#fictionaut

I was interviewed by Heather Fowler for her Writers on Craft series at Fictionaut.

How has your perception of what you “do” with your work changed as you have continued to write?

Recently I’ve started to think of writing as a collective endeavor as opposed to an individual one. For a while I was dealing with this crisis of faith, wondering if the work I did was selfish, and whether I had anything to truly contribute to the literary arts. I probably quit writing half a dozen times (as close—and infinitely patient—friends can attest). Then I asked myself two questions that helped to clarify the situation: Do you believe the writing you create has value? And my natural response was no. The follow-up question: Do you believe that literature as a whole has value? That I answered with a resounding yes. Literature can initiate social and political change, foster deeper feelings of compassion, and open the mind to new channels of thought and inquiry. Once I stopped thinking of myself as an individual entity, fighting for recognition in an overcrowded field, and imagined myself instead as part of a larger constellation of writers, all aiming to put beautiful things into the world, I was able to relax and get back to work.

- Herman Melville, Omoo

I was interviewed by Heather Fowler at Fictionaut last month for the Writers on Craft series. Heather is a good friend, a member of the Legion of Vermin and we've been reading each other's work for years. You would think this would make answering the questions easier, but these were tough.

What do you feel is the purpose of literature?

I think literature has a socio-historical function. To me, literature feels bound to the context of its creation in ways that don’t register in other arts. That’s probably a bias on my part, but there it is. Literature attempts to teach the reader about class, sex and power in human relationships at a particular moment in time. It’s meaningless, of course. We’re all passengers on this dinky life raft we call earth. We haven’t gotten to the kill-or-be-killed part of the endgame where your next-door neighbor starts to look like a roasted chicken, but we’re getting there.