Lydia Millet was kind enough to be interviewed for this brief article, via email last week. I share our brief exchange below.
KB: Do you remember where you were when you first got the idea for your new novel, How the Dead Dream?
LM: I'd like to say someplace lovely and appropriate, but I suspect it may have been an Exercycle.
KB: The novel has a lot of animals in it, and at times a supernatural feel. Can you comment on that?
LM: Magic and animals are close. Animals are the product of evolution, but also precisely supernatural, that is, more than natural, extraordinary and maybe semi-divine. And ephemeral. Their uniqueness took millions of years to reach this form, yet they can be made to disappear in an instant.
KB: If you were to take your main character, the businessman T., somewhere in Tucson, where would you take him and why?
LM: Depends on what mood I was in, and whether I was trying to seduce him. Options include Gates Pass and a number of seedy bars.
KB: What can you see out of the window in the room in which you write your books?
LM: At home I see an ironwood tree with a birdfeeder on it, some chickenwire, various cacti and yucca, and the sky. Or, if I'm writing at work, I see a parking lot, a chainlink fence and iron-gate, and a highrise of subsidized housing, the Tucson House. In common, I guess, both views have barriers.
KB: Do you have a favorite Joy Williams book?
LM: Of her novels, this one, The Changeling, which I revere. But I also adore her essay collection Ill Nature.
KB: When you were a child, were you ever a fairy-tale character for Halloween?
LM: Only a fairy—or in particular a fairy princess queen. Never one for half measures.
In Celebration of The 30th Anniversary Edition of The Changeling by Joy Williams
May 15, 2008, 8:00 p.m.
Reading by Joy Williams & Lydia Millet
co-sponsored by The University of Arizona Poetry Center & Fairy Tale Review Press
May 15, 2008, 8:00 p.m.
Reading by Joy Williams & Lydia Millet
co-sponsored by The University of Arizona Poetry Center & Fairy Tale Review Press
The spirit is animal, she thought. It is the spirit which knows God. It is His favorite, His dream, His imagination. The shadow of Jesus, the shadow of the Devil were so long ago laid to rest, side by side, in one common death, but the spirit is changeling. And is forever being fashioned into endless and impending transformations. She raised the glass and drank, and felt herself being taken up by, being part of, an enormous wave just about to fold, just about to begin its triumphant fall . . .
--Joy Williams, The Changeling
There were many common replacements. When they said they wanted passion, they meant the feeling of novelty; instead of what was beautiful, they wanted what affirmed; instead of a challenge, an easy victory that others believed to be hard-won. Instead of God, a father who showed his love; instead of Jesus, a friend who proved his love; instead of faith, a mother who loved them with a love that never changed.
--Lydia Millet, How The Dead Dream
I first met Joy in Tucson in 1991 when I arrived to begin the MFA Program in Creative Writing. In fact I came to Tucson precisely to study with her; I had read The Changeling and was transfixed, and elated to discover she was teaching in the desert, land of my dreams. Enchanted, frightened, and awakened by her writing, I also learned more from Joy about living and writing than I ever have learned from anyone. One of my favorite Tucson memories is of Joy calling me the day she found out she won the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters; she picked me up in her Jeep and we drove up to Mt. Lemmon. “Let’s go throw snowballs to celebrate!” she had said on the phone. After workshop sometimes, we’d convene with her to the Arizona Inn bar, and the piano player at the time would grin ear-to-ear and triumphantly play “Joy to the World” in her honor as she entered the fern-colored room. Joy persuaded me, too, to take pistol lessons in a mini-mall so she could research an article she was writing (which later became a short story in the brilliant collection Honored Guest). We both liked the 25 cent coffee you could get in a paper cup from a machine in the lobby while waiting for class, and were both creeped out by our instructor, who promised the class, in firm and clear tones, that everyone in the world had a “personal attacker” out there somewhere, lying in wait. As we’d leave class the saguaro in the parking lot shone in artificial light and we’d scurry to her car, get in very fast, and drive off into the desert sunset, sort of giddy and shocked.
How fitting for this book release event to take place in Tucson, then, at the shiny new Poetry Center on the University of Arizona Campus, and what an honor it is to co-host the event as editor of Fairy Tale Review Press, which is reintroducing The Changeling to readers.
Yes, Joy Williams has earned a reputation as a major American author for books that are intellectual, fantastical, political, hilarious, and imbued with dark brilliance. She is the author of four novels, including The Quick and The Dead, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2001, and State of Grace, her first book, which was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1974. She has been a recipient of the Strauss Living Award, the Rea Award for The Short Story, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and numerous other honors. Yet The Changeling, the first book of hers that I read and which changed me, remains an egregiously overlooked masterpiece of her oeuvre.
This wonderful, classic novel, from which she will read at the Center, has never gotten the recognition it deserves despite the fact that Joy Williams has legions of fans—- many among them are themselves extraordinary authors. Lauding Joy Williams as one of our “best and most talented of writers,” Rick Moody, in his Foreword to this reprint edition, strives to set the record straight on the critical failure to recognize the dark genius of The Changeling upon publication in 1978:
Thirty years later, the situation looks quite different. Felicitously so. The Joy Williams who went on to write the short stories of Taking Care, Escapes, and Honored Guest, and such marvels of realistic other-worldiness as the recent novel The Quick and the Dead (2002), has instructed us, as the most original writers must, as to the consumption of her graceful arabesques. The tectonic movement of her paragraphs and narratives no longer looks impulsive, if indeed it ever did. Now it looks exactly like originality.
Please join The Poetry Center in welcoming Joy Williams to read from The Changeling. This book release event will also feature the powerful, ecological vision of cherished Tucson novelist Lydia Millet, whom I also met in Tucson that year. (What luck!) Lydia, who works for the Center for Biological Diversity, is a generous, warm, and powerful thinker. Lydia’s latest book How The Dead Dream shares with The Changeling's literary intelligence and ecological vision.
Kate Bernheimer
Tuscaloosa, AL
