This installment in the Writer on Writer interview series has a twist: Instead of asking the participants to read a whole book, I asked two writers involved in the same anthology to read each other’s anthology piece. The anthology in question is one I’m proud to be included in as well. Wreckage of Reason Two (Spuyten Duyvil, 2014) is the sequel to Wreckage of Reason (Spuyten Duyvil, 2008), and both anthologies feature contemporary women writers experimenting with prose. This week’s Writer on Writer features E.C. Bachner and Lillian Ann Slugocki, two New Yorkers whose bold narrative voices pop off the page. Today E.C. (Elizabeth) Bachner interviews Lillian Ann Slugocki about Lillian’s story, Streetcar Deconstructed.Stay tuned, as always, for the second part of the interview, when Lillian will ask Elizabeth about Elizabeth’s story, How to Shake Hands with a Murderer.
Elizabeth Bachner: I’m obsessed with the idea of whether there are differences between a character and a person, an author and a self, and I love the brilliant and playful way your feminist deconstruction of A Streetcar Named Desire approaches these questions. What are your ways of thinking about autobiography versus fiction, “real” versus imaginary or invented? How do you use yourself in your work? How does your work change and shape your life?
Lillian Ann Slugocki: My life is like this scrapbook of stories, and people, and cities–and I look at it, dispassionately, as the raw material for my work. But having said that, there are many layers over and under the autobiography. I layer myth–my current obsessions are Leda, Orpheus, Eurydice and Leander–as well as narrative structure–e.g. a conflict and its resolution, as well as intertexuality. I use echoes of T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Angela Carter, plus all the lit crit I studied at New York University: Judith Butler, Thelma Shinn, Gayle Green, Mircea Eliade, Luce Irigaray, Julie Kristeva, and Audre Lord. The result is that the I, first person, in my work is me, but not me–an amplified version. Stronger, wiser, certainly more flawed, and certainly more interesting.
People who read my work are usually very quick to assume that it’s straight up autobiography, like when they read The Blue Hours, my novella about the sexual disintegration of a marriage. But real life can be very boring. I’m convinced that even memoirists are not unlike novelists–they use plot arcs, they deconstruct, compress, they add and subtract in similar ways–because it’s all in service of telling a story. And real life doesn’t contain those structural elements. There is an art to choosing where to begin a story, and where to end it, amongst all the hundreds of possibilities. The writer makes those choices, whether the genre is fiction or non-fiction. And I tend to write stories about the things that are of concern to me at any given moment. It could be identity, it could be sexuality or the female body, it could be history–and in writing them, I think I better understand the context of my own life.