***

The Rumpus: What does a script supervisor do?  Can you walk me through your preparation for Cherry since it was your most recent project?

Andrea Manners: I read the script about three or four times and then I break it down.  I create a timeline for the script, break it down by scene, location, characters and descriptions.  I divide each script page into eighths.  In the film world, instead of saying a scene is three quarters of a page, you say it’s six eighths.

Some scripts will have a lot of description of a scene instead of dialogue so you sort of feel out a scene to see how many eighths it really is.

Rumpus: What else do you do to prepare for the film?

Manners: Next, I go over the script in detail and try to look for continuity red flags, things that don’t make sense.

Rumpus: What do you mean by continuity?

Manners: For example I track wounds and blood if someone gets hurt.  I’ll ask the director how long it should take for the person to heal.  We shoot out of order so I need to make sure makeup creates the exact same scratch, or, if it’s four days later in the script, the wound should be less visible.  I make notes to myself throughout the film to make sure it’s all consistent.

Rumpus: What’s a typical production day like?

Manners: Before we start production, I meet with other departments.  I ask the hair department to communicate their ideas for the film, and I ask the makeup department what they plan to do.  I’m basically making sure the director’s idea and vision is translated from the script’s point of view.

I’m also the liaison between the director and the editor.  The editor needs a lot of notes to make the movie since he’s not there.  I represent the editor on set, and I represent the director through my notes.  I take really detailed reports for producers, the money people that are stuck in the office all day.  The reports tell them what we did on set, how many pages we shot, how much of the movie we shot, and how much is left to go.

As soon as we start our first shot, I start taking notes.  I do it on my laptop but it’s best to describe the process the old school way: I have the script in the binder with the script page on the right and a blank page on the left, which is the backside of the other script page.  I have a stopwatch so I time the take, note the sound roll, the camera roll, the lens we used and whether or not the director says the take is good or no good.

I draw lines and squiggly lines on the script.  It’s a language I talk with the editors.  I draw a straight line through the character’s dialogue if they’re on camera, a squiggly line if they’re not on camera but you can hear them talking and a straight line with a squiggly line over it if they’re on camera but out of focus.  So pages are just a bunch of lines and squigglys and little notes about what hand the actor was holding a coffee cup in, where her hair was, what outfit she was wearing.  I’m taking all these notes all day throughout filming and at the end of the day I create a report for the producers.

Another part of my job is to make sure we’re respecting the rules of cinematography.  There is a certain amount of degrees you can change from one shot to the next shot without it being jarring for the audience.

Rumpus: So you’re working with a lot of moving parts.  Do you get the blame if the day doesn’t go well?

Manners: Yeah, sort of.  I hate to say this but people like to describe the script supervisor as the person that’s supposed to make sure everyone else is doing their job.  I like to think of myself as the person who’s making sure we’re all working together.  Instead of going up to hair and constantly asking them to put the actor’s hair back the way it was earlier, I’ll ask them in between shots to do me favor and make sure the hair is a certain way.  That way they’re helping me with my job and we’re both making each other look good.

I’m okay with taking blame for stuff and being responsible for clips that are bad because I know by the end of the scene there will be clips we can use, clips that are great, and everyone will still preserve their dignity.  It’s a better work environment.

There are many ways a script supervisor can choose to do their job but I think the key is to decide what’s truly important and then try to get others to work with you to achieve it.

Rumpus: It seems like people who are attracted to this job like to have power.  Do you like to have power?

Manners: I like it once in a while but I don’t like calling people out in front of other people.  There are many ways to make sure you get a great shot. One way is to note it out loud as soon as it happens. This ensures that the clip does not make it to the editor. I am of the school of thought that the director is the only person that can call cut, so if anything goes wrong on the first take I won’t bring it up until after the cut. At that point I will walk up to the person or department that can help correct whatever went wrong. Unfortunately, this does mean that once in a while there will be a clip with a mistake that ends up in the editor’s hands.

Rumpus: You care more about the harmony on the set than getting a perfect take.

Manners: I don’t think they are mutually exclusive. When you’re working with people for such long hours, these people sort of become your family.  Calling them out constantly for things that aren’t that big of a deal isn’t worth it.  I really feel that it is reflected in the film.  Even actors mention it once in a while; you can feel when people are stressed or tightly wound.  It doesn’t allow them to let loose.  Honestly, who wants to work in that type of environment?

Rumpus: Once shooting is complete, how do you work with the editor?

Manners: I hand in the actual script with my facing pages and edit logs, which are notes to the editor about what the director liked and disliked.  The editor takes my notes and runs.  I’m completely done at that point and on to my next project.

Rumpus: How did you get into this job?

Manners: It was super random. I was film editing industrial videos at the time, like corporate stuff and commercials, but nothing narrative. I went to visit my parents in Florida and went to yoga with their neighbors who were really nice. They asked me what I wanted to do and I said I’d studied film. They said they knew a director of photography in LA, and that I should call him for career advice.  When I called him, instead of giving me career advice, he said he had a shoot with Matthew McConaughey the following week and asked me to be his script supervisor. I didn’t know what that was. So I bought a book and did the job. I did a couple more jobs, horribly of course, but realized it was something I wanted to do.

Rumpus: Can you support yourself as a script supervisor?

Manners: For most of the workers in the industry, we’re all independent contractors so you make a chunk of money, and then you can be without work for a week or three months. It’s definitely something I’m doing because I love it, and not for the money.

I was working at this company in Silicon Valley and got like three raises in five months.  I had benefits, a 401k, 8-hour days, it was super cush.  And then I would come home and think, this is stupid. My job doesn’t make a difference to anyone.

As a script supervisor, the pay is way less, I work really long hours and have this insecurity in between jobs, but I feel like I’m doing something with my life.

Rumpus: So you live in the Bay Area.  Wouldn’t it be easier to live down in LA?

Manners: It would be. Cherry was the first job I have ever worked up here.  I live in the East Bay and I have more than 200,000 miles on my 2003 Prius. I go where the work is and the work is usually in LA. I drive down and rent a room in an apartment with a friend.

Rumpus: So why don’t you move?

Manners: Yeah, I can’t do that.  I’ve made enough concessions in my life.  I was born and raised in Costa Rica and came out here seven years ago for college.  I was going to go straight back but I met a boy and ended up staying here.  The one promise I made to myself was that if I lived in the U.S., I had to live somewhere that was almost better in some ways than living in Costa Rica.  It’s sort of hard to do.  San Francisco has so much.  It’s very different, but I like it.

Rumpus: Do you have any desire to act?

Manners: When I moved to the States I thought I wanted to be an actress, but I quickly learned that there was this whole world behind the camera that I didn’t know existed. I definitely wanted to be behind the camera.

Stephen made me audition for Cherry but I didn’t know I was auditioning.  Midway through the shoot, he asked if I had a script. And I said, ‘Of course. I’m the script supervisor.’ We sat in a car and read lines. I didn’t know he was filming me on his phone.

Rumpus: Are you in the film?

Manners: I said I didn’t want to be on camera.  That’s the moment I realized that I’m definitely a script supervisor.  Most people would take the chance to be in a movie, but the first thing that came to my mind was, ‘Who’s going to take notes on that take?’

Rumpus: Do you have any ambition to direct or write your own screenplay?

Manners: I get that question a lot. I’m not a writer and I never thought of directing. They seem too abstract. I think script supervisors have a need for organization and a lot of details. I’m really happy where I am at the moment. I feel like I get to go into an artist’s workshop, watch them do their work and analyze and notate it for other people.

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We eventually sat down to talk, and our conversation led to the Leningrad Blockade during World War II. This is an excerpt of a longer conversation.  Thanks to my colleague Luba for translation assistance.

***

Gregory: At the time the fascists started to bomb Leningrad, someone from the Russian military came to our school and asked for a group of very active people.  They chose me to organize a special team of kids to monitor the roofs of buildings.  We sat there all night.  They gave us a special tool to pick up the firebombs that were dropped and a sand box where we would cover them with sand to put the fire out.

Rumpus: Did you ever see one explode?

Gregory: No, they were not explosives.  They were firebombs that would cause a fire on the rooftops.

Rumpus: How old were you?

Gregory: Thirteen years old.  There were around twelve children on my team, boys and girls.  We had to sit very close to each other on the roof, and I liked to sit especially close to the girls.

The winter came very early, in the beginning of October.  It started to snow.  A military commander asked my team to help with the next project – delivering ammunition to the canons they had set up inside Leningrad.  We used sleds to transport the cannonballs.  It took two boys to move each sled.  We would spend half the day moving ammunition to the canons.

All the people in Leningrad at this time were given a quarter pound of bread each day, but my team received half a pound of bread each because we were working.  The Russian military named us “Sons of the Brigade.”

Our next project after ammunition delivery was to help find corpses.  We knew the houses better than the military, so we showed them where people were living.  We knocked on the door, and if no one answered, we went inside to look for corpses.  When we found them, the military sent us away.  They took the bodies away on sleds.

Rumpus: How long did you work for the Russian military?

Gregory: For 700 days.  I think my childhood ended when the Blockade started.

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In his essay, Baxter discusses the degree to which Americans “have distrusted silence and its parent condition, stillness.”

Recently, I gave a lecture at my final MFA residency in Vermont, where I talked about Charles Baxter’s essay “Stillness” in his collection Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction, published over a decade ago.  In his essay, Baxter discusses the degree to which Americans “have distrusted silence and its parent condition, stillness.” He asserts that silence is often associated with “madness, mooncalfing, woolgathering, laziness, hostility, and stupidity.”  The negative associations and perceived value of silence and stillness in American culture is further exacerbated by the value placed on “vitality” in our culture, which in our postmodern society, has “everything to do with speed and talk,” according to Baxter.  He argues that, in our postmodern society, “speed and information, combined through data processing, have moved into cyberspace.”  In other words, we are more connected now than in any previous eras, and are therefore placed in a position where we have to process large amounts of information in a timely manner.

As a result of this “peculiar and immeasurable speed of language” in contemporary society, Baxter believes that fiction writers are plagued with what he refers to as “information sickness.”  He cites the critic Walter Benjamin, who showed concern that an abundance of information in daily life would “block the experience of being transported by the storyteller.”  In other words, it’s the writer’s job to transform information at the data level into a story with which readers can experience and relate.  The constant bombardment of information, however, threatens the writer’s ability to transform data into fiction, thus trapping the reader at the data level as well.

So in a culture that devalues silence and stillness, and in a society where speed and violence is favored over slowness, how does an author sustain the reader’s attention by slowing down narrative time?  Baxter argues that there are many ways in which an author can keep the reader engaged with silence and stillness.  He points out that while silence is often thought of as “being a blank, a null set, or of all silences being similar, expressing the same thing, the same nothing,” it actually serves as an “intensifier” that can strengthen “whatever stands on either side of it.”  In other words, silence can be colored by different emotions depending on the scene it “flows through or flows between,” thus creating a specific kind of stillness that intensifies mood and character.

Silence and stillness in fiction also give the reader the ability to experience a character’s “absorption” of the minute details of his/her setting, thus deepening the reader’s experience of characterization.  Instead of a forward-moving plot, the story pauses temporarily so the reader can take in the layers of experience and sensory perceptions the character has to offer.  Baxter describes the experience in this way:

Instead of the forward dramatic line we (at least temporarily) have the absorption of the character into the minutiae of the setting.  The dynamics of fear and desire are momentarily displaced by a rapt attention to small details, to the cultivation of a moment’s mood for its own sake without any nervous straining after insight.

The Rumpus: In your essay “Stillness,” published over a decade ago, you discuss contemporary society’s distrust of silence and its fascination with speed and information.  How have your views on technology shifted (or not) since then?

Charlie Baxter: I’m afraid that they haven’t. Speed (which is sometimes confused with efficiency) is still considered laudable; by contrast, people often speak of slowness as if it were deplorable.

Rumpus: You make a connection between narrative violence and data processing: both have speed in common.  You also point out that we don’t notice action as much as readers did “in previous centuries.”  It has turned into a type of narcotic – we need it but we’re not interested in it.

Baxter: Yes. Speed is of course addictive. As is a fascination with violence—everything else starts to look dull by comparison. In this way, we habituate ourselves to excitement, but as one commentator observed, “There is no boredom like the boredom of being excited all the time.”

Rumpus: What’s at stake if writers suffer from the “information sickness” you describe in your essay – when information overload blocks the writer’s ability to transform data into experience?  What kind of defense is there against information sickness?  Meditation perhaps?

Baxter: Good fiction doesn’t just convey information; it conveys—imparts—an experience. Meditation might help as a path to a reacquaintance with silence. But nothing works so well as a judicious shutting-down of screen culture: computer screens particularly.

Rumpus: You wrote your essay “Stillness” as a lecture for an MFA program, but I’m wondering what triggered this topic for you.  Had you been reading work by contemporary authors and/or students that focused more on constitutive events that move the story forward as opposed to supplementary events that occur at the periphery of a story?  What constitutes a supplementary event in fiction, and how do you define the difference between the two?

Baxter: I’d been reading the work of Wright Morris, whose novels are beautiful but static. He never quite gained the audience he deserved because his fiction is so demanding (he was a great photographer whose subject was lastingness: he loved to photograph objects that had withstood the weathers of time). His books require your complete concentration. They’re quite uncompromising in that regard. In Morris’s work, almost everything seems to be a supplement; there are almost no constitutive events in his work. If you can imagine stories or novels made up entirely of subplots, you’ll have an idea of what he was up to.

Rumpus: One of your personal interests in stillness in fiction has to do with “its benign features and the great difficulty we have in expressing them.”  You pose the important question: “…how does anyone get [expressive air-pockets of dead silence] into fiction, where the flow of words must continue line by line, page by page, until the whole thing stops?”  In an interview with David Means, he says that the writer can’t make conscious decisions to slip in stillness in the work, “You can’t just say: I’ll slip some stillness in here, and some more here.”

Baxter: With all due respect, I think you can slip in such moments, but you can’t just write the word “Silence” and expect the reader to experience that silence. You have to write about what’s happening at the peripheries of the scene: a door is opening, a floor creaks, the water dribbles out of the tap, the wind blows the curtains into the room. It’s through these small events that we experience that sense of stillness, which is, of course, a quality, not a thing-in-itself. So you give the quality to the objects.

Rumpus: I love Edward P. Jones’s collection Lost In The City, particularly his story “The Girl Who Raised Pigeons” which is filled with silence and stillness.  Can you recommend other works or authors who achieve a similar effect?

Baxter: There are so many. Virginia Woolf, of course, and the great Japanese novelist and short story writer Kawabata. Start with his Palm of the Hand stories. I’ve mentioned Wright Morris. Hemingway likes to write scenes of dangerous stillness, full of menace: the last two or three pages of “The Killers,” for example. There’s a kind of ecstatic stillness in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping. Many poets have addressed the subject: Gary Snyder, Robert Bly. Many, many others.

Rumpus: “If, however, we have truly lost the ability to be interested in stillness … we will have lost the capacity to be accurate about an entire dimension of our experiences.”  Can you comment on this statement in your essay?

Baxter: There can be great narrative interest in a man or a woman sitting quietly, if only you surround that person with an interesting narrative context. There can be great narrative interest in slow art, in the nothing-happening moment. These may be the very moments, in fact, that lead to real enlightenment. No one was ever enlightened by a car crash. But stillness requires a kind of patience, a putting-aside of restlessness. That requires discipline, and not everyone has the strength or patience to get there. So be it.

***

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In Yiyun Li’s “A Soldier Home,” she recalls the way she used to live through Frederic’s character in Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms as an escape from her mother’s growing madness one summer.  Yiyun was nineteen years old at the time, and had just returned to Beijing after a year of “involuntary service” in the Chinese Army.  Her father approached her one night asking her to save her mother from insanity, the same condition from which her grandmother had suffered before her mother was born.  As Yiyun dealt with her mother’s increasing outbursts and “poisonous words,” and her father’s feelings of failure over not being able to save his wife from madness, she escaped from her real life to assume the life of Frederic, a soldier whose world was filled with the drama of war and love.  She discovers, however, that while Frederic’s war ends “beautifully, tragically,” her own war would continue.

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Tamim Ansary is the author of West of Kabul, East of New York and the forthcoming book Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes. He is also the facilitator of the the oldest continuous free writers’ workshop in the country.

Rumpus: I need to record you so you’re not able to retract anything later.

Ansary: That’s okay, I’m not running for office anytime soon.

Rumpus: What was it like being of mixed race in Afghanistan? I know in the Philippines, children of mixed race are often looked down upon, but it’s complicated because they’re also admired for their beauty – lighter skin, eyes and hair.

Ansary: Well, I don’t think we were more attractive (laughs). It’s true that being of mixed race over there was a very distinct experience. I was not an Afghan, I was not an American either. There was never a time when I didn’t know it. When I say not ever a time, I mean not one second.

I remember one time the religion teacher said to the class, “Afghans are very tough and foreigners not so much. Here, I’ll give you a demonstration.” He asked me to come up to the front, and then said to the class, “I’ll beat this guy and you’ll see he’s going to cry.” So he beat me and I cried. Then he sent for my cousin, the son of an Afghan general, and beat him, but he didn’t cry.

Rumpus: Was there any advantage to being of mixed race?

Ansary: Personally, there was a huge advantage. Intellectually it’s a really good thing to have access to the knowledge that all truth is relative. That’s an inheritance when you’re growing up across two cultures. I think this idea makes people uncomfortable; it’s certainly a lot more comforting and easy to live in a culture that is homogenous and amongst a society of people who are sure about things, so that you can feel like there’s a rock you’re standing on. The trouble is, there is no rock that any of us is actually standing on.

Rumpus: Did you want to go to boarding school in America or did your parents ship you off at sixteen?

Ansary: No, I wanted to go, I arranged that myself. I applied for a scholarship and then told my parents what I’d done. I was always very conscious of the fact that if you’re an Afghan in world terms you’re so poor that you can’t do anything. My father had a big, responsible position in the government, and I was told that his salary was something like forty dollars a month at that time. And my mother taught in the American school, so she was paid two hundred dollars a month. She earned five times what my father made simply because she was working at the lowest possible American wage scale. So I just felt like, if you’re an Afghan, you just can’t get out. There’s no way.

Rumpus: What was the biggest shock for you arriving in America?

Ansary: The biggest shock was dealing with sexuality. There is just no such thing as dating in Afghanistan. When I was a senior in high school, and I’d been here for two years, I thought I had a girlfriend. We were both in this modern dance class and we did a performance together. We spent a lot of time together, and I was in love. I ran into her thirty years later, and she said that after several marriages had broken up, she had met a guy that was in our class and they had fallen in love and were going to get married. She said he was her boyfriend when we graduated from Rocky Mountain. And I was like, he was? At the time I thought you were my girlfriend, you had a boyfriend?

After high school, I transferred from Carlton College to Reed College because it had a reputation for being this wild place. I got wild and I got crazy. After that I ended up in the hippy world of Portland, but I still didn’t have any experience with normal American dating customs. I’d never asked a girl out. We just ended up in the same place and had sex. I never picked a girl up or said, “I’ll meet you at 8 pm and we’ll go to dinner.” We were hippies. We didn’t have money, we didn’t go to dinner. We went to the hot springs with peyote and got naked.

Rumpus: Are you carrying any drugs on you right now, such as LSD in your wallet?

Ansary: Well, I used to when I was a college student. You never know when you might need to be enlightened.

Rumpus: You talk about the difficulty of returning to Afghan culture, what you’d have to give up in order to do so, namely individualism, the sense that each person has charge of their life. In Afghan culture, there’s a sense of being a part of a larger group, a tribal connection that’s difficult to break. People spend more time building and strengthening social networks than focusing on their own personal productivity and growth. Do you think Americans give up too much for freedom?

Ansary: I don’t know if we have a choice. When I think about those aspects of Afghan culture that you just called out there, I’m really talking about a culture that still had possession of its norms, but that was destroyed in the last quarter of a century. I think it’s very up in the air as to what the culture of Afghanistan is like now. When you take a country that consists of interrelated stable networks of tribes and clans and families and you randomly drop bombs everywhere, so that every possible connection is broken by bloodshed, people run and hide, some run across the border, some go back in and fight, then you’ve got this world in which all the old mechanisms for how someone becomes a leader and becomes respected are gone.

In a culture that’s been destroyed like that, pure military strength and savagery count for a lot — the ability to get at least ten or twelve guys to obey and follow you, or the ability to suck up to some foreign person that will give you money and guns. New kinds of strengths and skills are favored by the circumstances, so then when the smoke cleared of that, there was a whole new kind of level of leaders and authority figures that didn’t have that much to do with the old days.

A society like ours consists of individuals making their way within certain frameworks of rules. It’s a very flexible, creative society that is absolutely adaptable and really strong. You know, all these older societies with conditions, customs and traditions, where everyone has to follow their rules — our society will just come in and smash it. So I think our only hope is to start from here and say, “How do we get beyond this to more values, to find a new way to have a connection with that which is permanent?”

Rumpus: You talk about going back to authentic memory when writing, and not imposing on the journey of the memory, but allowing associations to happen so one memory triggers another.

Ansary: This idea of just capturing memory came from a guy named Don Anderson who came to our workshop. He was writing his memoir about his life before he was six years old, and had amazing details of an otherwise completely average childhood. The clarity of his details reminded most of us, including me, who grew up in Afghanistan, of our childhood. So one time I said to him, “These are really great; at some point, you’re going to want to organize it and figure out your theme.” And he said, “No, I’m not really interested in doing that. I’m just interested in remembering.”

So when I started working on what would eventually become West of Kabul, it was just remembering. That’s all I was trying to do. One thing led to another, and there were things I didn’t include in the book, like memories of various Afghan friends of my father and moments of childhood memory like walking in from the snow and seeing my grandmother, who was four feet tall when she stood up (but rarely stood up), sitting in a corner, puffing away at her hookah.

But what I was reminded of when you asked that question was, after I had written about some of these memories that didn’t appear in the book, I tried to remember a trip to North Africa, but I wasn’t getting anywhere. Finally I realized I wasn’t actually trying to remember. I was actually trying to write the narrative that fixed itself in my mind. I was stuck on the narrative, and I wasn’t bursting through to the raw material of events. So I managed to figure out a way to just let go, and when I did that, I’d remembered something I hadn’t ever thought of since then: when I was in Paris on my way to all this excitement going on in the Muslim world, I walked into a shop and the guy was an Afghan. I was completely astounded. In those days you hardly ever saw Afghans anywhere. So I introduced myself and we fell into a conversation, and he said, “Oh, you’re so and so, why I knew your father, I knew your uncle.” He asked questions about my family in such a way that I felt pretty plumped up. I come from a pretty eminent family and this stranger in Paris knew all about them. It made me feel pretty good about myself. And it was only when I re-remembered that moment in that authentic way, that I realized he was doing something that I was supposed do, the complimentary thing to, but instead, I just sat there soaking up his words. It’s a seriously rude thing. Many years later retrospectively, I felt embarrassed. That’s the mark of an authentic memory — when you feel emotions appropriate to the event that you didn’t even feel at the time.

Rumpus: In an article in The Atlantic a few years ago, Rick Moody compares the creative writing workshop to a focus group or a test screening of a film because of the “checklist” of broad questions often used to rate aspects of a film. He also discusses the ways in which teachers and students alike agree upon a predictable formula for critique that promotes mediocre writing. What are the alternatives to the writing workshop?

Ansary: I think what he’s saying applies to workshops that have a stable membership and a recurring group that feeds back to each other, which is all MFA workshops. One thing that makes our workshop different is that there are different people all the time; it changes every single session, and it’s instant critique. Nobody gets to ponder anyone’s stuff for two weeks and give them their considered opinions. So it’s kind of like an open mic in a way.

I really think of a writer’s workshop as being mostly a social thing. Writing is the loneliest profession. It’s really great to get out and knock about with some other writers. But I think the big danger of the workshop is when you think people are telling you how good your stuff is, whether it’s working or not. That’s not true at all. Whoever is there has an opinion, but their opinion is nothing exalted. If you think that you’re getting advice on what to do, that’s ridiculous. Nobody knows that. If you don’t know, then you shouldn’t be writing. The critiquer’s job is to say “ouch” when you hit them, but they can’t tell you how to load your gun, fire, or aim it.

Rumpus: When someone in workshop is reading from their piece, I notice you look around at other people, stare up at the ceiling, squirm in your seat a bit, adjust your glasses. It appears that you’re not paying attention at all, but then you emerge with such precise observations and insights. Are you just fidgety?

Ansary: Those seats are hard. Who can help but fidget in those seats? It’s true that I find it very interesting to listen to and to think about writing that’s not good as well as writing that is good. For me, it’s very interesting to think about what a piece would be doing if it were working, and why didn’t it have that affect. And yet when something is not working, I can’t help but fidget when I’m listening to it, it’s true. There’s no screening to attend this workshop; nobody has to pass a test to be part of the group. The only criterion is that they have to think they’re a writer, and, the truth is, not everyone that thinks this is correct in their assessment. But somehow I think it works.

What’s interesting is that some people who come in aren’t writing anything I can really find myself able to listen to, and then later something happens and they write really good stuff. They come because they’re pregnant. And then eventually they have their baby, and some have false pregnancies (laughs). And there are also people who seem pretty good, their stuff is interesting, but then it gets less interesting as time goes on.

Rumpus: Kind of like dating.

Ansary: Yes, I guess it is. Now I’m trying to think back – did that happen or did I always get dumped before I ever found that out?

Rumpus: What do you think the common pitfalls are of beginning writers?

Ansary: Writing can fail for a lot of different reasons. My personal little bug-a-boo is writing that has great language, but it’s disguising the fact that’s it’s not doing anything else. But I feel that about much published and much praised writing.

Vikram Seth is my favorite modern writer. And he said something about how he wants to draw people down into this world and not have them notice the language. Obviously language is the medium of writing, so it has to be good, but my thought is, what is good language? Good language is only good if it serves something. So what is that something?

Rumpus: At the pub after every workshop, you have a slice of cherry pie. Why do you like cherry pie so much?

Ansary: I like cherry pie cause it’s delicious! The fact is, my mother made cherry pie when I was a kid. It was one of her standard things, maybe that’s why. She made lemon meringue pie, too. I make it once a year. I really perfected that one.

Rumpus: Tell me about your new book Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes. Who’s your audience and what do you want them to take away from it?

Ansary: My audience is largely American, non-Muslim readers who don’t have a clue or have only a vague idea of what the context of today’s political events are for most Muslims. But I also think about my friends in the Afghan community. They know many things about Islam, but there are many things they don’t know. I think they’ll find it interesting because it’s all there. I wrote this book because I think that most of us in the West have an unconscious narrative of world history. I think it’s interesting and important to explore that other story line. The events are the same, we’re all in them, but I’m telling the story that leads to today’s events through a whole different landscape. And I’m trying to do it in the way that if you and I were sitting in a bar and you said, “Hey, you’re from that part of the world, is there a whole other idea of history there?” I’d say, “Yeah – bartender, bring me a couple more.”

Rumpus: After you finish each book, you head straight to the movie theater to watch whatever is playing at that moment. What did you watch after you finished Destiny Disrupted?

Ansary: There was some movie about Robert De Niro being a movie producer, and I don’t remember much of that because I fell asleep. And then the next day, I realized I had been editing two different versions of the book, and when I sent it to my editor, it had some correct changes but many were incorrect, so I wasn’t done at all. Later, I saw The Day the Earth Stood Still. That was the punctuation mark that ended the project.

Rumpus: I think I speak on behalf of workshop attendees when I say thank you very much for having given up every Tuesday for the past ten years to facilitate the workshop, and for your service for many Tuesdays to come.

Ansary: As long as my strengths hold out.

***

See Also: The Rumpus Interview With Malcolm Gladwell

See Also: Flannery On The Couch

Related Posts:

• Tamim Ansary At Red Hill Books
• Afghan Star: A Conversation with Tamim Ansary
• Dave Eggers: The Last Book I Loved, Destiny Disrupted
• Iran’s Regime: Marching Toward a Cliff
• The Rumpus Long Interview With Tamim Ansary

“The style in the second collection is more developed, more established. I feel like I’m more mature as a storyteller now and I also know what kind of stories I want to tell.”

Editors Note: This interview was originally published in The Rumpus January 14, 2009, one week before our launch. We’re continuing to republish select Rumpus Originals published during our beta period which ran from December 2, 2008 to January 20 2009.

**

I first interviewed Yiyun Li in 2005 when she won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, among many other awards, for her debut collection A Thousand

Years of Good Prayers. Her first novel The Vagrants is forthcoming in February 2009.

Parayno: As a writer, how do you feel when you’re asked to make public statements on the political direction of China?

Li: I usually don’t want to make a comment because I feel if I have something to say, I have to know it really well. I don’t think I know the political situation well enough to make useful comments, so I just pass on this question.

Parayno: What was it like to see your stories “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers” and “Princess of Nebraska” in film?

Li: It’s a very fun experience. You make up something in your mind and all of the sudden these real people come in. I have different relationships with each film. I wrote the screenplay for “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers” so I worked much more closely with Wayne [Wang] on that project. It was a good lesson in storytelling because I’m not a very visual writer. When I think about someone, I never think about the character’s face, even though I like to watch people. Right away I think about their internal world. But in film, you have to present everything on the screen so it’s the opposite of what I usually do with storytelling. It forced me to think about how people walk, where they sit at that moment. With Princess of Nebraska, it was just fun to watch because the movie was so far from the story. It was very much a different story.

Parayno: During our interview a few years ago, you had mentioned that you weren’t an autobiographical writer. Has that changed?

Li: No, it hasn’t. Although when I met Colm Tóibín, he told me one of his students had asked how he started The Master. He said he did a lot of research and had all these things in his mind, but just didn’t know where to start. So one day when he was in Italy, he took a walk in the garden and thought, I’m going to start here, with something in my life. I’ll give this to Henry James. So he started the novel with Henry James having a dream about that garden. I thought that was very nice. He says it keeps you engaged. Ever since he said that to me, I’m always trying to slip or sneak little things in to keep me engaged. For example, if a main character is walking down the street and someone is standing there, that person might be me or somebody I know. It’s just fun.

Parayno: You cried when you read the galley copy of your forthcoming novel The Vagrants. You also mentioned that writing this novel was your way of questioning heroism.

Li: Actually I was in Kilkenny, Ireland when I proofread the galley and I just got sad. I felt sad for sending these people to their world. Your characters are always your children. And while you are writing, you’re keeping them safe. Now they’re ready to go into the world and it’s sad. I’m happy with the way the novel came out but all the characters’ ending really saddened me.

Regarding heroism, I grew up in a culture where you learn about heroes and heroines all the time. In a way, when you call someone a hero or heroine, it’s the same as calling them a villain. I have one very heroic woman in the novel but she was actually the most difficult character for me to write because I just couldn’t buy her heroism. I had to constantly question her motivation. She was a young woman with a young child; she gave up all this: her status, her child, her family and her marriage for something she was executed for. There has to be something that really moved her to do that.

Parayno: Did you do a lot of research for your novel?

Li: The major research was how to set up this town. I modeled the town after my husband’s hometown. He has a very good memory of places so he made a huge map (this is before Google Earth) and made it really detailed. There was a department store, a butcher shop. And then I put my characters in it. After I looked up his hometown in Google Earth, I thought, Wow, it’s very similar.

Parayno: What is your process for accessing memory? Your novel is set in the late 70′s, when you were a young child. Did you consciously try to remember details from your childhood? Did you look at pictures?

Li: That’s a very good question. I was doing a New Yorker panel with Manil Suri, so I read his first novel. In the first few chapters, there is a scene where a woman is dying her hair with an old toothbrush. I told him that scene is exactly how my mom used to dye her hair, but I had forgotten. So I think we read to retrieve our memory.

In William Trevor’s book Reading Turgenev, there’s a minor detail in the beginning of the novel about a prosperous fabric shop. The shop is downstairs and the accounting office is upstairs. All the bills and the money would go from downstairs to upstairs in a little train car overhead. That’s a detail no one is going to pay attention to because it’s just one line, but that line really reminded me of a department store when I grew up. There wasn’t a train system, but they had all these metal lines driven by little motors. If you wanted to buy something, the shop assistant put the money on the metal clip and it travelled across the store. It’s really satisfying to me that one sentence triggered that memory.

For the novel, pictures were very helpful. I did look at photo albums from around that time. I saw a really great picture, taken from the New York Times about the time when sunglasses first appeared in China. For about thirty years in communist China, there were no sunglasses, but in the late 70′s and early 80′s, all of the sudden they were introduced again. The picture was of three young males with really dark sunglasses. Really tough young men. I thought, That’s neat. So I put them in my novel as very minor characters.

Parayno: How do you feel about the publishing industry’s pressure on short story writers to produce a novel?

Li: Because we come from an MFA background, we’re all writing stories for workshop, so you end up with a collection. I love stories, and I love novels for different reasons. People always say short stories are dead, but I don’t really believe that. If you look at every generation, there is an Alice Munro and a William Trevor. They will not give up writing stories. I try to tune out all these things from the publishing world because they’re very distracting. If I feel like I want to write a story, I write a story. And if I want to write a novel, I’ll go into a novel.

Parayno: What do you know about the publishing industry now that you didn’t know when you started writing?

Li: I don’t think I know anything yet. It’s still a mystery to me. I prefer not to think about it. But what I do know actually came from working as an editor on A Public Space with Brigid Hughes. It was a good learning experience to think about what you look for in a story. If you read a story and remember it in six weeks, that’s a very good story. Sometimes you read a story, and the next day you can’t remember anything. That’s horrible.

Parayno: At a recent Progressive Reading event, you became fixated on an older woman who was sitting alone. You were really drawn to her.

Li: What happened to that woman? (laughs). If I remember correctly, I think that woman stood out a little in that crowd. There was something about her. If you see a room full of people, for instance, you can place most of the people, you can guess where they’re from. Even if your guess is wrong, you still have a guess. But I couldn’t place her. I couldn’t come up with something that explained her existence in that moment. Those are the things that really stand out to me. Then I start to become really curious. I’ll come up with a situation that can possibly explain the mystery to me, and then comes the plot and the story.

Parayno: I love your piece in the New York Times about how your father used dried orange peels as a home remedy for colds. It reminded me of my grandfather who came from the Philippines. He would perform a ritual with warm coconut oil and Latin prayers to heal us from ailments such as headaches and stomach aches. Do you know of other home remedies?

Li: I remember when my son was a baby, he was crying for no reason. In America the doctors call that a colicky baby. He wasn’t a colicky baby, but one day he kept crying and crying for no reason. My mother-in-law was here, and she said, Let me go outside and do something. She went to talk to these ghosts and she was calling my son’s name. She would say, Fine, fine, just move on. My husband told me not everybody can perform this; you have to have a certain capacity. I find it really funny.

Parayno: Did it help?

Li: It helped! (laughs)

Parayno: What are you reading now?

Li: I’m reading all short stories because I’m teaching short stories this quarter. I’m reading a lot of Chekhov and Grace Paley, writers I’ve read before but not systematically. I just moved War and Peace downstairs to my office, but I don’t know if I want to start it; it’s a big novel. I’m reading a lot of Sherlock Holmes now. Also Patricia Highsmith.

Parayno: Now that you’ve completed your first novel, do you have any suggestions on the process of novel writing?

Li: One easy mistake to make with the first novel is to expand the short story. Some things are better as a story; you cannot dilute things into a novel. I think the first hundred pages of a novel are very important. That’s where you set things up: the world, the characters. Once you’ve set that up, it’ll be much easier. I always tell my students to go back after a hundred pages and rewrite from the beginning. It’s really harder if you’ve already finished four hundred pages and realize the first hundred aren’t working.

Parayno: What are you working on now?

Li: I think I’m going to start another novel in the spring. It’s about a murder. I’m learning about murders, but it’s very preliminary. That’s why I’m reading Sherlock Holmes.

To prepare for the novel, I just finished an eighty-page story. I think that’s probably the last story of my second collection, which I wrote as a side project while writing The Vagrants.

Parayno: How would you say the stories in your second collection differ from those in your first collection? Are they more expansive? Did you experiment with new forms?

Li: I like the second collection better. If I don’t like it better than the first collection, there’s a problem there (laughs). If you look at A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, style wise, there are a few stories that are very much different from the rest of the stories, so you know that I was just experimenting with a lot of different things. The style in the second collection is more developed, more established. I feel like I’m more mature as a storyteller now and I also know what kind of stories I want to tell.

**

See Also: The Rumpus Interview With Malcolm Gladwell

See Also: Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam

Related Posts:

• No related posts…

“The style in the second collection is more developed, more established. I feel like I’m more mature as a storyteller now and I also know what kind of stories I want to tell.”

I first interviewed Yiyun Li in 2005 when she won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, among many other awards, for her debut collection A Thousand Years of Good Prayers. Her first novel The Vagrants is forthcoming in February 2009.

Parayno: As a writer, how do you feel when you’re asked to make public statements on the political direction of China?

Li: I usually don’t want to make a comment because I feel if I have something to say, I have to know it really well. I don’t think I know the political situation well enough to make useful comments, so I just pass on this question.

Parayno: What was it like to see your stories “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers” and “Princess of Nebraska” in film?

Li: It’s a very fun experience. You make up something in your mind and all of the sudden these real people come in. I have different relationships with each film. I wrote the screenplay for A Thousand Years of Good Prayers so I worked much more closely with Wayne [Wang] on that project. It was a good lesson in storytelling because I’m not a very visual writer. When I think about someone, I never think about the character’s face, even though I like to watch people. Right away I think about their internal world. But in film, you have to present everything on the screen so it’s the opposite of what I usually do with storytelling. It forced me to think about how people walk, where they sit at that moment. With Princess of Nebraska, it was just fun to watch because the movie was so far from the story. It was very much a different story.

Parayno: During our interview a few years ago, you had mentioned that you weren’t an autobiographical writer. Has that changed?

Li: No, it hasn’t. Although when I met Colm Tóibín, he told me one of his students had asked how he started The Master. He said he did a lot of research and had all these things in his mind, but just didn’t know where to start. So one day when he was in Italy, he took a walk in the garden and thought, I’m going to start here, with something in my life. I’ll give this to Henry James. So he started the novel with Henry James having a dream about that garden. I thought that was very nice. He says it keeps you engaged. Ever since he said that to me, I’m always trying to slip or sneak little things in to keep me engaged. For example, if a main character is walking down the street and someone is standing there, that person might be me or somebody I know. It’s just fun.

Parayno: You cried when you read the galley copy of your forthcoming novel The Vagrants. You also mentioned that writing this novel was your way of questioning heroism.

Li: Actually I was in Kilkenny, Ireland when I proofread the galley and I just got sad. I felt sad for sending these people to their world. Your characters are always your children. And while you are writing, you’re keeping them safe. Now they’re ready to go into the world and it’s sad. I’m happy with the way the novel came out but all the characters’ ending really saddened me.

Regarding heroism, I grew up in a culture where you learn about heroes and heroines all the time. In a way, when you call someone a hero or heroine, it’s the same as calling them a villain. I have one very heroic woman in the novel but she was actually the most difficult character for me to write because I just couldn’t buy her heroism. I had to constantly question her motivation. She was a young woman with a young child; she gave up all this: her status, her child, her family and her marriage for something she was executed for. There has to be something that really moved her to do that.

Parayno: Did you do a lot of research for your novel?

Li: The major research was how to set up this town. I modeled the town after my husband’s hometown. He has a very good memory of places so he made a huge map (this is before Google Earth) and made it really detailed. There was a department store, a butcher shop. And then I put my characters in it. After I looked up his hometown in Google Earth, I thought, Wow, it’s very similar.

Parayno: What is your process for accessing memory? Your novel is set in the late 70′s, when you were a young child. Did you consciously try to remember details from your childhood? Did you look at pictures?

Li: That’s a very good question. I was doing a New Yorker panel with Manil Suri, so I read his first novel. In the first few chapters, there is a scene where a woman is dying her hair with an old toothbrush. I told him that scene is exactly how my mom used to dye her hair, but I had forgotten. So I think we read to retrieve our memory.

In William Trevor’s book Reading Turgenev, there’s a minor detail in the beginning of the novel about a prosperous fabric shop. The shop is downstairs and the accounting office is upstairs. All the bills and the money would go from downstairs to upstairs in a little train car overhead. That’s a detail no one is going to pay attention to because it’s just one line, but that line really reminded me of a department store when I grew up. There wasn’t a train system, but they had all these metal lines driven by little motors. If you wanted to buy something, the shop assistant put the money on the metal clip and it travelled across the store. It’s really satisfying to me that one sentence triggered that memory.

For the novel, pictures were very helpful. I did look at photo albums from around that time. I saw a really great picture, taken from the New York Times about the time when sunglasses first appeared in China. For about thirty years in communist China, there were no sunglasses, but in the late 70′s and early 80′s, all of the sudden they were introduced again. The picture was of three young males with really dark sunglasses. Really tough young men. I thought, That’s neat. So I put them in my novel as very minor characters.

Parayno: How do you feel about the publishing industry’s pressure on short story writers to produce a novel?

Li: Because we come from an MFA background, we’re all writing stories for workshop, so you end up with a collection. I love stories, and I love novels for different reasons. People always say short stories are dead, but I don’t really believe that. If you look at every generation, there is an Alice Munro and a William Trevor. They will not give up writing stories. I try to tune out all these things from the publishing world because they’re very distracting. If I feel like I want to write a story, I write a story. And if I want to write a novel, I’ll go into a novel.

Parayno: What do you know about the publishing industry now that you didn’t know when you started writing?

Li: I don’t think I know anything yet. It’s still a mystery to me. I prefer not to think about it. But what I do know actually came from working as an editor on A Public Space with Brigid Hughes. It was a good learning experience to think about what you look for in a story. If you read a story and remember it in six weeks, that’s a very good story. Sometimes you read a story, and the next day you can’t remember anything. That’s horrible.

Parayno: At a recent Progressive Reading event, you became fixated on an older woman who was sitting alone. You were really drawn to her.

Li: What happened to that woman? (laughs). If I remember correctly, I think that woman stood out a little in that crowd. There was something about her. If you see a room full of people, for instance, you can place most of the people, you can guess where they’re from. Even if your guess is wrong, you still have a guess. But I couldn’t place her. I couldn’t come up with something that explained her existence in that moment. Those are the things that really stand out to me. Then I start to become really curious. I’ll come up with a situation that can possibly explain the mystery to me, and then comes the plot and the story.

Parayno: I love your piece in the New York Times about how your father used dried orange peels as a home remedy for colds. It reminded me of my grandfather who came from the Philippines. He would perform a ritual with warm coconut oil and Latin prayers to heal us from ailments such as headaches and stomach aches. Do you know of other home remedies?

Li: I remember when my son was a baby, he was crying for no reason. In America the doctors call that a colicky baby. He wasn’t a colicky baby, but one day he kept crying and crying for no reason. My mother-in-law was here, and she said, Let me go outside and do something. She went to talk to these ghosts and she was calling my son’s name. She would say, Fine, fine, just move on. My husband told me not everybody can perform this; you have to have a certain capacity. I find it really funny.

Parayno: Did it help?

Li: It helped! (laughs)

Parayno: What are you reading now?

Li: I’m reading all short stories because I’m teaching short stories this quarter. I’m reading a lot of Chekhov and Grace Paley, writers I’ve read before but not systematically. I just moved War and Peace downstairs to my office, but I don’t know if I want to start it; it’s a big novel. I’m reading a lot of Sherlock Holmes now. Also Patricia Highsmith.

Parayno: Now that you’ve completed your first novel, do you have any suggestions on the process of novel writing?

Li: One easy mistake to make with the first novel is to expand the short story. Some things are better as a story; you cannot dilute things into a novel. I think the first hundred pages of a novel are very important. That’s where you set things up: the world, the characters. Once you’ve set that up, it’ll be much easier. I always tell my students to go back after a hundred pages and rewrite from the beginning. It’s really harder if you’ve already finished four hundred pages and realize the first hundred aren’t working.

Parayno: What are you working on now?

Li: I think I’m going to start another novel in the spring. It’s about a murder. I’m learning about murders, but it’s very preliminary. That’s why I’m reading Sherlock Holmes.

To prepare for the novel, I just finished an eighty-page story. I think that’s probably the last story of my second collection, which I wrote as a side project while writing The Vagrants.

Parayno: How would you say the stories in your second collection differ from those in your first collection? Are they more expansive? Did you experiment with new forms?

Li: I like the second collection better. If I don’t like it better than the first collection, there’s a problem there (laughs). If you look at A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, style wise, there are a few stories that are very much different from the rest of the stories, so you know that I was just experimenting with a lot of different things. The style in the second collection is more developed, more established. I feel like I’m more mature as a storyteller now and I also know what kind of stories I want to tell.

**

See Also: The Rumpus Long Interview With Tamim Ansary

See Also: The Rumpus Interview With Malcolm Gladwell

See Also: Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam

Related Posts:

• The Neighbors’ Troubles
• Notable New York, This Week 11/2 – 11/8
• A Barricade of Books
• No One Is Innocent
• The Rumpus Long Interview With Tamim Ansary

Tamim Ansary is the author of West of Kabul, East of New York and the forthcoming book Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes. He is also the facilitator of the San Francisco Writers Workshop, the oldest continuous free writers’ workshop in the country.

Parayno: I need to record you so you’re not able to retract anything later.

Ansaray: That’s okay, I’m not running for office anytime soon.

Parayno: What was it like being of mixed race in Afghanistan? I know in the Philippines, children of mixed race are often looked down upon, but it’s complicated because they’re also admired for their beauty – lighter skin, eyes and hair.

Ansaray: Well, I don’t think we were more attractive (laughs). It’s true that being of mixed race over there was a very distinct experience. I was not an Afghan, I was not an American either. There was never a time when I didn’t know it. When I say not ever a time, I mean not one second.

I remember one time the religion teacher said to the class, “Afghans are very tough and foreigners not so much. Here, I’ll give you a demonstration.” He asked me to come up to the front, and then said to the class, “I’ll beat this guy and you’ll see he’s going to cry.” So he beat me and I cried. Then he sent for my cousin, the son of an Afghan general, and beat him, but he didn’t cry.

Parayno: Was there any advantage to being of mixed race?

Ansaray: Personally, there was a huge advantage. Intellectually it’s a really good thing to have access to the knowledge that all truth is relative. That’s an inheritance when you’re growing up across two cultures. I think this idea makes people uncomfortable; it’s certainly a lot more comforting and easy to live in a culture that is homogenous and amongst a society of people who are sure about things, so that you can feel like there’s a rock you’re standing on. The trouble is, there is no rock that any of us is actually standing on.

Parayno: Did you want to go to boarding school in America or did your parents ship you off at sixteen?

Ansaray: No, I wanted to go, I arranged that myself. I applied for a scholarship and then told my parents what I’d done. I was always very conscious of the fact that if you’re an Afghan in world terms you’re so poor that you can’t do anything. My father had a big, responsible position in the government, and I was told that his salary was something like forty dollars a month at that time. And my mother taught in the American school, so she was paid two hundred dollars a month. She earned five times what my father made simply because she was working at the lowest possible American wage scale. So I just felt like, if you’re an Afghan, you just can’t get out. There’s no way.

Parayno: What was the biggest shock for you arriving in America?

Ansaray: The biggest shock was dealing with sexuality. There is just no such thing as dating in Afghanistan. When I was a senior in high school, and I’d been here for two years, I thought I had a girlfriend. We were both in this modern dance class and we did a performance together. We spent a lot of time together, and I was in love. I ran into her thirty years later, and she said that after several marriages had broken up, she had met a guy that was in our class and they had fallen in love and were going to get married. She said he was her boyfriend when we graduated from Rocky Mountain. And I was like, he was? At the time I thought you were my girlfriend, you had a boyfriend?

After high school, I transferred from Carlton College to Reed College because it had a reputation for being this wild place. I got wild and I got crazy. After that I ended up in the hippy world of Portland, but I still didn’t have any experience with normal American dating customs. I’d never asked a girl out. We just ended up in the same place and had sex. I never picked a girl up or said, “I’ll meet you at 8 pm and we’ll go to dinner.” We were hippies. We didn’t have money, we didn’t go to dinner. We went to the hot springs with peyote and got naked.

Parayno: Are you carrying any drugs on you right now, such as LSD in your wallet?

Ansaray: Well, I used to when I was a college student. You never know when you might need to be enlightened.

Parayno: You talk about the difficulty of returning to Afghan culture, what you’d have to give up in order to do so, namely individualism, the sense that each person has charge of their life. In Afghan culture, there’s a sense of being a part of a larger group, a tribal connection that’s difficult to break. People spend more time building and strengthening social networks than focusing on their own personal productivity and growth. Do you think Americans give up too much for freedom?

Ansaray: I don’t know if we have a choice. When I think about those aspects of Afghan culture that you just called out there, I’m really talking about a culture that still had possession of its norms, but that was destroyed in the last quarter of a century. I think it’s very up in the air as to what the culture of Afghanistan is like now. When you take a country that consists of interrelated stable networks of tribes and clans and families and you randomly drop bombs everywhere, so that every possible connection is broken by bloodshed, people run and hide, some run across the border, some go back in and fight, then you’ve got this world in which all the old mechanisms for how someone becomes a leader and becomes respected are gone.

In a culture that’s been destroyed like that, pure military strength and savagery count for a lot — the ability to get at least ten or twelve guys to obey and follow you, or the ability to suck up to some foreign person that will give you money and guns. New kinds of strengths and skills are favored by the circumstances, so then when the smoke cleared of that, there was a whole new kind of level of leaders and authority figures that didn’t have that much to do with the old days.

A society like ours consists of individuals making their way within certain frameworks of rules. It’s a very flexible, creative society that is absolutely adaptable and really strong. You know, all these older societies with conditions, customs and traditions, where everyone has to follow their rules — our society will just come in and smash it. So I think our only hope is to start from here and say, “How do we get beyond this to more values, to find a new way to have a connection with that which is permanent?”

Parayno: You talk about going back to authentic memory when writing, and not imposing on the journey of the memory, but allowing associations to happen so one memory triggers another.

Ansaray: This idea of just capturing memory came from a guy named Don Anderson who came to our workshop. He was writing his memoir about his life before he was six years old, and had amazing details of an otherwise completely average childhood. The clarity of his details reminded most of us, including me, who grew up in Afghanistan, of our childhood. So one time I said to him, “These are really great; at some point, you’re going to want to organize it and figure out your theme.” And he said, “No, I’m not really interested in doing that. I’m just interested in remembering.”

So when I started working on what would eventually become West of Kabul, it was just remembering. That’s all I was trying to do. One thing led to another, and there were things I didn’t include in the book, like memories of various Afghan friends of my father and moments of childhood memory like walking in from the snow and seeing my grandmother, who was four feet tall when she stood up (but rarely stood up), sitting in a corner, puffing away at her hookah.

But what I was reminded of when you asked that question was, after I had written about some of these memories that didn’t appear in the book, I tried to remember a trip to North Africa, but I wasn’t getting anywhere. Finally I realized I wasn’t actually trying to remember. I was actually trying to write the narrative that fixed itself in my mind. I was stuck on the narrative, and I wasn’t bursting through to the raw material of events. So I managed to figure out a way to just let go, and when I did that, I’d remembered something I hadn’t ever thought of since then: when I was in Paris on my way to all this excitement going on in the Muslim world, I walked into a shop and the guy was an Afghan. I was completely astounded. In those days you hardly ever saw Afghans anywhere. So I introduced myself and we fell into a conversation, and he said, “Oh, you’re so and so, why I knew your father, I knew your uncle.” He asked questions about my family in such a way that I felt pretty plumped up. I come from a pretty eminent family and this stranger in Paris knew all about them. It made me feel pretty good about myself. And it was only when I re-remembered that moment in that authentic way, that I realized he was doing something that I was supposed do, the complimentary thing to, but instead, I just sat there soaking up his words. It’s a seriously rude thing. Many years later retrospectively, I felt embarrassed. That’s the mark of an authentic memory — when you feel emotions appropriate to the event that you didn’t even feel at the time.

Parayno: In an article in The Atlantic a few years ago, Rick Moody compares the creative writing workshop to a focus group or a test screening of a film because of the “checklist” of broad questions often used to rate aspects of a film. He also discusses the ways in which teachers and students alike agree upon a predictable formula for critique that promotes mediocre writing. What are the alternatives to the writing workshop?

Ansaray: I think what he’s saying applies to workshops that have a stable membership and a recurring group that feeds back to each other, which is all MFA workshops. One thing that makes our workshop different is that there are different people all the time; it changes every single session, and it’s instant critique. Nobody gets to ponder anyone’s stuff for two weeks and give them their considered opinions. So it’s kind of like an open mic in a way.

I really think of a writer’s workshop as being mostly a social thing. Writing is the loneliest profession. It’s really great to get out and knock about with some other writers. But I think the big danger of the workshop is when you think people are telling you how good your stuff is, whether it’s working or not. That’s not true at all. Whoever is there has an opinion, but their opinion is nothing exalted. If you think that you’re getting advice on what to do, that’s ridiculous. Nobody knows that. If you don’t know, then you shouldn’t be writing. The critiquer’s job is to say “ouch” when you hit them, but they can’t tell you how to load your gun, fire, or aim it.

Parayno: When someone in workshop is reading from their piece, I notice you look around at other people, stare up at the ceiling, squirm in your seat a bit, adjust your glasses. It appears that you’re not paying attention at all, but then you emerge with such precise observations and insights. Are you just fidgety?

Ansaray: Those seats are hard. Who can help but fidget in those seats? It’s true that I find it very interesting to listen to and to think about writing that’s not good as well as writing that is good. For me, it’s very interesting to think about what a piece would be doing if it were working, and why didn’t it have that affect. And yet when something is not working, I can’t help but fidget when I’m listening to it, it’s true. There’s no screening to attend this workshop; nobody has to pass a test to be part of the group. The only criterion is that they have to think they’re a writer, and, the truth is, not everyone that thinks this is correct in their assessment. But somehow I think it works.

What’s interesting is that some people who come in aren’t writing anything I can really find myself able to listen to, and then later something happens and they write really good stuff. They come because they’re pregnant. And then eventually they have their baby, and some have false pregnancies (laughs). And there are also people who seem pretty good, their stuff is interesting, but then it gets less interesting as time goes on.

Parayno: Kind of like dating.

Ansaray: Yes, I guess it is. Now I’m trying to think back – did that happen or did I always get dumped before I ever found that out?

Parayno: What do you think the common pitfalls are of beginning writers?

Ansaray: Writing can fail for a lot of different reasons. My personal little bug-a-boo is writing that has great language, but it’s disguising the fact that’s it’s not doing anything else. But I feel that about much published and much praised writing.

Vikram Seth is my favorite modern writer. And he said something about how he wants to draw people down into this world and not have them notice the language. Obviously language is the medium of writing, so it has to be good, but my thought is, what is good language? Good language is only good if it serves something. So what is that something?

Parayno: At the pub after every workshop, you have a slice of cherry pie. Why do you like cherry pie so much?

Ansaray: I like cherry pie cause it’s delicious! The fact is, my mother made cherry pie when I was a kid. It was one of her standard things, maybe that’s why. She made lemon meringue pie, too. I make it once a year. I really perfected that one.

Parayno: Tell me about your new book Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes. Who’s your audience and what do you want them to take away from it?

Ansaray: My audience is largely American, non-Muslim readers who don’t have a clue or have only a vague idea of what the context of today’s political events are for most Muslims. But I also think about my friends in the Afghan community. They know many things about Islam, but there are many things they don’t know. I think they’ll find it interesting because it’s all there. I wrote this book because I think that most of us in the West have an unconscious narrative of world history. I think it’s interesting and important to explore that other story line. The events are the same, we’re all in them, but I’m telling the story that leads to today’s events through a whole different landscape. And I’m trying to do it in the way that if you and I were sitting in a bar and you said, “Hey, you’re from that part of the world, is there a whole other idea of history there?” I’d say, “Yeah – bartender, bring me a couple more.”

Parayno: After you finish each book, you head straight to the movie theater to watch whatever is playing at that moment. What did you watch after you finished Destiny Disrupted?

Ansaray: There was some movie about Robert De Niro being a movie producer, and I don’t remember much of that because I fell asleep. And then the next day, I realized I had been editing two different versions of the book, and when I sent it to my editor, it had some correct changes but many were incorrect, so I wasn’t done at all. Later, I saw The Day the Earth Stood Still. That was the punctuation mark that ended the project.

Parayno: I think I speak on behalf of workshop attendees when I say thank you very much for having given up every Tuesday for the past ten years to facilitate the workshop, and for your service for many Tuesdays to come.

Ansaray: As long as my strengths hold out.

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See Also: East Of New York West Of Kabul Named San Francisco One Book 2008

See Also: The Rumpus Interview With Malcolm Gladwell

See Also: Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam

Related Posts:

• Tamim Ansary At Red Hill Books
• Afghan Star: A Conversation with Tamim Ansary
• Dave Eggers: The Last Book I Loved, Destiny Disrupted
• Iran’s Regime: Marching Toward a Cliff
• The Rumpus Long Interview with Dave Eggers