Joyce Carol Oates webchat – as it happened

Both / neither.

To set off hoping for a "lucrative deal" does seem rather hopeless. Most writers & poets begin when very young out of a wish to create, not to reap a harvest, & virtually everyone I know who is a writer or a poet would continue to write without being published.

I think it is "real" – not a toupee. Or "real" in some way.

I am totally informed of Charlie Hebdo which had a history of viciously excoriating feminists some decades ago. Why do you say this? Do you consider that your opinion is weightier than others' opinions, who don't agree with you?

If you are referring to the PEN award, some writers objected to an award on the basis of content. "Charlie Hebdo wandered into the realm of hate speech" – Garry Trudeau (the distinguished American cartoonist of whom perhaps you have not heard.) "Punching down" is not an admirable element of satire.

If the award is for courage in the face of great danger, & not for the actual content of the published work, then the PEN award is justified. I think that everyone has agreed on this.

However, there are sincere disagreements in adult life. The challenge is to respect others' opinions when they differ from your own. America is plagued with bitter, insanely vicious divisions springing from political/ religious sources. The image of Donald Trump, the quintessential bully, is very ugly in a democracy, yet has drawn much admiration. One would expect PEN to honor "freedom of expression" within its own quarters.

Dreams suffuse us with feelings, sometimes very strong, but largely inarticulate and unrealized. The "dream inspiration" is rare, & even then one must work with infinite patience to tease it out of the unconscious.

Zombie has been made into a short film by Bill Connington, who also adapted the novella for the stage, quite brilliantly & chillingly. (Bill Connington, an excellent actor, has played Quentin.) This might be available on YouTube - I'm not sure. It was posted for a while.

I feel very close to the Mulvaney family & find it emotionally upsetting to visit certain kinds of farms – family farms – the very smells bring tears to my eyes... The farm is based upon my own family farm of decades ago, long lost. Muffin was my own beloved cat. Much was autobiographical in the novel, woven with much that was totally fiction. But the "real" elements leap out at me if I open the novel... My favorite passages involve Marianne & Muffin, at the very heart of the novel of an American family devastated by a crude, coarse American culture which would be even worse today with "social media" – "cyberbullying" – of young people.

It has influenced a number of short films, some of them quite dazzling, surreal & inventive – the story is the jumping-off place for the young filmmakers' imagination. This is always fascinating to me.

This is difficult to answer. Certainly I have been influenced by American writers – Melville, Poe, Hawthorne, Hemingway, Faulkner predominantly – but also by James Joyce, Thomas Mann, D.H. Lawrence, Thomas Hardy, Kafka... Perhaps the wide range of subjects, or genres.... In essence I am a formalist & it is the forms of fiction that intrigue me.

As a girl in upstate NY, in the notorious Snow Belt, I helped build snowmen with my young friends – this was much fun! As I recall.

That is always a difficult question. We are less likely to be easy about ourselves as adolescents – well into our twenties, perhaps – because we have not yet established anything like a secure life for ourselves. Thus, younger people are edgy, prone to some anxiety – which I think is probably for the good, as it stimulates our brains into planning, plotting, imagining, thinking – as Sartre once said, "Genius is...what one does in desperate circumstances." (This is a paraphrase of a longer remark.) Younger writers may tend to be more experimental than their elders, which is also a good thing.

Yes, I have admired Bellow enormously, especially his earlier, more vividly realized & less polemical novels. The "voice"-driven novel does not seem to be fashionable at the present time, however; at least not the highly intellectual, verbal, "talky" novels for which Bellow became famous.

Recently I reread most of Joan Didion’s books – a wonderful experience – in order to review the considerable biography of her by Tracy Daugherty.

An underrated American novelist, born in South Africa, is Sheila Kohler, who writes beautifully – tightly structured, ingeniously imagined novels (Dreaming for Freud, Becoming Jane Eyre, Crossways) & a story collection, Stories from Another World.

Yes, I have always been writing, to a degree. My new memoir The Lost Landscape is about the origins of writing, in childhood. Practically speaking, writing emerges out of reading; it is a kind of mimicry of what we read, but transformed into our own voices & personalities. The first great book of my life was Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking-Glass – this made an enormous impression on me, & was wonderfully inspiring.

Muffin was my own, much beloved cat; his name was indeed “Muffin.” In the novel I tried to give voice to emotions some might condemn as sentimental & nostalgic; but they were, & still are, very genuine. I feel enormously close to some of my fictional families, like the Mulvaneys, & don’t really think of them as completed or absent.

Yes, I think there is an option on The Accursed. Someone is attempting to write a screenplay, but I am not personally involved.

1) I have spent some time in recent years reading in neuroscience with a
particular interest in memory. (My next novel is about a woman neuroscientist whose life’s work is in the field of memory/amnesia.)

2) Yes, that is probably so. I had not thought of it in those terms. I feel a distinct “sisterhood” with many women based more upon economic class & experience than on skin color & ethnic identification. My novel of some years ago Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart is a sort of valentine of those years when white/black children & young teenagers lived together in urban neighbourhoods before the inflammatory politics of the 1960s.

I have seen Mike Tyson just once in recent years when I moderated a panel consisting of just Mike and a documentary film maker who had created a film based on his life. Mike Tyson is a highly complicated individual about which there has been much said, perhaps too much; yet more will surely be written about him. The “posthumous” life of a champion athlete in America is a fascinating phenomenon.

You must not have read Mudwoman which ends on a very strong & hopeful note, or Little Bird of Heaven & The Accursed which are quite positively resolved. “Drenched in violent despair” does not seem to me applicable to most of my fiction, but perhaps you are thinking of a particular novel or short story that embodies this. Of course I am not writing propaganda but trying to present a nuanced vision of the world as it is, filtered through the lives of distinct individuals.

Big game hunting/trophy hunting should be allowed if the hunter hunts his prey with just his hands & “wits.” In the animal’s natural habitat.

Not at all. I don’t think that I have ever been inspired by a student essay. It has been a long time since I’ve written satirically or comically about academic colleagues – those stories were of an era (the 1960s) that lent itself to academic satire. At about this time, or a little later, David Lodge began writing his very funny but warmly sympathetic novels about academic life.

Cleo is much too skittish & restless to sit still to answer questions. She resembles a very small ocelot & alternates between being extremely affectionate & extremely “playful.”

I am not sure that I’d ever spoken of “channelling” Marilyn Monroe – this is a metaphorical way of speaking, if so. The language of Blonde is a heightened speech that is not “naturalistic” but rather an approximation of an interior language proportionate to the intense, complex feelings of characters who may in fact not be very articulate. My approach to Marilyn Monroe was through the child Norma Jeane Baker whose gradual metamorphosis into “Marilyn Monroe” constitutes the drama of the novel, & its irony.

Yes, I am sure you are correct. A novel could only focus upon one kind of boxer – a Joe Louis, a Mike Tyson – while ignoring another kind of boxer – Willie Pep, Sugar Ray Robinson; it could only focus upon one era, & not others. There are so many fascinating boxing stories – so much to say about the redoubtable “sport” – that only an essay collection, a gathering of numerous occasions, can do justice to the diversity. (You might have mentioned Mailer’s wonderful The Fight – a masterpiece of its kind.)

Yes, I’ve since learned more about these excellent boxers, who happen to be women. (A novel I am just completing, titled A Book of American Martyrs, includes a lengthy section on a young woman boxer & is a sympathetic portrait over all of that often desperate world; a kind of subterranean world, largely unheralded.)

Let me think about this. I believe it is not one of my stories, & I will try to recall whose it is. It does sound familiar – but there is no “lagoon” in my fiction.

Yes, this was a difficult issue. Both sides of the debate were persuasive but I decided to support the dissenting writers because they were being attacked, in some quarters quite rudely, by prominent PEN members. (Not by PEN officials, however.) This was unfortunate, and ironic – that PEN, which prides itself on being about “freedom of speech,” really harbors such censorious personalities.

If a number of writers sincerely believed that Charlie Hebdo had published “hate speech” – surely they had the right to disengage themselves from the award. What was so outrageous about this? There was never any doubt that the award would be given. Staying away from a fund-raising banquet (arguably the most unpleasant way of spending an evening) is hardly the same thing as preventing it from occurring.

Also, the self-congratulatory nature of the award seemed embarrassing and hypocritical to some writers. I think that Russell Banks spoke most eloquently on this aspect of the controversy. (Paul Auster spoke most eloquently in favor of the award.)

Ironically, no one seemed at all interested in what Muslim writers & readers thought – the entire debate was a phenomenon of First World white writers, predominantly male. They did not set out to garner publicity for themselves, but that is more or less what ensured.

Yes, I read constantly, & am in fact a fairly frequent reviewer for The New York Review of Books.
Many of the outstanding new writers are former students of mine – so it might be a kind of nepotism to name them.