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| “I always get involved with my characters and forget about the plot, and I don’t care if anything happens to them! I don’t want bad things to happen to my people. I don’t even want to put people in very much danger – and that’s my problem.” |
Tell us about the Shakespeare
Group that meets at your house in Fayetteville. About seven of us sit around a long table in my dining room every Sunday afternoon, and we read Shakespeare’s plays out loud. We began doing that in 1987. These are all people who are married to writers or are graduates of the MFA program at Arkansas. In May 1987 we were sitting on Buiji Salassi’s porch, and I said, “Oh, Buiji, I wish I didn’t hate to travel. I wish we could go to London and go to Stratford and see the plays.” And she said, “Wouldn’t that be nice?” I said that we could go up to my house and read one of the plays out loud. And Patty Hayes was there, and she said, “Oh, that’s a good idea.” So we called Bill Harrison and invited him. And he said, “My God, that’s gonna take 4 hours!” And we said, “We don’t have anything else to do all summer.” That was the beginning. And we’ve been doing it ever since. The reason it has lasted as a group is because anybody can cancel at the last moment, and that includes me, and it’s at my house. If somebody doesn’t want to do it, we don’t do it. But we’re pretty loyal. We get in spells where we’ll read for five or six weeks, then maybe things will keep us from doing it for two or three weeks. This year we’re reading the plays in the order they were written, and now we are just into the great plays. At first, we read favorites, but we had to stop because there were about six plays that we read over and over. I always wanted to read The Tempest and Hamlet. But reading them in order let us see Shakespeare develop. It is so wonderful to be a writer and know that the greatest writer who ever lived – probably in any language – wrote some really bad plays. That he had to learn! And that he learned by doing. I learned how to be a writer by writing poetry a long, long time before I ever wrote fiction I had worked out so much stuff. Maybe I didn’t know how to structure and plot yet – and I still don’t know how to plot – but I knew how to write the sentence and the paragraph. And you learn that being a poet. And I know how to edit. I will throw anything away. Usually when my books are edited in New York, all they ever want me to do is add stuff to them. When they ask me to cut something, it will usually be part of something they had me add. I give my editors something that would satisfy any poet’s imagination, and they want me to flesh out parts of it. And I used to hate to do it! But now I’ve gotten better natured about it. You have been with Little, Brown for nearly 20 years. What about overseas publishers? I changed publishers in London after 10 books. I stopped having Faber & Faber and started having Bloomsbury. I adored Faber & Faber, but they never sold my books. I have three books out in French; friends say the translations are horrible. In fact, everyone always tells me the translations of all my books in every language are pretty horrible. And that they’re not funny. They aren’t funny in French or the Scandinavian languages – it’s very dark. So I’ve lost interest in being translated because of that. I think a translation might work in Spanish but none of the Catholic countries will ever publish my books. PREVIOUS PAGE | PAGE 2 OF 5 | NEXT PAGE |