An Interview with Jean Thompson
Jean Thompson‘s been on my list since I don’t remember when. Her collection of stories Who Do You Love was my first exposure, and her last two novels—2011′s The Year We Left Home and the very recently released The Humanity Project—are both so quietly fantastic that it’s hard to even get a grip on them. Here’s what happens when you read Thompson: you read her fiction (and she’s equally good at short stories and novels, so, really, just take your pick), and you shut the book, and there are some sentences maybe that hang with you, and certainly there are characters and moments they lived/moved through which cling to yr head, but what you’ll likely feel is simply that you just came in contact with a very good book. What happens next, though, is the magic: you keep living, and you maybe read another book or three, or you see a movie, hang out with friends, whatever. Time passes in which you live, and about a week after you finish a Thompson book, you realize that her fiction somehow does a better job of capturing the felt experience of lived reality better than almost anything. That, at least, is what happens to me: Ms Thompson’s plenty stunning at the sentence level, but her work ultimately ends up meaning so much (at least to me) because years later I’m still thinking not just about characters of hers but actual scenes—I’m still picturing what I pictured years back while reading something. I can say that about few writers and their work. She’s incredible. You should absolutely be reading her. Below is an email she graciously took part in over email recently.
How did The Humanity Project begin? What was the hook or shelf on which the whole thing began to be built? Mostly I’m interested in this because of how widely it travels.
The genesis of The Humanity Project: I wanted to write something that was somewhat larger in scale than, say, the story of two people in a marriage gone bad. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that…) The expansive title is something of a clue. I wanted to pose the question — not necessarily answering it — how we cope with difficult times (economic, personal, environmental), how do forces beyond our control shape us? Fairly quickly I decided on a structure of different characters taking turns with different chapters. I wanted one hard-luck guy, Sean, and I set about multiplying his sufferings, like God did to Job.
Then there’s a somewhat organic, somewhat manipulated process of building on to that first narrative, as in, what if Sean had a son? What if there was another guy, another father, having to cope with a much more troubled teenager? What if this second guy had a downstairs neighbor, who happened to work for an old lady, who happened to employ the son, etc. I did want the characters to begin as separate story lines that gradually cross and intersect. It always interests me when those sorts of coincidences occur in our actual lives, though I posit no theory of cosmology that explains it. But I did want to reinforce the idea that we’re all in this together, whatever “this” comes to mean in the book.
This might be totally impossible, but I’m curious if you feel that there’s a contemporary school or group of writers with whom you either a) feel aesthetically aligned or b) see your work as being aligned with. I’ve got ideas of folks whose work seems engaged in similar stuff as yours (James Meeks’s The Heart Breaks In, for instance), but I’m curious.
I suppose I think less about particular writers — though I like the idea that those of us working with similar material might form some kind of literary street gang — but rather about inhabiting a particular turf. In my case, that’s the continent of the real, or what is now being called “the social novel”, which I interpret as novels about a recognizable world, and those of us who populate it. There are other continents out there, labelled Fabulism, or Crime, or Vampires. Plenty of land for everyone!
This is entirely personally motivated, but I’m curious if writing’s gotten harder since you no longer are full-time teaching. On the one hand: the idea of writing full time sounds fantastic; that said, I feel like I at least would have a really hard time being totally internal and on my own—I end up liking how teaching forces me out of myself, into the world. Clearly I’m projecting, but I’m still curious.
I get a lot more writing done now that I am not teaching, and in fact wonder how I ever managed to accomplish anything while I had a full-time job. Answer: I was younger then, had more energy, and didn’t know any better. I do think that one needs to engage with the world in whatever way is available. If not via the workplace, then wherever else the world presents itself. There are times I miss having colleagues, and being part of a community of writers, and of course, wonderful things can and do happen in the classroom. But I do not miss looking for parking spaces, climbing the same set of stairs for the umpteenth time, and department meetings, department meetings, department meetings.
I apologize if the following comes across as anything other than 100% respectful: do you, or did you while writing The Humanity Project, get at all nervous or anxious about portraying harrowing stuff like a school shooting? Here’s the background: I was at Virginia Tech, and lots of us have tried to write about not even *that* shooting, but just shootings or school violence in general since, and there’s this weird aspect of respect for or deference to the horror of it that has, far as I can tell, tripped up quite a few of us. Is there a difference, for you, in writing about something that large and fraught? (for what it’s worth: the moments of the shooting in THP were amazing, and Linnea’s experience was incredible, and harrowing, and goose-bump inducing).
First, in the matter of school shootings, and your experience at Virginia Tech: what a dreadful thing to have experienced first-hand, and I am sorry for that. It does not surprise me that any of you who
witnessed and survived it have difficulty in writing about it. There is trauma, there is, as you say, respect and deference. You may find that with time the experience itself settles and becomes somewhat easier to approach, in either fictional or non-fictional ways. Just as novels about war are often written some years after the fact of them, it takes time to digest what happened, and also, what it might really “mean” to you, that is, what persists and needs to be addressed.
As for my treatment of the same sort of event – wholly imagined on my part – yes, of course there was anxiety, wishing to be convincing without being exploitative. The shooting in my book is an unexplained act. Even the shooter’s mother has no real insight into him. And I don’t attempt to enter his head or provide him with motivation. I would not be capable of doing so. I wanted what we call “random, senseless violence” dropped into my characters’ lives, to see what sort of rippling effect it would have on this fictional world. I wanted the event to be terrible without seeming sensationalized, and I am glad to hear that you thought it worked.
Do you think of yourself as a midwest writer? Does such a categorization even remotely come into your world or bearing? I’m a very very proud midwesterner (from Minnesota, currently in Indiana), and lots of writers I really enjoy happen to be from here, or based here (RPowers with you there in U-C, Wallace before California, Roxane Gay, Ander Monson, etc. etc. etc.), and I inevitably ask this question simply because I don’t think there’s anything like an answer or anything, but I’m always curious how those writers who live in the midwest process or consider that effect/aspect on/of their work.
Am I a midwest writer? Well, we grow where we are planted, though it’s hard to identify a common thread among myself and any of the writers you mention. And “The Humanity Project” is largely set in northern California – a place I lived for a time – so on occasion, I take my act on the road. I don’t know if there’s a midwest sensibility or regionalism in the same way you can speak of southern regionalism, nothing that makes any of us particularly hip, exotic, quaint, etc. We’re all just folks here.
(I’m stealing this Q from Roxane Gay’s interview of Meg Wolitzer in Bookforum): what do you like best about your writing?
I think I’m a pretty fair psychologist, of fictional creations, at least. And sometimes I am inordinately fond of a particular turn of phrase, and sometimes these hold up under scrutiny.
Finally: what’s the view out your window?
My back garden waiting for me to plant, weed, dig, clip, and otherwise exert myself.
