Fiction Editorial Board member Susan Sanford Blades talks with the issue #229 contributor about his story's alternate universe, being pulled towards writing prose, and the difficulty of locating anything genuine outside the influence of mass culture.
SSB: My reading of your story, “Pendant,” is that it takes place in an alternate, post-patriarchal universe where men bob from trees or other perches and perhaps might be set free once they acknowledge and understand the harm they’ve done to the women in their lives. In any case, I love this world you’ve created and I’m wondering how you decided to address the story of a girl dealing with her father’s behaviour in this particular way.
JK:
Susan, first of all, thanks so much for taking the time to ask me these wonderful questions. I’m very grateful to you! And thanks for saying that about the world there in “Pendant.” It’s just as you say: I was trying to hallucinate a universe in which certain feminist adjustments have been made to the physics, eh? I was trying to imagine, in part, a space in which the profundities and visions of certain women artists—Louise Bourgeois, Maya Deren, Madeline Gins, Jan Ash Poitras—had prevailed. The idea of the image of floating men was also suggested by an early Cowboy Junkies album entitled “Whites Off Earth Now.”
Read the rest of Jake Kennedy's interview and a story excerpt.
Yasmin Rodrigues,
#229 fiction contributor
Fiction Editorial Board member Sarah Lachmansingh talks with the issue #229 contributor about Guyana in the 50s, personal stories set in turbulent times, and a novel in the works.
SL: What inspired you to write this story?
YR:
It is part of a longer work that is set in British Guiana in the early 1950s. It's a story about what happens to young people, in this case a young girl, as she emerges into adulthood while the world she lives in turns upside down and she gets into all kinds of trouble. It’s a coming-of-age story in a context where the world outside her flat is churning in chaos.
SL: I see you are working on a novel. Can you share more about it?
YR: Well, one reader told me that it was a big sexy sprawling historical novel that can be quite funny in parts and quite serious in others. I think there is a bit of my soul in it, because it talks about how my country got destroyed. There hasn't been much writing about what really happened in Guyana and why so many people emigrated to find a peaceful future elsewhere. I'm hoping to contribute a bit to that.
Read the rest of Yasmin Rodrigues' interview.
Volunteer Joyce Chung talks with the