Interview with Printasia

Let’s start with an easy one, What are you currently reading and which books you have reread many times in your life?

I am currently reading Colum McCann’s new novel Transatlantic. I have been known to re-read the essays of Joan Didion many times in my life so far (The White Album) in particular. I also go back to Virginia Woolf a lot and re-read Mrs. Dalloway and To The Lighthouse for the experimental, fluid prose she was inventing on the page. I also really enjoy the intricate novels of Colim Toibin and have read some of his novels several times.

How did you come up with the idea of setting your novel in Paris? Do you have any personal history with Paris?

I lived in Paris in the late 1980′s, and I really wanted to capture that time and place in my novel. I wanted Paris to come alive on the page, almost as if the city was a whole separate character in the novel. I felt I understood some aspects of what Paris was like in 1989, and I very much wanted my protagonist, Willow, to have to grapple with what it’s like to be an outsider looking in.

Tell us something about the portrayal of the character Willie Pears. Is she related to you personally in some ways?

Willow, or Willie as she goes by, isn’t related to me really in any way. She is a fictive character who came to life on the page. My first inkling of her was when I imagined an American woman riding a train alone in France, and I realized that I wanted to write a novel about that woman. I wanted to understand what she was doing in France and what would happen if she fell in love and had to grieve the death of her mother and had to make very hard professional decisions about how much she could ever help any one student of hers.

Your book requires a great deal of research. Could you share those experiences you have had whilst conducting research for this book?

Living in Paris in the 1980′s was experiential research. Then I returned as a visitor to Paris in 2007, after which I spent more time traveling through France, which all really helped my work. In the United States I have had the honor of being a story writing teacher to different refugee teenagers through a writing center that I helped start with two other writer friends (www.thetellingroom.org). So I understood a lot of the components of what it means to try to teach storywriting to teenagers who have a very powerful and important story to tell. I also did a lot of research around the French judicial system and the intricacies of the French courts as well as the neighborhoods.

If you had one day to show someone around the city, what would be in the Susan Conley tour of Paris?

I think now that I’ve completed Paris Was the Place the tour would be a replica of the places Willie enjoys going in the novel: The Rodin Museum (pictured above), the Tuileries, the narrow, winding streets in the 6th arrondisement, the creperies along St. Germain des Pres, the gorgeous Parisian bridges and the walks along the Seine, the Luxembourg Gardens. But at every turn I would also encourage people on this tour to take time to go off the beaten track and explore unknown neighborhoods:  try some Indian food in Brady Passage for example. Get lost in the alleyways around the Pantheon. Paris is such a vivid, fascinating city and is almost a world unto itself.

We would like to know something about your next book. What and when can we expect it?

My next book may follow in the footsteps of my first book and find itself set in China. My family and I lived in Beijing for close to three years from 2007-2010, and my memoir (The Foremost Good Fortune) traces our time there. Now I’d like to write a novel and Americans and Chinese–all friends living in Beijing who travel to a small town north of the city for the weekend. It’s meant to be a study in cultural intersection and perhaps a story about  how people re-invent themselves when they are far from home.            

What message do you want to convey to your readers?

I like to convey complex emotion to my readers. I like to render my characters in ways that show that the choices we make are never as simple as they may appear. I also like to give my readers the joy and the pleasure of being on the open road:  meeting new people in the pages of my books, seeing new sites, eating delicious food.  So much about my writing is about tracing the moments of real connection between one character and another. It’s my hope that this emotional connection is then transferred to the reader.

Read the original interview here. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons