{"id":22549,"date":"2014-01-09T09:55:05","date_gmt":"2014-01-09T13:55:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookdragon.si.edu\/?p=22549"},"modified":"2015-08-17T09:54:33","modified_gmt":"2015-08-17T13:54:33","slug":"author-interview-nina-schuyler-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/bookdragon\/author-interview-nina-schuyler-part-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Author Interview: Nina Schuyler (Part 2) [in Bloom]"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"NinaSchuyler\"<\/a>Following is Part 2 of an extensive interview with author \u00a0Nina Schuyler<\/a>. Click here to read Part 1<\/a>. Click here for the Schuyler feature<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As a writer who is a woman, who also happens to be a mother of two small young kids \u2013\u00a0do you feel that motherhood has specifically influenced your writing? And if so, how?<\/strong>
\nMy quick response: Writer\u2019s block? I don\u2019t have time.<\/p>\n

On a more honest note, I have a two-and-a-half year old, and the world for him is full of wonder. A toddler\u2019s way of moving through the world is slow, full of curiosity, and easily and delightfully dazzled.<\/p>\n

An artist, any artist, works to see the world anew. Having a young son who naturally sees the world with bright eyes, well, it\u2019s a blessing. He\u2019s pointing out to me so much beauty and mystery.<\/p>\n

Finally, I\u2019ve learned to get the writing done any way I can. I am so flexible now I should be a contortionist. I have no rituals, no lighting of candles or music or anything. I manage to write nearly every day. If it\u2019s only a sentence, or a revision of a sentence, I call that writing and let it feed me.<\/p>\n

And are you and Mr. Timer<\/a> still good friends?<\/strong>
\nWe are. But I can now go for about 45 minutes instead of just 30. My two-and-a-half year old is older now. I wrote that [blog post] when he was just 1. Now I have more energy and can focus for longer periods of time.<\/p>\n

Mr. Timer is still my buddy. He helps me bake and he helps me write.<\/p>\n

You mentioned in an interview that you\u2019d \u201clove to read more novels with female characters that shake up and out of the stereotype. More females who experience anger, raw ambition, intellect, sexual hunger, arrogance, a solid ego, authority, power.\u201d Who are some of your favorite women characters who fit such a description? Who are some of your own favorite writers (NO gender specified here on purpose!) who have created such women?<\/strong>
\nLily Briscoe in Virginia Woolf\u2019s To the Lighthouse<\/em> for her ambition and passion for her art, painting right to the very end of the novel. J.M. Coetzee\u2019s Elizabeth Costello in the book of the same name for her intellect, her honesty, her solid ego. Elizabeth Strout\u2019s Olive Kitteridge in the book by the same name is dear to me. Olive gave me permission to go ahead and create a complex female character, full of impatience and patience, who is stern, driven, and utterly devoted to her art and her children. Leda in Elena Ferrante\u2019s The Lost Daughter<\/em>, for her brutally honest ambivalence toward motherhood. Grace Paley\u2019s first person narrators, especially in her short story collection, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Do you think writers who are also women (won\u2019t dare use \u201cwomen writers\u201d!) need to create more female characters like those you describe above? Just as authors get outed, noted, criticized, or applauded for writing beyond their ethnic box, do you think authors can or should write beyond their gender?<\/strong>
\nAbsolutely. In my first novel, \u00a0The Painting<\/i><\/a>, I wrote my way back into the 19th century in Japan and Paris during the Franco-Prussian War, inhabiting both men and women. It was thrilling.<\/p>\n

Now that I\u2019ve outed that word\u2014sex, albeit via \u201cgender\u201d\u2014I have to mention your blog post, \u201cWriting Sex<\/a>,\u201d in which you confess, \u201cI have to write a sex scene. It\u2019s inevitable.\u201d I love that \u201cinevitable.\u201d In the post, you channel the words of Edmund White (\u201cMost sex is funny\u2026\u201d) and Ernest Hemingway (\u201c\u2026and for her everything was red, orange, gold-red from the sun on the closed eyes, and it all was that color, all of it, the filling, the possessing, the having, all of that color, all in a blindness of that color\u201d). How come no exemplary scenes by writers who are women?
\n<\/strong>You\u2019re right. I\u2019m not sure there\u2019s one author, but let\u2019s add the \u201cSong of Solomon\u201d from the King James Bible. Ana\u00efs Nin. Marguerite Duras\u2019s The Lover<\/em>. I\u2019m thinking of writers who do sex in an interesting way. Oh, Toni Morrison\u2019s scene in Beloved<\/em> between Sethe and Paul D. Garner.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d love to hear from your readers about their favorite sex scene in literature.[…click here for more<\/a>]\n

Author interview<\/strong>: “Q&A with Nina Schuyler (Part 2),” Bloom<\/em>, January 8, 2014<\/a><\/p>\n

Readers<\/strong>: Adult<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Following is Part 2 of an extensive interview with author \u00a0Nina Schuyler. Click here to read Part 1. Click here for the Schuyler feature. 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