Interview: Manuel Muñoz, author of What You See in the Dark

Manuel Muñoz’s What You See in the Dark, released earlier this year by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, boasts what Booklist called “a killer premise: the making of Psycho set against [a] real-life murder.”

The victim of that killing is Teresa Garza, a young shoe store salesgirl who has caught the attention of Bakersfield, California’s townspeople in a number of ways: the day laborers who whistle at her, including the shy Cheno, who slowly begins to court her; Dan, the handsome bartender who offers her a real start on her dreams of a singing career and wins her heart in the process; and the audiences at her initial performances, including an unnamed co-worker at the shoe store, burning slowly with jealousy over Teresa’s accomplishments and affairs.

That co-worker and rival is the first of three women whose perspectives dominate this story. The second is Arlene, a waitress at the local diner, owner of a small motel, and mother to Dan, simmering with her own worries and frustrations. The third is the Actress, come to town for a small scene in her upcoming feature, pondering her role, her career, her future.

The film that shadows this book is never mentioned by name and neither are the primary players in that filmmaking, referred to instead as the Director and the Actress. But several of Psycho’s more famous and more provocative scenes get plenty of attention, and elements of the film are mirrored frequently in the parallel story: the mother who owns a motel, the son she wants to protect, the potentially shameful series of relationships, that murder itself.

While What You See in the Dark is Muñoz’s debut novel, he is also the author of two short story collections, Zigzagger and The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue. He’ll be appearing at this year’s Fall for the Book Festival at George Mason University, in Fairfax, Virginia, on Friday afternoon, September 23. In advance of that visit, he indulged a few questions here about his new book.

Where did the idea originate for What You See in the Dark — for placing these two stories together?

Novelist Manuel Muñoz (Photo by Stuart Bernstein)

Because I write exclusively about California’s Central Valley, I feel the pressure to make my fiction relevant to the American literary landscape. The pressure I feel has its root in being labeled a “regionalist.” I kept thinking of ways in which the “outside” world visits people in the place I come from and the answer was simple: movies. Movies (and television) are the way that many people get stories into their lives—it’s easier than the kind of attention required for books to work the same power.

I could have picked any film moment that demonstrated some sort of social shift, like Sidney Poitier slapping the town’s head honcho in In the Heat of the Night. I chose Psycho because careful viewers will pick up the visual clues about the film’s geography: it’s set in the Central Valley, but the film refuses to name it. And that’s the aim and mission of my writing life: to show that place does matter and that stories do happen in places like that. I was just lucky that the film has such a storied history in American cinema.

Interview: Tayari Jones, author of Silver Sparrow

Occasional contributor Brandon Wicks returns to Art & Literature this week to interview novelist Tayari Jones, who will be touring throughout the country with her new book Silver Sparrow, including a stop this weekend at the Gaithersburg Book Festival and in late May at Politics and Prose in Washington, DC, a swing through the author’s native Georgia in early June, and an appearance later this year at the Fall for the Book festival, with which I’m associated. For the full list, see her schedule here. Thanks to both the interviewer and the interviewee for such a great discussion. — Art Taylor

Tayari Jones is the award-winning author of Leaving Atlanta and The Untelling. Her third novel, Silver Sparrow, is being published this month by Algonquin Books. 

Set in Atlanta in the 1980s, Silver Sparrow tells a story of urban bigamy through two sisters, Dana Yarboro and Chaurisse Witherspoon. One child, Chaurisse, is the product of James Witherspoon’s public marriage while Dana is part of his hidden world—a second family he supports on the side. What follows is a complicated negotiation of lies and family secrets which threaten to explode as the girls mature, potentially destroying both families if the truth should be revealed.

Brandon Wicks: With Silver Sparrow, I was immediately captivated by this notion of secret families and was reminded of Son’s Place, a famous and now sadly defunct Atlanta restaurant, whose proprietor struggled for his inheritance for being an “outside child.” All of this prompted my curiosity about the cultural history of this situation. Do you see “outside families” as an issue particular to an era or a region? to African American communities in particular? Or as something more universal?

Tayari Jones: The question of paternity and legitimacy has been a theme in literature since before the written word, I imagine. Think of all the “legitimate” and “illegitimate” children in the Bible, in Greek mythology, too. Zeus had dozens of outside children. Hercules, Perseus, even the Minotaur, all of them — outside kids. And even in African American literature, the slave narrative was not only about abolition of slavery but often about unacknowledged paternity. So this is nothing new, but it’s endlessly interesting.

The obvious question is the extent to which relationships can be institutionalized and what happens to people whose relationships are excluded from these institutions. And of course, there is the idea of rank and hierarchy in families. We don’t think of ourselves in the US as a caste culture, but the children born inside and outside of a man’s marriage offers a system of valuation that is readily accepted.

On the issue of whether is story is universal, I have to say that with everything I write, I am always asked whether I think my subject matter is universal. I believe that most art is universal. Of course different issues manifest with different nuances depending on cultural differences, but the emotional core of these human conflicts are applicable to all of us who are human. I know what I have to say next is not really the intent of what I am being asked, but when an author is asked whether her work is universal, the feeling is that you are being asked to argue on behalf of your own humanity, a position that no one should have to be in. As a black writer, a woman writer, a southern writer — this comes up a lot.

Interview: Andrew Wingfield, author of Right of Way

Andrew Wingfield is the author of the novel Hear Him Roar and of the new short story collection Right of Way, winner of the 2010 fiction prize from the Washington Writers Publishing House. Right of Way focuses on the community of Cleave Springs, a fictional world which drew its inspiration from Wingfield’s own Alexandria neighborhood. The stories reflect the complex challenges of quickly changing communities in today’s urban and suburban communities but with always with focus on individual people and specific personal dramas.  In “Lily Pad,” for example, the stories of a young musician and a waitress at the local hangout parallel, intersect, and inform one another — stories of love, loss, longing and redemption (or at least the potential for redemption). Wingfield, an associate professor in George Mason University’s New Century College, will read from and discuss his new book as part of the upcoming Fall for the Book Festival; his talk takes place on Thursday, September 23, at 10:30 a.m. in Dewberry Hall in the Johnson Center on Mason’s Fairfax, VA Campus. In advance of that appearance, Wingfield answered a few questions about the inspirations for the novel — both literary inspirations and lessons from the real world.

Art Taylor: The linked stories in Right of Way are centered on Cleave Springs, a neighborhood similar to the one in which you live now. What was it that inspired you to give this place the Winesburg, Ohio treatment?

Andrew Wingfield: Place has always interested me, as a reader, a writer, and a human being. It was natural for me to tune into what was happening in my neighborhood and maybe it was inevitable that I’d get intrigued and want to write about it. But this project snuck up on me. My wife gave birth to our fist son about six months after we moved in to our place, and I started teaching full-time a few months after that. I became a busy man, a writer whose writing time was very fragmented. I had written one novel and had a couple of ideas for new novels that would require a lot of reading and research. But I had no time for reading and research. As soon as he could walk, my son would stand at the top of the stairs in the morning and holler until someone took him outside. I walked all over the neighborhood with him in the stroller or on my shoulders; and I spent many, many hours with him at the playground down the street. As I pushed him on the swing, I’d watch the action on the slab of pavement nearby, where the mostly black, mostly poor children of our neighborhood’s longtime residents biked and skated and scootered among the helmeted children of the mostly white, mostly well-educated, mostly middle class new arrivals. I might see the tall, handsome chauffer with the three pet whippets walk past. I might be harangued by the old Polish immigrant who was eager to start dropping bombs on Iraq. I might eavesdrop on the construction crew that was working on the house next to the park, renovating yet another of the neighborhood’s dilapidated homes in hopes of a quick and profitable flip. One day it struck me: I’m surrounded by stories here. This—what I’m doing right now— is my research!

Interview: Kathryn Johnson, author of The Gentleman Poet

Kathryn Johnson’s new novel, The Gentleman Poet: A Novel of Love, Danger, and Shakespeare’s The Tempest, starts from an intriguing premise: Scholars have long cited a real-life shipwreck saga as one of the inspirations for the Bard’s late great play, but what if instead of simply reading about it, Shakespeare had himself been a passenger on the ill-fated voyage of the Sea Venture? The ship, en route from England to the Jamestown in the New World, encountered a strong storm and was ultimately steered into the reefs of Bermuda, where 150 passengers (including John Rolfe, who would later wed Pocahantas) disembarked and tried to make a home for nine months until two ships could be built for the survivors to continue the journey. Dramatizing this already suspenseful tale — and injecting the possibility that Shakespeare might have been on board —  Johnson’s novel works on a number of levels: as minutely researched historical drama, as speculative fiction, as literary homage and gamesmanship, and even as romance, since the book’s focus is as much on a young servant girl named Elizabeth Person and her budding relationship with the ship’s cook as it is on that distinguished title character.

The Gentleman Poet hits bookstores on Tuesday, September 7, and Johnson has a full schedule of events ahead, including an appearance at George Mason University’s Fairfax, VA Campus as part of the upcoming Fall for the Book Festival; she’ll be speaking there on Monday, September 20, at 1:30 p.m. in the Sandy Springs Bank Tent, just outside the Johnson Center.

In advance of her tour, Johnson indulged a few questions about the new novel, and I’m glad to share our chat here.

Art Taylor: A simple question to begin with: What inspired you to write a novel about Shakespeare? Are you a longtime fan of the Bard’s work? Of The Tempest in particular?

Kathryn Johnson

Kathryn Johnson: Actually, my interest in writing The Gentleman Poet began in just the opposite way. I felt that I’d read far too few of Shakespeare’s plays in college. I wanted to learn more about him and what has made his poetry and plays so enduring. But as a working writer it’s very hard to find time for exhaustive reading and study unless it’s devoted to producing something. I think that’s why I so appreciate Bill Bryson and his books. He finds something that interests him, like hiking the Appalachian Trail or sampling historical high points (A Short History of Nearly Everything), and feeds his curiosity by going off to research until he has enough for a book. Before I could write anything, I needed to read not just from the plays but also some of the excellent nonfiction works that have recently been written, like Marjorie Garber’s Shakespeare After All, Ron Rosenbaum’s The Shakespeare Wars, and Stephen Greenblatt’s wonderful, Will in the World. At first, just writing a story with Shakespeare somehow involved, something like the film, Shakespeare in Love, that was all I had in mind. Focusing on The Tempest came later.

SIBA Book Award Winners

The Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance has announced the 2010 SIBA Book Award winners. Congratulations to all!

• Best Fiction: The Help by Kathryn Stockett
• Best Nonfiction: The Most They Ever Had by Rick Bragg
• Best Children’s: The Secret World of Walter Anderson by Hester Bass
• Best Cookbook: The Lee Brothers: Simple Fresh Southern by Ted and Matt Lee

Over the Fourth of July weekend, we actually enjoyed a recipe from the Lee Brothers’ latest cookbook: Pimento-Cheese Potato Gratin. (Yum!) And Kathryn Stockett is appearing at this year’s Fall for the Book festival in Northern Virginia, with which I’m also associated.

All in all, couldn’t agree more with the winners here!