John Domini has recently been given a major 2008 grant from the Iowa Arts Council for his writing and has accepted a visiting position in Creative Writing at Grinnell College.
John Domini has published fiction in The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Threepenny Review, and several anthologies. His second collection, Highway Trade, was praised by Alan Cheuse, of NPR's "All Things Considered," as "the way we live now... witty, biting portraits." His first novel, Talking Heads: 77, was praised by the Pulitzer winner Robert Olen Butler as "both cutting-edge innovative and splendidly readable... a flat-out delight." Italian publications of his work have been arranged through Tullio Pironti Editore, also the first Italian house to translate Don DeLillo.
Domini has also published essays and other non-fiction in GQ, the New York Times, and many other places, including Italian journals. He is a regular book reviewer with The Believer and other publications. Domini has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram-Merrill Foundation, and elsewhere. He has taught across the country, has been a visiting writer at Harvard, Lewis & Clark, and Northwestern, and is currently based in Des Moines.
Excerpt of Interview:
Q: Hello, John. I understand that this is your second book set in Naples, and what struck me immediately about the story is how authentically Italian every aspect of the story was, which I'm assuming means that you have lived in Italy for a number of years. Can you talk about how your connection with Italy the country, brought out the Italy in your book?
A: Well, naturally I’ve got a personal connection to Naples. My father is from the city (he came to the US as a grown man, after World War II), and I did my first writing over there when I was 11 and he’d taken the family back, trying to make his business work from that side of the Atlantic. My way of dealing with finding myself in such a strange element was to invent stories, adventure novels. Then I went back again as a teenager, and then in college. Most recently I’ve visited as an adult writer, on grants or on assignments. I completed articles about Italy in the New York Times Travel section, in GQ, in Southwest Review.
But when you’re talking novels -- place and novels -- isn’t the significant connection the artistic one? Doesn’t setting take us to root issues of inspiration and purpose? Even back when I was writing my adventure novels (juvenile, to be sure) I was dealing with a rich paradox, in which dislocation was combined a greater connection than ever. Naples embodies that paradox in so many ways, I could go into an encyclopedia’s worth of examples. Suffice to say that the place sets challenges of every kind to the Euro-American notion of a liveable city, and yet remains intensely liveable. Against such a big canvas, what takes imaginative shape can only be a novel, or a sequence of them. That’s how it works for my sensibility, anyway, and not just mine. Think of Melville: “To write a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.”
A: In the first couple of pages, you bring the reader immediately into a tension-filled scene and only later give a back story on the family dynamics of you main character, Fabbrizio, to explains his motives in agreeing to get involved in the theft of ancient jewelry. How did you first plan the structure of the story? Do you use any outlining techniques or do you just write through a full draft?
Q: Myself, I have to do a good deal of exploratory writing before I find the narrative focus. I had some idea of the core situation -- the necropolis and necklace, and the protagonist’s skills as an artisan. But there were a number of false leads, pages and pages (some of it in manuscript draft) that had to be dumped once the story emerged from the material. At that point, yeah, I sketched an outline. While also, to be sure, giving myself permission to deviate from it.
Yet even with the extra work, the discovery of what should go and such, this one got done pretty quickly. I mean, I moved twice during the composition, I taught classes and fell in love and kept that woman’s love, and still the book was done in a couple of years. I recall doing some of the work in a rental apartment in downtown Naples, and finding myself surprised at how much ground I had covered between the first old-fashioned machinetta of drip espresso and the next. Something in that character and his challenges really drove me on.
By John Domini
Published: February 28, 2008
Publisher: Gival Press
http://www.johndomini.com
Author's Biography:
John Domini has recently been given a major 2008 grant from the Iowa Arts Council for his writing and has accepted a visiting position in Creative Writing at Grinnell College.
John Domini has published fiction in The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Threepenny Review, and several anthologies. His second collection, Highway Trade, was praised by Alan Cheuse, of NPR's "All Things Considered," as "the way we live now... witty, biting portraits." His first novel, Talking Heads: 77, was praised by the Pulitzer winner Robert Olen Butler as "both cutting-edge innovative and splendidly readable... a flat-out delight." Italian publications of his work have been arranged through Tullio Pironti Editore, also the first Italian house to translate Don DeLillo.
Domini has also published essays and other non-fiction in GQ, the New York Times, and many other places, including Italian journals. He is a regular book reviewer with The Believer and other publications. Domini has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram-Merrill Foundation, and elsewhere. He has taught across the country, has been a visiting writer at Harvard, Lewis & Clark, and Northwestern, and is currently based in Des Moines.
Excerpt of Interview:
Q: Hello, John. I understand that this is your second book set in Naples, and what struck me immediately about the story is how authentically Italian every aspect of the story was, which I'm assuming means that you have lived in Italy for a number of years. Can you talk about how your connection with Italy the country, brought out the Italy in your book?
A: Well, naturally I’ve got a personal connection to Naples. My father is from the city (he came to the US as a grown man, after World War II), and I did my first writing over there when I was 11 and he’d taken the family back, trying to make his business work from that side of the Atlantic. My way of dealing with finding myself in such a strange element was to invent stories, adventure novels. Then I went back again as a teenager, and then in college. Most recently I’ve visited as an adult writer, on grants or on assignments. I completed articles about Italy in the New York Times Travel section, in GQ, in Southwest Review.
But when you’re talking novels -- place and novels -- isn’t the significant connection the artistic one? Doesn’t setting take us to root issues of inspiration and purpose? Even back when I was writing my adventure novels (juvenile, to be sure) I was dealing with a rich paradox, in which dislocation was combined a greater connection than ever. Naples embodies that paradox in so many ways, I could go into an encyclopedia’s worth of examples. Suffice to say that the place sets challenges of every kind to the Euro-American notion of a liveable city, and yet remains intensely liveable. Against such a big canvas, what takes imaginative shape can only be a novel, or a sequence of them. That’s how it works for my sensibility, anyway, and not just mine. Think of Melville: “To write a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.”
A: In the first couple of pages, you bring the reader immediately into a tension-filled scene and only later give a back story on the family dynamics of you main character, Fabbrizio, to explains his motives in agreeing to get involved in the theft of ancient jewelry. How did you first plan the structure of the story? Do you use any outlining techniques or do you just write through a full draft?
Q: Myself, I have to do a good deal of exploratory writing before I find the narrative focus. I had some idea of the core situation -- the necropolis and necklace, and the protagonist’s skills as an artisan. But there were a number of false leads, pages and pages (some of it in manuscript draft) that had to be dumped once the story emerged from the material. At that point, yeah, I sketched an outline. While also, to be sure, giving myself permission to deviate from it.
Yet even with the extra work, the discovery of what should go and such, this one got done pretty quickly. I mean, I moved twice during the composition, I taught classes and fell in love and kept that woman’s love, and still the book was done in a couple of years. I recall doing some of the work in a rental apartment in downtown Naples, and finding myself surprised at how much ground I had covered between the first old-fashioned machinetta of drip espresso and the next. Something in that character and his challenges really drove me on.
For complete interview, please go to:
http://jenniferprado.blogspot.com