Interview with Fanny Howe
The Lives of a Spirit / Glasstown: Where Something Got Broken
Fanny Howe
134 pages, $16.95
Nightboat Books; 2005
ISBN: 0976718510
Available from Amazon.com
Photo Credit: Ben E. Watkins
Introduction
If you are a reader who is not also a writer you may not know that Q&A interviews are mostly faked. Seriously. An interviewee gives you a mess of quotes, musings, and one-offs which you must edit into something reasonable. You rearrange and trim. You rewrite your questions so they sound better, forward the narrative, and provide information that your readership needs but which your interviewee did not mention.
Fanny's one request regarding this interview was that she be allowed to answer, "holistically" rather than question by question. I said that was okay, but warned her that I would hack up her words in the standard way. She said that was fine, and wrote me two wonderful letters.
I could not disassemble Fanny's letters. (I should have expected as much from the author of a novel called Indivisible.) The flow of her writing was utterly unyielding to my Frankenstienish agenda; their holistic quality was a fundament of their content. To slice and dice such lucid, graceful thought would have been a disservice to everyone—her, you, me.
The interview has been split into two parts: my first set of questions to Fanny, more or less as I emailed them to her, paired with her response to me; and then my followup questions to her, paired with her second letter.
—Justin Taylor
Justin Taylor is the criticism editor at Half-Drunk Muse, and an associate editor at Pindeldyboz. Visit his personal website at http://www.justindtaylor.net