Jessica Anthony

Born in Croatia, Josip Novakovich emigrated to the United States when he was twenty years old. He has published two collections of stories, Salvation and Other Disasters (1998) and Yolk (1995), a collection of essays, Apricots from Chernobyl (1995), two books on the art of fiction writing, as well as numerous stories, essays, and poems in leading literary journals. He has received grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship Foundation, the New York Public Library and the National Endowment for the Arts. Thirteen years ago, Phoebe published the first three chapters of a novel “Interrupted Death,” which is now being published by TriQuarterly Press with a new title, Poppy Slopes.

Josip was kind enough to agree to an interview during the Associated Writing Programs conference in Baltimore, Maryland.

JN: So let’s begin by talking about how we just ran into Virgil Suarez. He’s a terrific writer and should be famous, and he’s not because he mostly works in the short form?

JA: What’s wrong with the short form?

JN: The wrong thing with the short form is that you cannot sell it for a lot of money and this country’s run on money. So therefore people who do the short form are neglected.

JA: Didn’t you start in the short form?

JN: Yeah. It’s my favorite thing because I don’t like beating around the bush. If there’s something to say, you say it. The problem with the basic form of storytelling is that it can take too long. And who can be drunk for too long? Do you pass out? Or are you too sober and you leave and do something practical? The short story is like getting tipsy. You get a few drinks and then if it’s too much, then you get vile and you leave and you don’t talk anymore. Then probably at that point somebody gets killed in a short story.

JA: If the short story is getting tipsy, what’s the novel?

JN: The novel is being infinitely patient. It’s like being a prisoner, or it’s a tedious marriage. But it has some highlights. It’s a family. You can write about everybody, and have life insurance policies. After one chapter, a character survives into another one, and even gets some payback from the previous chapter.

JA: What’s your preferred form?

JN: The short story and the essay alternate. If something really happened, the essay is unbeatable. You don’t have to hold back; you are the story, and there’s no pretense. It’s totally honest.

JA: You said in your book, Fiction Writers Workshop, that many of your stories have come from an actual moment or an experience. Has your approach changed?

JN: It’s become more technical now, because I’m not so autobiographical. That is what I was doing when I wrote Fiction Writers Workshop, but now I’m actually writing stories out of glimpses or ideas. Sometimes I write totally absurd stories out of glimpses or ideas, like now I’m writing a story about an American tourist who has pissed on a sacred site in Russia, the Kazan Cathedral. He doesn’t even know it; he just thinks he’s pissing—it’s like burning the flag in DC and not knowing you’re doing it—so the guy gets imprisoned and he’s just an American tourist who’s studying creative writing…

JA: Are you sure this isn’t based on a true…

JN: No! I didn’t piss on the Kazan! So the guy goes to the police station and they give him a prostate exam because he says he couldn’t hold it. And they say, “Well your prostate seems to be healthy, so you could have held it. You could have gone to a bar and done it the civilized way, but since you didn’t, you get the fine of $200.” The guy protests, and they say, “What are you complaining about? We know that a prostate exam in America is at least $200.” So my point is, yes, there is a bit of experience, but I’ve never been to a police station. Actually I haven’t even had a prostate exam. At least since I was twenty. It was totally useless.

JA: You read a story in Russia, on the Summer Literary Seminars program, about two boys arguing over how to properly drink a Coca-Cola, called “Ice.” Was that autobiographical?

JN: That one was quite a bit autobiographical. My brother and I did go to the hotel where the Coca-Cola came. There was a plagiarist version that we drank, called “Kokta.” (It’s actually much better than Coca-Cola). But it was a bad day, like tonight. There was a snowstorm. So no police were there, and it was the perfect opportunity. We stole a whole case of Coca-Cola. I wanted to drink it right away, but my brother said Coca-Cola was very mysterious.

JA: Mysterious?

JN:  It had to be precisely at the perfect temperature between liquid and ice. According to him, you could not just put ice into it. So we put it in the snow to wait for it to be the right temperature, and of course, it was ruined.

JA: Tell me the role imagination plays in your work. Because your language is poetic in a way that goes beyond the real. It’s not magic realism, but there are definitely moments when it seems like you reach in the direction of pure imagination.

JN: That’s right. I very frequently write hyper-realistically, basically recollecting from my memory. Then I slip into the other mode, where the elements of the memory suggest possibilities: it didn’t happen, but it could happen. When I was writing about war before the war happened, I ran into a guy I know from Israel, who said, “Look, you wrote this before the war, and it seems to me that you wrote about the war,” and he was impressed. But I said, “Don’t give me that. It would be very cheesy to buy into the prophetic.” We are very cyclical there; there is always a war.

JA: When you first came to America, you were twenty?

JN: Yeah. Actually, I wouldn’t have been, if I hadn’t gotten a delayed acceptance from Vassar College.

JA: Delayed?

JN: Yeah, because I didn’t know it took—in the fast-paced American society—a whole year to get into college.

JA: I read in Apricots from Chernobyl that you started writing as a way of going back home because you couldn’t go home.

JN: That’s right. I was resurrecting all kinds of sights and places from my hometown. And the funny thing is, once I actually went home, those places really died for me. But it was important to be there, where the picture and the word really had nothing to do with each other. In this case, I needed a thousand pictures to get one good word. Sometimes that’s how going home happens: some street may look totally flat. Well, it’s flat now but then it was where you were caught by a policeman driving a strange looking bicycle, where you got deflated tires, and where you tried to have your first kiss and didn’t.

JA: Is this, now, where you imagined where you would be when you were a boy?

JN: No, no, no. No way. I imagined I would be—when I was religious I imagined that I would be like Billy Graham. He was like the traveling circus, or a rock star, filling up the stadiums. But actually when the Baptists came to Croatia I already had an aversion to that kind of rock star evangelism—I still thought I might become an evangelist, but in a quieter more subversive way. The idea of heaven and hell interested me. In graduate school, I met a guy who was very shy—he was getting a PhD in creative nonfiction—and he said the greatest problem within theology was heaven, because in heaven it seemed to him that he would always have to talk to a lot of people and sing in public. And he didn’t like that idea.

JA: What is your opinion about “balance” in fiction? Do you think writers should be pushing the extremes more?

JN: Well, that’s a tricky question. I mean, I don’t think there is such a thing as a perfectly shaped, perfectly balanced story. So it’s a given that you won’t have the balance, but the idea of harmony and no loose ends—I think you have to push in some ways. You have to be persistent; it’s surprising how painful or how unavoidable something is in a story. Like a bad toothache; you neglect a filling and the tooth cracks and then you’ve got an abscess and the your mouth has shifted. So there’s a whole domino effect if you ignore one aspect of a story. If you lost it, it’s very hard to restore that balance. One of the stories that I admire most is The Death of Ivan Ilyich. So the guy has this slight pain because he bumped himself on the piece of furniture that rearranged the curtain and that little discomfort because the main thing that totally consumes him.

JA: Which country, in your opinion, has the most vibrant literary scene today?

JN: That’s a good question. I’m not a literary expert; a lot has happened in small, Slavic countries. The Czech Republic, for example. But that was all during Communism. They don’t have it now. You know, Hrabal and Kundera and Capek, they first appeared in opposition to the systems. So that was very exciting. But not now; now it’s just a tourist trap. That’s the thing about Slavic countries now: it should be more exciting with all those wars, but it’s amazing how little they write about wars. When I wrote about it, some of my friends wanted to dispossess me; how could I be their friend and write about wars? I should not be interested in wars. They went through it, and they’re not interested in it. They want something beautiful and light.

JA: Do you think fiction writers have a responsibility to be beautiful?

JN: I don’t know about responsibility; it’s all a matter of style and enjoyment. It’s like a musician. Does a musician have a responsibility to play beautiful music? In that way, music is almost non-beauty. Maybe it’s the other way around completely; maybe beauty has the responsibility to become music.

 

Josip Novakovich immigrated to the States from Croatia when he was twenty and is the author of the novel April Fool’s Day, two essay collections, and three story collections. His work has been anthologized in Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize, and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. A recipient of the Whiting Writers’ Award, the Ingram Merrill Award, and an American Book Award, Novakovich teaches at Concordia University in Montreal.

Jessica Anthony is the author of The Convalescent (McSweeney’s/Grove) and Chopsticks (Penguin/Razorbill), a multimedia novel created in collaboration with designer Rodrigo Corral. Anthony’s short stories can be found in Best New American Voices, Best American Nonrequired Reading, McSweeney’s, The Idaho Review, Pear Noir! and elsewhere. She has recently received fellowships from the Creative Capital Foundation for Innovative Literature, the Bogliasco Foundation and the Maine Arts Commission. Anthony is spending the summer of 2017 working on her next book while guarding the Mária Valéria Bridge between Ezstergom, Hungary, and Štúrovo, Slovakia. She lives in Portland, Maine.