Lit Hub Asks: 5 Authors, 7 Questions, No Wrong Answers

The Lit Hub Author Questionnaire is a monthly interview featuring seven questions for five authors with new books. This month we talk to:

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Jade Chang (What a Time to Be Alive)
Catherine Chidgey (The Book of Guilt)
Adam Nicolson (Bird School: A Beginner in the Wood)
Katharina Volckmer (Calls May Be Recorded)
E.Y. Zhao (Underspin)

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Without summarizing it in any way, what would you say your book is about?

E.Y. Zhao: Indignities and confusion of adolescence. Tiny compromises we make for community and success that add up to something awful. Joys and horrors of competitive sports, or any activity you surrender yourself to. Generational abuse. Having a crush.

Jade Chang: “There is a pleasure in the endless scroll,/There is a rapture on the lonely shore”

Catherine Chidgey: Abiding guilt. The human capacity to look away from suffering. Unexpected connections. Nature versus nurture. The origins of evil. Spirographs. Richard Clayderman.

Adam Nicolson: Getting down with the realities of the most ordinary aspects of the natural world. Nothing exotic. All the usual beauty.

Katharina Volckmer: Being fat. Being unsuccessful in an expensive city. Being an immigrant. Having a shitty job. The sadness and humiliation that capitalism has in store for most of us. Letting go of your dreams. Despair that there is no other way of living available and how to laugh at this same despair. Our perverse desire for holidays. The ugly layer beneath all beautiful things.

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Without explaining why and without naming other authors or books, can you discuss the various influences on your book?

Jade Chang: This 2016 incident: A thief with a knife tried to rob a Chinese noodle shop in Australia. The chef grabbed two meat cleavers and chased after him, shouting, “You have one knife? I have two!!!” Also, Giant Sequoias, long late night conversations, watching a trio of crows windsurfing in a desert canyon, that one friend who got kind of famous, and that other friend who kind of had a hard time with it, forms of currency that are not legal tender, a little bit of gossip I heard about Father John Misty finding his true voice while on tour with the Fleet Foxes.

Catherine Chidgey: The late 1970s. World War Two medical research. A 1990s trip to the New Forest, England, and an encounter with the New Forest ponies. My 1991 undergraduate psychology degree. A stone wall topped with broken glass seen in Ireland in 2008. Outdated sets of children’s encyclopedias that speak in the Voice of Empire.

Adam Nicolson: The book is motivated by my previous indifference to birds and a sense of shame at my own carelessness, something that is symptomatic of the culture as a whole. People I know have loved birds all their life. I haven’t. So the influence really is the question “Why on earth not?”

Katharina Volckmer: Our physical reality, i.e. our bodies. The stories they tell. The words they use. The way people talk, as a non-native speaker I have a different way of listening. The trash that life throws at us every day. Quite literally. This morning, I found a pigeon’s head on my morning walk, and it stayed with me all day. It was deeply tragic, a bit pathetic and very beautiful, that’s what I’m usually after.

E.Y. Zhao: Time jumps, communal narration, sad rebellious boys, mullet and jean shorts (IYKYK).

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Without using complete sentences, can you describe what was going on in your life as you wrote this book?

Catherine Chidgey: Lockdown. Teaching on Zoom. The death of my mother. The death of my friend. A new cat. House-hunting.

Adam Nicolson: Total pleasure at not moving. Stuck in a bird hide down in the wood as if it were a yacht that never sailed. Absorbatory stillness. Occasionally speaking to other human beings. Recovering from writing a book about the pre-Socratic philosophers.

Katharina Volckmer: I can’t. It happened during the pandemic, and I have no idea how I started this book. Or how I finished it. I regret this amnesia, and I hope those memories will return one day.

E.Y. Zhao: MFA, fear of failure…

Jade Chang: Despair <===> Joy

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What are some words you despise that have been used to describe your writing by readers and/or reviewers?

Adam Nicolson: “Deep dive.” Pleasant.

Katharina Volckmer: ‘Very European’, ‘earnest’ and ‘urgent’ were among my least favorite. I disagree with the concept of books being ‘urgent’ – we’re not in A&E. I wear ‘disgusting’ as a badge of honor though (yes, somebody said that to me once about my first novel.)

E.Y. Zhao: I love all my readers and their descriptors! Some folks find the book “slow” or “difficult,” but that still makes me happy; it means I was allowed to write the structure I originally envisioned (and feared someone might edit away).

Jade Chang: Honestly, none. But some readers really despised the profanity in my last book; I’d like them to know that this novel contains very little profanity! (Addendum: I just searched the manuscript and was surprised to find that there are exactly 53 instances each of our two major four-letter-words!)

Catherine Chidgey: Sunny. Slow. Rushed. Intuitive (as in there’s no slog behind it). By Catherine Gidgey.

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If you could choose a career besides writing (irrespective of schooling requirements and/or talent) what would it be?

Katharina Volckmer: A classical singer. I would love to know what it feels like to be able to sing Bellini’s ‘Casta Diva’ or Schumann’s ‘Ave Maria’. When I was younger, I wanted to become a pathologist. I thought dead people would be easier to deal with.

E.Y. Zhao: As a girl, I wanted to be an orthopedic surgeon. If I could just stomach the sight of blood, I still think it’d be fulfilling to work with and on bodies, and to help people heal.

Jade Chang: Researching a book about an accidental self-help guru made me want to be a tent-revival preacher. Guru-dom is very seductive.

Catherine Chidgey: 1920s trophy wife.

Adam Nicolson: Architect.

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What craft elements do you think are your strong suit, and what would you like to be better at?

E.Y. Zhao: I can write a sentence and, after reading all of Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant, I can jump around time pretty well. I wish I were better at crafting a linear plot…

Jade Chang: Strong suit: Serious fun. Desired suit: Brevity. My goal is to write a book that’s under 250 pages. The first was 355 and this one’s 304, so I’m getting closer!

Catherine Chidgey: I think I’m quite good at creating a creeping sense of dread and giving close-focus sensory details of a place. I’d like to be better at describing people’s hair beyond brown, blond, red, black, white, gray…but when I do: “Laughing, she threw her opalescent tresses over her shoulder.” I’d like a better handle on the seasonal availability of flowers and produce.

Adam Nicolson: Strong: cliche avoidance and a kind of suppressed rhythmicity (borrowed from Wordsworth). Like to be better at: grippingness in telling stories.

Katharina Volckmer: I enjoy writing inner landscapes, monologues and I love making people laugh. I’m very bad at descriptions of places and objects, I also don’t enjoy them in other people’s books. They tend to overwhelm my little brain, and I agree with Thomas Bernhard that some writers waste 60 pages and they haven’t even reached the garden fence yet. At least that’s my excuse for writing bad descriptions.

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How do you contend with the hubris of thinking anyone has or should have any interest in what you have to say about anything?

Jade Chang: Hubris, thy name is me.

Catherine Chidgey: I pretend I’m writing for myself only, and that no one will ever read it.

Adam Nicolson: Nice funny question. As I never know anything beforehand about the subjects of my books, I think the reader and I start on the same ignorant page and wander off together hand in hand from there. The whole thing is an exercise in not being expert.

Katharina Volckmer: You could ask that about most things. ‘Why should anyone give a fuck about this?’ There is nothing modest about being a writer (but neither is there anything modest about posting pictures of your new haircut or your dinner or your ugly friends on social media or all the other ridiculous stuff we get up to when we could be saving the planet) yet we depend on other people’s attention/ validation. I often feel bad about exposing others to my writing but then at least books are relatively subtle. They’re not dick pics. They give people a choice.

E.Y. Zhao: I try hard not to write about things I know I don’t know; hopefully, what little remains has meaning for others. (And I mean, better me than Andrew Tate.) I’m still kind of pretending no one has read my work, though.