I love this: Sara Lippmann Interviews Julie Innis
| SL: | I’m also always struck by your restraint. So much of the emotional weight in your more realist stories, “Heller”, “Big Angel” and “Room With A Partial Ocean View” arise from what’s left unsaid. It brings to mind that Hemingway quote – “If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows.” |
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| JI: | Forgive me as I take myself way too seriously with this question, but what you call ‘restraint,’ I call ‘struggle’: show/don’t show, tell/don’t tell, what’s the right combination that will bring a character to life on the page, etc. etc. As a reader, I’ve always been a big fan of writing that elucidates through a careful balance of description and omission as opposed to narratives seeded with so many explanatory details that all nuance and mystery is lost. I think, and I say this as a former English teacher of fourteen years, one of the worst things to happen to “literature” is the demand from readers for analysis at the expense of empathy. When we teach young readers to hunt for clues to character, specific lines or gestures that are meant to reveal some sort of “deeper meaning,” I think we’ve pretty much fucked the whole thing up. Which, for some reason, brings to mind the ending of the original Planet of the Apes movie. I read somewhere recently that all interviews about one’s writing should contain at least one Charlton Heston-esque outburst. So there you have it. |
| SL: | Three Squares a Day with Occasional Torture. The title’s a line from “My First Serial Killer,” and functions brilliantly as a metaphor for the collection. It also sounds a lot like my writing process. What was your process like in compiling this collection? |
| JI: | First, I am forever indebted to Stephen Marlowe at Foxhead for approaching me for a collection in the first place and for his patience with me through the process of selecting and arranging the final mix of stories. It took a lot of sifting to find the ones that I felt, when placed together, told the overall story of a life. Once I had this “life” in mind, the title seemed to sum it all up pretty nicely. |
| (Read the rest of the interview at Necessary Fiction.) |
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