{"id":5128,"date":"2012-04-01T00:10:11","date_gmt":"2012-04-01T05:10:11","guid":{"rendered":"\/nashvillereview\/?p=5128"},"modified":"2015-03-25T20:59:22","modified_gmt":"2015-03-26T02:59:22","slug":"an-interview-with-maile-maloy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/archives\/5128","title":{"rendered":"An Interview with Maile Meloy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Maile Meloy<\/span> <\/span>grew up in Helena, Montana, and now lives in Los Angeles.\u00a0 Her new novel, The Apothecary<\/em>, is her first for young readers.\u00a0 She is also the author of the novels Liars and Saints<\/span><\/em> and A Family Daughter<\/span><\/em>, and the story collections Half in Love<\/span><\/em> and Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It<\/span><\/em>, which was named one of the Ten Best Books of 2009<\/span> by the New York Times Book Review<\/span><\/em> and one of the best books of the year by the Los Angeles Times<\/em> <\/span>and Amazon.com.\u00a0 Meloy\u2019s stories have been published in The New Yorker<\/span>, The Paris Review<\/span>, Granta<\/span><\/em>, and other publications, and she has received The Paris Review<\/span><\/em>\u2019s Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, the PEN\/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a California Book Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.\u00a0 In 2007, she was chosen as one of Granta<\/span>\u2019s 21 Best Young American Novelists.\u00a0 Her essays have appeared in the New York Times<\/span><\/em>, the Wall Street Journal<\/span><\/em>, The New Yorker<\/em>,<\/span> Slate<\/span><\/em>, Sunset<\/span><\/em>, and O<\/span><\/em>.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Interviewer: When you started working on The Apothecary, did you know that your audience would be younger than that of your previous works?\u00a0\u00a0If not, at what point in the writing process did that become clear to you? <\/strong><\/p>\n

Meloy: Yes, I knew it was a kids\u2019 book from the start.\u00a0 But I didn\u2019t know any of the rules for kids\u2019 publishing, so I thought I was writing a young adult novel, and found out only after I turned it in that the characters being 14 made it a middle reader novel.\u00a0 But mostly I felt like I was just writing an adventure story about two 14-year-olds in 1952, and that would determine the tone and the content.\u00a0 I hoped it would be a book that people of all different ages could read.<\/p>\n

Interviewer: Were you influenced by any young-adult or middle-reader authors in particular? <\/strong><\/p>\n

Meloy: I think the Trixie Belden mystery series, which my stepmother gave me when I was a kid, must have influenced me, although I haven\u2019t looked at one of those books since I was 13.\u00a0 Trixie, like Janie in The Apothecary, is smart and intuitive and curious but also a real girl, not a detective-superhero.\u00a0 And because it\u2019s a Cold War spy novel, I had John LeCarr\u00e9 in mind at the beginning\u2014but John LeCarr\u00e9 for kids, which doesn\u2019t exist.\u00a0 I revere Philip Pullman, both His Dark Materials and the Sally Lockhart books.\u00a0 But I only really started deliberately reading kids\u2019 books after I\u2019d written the first draft or two.<\/p>\n

Interviewer: Having written fiction for an adult audience previously, did you find writing for a younger audience made the writing process easier, or more difficult, in any way?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Meloy: I think it opened up a new area of my brain.\u00a0 When you\u2019ve been writing fiction for adults, dealing with the real, hard facts of the world, it\u2019s very liberating to get your characters into a scrape, and to need a way out, and to realize, \u201cWell, they can fly.\u201d<\/p>\n

Interviewer: In some of your short stories, you open with pithy, fast-moving narration.\u00a0 For instance, \u201cFour Lean Hounds, Ca.1976\u201d and \u201cLovely Rita\u201d both cover major events and\/or relatively long swaths of time before slowing down for dialogue and scene.\u00a0\u00a0This stands out to me, because it\u2019s so different from the more conventional structure of covering narrative backstory within the scenes.\u00a0And yet it works in your stories, so brilliantly. How do you decide which stories merit that form? <\/strong><\/p>\n

Meloy: I don\u2019t really plan how I\u2019ll write the stories ahead of time.\u00a0 I can recognize when it works, and when it doesn\u2019t, I try to fix it or I throw it away.\u00a0 But I think there\u2019s really something to just saying what happened, to get the reader up to speed.<\/p>\n

Interviewer: One thing I really admire about your work is the way you foster empathy for all of your characters, regardless of their wrongdoings or poor choices.\u00a0\u00a0That is so difficult to do.\u00a0 At what point in the writing process do you find yourself seeing characters in a new way (either less perfect or more relatable than you thought)?\u00a0\u00a0Have there been characters you\u2019ve had more trouble cracking open to access that empathy? <\/strong><\/p>\n

Meloy: The most interesting characters are multidimensional, of course. I think flaws make people relatable.\u00a0 And I think close third person helps generate empathy for problematic characters.\u00a0 Some characters can tell their own stories (in first person) and we believe them, but there\u2019s always the possibility that they\u2019re lying.\u00a0 With third person, you\u2019re inside the character\u2019s head, but there\u2019s also a separate narrator telling you that this version of events is true.<\/p>\n

Interviewer: Your novels take on several points of view\u2014more than I\u2019ve read in any other novel I can think of, off the top of my head.\u00a0And yet, it feels very natural, in reading your work, to move from one perspective to another, and another, at a fairly quick pace.\u00a0 In your initial drafting process, do you jump around between different points of view, or do you work on one point of view at a time?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Meloy: I write the story beginning to end, and shift to the character who can best pick up the ball at that point.<\/p>\n

Interviewer: In an essay on place in fiction, Richard Russo says, \u201cI\u2019ve never written effectively about any place I was currently residing.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0Does this speak to (or contradict) your own experience at all?\u00a0\u00a0Did it become easier in any way to write about Montana once you moved away?\u00a0\u00a0Has it been at all difficult writing stories set in California?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Meloy: I\u2019ve written things set in California, but they\u2019ve mostly been set in the past, in cities where I don\u2019t live.\u00a0 I think Russo\u2019s right.\u00a0 I\u2019ve written a lot of stories about Montana while living in Los Angeles.\u00a0 When I was in high school we read Ursula K. LeGuin\u2019s The Dispossessed, and there was a line that struck me, although I don\u2019t think I really understood it then: \u201cYou need distance, interval.\u00a0 The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon.\u201d<\/p>\n

Interviewer: You said in another interview that you want to still be writing when you\u2019re eighty, which isn\u2019t something a lot of people can say about their occupations.\u00a0 What ways do you have of keeping the balance between work and play in the writing process\u2014because it can\u2019t be all fun, all the time, right?\u2014so that you\u2019ve arrived at this place of wanting to write forever?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Meloy: Writing is hard and sometimes frustrating, but when it\u2019s going well, it\u2019s great.\u00a0 I feel more grounded when I\u2019m writing something, and I pay more attention to the world.\u00a0 I become more engaged with the stories in books and movies and conversation, and with thinking about how they work.<\/p>\n

Interviewer: What advice about writing do you wish someone had given you earlier?\u00a0\u00a0(Or, what have you had to learn the hard way?)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Meloy: I\u2019m an obsessive editor, and try to make sure a book is really finished when I turn it in.\u00a0 But when it comes back to me in galley pages, typeset in a new font and with the margins justified, I always see things I want to change.\u00a0 So now, before I turn the manuscript in, I put it in a different font and justify the margins as an editing tool, to try to trick myself into seeing it fresh.<\/p>\n

Any way you can get some distance is good.\u00a0 Put the manuscript aside for a while, because time is the great editor.\u00a0 Read it aloud to yourself or (even better) to someone else.\u00a0 You\u2019ll see and hear things your eye would otherwise skip over.
\n
\nInterviewer: If you had to stop writing, what would be your first-choice dream job?\u00a0\u00a0(Nothing off limits.)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Meloy: Film editing, which is cheating because it\u2019s just another form of storytelling.\u00a0 Or fixing up old houses\u2014but again, you\u2019re making something that people will live in, and thinking about their experience of living in it, which is sort of like writing novels.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Maile Meloy grew up in Helena, Montana, and now lives in Los Angeles.\u00a0 Her new novel, The Apothecary, is her first for young readers.\u00a0 She is also the author of the novels Liars and Saints and A Family Daughter, and the story collections Half in Love and Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[10],"tags":[23],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Jypy-1kI","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5128"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5128"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5128\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11803,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5128\/revisions\/11803"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}