some time between teaching. And my son was in first grade, I started having some time and began doing nonfiction that was a memoir that would require me to go out and see things.
MLR: The West has developed its popularity because of its culture or maybe it's cultural icons. These icons developed through the stories and myths over the years. Then they were passed down through literature and are movies. The South also has its own images. Say the word “South” and certain things come to people's minds. Do you think the Midwest is under-explored by artists and writers?
Neville: That's a good question. I teach Midwest literature, and there's a lot of good stuff there. Like Willa Cather and Theodore Dreiser and Richard Wright. I mean there's just a lot of good material, it's very diverse -- the Midwest. I think it's a very diverse place. Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, if you drive through them, they seem very similar. But when you're talking about Nebraska or Kansas they are very different. Minnesota is very different. The Midwest is such a large area. One of the first things I did when I realizedI was going to be staying here was to read a lot of Indiana literature. There's not a particular kind of sense of the state that the literature seems to show. Like with Faulkner you get the real idea of what Mississippi might be like. You don't really get any real coherent vision from Indiana literature. And a lot of it, unfortunately, the good stuff is out of print. So that makes it more difficult to have that (coherent image) sense of place.
MLR: when you say out of print what works are you speaking of?
Neville: Right now Indianapolis is part of that one book, one city, and we are reading Jessamyn West’s “Friendly Persuasion”. It’s really a good book that I'm glad they chose. A lot of people haven't read it before. And when you start looking at her and her work, I mean, she's got a wonderful book called “The Witch Diggers,” which received a rave review in the New York Times when it came out. And it's been out of print for years. It's an Indiana book that should be out in print and we should know it, we should revere it. It gives us a sense of place and who we are in our history. She has another book called “Leafy Rivers” which is out of print. I'm thinking of women writers right now for some reason, but Janet Flanner, she wrote for the New Yorker under the name of Jenna, she has a book called “The Cubicle City” which gives a really interesting sense of Indianapolis, but it is out of print. There are lists of books and writers like that of a collection of poetry by Jean Garrigue. And there’s Eudora Welty. There are even some books of those we think of as icons of Indiana literature, Harris Nicholson, and they are out of print too.
MLR: Many writers, musicians and artists may begin their careers here in Indiana and then move East or West. By staying here, do you think that what you write, those icons or images of people would someday be recognized when someone would say Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, or the Midwest? Do you think they can be developed in the future?
Neville: I don't know. Maybe a lot of writers that developed a sense of place did live and write in that place. I'm thinking of Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty, and southern writers that you think of. I don't know. It's kind of a risk. You know, you might get tagged as aboriginal and not able to speak to anybody else.
MLR: In “The House of Blue Lights,” you appear to make a lot of use of local myth and legend. Is this something you plan to continue to explore?
Neville: Yes. I get really fascinated by quirky little things in Indiana history. In the whole story of “The House of Blue Lights” was a wonderfully underdeveloped folktale, or urban legend. Yes, I have plans for a couple books that are developed more on mythology or along that line.
MLR: Evil seems to keep surfacing in your works. In your essay “Where's Iago” you say that Iago is the image of evil the way the rose is the image of romantic love. In “Indiana Winter” you explore the good and the bad things that happen to people. “The House of Blue Lights” has many connections to evil. There is one about a man, a mass killer, who didn't get the recognition that maybe other killers got. Is that right?
Neville: Actually it was the victims that didn't get any recognition at all. But right, it is the mass killer that we sort of ignore.
MLR: What have you found in this exploration of evil?
Neville: I don't know. It’s really strange why you become obsessed with one particular thing. I guess it goes back to college. The whole issue of evil and why it exists, why people behave the way they do. Maybe it's growing up with some part of the German heritage on my side of the family. I grew up thinking a lot about the Holocaust when I was a kid. And maybe too it’s living in a place that has a kind of wonderful veneer of kindness and niceness that makes me think about evil. I just think about trying to define it a lot. Everything seems to bring me back to it; like the war in Iraq. What is evil, does it have a function? I guess you can't explain that obsession any more than you could why somebody likes Lionel trains (laughs). The best conclusions I come to were the conclusions I came to in Iago. I think it was Martin Luther that said, God requires of his creatures that they become real. That they don’t live in an illusion. At least in literature, the function is to remind the characters of the world they are living in, and to face it with their own illusions about themselves and their world. I guess that’s where my thoughts are right now.
MLR: It sounds like your peeling away that veneer of goodness to get at what is behind there or what might be suppressed. I see in “Fabrication” that you are doing a similar kind of thing. You peel back layer behind layer. You peel back and describe these old plants that have been converted to other uses.
Neville: I think that goes back to your first question. My way of discovering new information, or new things to write about isn’t to travel vertically, it’s to peel away and go down through layers and that’s what interests me.
MLR: Also in those stories, it seems you have uncovered things about people’s lives, where there are these individual lives, or threads of peoples lives. I think it was in the doll or globe factory, there was this Hungarian who came here to the United States years ago…
Neville: That’s in the story, The Veneer Factory.
MLR: I get the feeling you are using these essays to suggest that in all of these stories, there are these individual lives out there.
Neville: I think that the story that ends with something that the world is filled with so much sadness that you can’t ever get to the bottom of it. It’s a peeling away to keep discovering these things. I think of those particular essays as meditations. The factory itself is a beginning thing to focus on. It’s kind of like blank slime. I give you the end of a golden thread and follow it and you end up in the New Jerusalem. I like the idea of starting with one thing to focus on and really sticking with but ending up finding something truthful about the world.
MLR: Let’s shift gears and talk about your personal poetics: From whom do you draw inspiration and read?
Neville: Right now I read a lot of fiction, when I’m doing fiction. When I’m doing nonfiction, I read a lot of nonfiction. But the person I read the most when I first started out was Virginia Woolf. I was amazed by Virginia Woolf. I read every published thing she had, one summer when I was in graduate school. That had a lot of effect on my style, I think. Probably in subtle ways, a lot of poetry did too. I read a lot of Edina O'Brien. Then when I started writing nonfiction I read Annie Dillard, Wendell Berry and Scott Sanders.
MLR: You mentioned how you have gone back and forth between fiction and nonfiction. It seems to me that you blur the lines of imagination and reality in some of the creative nonfiction. Psychologists say there is no such thing as truth. That’s why you can go to an accident scene and no two witnesses will have the same story, but to them it’s the truth. I get the feeling you are playing with that concept with your characters and the stories you tell.
Neville: I definitely think I blur the line. In my first book, a collection of stories, there’s a story called “Cousins.” It’s an essay. No one was publishing essays at the time I wrote that. I kept getting it back. They would say this is an essay. “We don’t publish essays.” When I’m writing nonfiction, I’m looking for metaphor. I think in the essay -- in the little title piece in “Fabrication,” -- I say “I’m a fabricator not a liar.” I fabricate the essays -- pick and choose -- that gives them a sense of meaning. But someone else there might not have seen the same things. But I don’t make things up. I mean I try consciously not to make anything up.
In the story “The House of Blue Lights,” it’s about a serial killer that lived around the corner from me. The killer was named Howard Bowmeister. That’s something I had written as nonfiction and gone into Harriet girl-spy mode. I talked to the FBI profiler and did a few interviews along that line. But finally, there were things you just couldn’t get at with nonfiction. It was just impossible. I would have had to try to imagine what it was like to be in his head, and imagined what it would have felt like to be a relative of the victim. So there’s kind of a role for the imagination that works differently in nonfiction than it does in fiction. The imagination forms things in nonfiction and looks for things that have meaning -- that’s a metaphor for something and that’s a metaphor for something else. So you’re creating an imaginary meaning but you aren’t creating an inner life for people you don’t know.
MLR : It sounds like the labels of creative nonfiction and fiction don’t have so much to do with you as they do for others to departmentalize things.Neville: When I’m writing, it doesn’t feel much different. I’m trying to create a structure that has some meaning. I know when I’m writing an essay and when I’m writing a story, but the end result may look the same to someone else. Then it becomes very important for them to know how to categorize this, where do you put this in the library, which shelf. The one that becomes very problematic is Indiana Winter, because it contains both. In the beginning I set out which ones are fictions, in the introduction, and which ones are essays. The reason I included them together is because I thought of the whole book as a work of nonfiction that explores the idea of madness, of what is real and what isn’t. Including fiction in the book, that is part of that exploration.
MLR: Let’s talk about the new book coming out. When is it due out? And I hear there’s a debate on the title?
Neville: The title is “Iconography.” It’s the subtitle that there’s a debate on. It will probably be called “Iconography and meditation or Iconography: a memoir of 40 days” or something like that.
MLR: So this will be creative nonfiction?
Neville: Yes, it’s nonfiction.MLR: We talked about the Midwest and Southern symbols, so in this case Iconography will imply what?
Neville: It starts literally, a bit like the factory book. It’s not a collection of essays. It’s one big long piece. I started taking a class in painting Icons, which are really interesting. There’s a woman in Indianapolis who teaches icon painting. She is this nun and she teaches five or six people at a time in this little basement -- teaches them how to paint icon paintings the way you would have done it in medieval times. I thought it would make an interesting essay and wouldn’t take much time. But as it turns out, it takes over a year to paint an icon -- so I’m into this thing for the long haul.
It begins, and ends with the frame as a description of the class. I start the class, and then stop it and in between I keep a journal for 40 days and then I go back and paint the icon. The journal itself becomes an icon. I try to see things in the world in a way that you can see. The thing with an icon is you are supposed to be able to look through it and see a kind of spirit coming through it, and see light. You put all these layers of paint on it so it looks like there’s light. I walked around Indianapolis looking for that same light in the world itself.MLR: Are these religious icons?
Neville: Yes, they are religious. I think of it as kind of an agnostic cloister walk. Like Kathleen Norris in “Dakota,” and “Cloister Walk,” -- the memoirs are diaries but religious. I’m painting this religious icon, but I’m not particularly religious. In the book itself, I am trying to become so. It’s due out in the fall (2003).
MLR: Do you see with the advent of the Internet and electronic media, publication will get easier, more difficult or just more confusing for people.
Neville: Right now I think maybe a little bit more confusing. It is going to be different. Sometimes I think the difference is going to be in marketing. You can very easily self-publish a book, give yourself a name of a press and it can look really good and it’s up to you to go out and try to sell it. Which, in some ways happens with publishers as well. Which you have to do, and which I’ve never been particularly good at or wanted to be good at.
MLR: Then we won’t see you on a 50-city book tour.
Neville: No. No, no, not likely.
MLR: Writing programs have blossomed since the 1970s, almost every school has one. Are we getting away from a wider readership by creating a system of journals and chapbooks and going now to a closed system of literary journal readers?
Neville: It will be interesting to see what will happen. When I went’ to graduate school, there were only five graduate writing programs. And as you say; now there’s one in almost every university. My hope is that if it doesn’t create a lot of bitter people saying, “I have this degree, now what am I going to do with it,”—that it may create better writers and readers. I think writing makes you a much better reader. All of these programs are creating a lot more readers for quality literature as well as more quality writers. A book like Alice Seabolt's, The Lovely Bone, which has been a best seller all year, she came out of a writer’s program. So I don’t know that it’s creating a closed society. Whenever you are involved in academia, and you are an artist, you have to be aware of that. That’s always been true. It wasn’t the academic artists that became the impressionists; it was those outside the academy. Now you could argue that it’s maybe the slam poets that are where the real energy in poetry is today.
MLR: What’s in the works next, fiction or nonfiction?
Neville: I’m working on fiction now. I tend to go back and forth. I have a draft of a novel that I’m working on right now and getting it into shape to give to my agent. And I have this collection of stories that she’s holding and going to try to sell at the same time.