Short Fictions Fed on History & Lunacy & the Transactions of Care
An Interview with Diane Josefowicz, writer of Guardians & Saints
by Geri Lipschultz
Diane Josefowicz’s fiction casts a sprawling net over the geography and history and anthropology of our species. Her focus in these stories—so she realized, as she indicates below, only after putting the book together—seemed to be on caretaking, the highs and lows of it: thus the title. But other themes persist, and what also delights this reader are the idiosyncrasies of character, and the specificities of place. Her fiction is a treat for the senses and the sensibilities, and although I knew her as an editor—and an accomplished historian and translator, I found her fictions beautiful and riveting. I was completely won over by the first story, which I had to read many times, and I’m still not sure I’ve gotten every morsel of beauty. Also…the second story, as well. There just aren’t enough father/daughter stories in the world. And that moment in the second story, when the daughter is discovering and falling in love with a miniscule telescope—just so made me want to have it, myself. I’ve written a review of this collection, due to be published in World Literature Today, in their winter issue, but for now some questions!
Geri Lipschultz: Your title so helps to draw together these stories that at the outset seem so disparate, due I imagine to the intricacy and complexity and variety of the worlds the characters inhabit. I wonder when the title came to you. Did you knowingly set out to write stories about children at the mercy of what I see as daft and corrupt and incompetent adults? The theme of caretaking—not only ascribed to parents and official guardians—really seems to permeate all of the stories, setting up a major conflict, opening up the reader to an idea that suddenly seems so reflective of our current situation, of modernity, if you will. And this in spite of the various time and place settings of your stories. I’ll save that for another question, though. So—yes, I am still asking more than one question here—I do wonder if you see this inability or unwillingness of humans to care for each other as one of the large and glaring issues of our time? So, if it’s a fair question, and if it makes sense to ask, can you say whether you set out with these ideas, or did the characters show themselves to you as you were writing. (Obviously, do not answer if this is not something you wish to talk about, but suddenly, it seems to me that this failure of caretaking is among our greatest failures as humans—and I didn’t really ever quite see it in this light until after reading your stories. I was so taken by the language and the intricacies of the details, by the fullness and strangeness of your worlds—different in each story—that this theme didn’t really hit home until after I was finished with the book.)
Diane Josefowicz: The title was the last thing I wrote. It arrived after I’d been immersed in the world of these stories for some days, reading and taking notes on themes that asserted themselves as I read them. I think of the lonely narrator of “Psoriasis Memoir.” She’s in awe of what it takes to grow a prize pumpkin, and she wonders if she has what it takes. I noticed, at that point, that many of my characters were preoccupied either with caring for someone else or being taken care of. They were dealing in different ways with dependency, their own or other people’s. They were children and parents; doctors and patients; students and teachers. Care started to seem special—that is, strange in a potentially productive way.
Where the theme really came forward, the characters were parental stand-ins, like the retrograde landlady “I, Zinnia,”[1] — a person acting intrusively in loco parentis, who locks the entry to her apartment building in order to discourage her young women tenants from the sexual adventuring they so want to undertake. An editor gave me a clue there: Her apartment building is called the St. Dunstan Arms, and Dunstan is the patron saint of locksmiths. The figure of the locksmith condenses quite a bit of what’s going on in this collection. A locksmith doesn’t lock your door for you but makes locking up possible, for better and worse.
I think it’s significant that caregiving and caretaking refer to similar kinds of activities the opposed meanings of give and take. We give care, we take care. So far, so good. But care has a dark side. What does it mean to steal care, to hijack care, to weaponize care? To manipulate the caregiving or caretaking situation? My characters are exploring this boundary. They’re learning about power, discovering their power and the limits to it—as they do.
Geri Lipschultz: The next thing that occurred to me—after the first three stories—(both in the “Psoriasis Memoir” [oh, that title, such a statement about ‘memoir’—so funny in and of itself] and to some extent in the stories narrated by Zinnia, along with that of the institutionalized geology professor) was the feeling of a series of rants, the likes of which brought to mind Thomas Bernhard, despite your unwillingness to dispense with punctuation and paragraphing. Like Bernhard, there is a wild intelligence at work, along with an obsessiveness, and—most important—humor. Obviously, the characters themselves, the place—all different—and different from each other, even in this book of yours, but the rhetoric is similar—and I began to wonder about your influences, whether Bernhard was among them. I sense a Borgesian-like feeling of riddles at times, and in your defamiliarizing, your lush descriptions of place and objects that practically bring them to life. So here, again, a couple of questions—do you feel yourself coming out of a tradition? Do you see your stories as breaking with realism at times, or straddling that line?
Diane Josefowicz: You’re absolutely right about Thomas Bernhard, whose ranting narrators were very much in my mind as I wrote “Psoriasis Memoir” and “Eleven, the Spelunker.” But Bernhard came to me relatively late. My first writing workshops were at Brown University in the early 1990s, and the ranting narrator was everywhere. One week I was assigned the novels of Samuel Beckett: Malloy, Malone Dies, The Nameless. Malone Dies features an incredible ranting narrator, he’s dying in a wheeled hospital bed and the only thing he owns is a stick. All he can do for himself is push himself around the room. The bed becomes this kind of rowboat, and as he rows, he gets off on a tear, a storytelling tear—and drops his stick. The rant breaks off, there’s a bit of space on the page, and then he starts up again: I have lost my stick. I read that, and I howled. Brown was also where I was introduced to the writing of Angela Carter and Rikki Ducornet, whose influence I hope is palpable as well. Rikki wrote somewhere about being surprised by a gorgeous red fox in a forest somewhere, then looking closer and finding that the fox was actually dead—and the corpse was humming, humming, with bees. I love that image—there’s death and life, beauty and terror, metamorphosis—and it is something you can just stumble over during an ordinary walk in the woods.
The late poet Richard Howard once told me that to write well, it’s necessary to tolerate a certain amount, possibly a very great amount, of craziness in one’s own work, in one’s characters, and possibly in one’s own life. I don’t like that last part, but I do think he was right about it. Susan Sontag said somewhere that she had four writers inside herself: the lunatic, the moron, the editor and the critic. The lunatic talks, the moron takes dictation, the editor shapes the mess, and the critic does the tweaking that brings the work into conversation with a larger context, with the contemporary landscape and with history. I think about these ideas a lot, especially the craziness. Which is a roundabout way of saying that my commitments to realism don’t exclude the crazy parts of reality. In my first novel, Ready, Set, Oh, a dead character returns as another character’s hallucination, and the dead character, whose body is decaying, accidentally stirs her own earlobe into her coffee. Nothing in the plot relies on this moment, but the book would not be one I recognize as mine without it.
Geri Lipschultz: In looking at the work you’ve published, I see quite a range, going from translation to an expertise in several areas of intellectual history—and also you seem to have a range of styles, from straight realism to work that verges on the surreal. Do you imagine yourself on a trajectory of sorts? A kind of practice that is leading you to your so-called “stride,” or is experimentation and also a variety of forms where you see yourself. You are so accomplished—your thirst for knowledge, along with your sense of literary citizenship, so much to admire. And there is not only this book that is just out, but a novel also coming out—is there a connection between this work and the novel? (This question is slightly connected to the last question -7-.)
Diane Josefowicz: You’re kind to notice this, Geri! At times I have felt, and still feel like my work is siloed into different categories or genres while for me, the experience of making this work is all of a piece. I’m alienated, I guess, by the market forces that require my books to be on different shelves in the library or bookstore. At the same time, I really have no good answer to your question. I don’t sense a particular trajectory, like I don’t ever imagine I’ll ever be the object of marketing copy like “and now this historian has made her long-awaited turn to fiction.”
At the same time, there are intersections. Literary history means a lot to me, and my feelers are always out for historically lost or overlooked work. Lately I’ve been translating the prose of Anna de Noailles, a fin-de-siècle writer and confidant of Proust who is still well known in France but almost entirely unknown and largely untranslated in English. Her writing, especially on Italy and Italian subjects, is still incredibly fresh, and I’m astounded at how available her language is to me, at least her prose. I doubt I’d have access to her work if I was not also trained as a historian, part of that training was learning to sniff out what’s been overlooked and find the story there.
Geri Lipschultz: Do you see yourself collecting the Zinnia stories—her role in the family, at least as seen in the stories in this collection—she seems to hold the position of responsibility. Having not read her earlier stories, I wonder if you start from the time she was quite young, and how long do you plan to follow her?
Diane Josefowicz: Zinnia’s not finished with me, I fear. A second novella is in the works, in which she is drawn once more into the world of the adults around her. Ultimately there will be three Zinnia novellas as well as the stories, and altogether they make up an omnibus work, still very much in progress, called The Zinniad.
Geri Lipschultz: My favorite story of yours—it’s funny, when I reviewed Joan Connor’s book of stories, I also had a favorite story—maybe it’s like songs on an album?—but the story that wins my greatest loyalty is “Alberto—A Case History.” And, as you’ll see in the review, it somehow brought to mind the Willa Cather story, “Paul’s Case,” even though these two characters—and the story itself have nothing in common—but the similarity of the title, which is likely coincidental. What they have in common is that I adore them. They both seem like utterly perfect stories. What makes your story perfect? I am so totally transported to this place that I found myself going to a map—and thinking—ah, this truly is a place in Germany—but then I checked again and realized you lopped off the last syllable and added another—so no—you’ve done the Nabokovian reinvention, a successful tease. And also deciding to use the word “filbert” rather than “hazelnut”—had me speaking about this story—and you—at the dinner table, and my brother-in-law mentioned that in fact a filbert was another word for hazelnut—and we did a slight dive, by way of googling, to discover the sources of both words. The initiating circumstance of the story, whether it comes from a dark fold of your brain or a darker corner of history, is both horrific and brilliant. Do you care to share? It is again, your background in history that seems to provide enough information from which you may feel free to leap? But the perfection in this story comes from your handling of the tenderness between Lunette and Alberto, honoring the rise and fall of their story—along with the equally beautiful relationship between Lunette and her father—and in such a short story, you manage to so generously render plot, characterization, and setting.
Diane Josefowicz: I’m glad my word choice sent you on that journey. “Alberto” came to me in a single night. I was traveling with my husband and infant daughter, and we were staying in a hotel. We’d been on the road for a while, seeing family. We’d had a long day, and both my husband and daughter both fell asleep. I was trying to sleep too, but there was this voice in my head, a woman telling me a story about her psychiatrist father and a little boy who came to them in their small and ambiguous therapeutic center on the outskirts of a mysterious little town that bore a resemblance to one I’d lived in, years before, in the former East German. So I crept out of bed and hid myself away in the bathroom and scribbled in my notebook until I’d come to the end of the voice and the images.
“Filbert” was the word I heard that night—I remember that moment clearly. I’m not sure why I chose it, or even if I chose it—this waking dream really did seem to have its own integrity and authority, apart from me—but it may have had something to do with another translation I’d recently finished, of a short story called “Life During Wartime” by the East German writer [whose name I forget]. The translation put me in touch with my history as a student of German. Right after college I took a job teaching English in a village near Magdeburg, which was still very much East Germany even though the Wall had come down, the farms were still de-collectivizing. On that trip I had a pocket German-English dictionary that did not include the word for hazelnut, and that summer everyone was eating ice cream flavored with them. They were new to me, and I could not find either “hazelnut” or “hazelnuss” in my dictionary. I was living with a family, and I asked one of the older relatives how long they’d been eating hazelnuts in their town, because in mine, they were completely new and exotic. And she said, we’ve been eating those forever! You’ve never heard of Nutella? Well, no. I had not. She told me a long story about how one of their children refused to eat breakfast unless it was Nutella on toast, but Nutella as a Western product could not be found anywhere. And so she used to sneak into Berlin and get off the train at one of the secret stops, and buy a bunch of Nutella to smuggle back. And then she said: In my day a hazelnut was called a filbert.
Perhaps it’s relevant that when I wrote the story, my daughter was at the age when kids learn language at a furious rate. She had a new word every few minutes. I was just astonished by this, it reminded me of another experience I’d had, living in Germany, when my grasp of the language was relatively weak yet I’d been there long enough to have forgotten a lot of English as well. On a coffee break one afternoon, someone handed me a pastry. I bit into it, it was full of delicious jam, and for a few minutes I could not find the word for the flavor in any language I knew. I was utterly without language at that moment. As my daughter was passing through this stage of intense word-acquisition, I thought a lot about that moment, how it is possible to not have a word and then have it, and then not have it again. In my story, the little boy Alberto is also passing through a phase like that, though the situation is a bit different because he’s not acquiring language so much as re-acquiring it.
Geri Lipschultz: I notice that the song “Daisy, Daisy…” came up more than once, in more than one story, that is. I notice also that skin rashes did as well, and certain foodstuffs, along with plumbing issues—showers, baths—and also fathers and daughters. I notice as well a plethora of gadgets. Your use of these objects is singular—wondering if you want to say anything about this.
Diane Josefowicz: You’re right—my characters are often physically uncomfortable. They itch. They get brain worms, those intrusive snatches of imagined music that don’t go away until someone sings an advertising jingle. I don’t think I mentioned it, but the landlady at the St. Dunstan Arms has a bad bunion. Their discomforts prompt them to say and do things—and then, often as not, a story is off and running. Gadgets have the same potential. Like a rock in the shoe, a gadget gets a character moving. If I’m stuck, I might wonder about the contents of a character’s pocket, or how well their wristwatch is working—some detail that gives me a focal point, a way to move through the moment and the next moment and the one after that.
Geri Lipschultz: Do you have a preference—among all the various genres within which you write. Is there one that is your most favorite? Do your ideas come from the form, or does the form come after the impulse, the choice of forms forming from the ideas floating and making themselves manifest in your mind? Also—was writing fiction where you always wanted to be—but somehow you knew that the trajectory would be a long one—because you knew the kind of fiction you wanted to write would demand an understanding of the world that could only be gained by undertaking the scholarly and intellectual journey you created for yourself? Or did you see yourself writing history? Or both? Or whatever?
Diane Josefowicz: In all my writing, I’m attracted to details that gesture toward a larger story. I’m not fussy about where these details come from. Some come from my everyday life. In “Jackals,” there is a detail about a nutritional supplement that is lifted almost without change from an experience I really did have at the grocery store, in which a somewhat wild-eyed young woman convinced me that her fantastic complexion was due to her consumption of this stuff and so I wound up with an expensive bottle of gross-tasting juice that made me think of Genghis Khan every time I opened my fridge and saw the stuff moldering away in there. Other details come from books, very often old ones. For instance, in The Zodiac of Paris, a history of the fortunes of an ancient monument stolen from Egypt that caused a stir when it arrived in Restoration France, I opened a chapter about Napoleon’s occupation of Egypt with a first-person account, of the death of a baby crocodile at the hands of some French soldiers. The writer, Vivant Denon, was disgusted by the soldiers’ treatment of the animal, and his attention to their high-handedness made it possible to tell a more critical story of the occupation than Western historians had done previously. For Denon, it was a small moment, a brushstroke on a canvas; for me, it became a window I could open on a time and place.
BIO
Twice a Pushcart nominee, Geri Lipschultz has published in Terrain, The Rumpus, Ms., New York Times, the Toast, Black Warrior Review, College English, among others. Her work appears in Pearson’s Literature: Introduction to Reading and Writing and in Spuyten Duyvil’s The Wreckage of Reason II. She has an MFA from the University of Iowa and a Ph.D. from Ohio University and currently teaches writing at Borough of Manhattan Community College. She was awarded a CAPS grant from New York State for her fiction, and her one-woman show (titled ‘Once Upon the Present Time’) was produced in NYC by Woodie King, Jr. Her novel, Grace before the Fall, has recently been released by DarkWinter Press.
