Rachel Kadish              April 21, 2009

 

RK: So I felt like, what is it that in literature only tragedy is considered interesting? And it’s true all around, you know, if you wanna win- what are the movie awards, the Oscars? I always forget. I mean, the Oscars, the Grammys, the Oscars, I think. If you want to win an Oscar, you don’t write a comedy, right? You write a tragedy. Um, and why are we so in love with, do we really get, only get our value from tragic stories? Or are we ignoring the moral value that we get from happy stories and stories about happiness and the fact that happiness is actually very diverse. So I had my, I realized I was having trouble taking my love story seriously, so I went back and I rewrote the opening and I had the character take on that quote from [tall stories? Tolstoy?] and say, I disagree with this. And it was my way of saying, okay, now I’m going to take a story about happiness seriously, and see what happens when you do that. So that was my approach to that book.

 

But, you know, right now I’m working on some short stories and, you talk about things bubbling up, um, and I guess they’re two very different examples. One, um, my great-aunt told me a story, actually she wrote a story in her memoirs that I was helping her on, um, that was just two sentences long that I read over Thanksgiving. It was about what happened to one of her relatives during the Holocaust. And I found it so haunting that I wrote a story based on it over the next couple months. And it wasn’t, it’s not supposed to be the same character, it’s different names, you know, I changed a lot of the circumstances, but that was one of those rare moments where something very directly strikes me. And my only way to deal with it is to sort of push through it and weave it into a story.

 

There’s something else I’m working on now that I had notes in my computer for it two, three, four years ago, and I wasn’t ready to write it. And I’m ready to write it now and things that are bubbling up in it, I’m writing about things that, I mean, they’re transformed, it’s not my experiences, but I’m writing off of some experiences I had in college that were very upsetting at the time, with some misogyny and anti-Semitism on campus.

 

RR: At Princeton?

 

RK: Yeah, but I don’t- you know, it happens everywhere.

 

RR: But you know, how, how I find that now I see that, you know, Israel apartheid, we notice on you know, going on [BC?], things like that, it’s just, it is stirring up for me what happened when I was an undergrad and someone came to campus and was speaking about, you know, Zionism must be eliminated by any means necessary and getting cheered because he said Zionism, not Jews, so it was okay. And what it felt like to be a Jewish student on that campus. You know, I hadn’t thought about that, that happened in 1990 or 1989. I was sophomore or a junior. And suddenly I’m writing about it now in a different context in a different story with a character who’s very unlike me, and how does she get drawn into this on campus and how would she react to it. So these things do bubble up later.

 

RR: So, um, I- you’ll get fifteen minutes on the panel, and it’s the moment, the moment of creation that I’m interested in. There was something that Suzanne Hanser brought up here, I hope that it came across in the tape. It’s that the music was for her. That she always hears music and that performance was not important. The aftermath, the, uh, reaction. I think I may ask that question then, but, you wanna think about it now, and talk about it-

 

RK: Yeah, [unintelligible] the writing is the thing. And, uh, writing for the characters. And then, you know, showing it to a few writers I really trust.

 

RR: You have a writing group? Your own group, or-

 

RK: Not a formal group, but I have a few people I show things to. And one friend I sometimes do [unintelligible] with, actually two friends in different ways. Um, and there are just three or four readers I show things to, and really value their input on it. But really the process is the writing itself. And then if I go and give a reading that’s icing on the cake, that’s great. That feels like, here’s this thing I made, you know, I’m sharing it.

 

RR: And then afterwards people come up and do they understand, or do they-

 

RK: You know, I think so, I think people sometimes are moved by it, but you know, you never know, but the writing is a funny thing, it um, things bubble up.

 

RR: I think she wants the room, but I’m gonna ask you, is there a question I should have asked you, is there something that comes to mind that you wanna say about the process?

 

RK: I think, you know, if you ask about a specific piece of work and where it was generated from and how it grew from there then I can sort of weave a lot of things in.

 

RR: Okay. Usually on the panel I would say, take one piece, start from and go right through, so one would be fine, gotta have fifteen minutes, and it’s the spark, it’s the process. Okay, is it a wrap?

 

RK: I think so. So at the panel and stuff you’ll ask, you’ll just sort of ask that question and then I’ll go for fifteen minutes, or-

 

RR: I don’t know yet.

 

[END]