Interview with Lee Rourke
Lee Rouke’s debut novel, The Canal has just been released in the the States and will be hitting the UK in less than a month. I’ve already said good things about it & so have Shane Jones & John Wray . I conducted this little interview with Lee over email.
First, an excerpt, then another after the interview:
She addressed him only.
“Do you remember me?”
There was a long pause.
He looked at the woman next to him, then back at her, then back at the woman. He looked nervous, rubbing his thumb into the palm of his hand. The woman’s eyes began to narrow and her whole face started to contort. He looked back up at her.
“Er . . . I’m . . . afraid . . . I’m afraid I don’t, sorry. Er . . . Have we . . . Should I?”
“You tell me.”
“I’m sorry, I’ve never seen you before in my life. I fear you may have mistaken me for another person, someone else in your life . . . I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry?”
“Yes.”
“You’re sorry? That’s all you can say? Sorry? Don’t you remember me at all?”
This is a mess, part ii
Yes, I know I linked this clip a couple weeks ago. But seriously, I can’t watch this video enough. Any time I’m feeling low, I think to myself: At least I can put a burger in my mouth. Ok, so I don’t eat meat. I’ll rephrase: At least I can put a veggie burger in my mouth.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xp0zlqdSsEo
Much like David Hasselhoff, I am a mess. Not in the “I’m so drunk I can’t put food into my mouth” kind of way, but literally: I am a mess. I am messy. My desk has enough space for my laptop to sit flat, but otherwise, I’ve got stacks of papers–manuscripts, my own and others’, half-opened bills, half-filled out contracts, old insurance cards, random sheets of paper, who knows what’s important and what isn’t –books I’m half done reading, at least eight notebooks of various shades and sizes, and pens, blue Bics, like a dozen of them, rubber bands and barrettes.
The Bather
Here’s me in the tub, circa 1999, reading Infinite Jest to Benji. Thanks to our third roommate, Craig, for sending me the photo.
Except for submissions, I read almost exclusively in the bathtub. I’ll even take a bath in the middle of the day so I can get some reading done. I think it just works best for me ergonomically. What about you?
Composition Space without Exposition
I used to be in a writing group, there were three of us (I’ll name one F and the other K because they may or may not want me writing about them publicly), all women, professors in our mid-twenties to early thirties, with at least one book published, and drastically different writing styles, and it was the radical range in style that made our group function: there was no secret animosity, no competition, we read and respected each other’s writing, worked towards doing what we wanted to be doing. This group functioned how a writing group ought to function, at least to me. Then, of course, as things go with the academy, we scattered. K got a TT job. F and I stayed put in South Bend. But the group dynamic wasn’t the same, since we lost 1/3 of our membership, and eventually, I left too: up north, with my partner, who’s here for grad school, and I’ll start grad school in the fall too, in Geography, a move away from writing entirely.
But back to my story, I tend to wander: We used writing group time to “workshop,” absolutely, but between stories, we’d talk about process. Both K and F write primarily by computer, though they always have a notebook handy, in case they get ideas. Maybe, let’s call it, a hybrid type of writing, relying mostly on laptop. I write by hand, usually a whole draft or most of a draft, but I transfer to computer every day or three. We talked about that for a while, the difference between these two modes of composition, and—I’m getting to my point, slowly, but I assure you, I’m getting there—then, we talked about paper.
We all write in Moleskines, typical, cliché, we can admit that. Here’s the difference though: F writes on blank paper, K on lined, and I write on graph paper.
My room
In three hours I will own a house. There will be a room to write in. A word space of my own. There will be books in this room and a big blue French farmhouse table. There will be a comfortable chair and sunlight. The sounds of birds outside the window. A big hawk’s nest in the tree above. There will be college students next door, and sometimes I will think about how new their lives are as I write, how unformed creatures begin to take form and find shape. There will be coffee. I will make lamps out of the glass jars I’ve been collecting for a year. I will live alone with my pets in this house. At night, it will be quiet, and sometimes I will cherish the silence.
Sometimes I’ll wonder what I’m doing there in my new writing room, all the luxury of selfhood skating away.
Sometimes I’ll be afraid.
What scares you about writing?
A Cambodian Reflection on Virginia Woolf
In 1929, Virginia Woolf rallied that women need a room of their own, not just to be a writer but to be free. Free here is used loosely. Freedom has more to do with creativity and empowerment, which may ultimately be what “freedom” means. I just want to differentiate between “freedom” in the constitutive or religious or new age definitions and what I mean.
I first read Woolf when I was eighteen or nineteen. In the most cliché ways, she totally rocked my world. Back then, I was some suffering, struggling poet—and a very bad poet too! Since then, I make it a point to teach her to my first years, hoping she’d inspire them to think critically, in the same ways she’s inspired me. And she did inspire me: I believed her. I believed I needed a room of my own to write, to be a good writer.
But driving through the Cambodian countryside—countryside here being a very poor translation. Here’s the problem with language, yeah? I say countryside to many Westerners, 
and they (WE) think of pastoral cowfields or quaint little bed & breakfasts—I’m reminded of Woolf and her call for a room. See: the houses in Cambodia sit on stilts (which is utterly irrelevant to my point, more of a cool observation) and they don’t have any doors, or rather, if they do have doors, they’re never closed. Driving by, anyone can see straight through the houses, which are more like shacks. They’re small, no bigger than my two bedroom apartment, and there aren’t even walls to differentiate personal, individualized space.
Word Spaces (18): Andrew Ervin
[Andrew Ervin is the author of Extraordinary Renditions, coming this fall from Coffee House Press. He took some time to show us around his home in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where he edits the Southern Review.]
As usual, I have a number of different projects going on and for each I write using different tools.
For short stories, book reviews, and whatever this thing for HTML Giant turns out to be, I use the program OmmWriter, which my friend Nikki recommended. I like it a great deal & encourage everyone with a Mac to download it. For the edits to Extraordinary Renditions, which will be published on Sept. 1, I’m using Word for Mac, which I detest.
Classic Word Spaces (6): Ernest Hemingway
Writing Room
Yesterday I spent a few hours in the Ernest Hemingway Home & Museum and got to see the room where he wrote more than half of his work, though he only lived there for about ten years on and off . His routine was to wake up at six am and work until he had 700 words or it was time for lunch. Then he went out to fish until happy hour and then he drank until he was tired. That was how he wrote most of his books. His writing room was only accessible via a catwalk from the main house, and no one ever went in there except for him. (It is now my life’s goal to have a private writing room only accessible by catwalk or maybe a ladder and fireman’s pole or maybe a zipline.)