Portland Fiction Project Interview: Marian English

This interview was conducted by contributor Spencer Cushing.  You can see what Spencer is up to over on Twitter.

Once again Reading Local: Portland sits down with a writer based in Portland. This week, we have Portland Fiction Project writer Marian English. Ms. English was kind enough to answer our questions via email. Without further ado, the interview.

Reading Local: What Inspired your piece for the Reading Local blog?

Marian English: Actually, I went back and forth on what I wanted to write for a while, depending on my mood—I can get a little cantankerous. I only settled on it when I realized that, as this was my first piece for Reading Local, I wanted my first impression to be based on what I love about literature.

So much of what we read and write about reading and writing seems to be dictated by the market: what sells? Is the book dead? How are ebooks and podcasts and blogs going to change literature? What genre or sub-genre is fashionable now? What is a writer supposed to be like to be considered serious or successful or marketable now? Is what I’m reading literary or is it commercial or both (if that’s possible?)?

Some of this is useful, but really, it all seems to be about what pose to assume—and that’s not why I write. And that’s not what dictates what any of the writers who’ve had any real effect on me have cared about. Gary Snyder, Salman Rushdie, Steven King, Gore Vidal. They all have something to say, a story to tell, and a love of literature that drive them first and foremost—all that other crap is for the publisher and the agent to worry about.

If you write to be popular or rich or cool, you’ll give up in frustration long before anything really good happens—literary or otherwise. Writing is not a stable career like accounting or programming, so the only reason to put yourself through the torture or writer’s block, rejection, judgment, disappointment, alienation, staying inside on nice days and not going out with friends or snogging with your lover (not to mention that horrible moment when you realize that the piece you’ve been putting all your blood, sweat, and sleepless nights into just doesn’t work.) if not for love of the craft.

RL: What excites you the most about writing fiction?

ME: I think storytelling is a great way at coming at something sideways. You can find yourself empathizing with people you want to hate. You can play out an idea to its logical (or illogical) conclusion and see if it’s still good. You can get out of yourself, and get your reader to take a journey with you which will maybe affect their perspective. If you try to do that in an article or an essay, people will just throw up their defenses: I think this, and that is wrong and there’s nothing you can say to make me disagree.

Storytelling is a much gentler way of getting people to stop worrying about opinions and just experience something outside of their own world.

I think it also calls to us in a pretty primal way. It’s like food and sex, do you know anyone who can go their whole lives without once yearning to tell or hear a story?

RL: What is your process for writing a piece of fiction-From Origin to polished draft?

ME: For me, every story is an exploration of a possibility. What if . . . ? Neil Gaiman said something to that effect in an interview and I have to agree. I want to get outside myself and the banal predictability of my world—and sometimes the start is really silly. What if fairies had decided humanity was all a myth because no one had seen a human in hundreds of years? What if the toy a little boy talked to really was alive?

Other’s are more serious: What do you do with the ultimate ultimatum? What is the nature of human connection—can you connect when someone is mentally ill? When they’re demented?

It often takes me to uncomfortable places, to difficult ideas; but I don’t think I’d bother if it didn’t. What’s the point in spending all that time alone, in my head, if I don’t get somewhere, push some boundaries, some ideas, grow a little?

RL: What do you think a community of writers such as PFP adds to your experience as a writer?

ME: Three things: discipline, editing, and perspective. Being the lazy, procrastinating slob that I am, I find that the schedule and the expectations of others gets me working when I would otherwise veg out. The editing speaks for itself, the more sets of eyes, the more mistakes caught.

The perspectives offered are probably the most difficult thing to take advantage of, and the most useful. The other writers catch you in your writing traps, conventions, and your stylistic failures. Most of those failures are failures of communication, but they sometimes occur as a function of our favorite part or aspect of the story. Every time I dismiss a piece of advice because I don’t like what it’s telling me, I am depriving myself of an opportunity to grow.

On the other hand, the advice could be wrong, but I will never know why it’s wrong if I don’t give it my complete attention.

RL: Do you see the Writer’s role in the literary world changing? (if so) In what ways?

ME: Ultimately, no. We’re in a time of transition because media is changing—but that is going to have more of an effect on the business of publishing than on the work of the writer.

The writer has always been a teacher and/or a storyteller. Both are art forms. You can do it with practice and study, and you can do it if you have a natural gift (though practice and study are still useful), but it’s not something everyone can do well just because they want to.

There were storytellers and teachers before the written word, and there will storytellers and teachers after the ebooks and blogging and social networking. The question we need to address now is: how best do we use media to tell these stories and share these ideas?

RL: What Portland Author would you recommend to others?

ME: There are tons of wonderful poets and writers from Oregon. Ken Kesey, Opal Whitley, Craig Lesley; but if I had to pick one from Portland I would say Ursula K. LeGuin. She’s a master of the craft, and a wonderful example of the artist who works on multiple levels and is still commercially successful. And she doesn’t angle the story to try to make the bestseller list when she writes, she just tells the best story she can as beautifully as possible.

Check out Marian’s first essay for Reading Local here, and more of her writing for PFP here.