EXCLUSIVE: LUCY CORIN INTERVIEW


Fascinated as I am with forensic science, manhunts for murderers, and anything that has to do with unsolved mysteries, [Lucy] Corin's subtly poetic memoir-slash-manifesto utterly amazed me, page by sometimes-quite-bloody page. Speaking as a reader with a 98.6 percent male-author library, I found myself underlining, asterisking, bracketing, and annotating my copy of Everyday Psychokillers with a magic marker. I couldn't help it. And the ink did not bleed through the paper. This is quality.

Mike Daily. American Book Review. January-February 2005.

INTERVIEW: MD

Lucy, 10 questions. Have fun with it, psychokiller. Thank you. Mike


1. What were your parents and childhood like?

I had hippy-intellectual-type parents and lived in a snowy college town and got to stay in dorms with my babysitters sometimes. I rode my bike everywhere and took my dog with me. I played in the woods. I liked to walk across logs that fell over the brook. For a while I wanted to be an archeologist and I brought things home that I dug up. Other people's garbage, mostly. We had a big garden and an above-ground swimming pool filled with algae, under a willow tree. My dad had friends over for beer and chess.

2. How did you get interested in language?

I think it had to do with my mother reading to me and telling me stories and me not learning to read until quite late--I think I was six or seven. Dyslexia. It was a very big deal for me to learn to read, finally. Most of my early memories are me telling stories to my little sister and then teaching her to read as soon as I learned. Then interviewing her on a tape recorder. But I remember my mother reading me Poe and Plath and ee cummings and James Dickey and how intensely musical her relationship with language was.

3. What can you tell me about your next novel? Have you started work on it yet?

I'm writing stories. I have a collection under submission called either Minor Revolutions or The Entire Predicament. There's a very wide range of formal narrative approaches and there's a range of attention, (similar to the range in EPK) from deeply personal, idiosyncratic concerns and pretty big, cultural ones. I just finished two new pieces, for example: one is called "Airplane" and it's a forward moving first person narrative about sitting next to a Marine during a plane crash, and another piece called "Graphic" which I wrote in an effort to write about sex, but I did it in a very strange abstract-yet-colloquial language that is about not-doing/writing/depicting (ie "graphic" things). Then there's this separate idea I'm working on that I keep thinking could turn into a book of its own which is a collection of apocalypses. I just keep writing tiny little stories in which there is or is not an apocalypse and I think it would be best if I could accumulate a whole booksworth of them. I could call it The Apocalypses. I can't tell you how much this cracks me up.

4. What are the disadvantages, if any, of being a woman writer?

Well only the same disadvantages that there are being a woman in general. Like you grow up pretending to be the male protagonists you read (ie in order to read) and letting all kinds of things slip so you can take in the book for all it's worth and then you're writing along one day wondering if maybe you should try to write a male protagonist. What a dumb thing to waste time thinking about! That kind of thing, for example. There's a consistent state of second-guessing that happens to women who try to do anything. But on another level it's hard for me to distinguish the disadvantages of being a woman from just being someone who keeps not entirely fitting in anywhere. I'm not any of the categories of writer that would make it cool for me to be a writer--I'm not a mainstream writer poised for a splash but I'm also not an identity politics writer and I'm also not very formally innovative (compared with the people I see out there really pushing it), and I'm not regional, I'm not topical, and I'm not polemical, and I'm not a hipster, and I'm not a scholar or a critic and I'm not a documentarian.

5. Is mod + pomo really written from positions of marginality?

Dissatisfaction, maybe? Like anything worthwhile that I can think of? Ie which tends to put one on the margin? Not buying things and trying to produce something that doesn't make you cringe with recognition? This is the kind of thing I can never spout off about. I'm pretty good at having conversations but I'm not much of a spouter (except of course in fiction: all spout, and all spout in search of whale).

6. (Is it still standing?)

I thought it (mo/pomo, yes?) was about not standing. You mean have these ideas run their course and now we need, as Coover would say, "a new new thing"? Anecdote: I remember being at one of my first writers' conferences and the famous-teacher-man saying that a great story must have a main character who the reader "identifies" with and I really thought he was kidding and I kept asking him to clarify because I thought there was no way that in, what was it, 1995, he could possibly mean this as literally and universally as he seemed to--he wouldn't even call it a personal taste thing--he insisted even when I sputtered something like "but...modernism?" I don't know--who and what counts as standing? I was talking to the very fine publisher of a very fine press I love (okay fc2) about the future of the press and I suddenly saw, in my own private version of a thousand points of light, this image of people making their art in their little homes in their little lives all over the country (I don't know how to imagine more than the country) and it was the first time I ever had a sense that I was part of something like a community, invisible as it is to me. I was thinking about how most writers work within this star-system aesthetic where the big prize is your name up in lights and when I had this sweet constellation image it was about being part of a kind of secret society--secret even to its members--and doing collective cultural work that mattered not because I am or am not a great writer but because I am one of so many people writing and variously working and thinking in the face of idiocy. So standing invisibly perhaps? Twinkling in the night sky?

7. What does the future offer?

Yeah so continuing from number six, was my point maybe: no one gets anything that's happened so far except for the people who already got it? Something like that? So I expect the future holds more examples.

8. What is the center of the world for you?

Writing, job, dog, family, friends. Pretty sickening. Wish I could say the revolution but it's just not so.

9. Do you remember your dreams well--your nighttime dreams, I mean?

Yup. In phases, at least. I have a very loving and intense relationship with sleep. If I am not at peace with myself I can't sleep but if I am okay I sleep beautifully. I have long term relationships with certain dreams and dreamscapes and dream scenarios, and I go back regularly.

10. Was this a mistake?

Eek, I hope not. You can turn this into a dialogue if it'd be more interesting. These e-mail interviews are so weird. I remember reading an interview with Don DeLillo sometime right after college and I thought Oh my god I can't believe he just speaks in these extraordinary sentences! It really hadn't occurred to me that an interview might take place in writing. It seems like it should go back and forth at least a little. Otherwise it's like filling out a form.

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SAMPLED! LUCY CORIN: PART II OF II...

Lucy, thanks. Please don't kill me. Here's where I got the interview questions. Sampled! See below...

I can't tell you how much this cracks me up.

Anything you would care to add? given the contexts?
Mike

1. What were your parents and childhood like?
Robert Wennersten to Charles Bukowski, "Paying for Horses: An Interview with Charles Bukowski," London Magazine, December 1974-January 1975.

2. How did you get interested in language?
David Meltzer to Lew Welch (Summer 1969), golden gate: interviews with 5 san francisco poets, 1971.

3. What can you tell me about your next novel? Have you started work on it yet?
Larry McCaffery to William Gibson, "An Interview with William Gibson," Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction, 1991.

4. What are the disadvantages, if any, of being a woman writer?
Linda Kuehl to Joan Didion, "Joan Didion: The Art of Fiction LXXI," The Paris Review, Number 74, Fall-Winter 1978.

5. Is mod + pomo really written from positions of marginality?
Unknown reader, recto upper margin, page 73, of Marianne DeKoven's essay "Male Signature, Female Aesthetic: The Gender Politics of Experimental Writing," Breaking the Sequence: Women's Experimental Fiction, 1989.

6. (Is it still standing?)
Henry Miller to Irving Stettner on 3/12/78, referring to the Empire State Building, "Fifteen Letters," Stroker Anthology, 1994.

7. What does the future offer?
William Carlos Williams to James Laughlin on 3/14/48, William Carlos Williams and James Laughlin: Selected Letters, 1989.

8. What is the center of the world for you?
Character Madeleine to character Paul in Masculine/Feminine, film by Jean-Luc Godard, 1965.

9. Do you remember your dreams well--your nighttime dreams, I mean?
Joe David Bellamy to Joyce Carol Oates, interview-by-mail conducted in 1971, The New Fiction: Interviews with Innovative American Writers, 1974.

10. Was this a mistake?
Benjamin Peret to Andre Breton on 10/15/36, "Letters," Death to the Pigs & Other Writings, 1988.
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Thanks-- I'm not sure what I'd add. I wonder if I'd have answered any differently had I known. I guess I wouldn't have tried to guess in the same way where the questions were coming from, that is, I would have had a different imaginary version of you in mind. I guess it goes to show a couple things: interviews are generic so it could be interesting to link not only with your sources but with other interviews that use the same questions. Obviously that'd be pretty endless. But funny. Then the form shows itself to be more like survey than conversation. The only other thing I can think of right now is that once again if a mind (ie mine) is supplied with a series of things it will make narrative. So you could add those comments if you'd like. I'll look forward to seeing it--
Lucy

Pants All Night by Frayn Masters...

Hello Pals:

My book of short stories Pants All Night will be released by Smart Cookie Press in August 2005. It has amazing illustrations by Alan Griswold and the first 50 will have spanky VELVET covers!

Thanks for your time.
Frayn Masters