The Lit Hub Author Questionnaire is a monthly interview featuring seven questions for five authors with new books. This month we talk to:
Lauren Michele Jackson (Back: Essays on the Soul and Spine of America)
Natasha Lennard (On Un/Certainty: The Uses of Doubt in Dangerous Times)
Julie Orringer (Luna, Phoenix, Queen)
Kawai Strong Washburn (The Names of the New World)
Adam Wilson (Fail Sons)
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Without summarizing it in any way, what would you say your book is about?
Lauren Michele Jackson: Form—but isn’t everything? How what something looks like courts our thinking about it. The beauty of a wayward humanism. The United States as a not-self-evident object of attention.
Natasha Lennard: Stop talking about “these uncertain times.”
Julie Orringer: Artistic and marital betrayal. A love triangle. A stolen manuscript. An injured dog who elicits confessions. Loss and recovery. A deer and a hedgehog in love. The woods. A river. Invasive ivy. A clarinet in the snow. Parents and children. Sisters and brothers. Authorship and identity. How we remain ourselves as the outlines of our lives change.
Kawai Strong Washburn: Courage, political and cultural evolution, the glory of the Pacific islands, climate instability, race, transcendence, Minnesota. Combat and its opposite.
Adam Wilson: The fantasy of immortality. Mortality. Fathers, sons, and brothers. Failure. Grief. Millennials in midlife crisis. “America.”
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Without explaining why and without naming other authors or books, can you discuss the various influences on your book?
Natasha Lennard: Constant talk of uncertain times, language games, hinges and riverbeds, uprisings, mass strikes, the impossibility of doubting everything.
Adam Wilson: Twenty years of talk therapy. Two years of physical therapy. Fear of death. Career dysmorphia. Becoming a parent. Grief. The movie Speed.
Kawai Strong Washburn: The landscapes of Hawai’i and Minnesota, storytellers that embrace the political, a multiracial and multicultural personal history that spans continents and defies categorization, storytellers that bend their prose to the breaking point, climate visionaries focused on a better future, hip-hop.
Lauren Michele Jackson: Digressive criticism, exasperation with takes and timeliness, amateur film viewing, gym bros, black-and-white photography.
Julie Orringer: This book was influenced by various dogs I’ve known. By getting lost in the woods. By what it feels like to love a person in the grip of an illness. By men’s betrayal of women’s authorship, and by a visit from a luna moth to the window of my studio when I was working on this book at MacDowell. By therianthropy. Fairy tales. Desire. Floods and tornadoes. By the Russian short story. Air travel. Jet lag. The terrible insecurity of being a novelist.
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Without using complete sentences, can you describe what was going on in your life as you wrote this book?
Julie Orringer: Losing my grandmother. Covid. Five months in Maine. A favorable election. Late-night work sessions. Jumping on a trampoline with my children. Adopting a dog. Loving my husband. Teaching graduate students. A disastrous election. Tearing my MCL. Ocean swims. Losing my glasses in the woods. Thirty-two revisions. Hundreds of late nights. Help from my editor. Writers’ group. Owls. Occasionally, breakfast for dinner.
Lauren Michele Jackson: Social distancing, dream employment, acclaim and unwanted virality, blonde again, airline status, vaccines, engagement (now defunct).
Natasha Lennard: Constant talk of uncertain times, the movement against genocide, New York or Nowhere, Berlin, fascism, anti-fascism, the destruction of my university, being in love.
Adam Wilson: A birth, a pandemic, another birth, hospitals, funerals, school drop-offs, travel chess tournaments, a kitchen renovation, herniated discs.
Kawai Strong Washburn: Laughter, soccer, love, hockey, fear, frozen lakes, resistance, unemployment & reemployment, all manner of physical pleasure (including sexual), heat waves, anger, American political deterioration, snow sledding, rainstorms, aches & pains, early mornings, school, depression, evolution.
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What are some words you despise that have been used to describe your writing by readers and/or reviewers?
Kawai Strong Washburn: It’s all love. I’m grateful people are reading and writing.
Julie Orringer: About my first book: “Little. Competent. Snapshots.” Like someone who’s learned to use an Instax in bad light.
Adam Wilson: Oversexed.
Lauren Michele Jackson: Anything in the realm of passion or intensity. I never write hot and “powerful” is not only lazy but an insult.
Natasha Lennard: Dense, academic flapdoodle.
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If you could choose a career besides writing (irrespective of schooling requirements and/or talent), what would it be?
Adam Wilson: I could see myself as a kind of Rick Rubin-type mentor/producer figure for Gen Z bands.
Kawai Strong Washburn: A doctor, especially in whatever place might desperately need it.
Natasha Lennard: Heiress.
Julie Orringer: NICU babysaver. Croissantist. Nineteenth-century explorer. Climate-change reverser.
Lauren Michele Jackson: Being a literary critic, I have lately taken to musing on an alternative life spent in divinity school or law school—different and also some of the same hermeneutics. To be faithful to the prompt: professional dancer—ballet, soloist, or principal with a well-managed company.
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What craft elements do you think are your strong suit, and what would you like to be better at?
Lauren Michele Jackson: I do think I have a talent for sitting with cultural detritus long enough to have an interesting thought about it. I wish I had a better historical sense; each time I write about anything, including within my own wheelhouse, feels like relearning what happened when to whom and in what order.
Adam Wilson: Rhythm.
Kawai Strong Washburn: I think I have a strong lyric instinct and some inherent sense of plot? I would love to craft more astute psychological observations.
Julie Orringer: If heavy lifting makes you strong, revision is my strong suit. And I’d like to get better at deciphering with my conscious mind the ransom-note cryptograms sent by my unconscious.
Natasha Lennard: I think I make complex ideas and concepts clear to nonacademic readers; I’m concise and concrete. I don’t think I’m a particularly skilled stylist. I’d like more poetry in my sentences.
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How do you contend with the hubris of thinking anyone has or should have any interest in what you have to say about anything?
Natasha Lennard: Having dozens of writer friends who themselves partake in and normalize this hubris; an awareness that, actually, very few people have any interest in what I have to say. There’s a Pomeranian with over 10 million Instagram followers. As Ludwig Wittgenstein reminds us in his notes On Certainty, “The difficulty is to realize the groundlessness of our believing.”
Julie Orringer: I remind myself that if other writers were silenced by that thought, there would be nothing for any of us to read.
Lauren Michele Jackson: As yet, nobody I respect has begged me to stop. I figure I can put off the dilemma until then.
Kawai Strong Washburn: Devotion to the craft and the self-discipline to push myself, always, artistically. I never come to the page lightly. But there’s no hubris in my storytelling instinct, I don’t think; I do it to overcome loneliness and achieve a sort of liberation. I’m never less alone than when I’m creating art.
Adam Wilson: I balance it out with crushing bouts of despair.