{"id":9210,"date":"2014-12-01T01:32:41","date_gmt":"2014-12-01T07:32:41","guid":{"rendered":"\/nashvillereview\/?p=9210"},"modified":"2015-03-25T20:39:26","modified_gmt":"2015-03-26T02:39:26","slug":"gish-jen-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/archives\/9210","title":{"rendered":"An Interview with Gish Jen"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gish Jen is the author of four novels, a short story collection, and a volume of lectures. Jen\u2019s work has appeared in many notable venues, including <\/em>The New Yorker, <\/em>The Atlantic Monthly, and <\/em>The Best American Short Stories. Jen has received many accolades and awards, including the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, a Guggenheim fellowship, and a fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Her latest book, <\/em>Tiger Writing: Art, Culture, and the Interdependent Self, is based on the Massey lectures Jen delivered at Harvard University in 2012. She currently resides in Cambridge.<\/em><\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Interviewer: Can you talk about your progression as a writer? How have your goals or interests changed?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Gish Jen: That\u2019s a really hard question to answer because I\u2019ve been writing for such a long time. As a young writer I was very focused on the making<\/em>. I wanted to get things down, to give them form and coherence. Helen Vendler wrote a wonderful book called The Given and the Made<\/em>. She talks about a writer\u2019s \u201cgiven,\u201d but also what the writer makes of the given. People can be given amazing material but the question is\u2014what did they make with that material? Now, maybe, I have more of a sense of wanting to open things up for other people. A writer makes a cultural space. And that cultural space can be very helpful.<\/p>\n

Many of the characters in your stories are first- or second-generation Americans. Can you speak to the way generational trauma or triumph affects the interconnectivity of your characters? <\/strong><\/p>\n

I can\u2019t say that those words ever crossed my mind, because I don\u2019t think about my stories in that way. Trauma wasn\u2019t a big word then\u2014it was 1986, pre-multiculturalism. I was more focused on the question, what makes something literature?\u00a0 I had the goal of writing a \u201creal\u201d novel.\u00a0 Almost every day someone would say, \u201cAren\u2019t you really writing immigrant autobiography?\u201d; \u201cAren\u2019t you really making something that is not artifice but artifact?\u201d I was very much focused on what makes something artifice and artifact, not just the facts of the matter\u2014like generational trauma\u2014or any of those things. For me, it\u2019s about all the ways in which materials form in a highly meaningful way. <\/p>\n

As I understand it, when writing Typical American<\/em>, you had not fully articulated the \u201cdual processing\u201d of the independent and interdependent selves at play in your fiction.\u00a0 Now that you\u2019ve defined them (in Tiger Writing<\/em>), do you find yourself paying more attention to the constructed self you draw influence from while writing? How do you navigate the boundary between these selves?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I think that I\u2019m much more aware of it in my day-to-day life. I\u2019m much more apt to say, \u201cthis is my interdependent part.\u201d It is very easy to know when I feel interdependent because I think that self is quieter. It is a listening self. And I see now that the listening self is part of my interdependent inheritance. Of course there\u2019s another part of me, when I\u2019m in front of the microphone, when I\u2019m withholding myself and it\u2019s not a time to be listening. It\u2019s a time to be speaking. In this way, I\u2019ve developed quite a strong independent self. I can feel myself shifting roles\u2014as a mother, author, and friend. I have to say that the interdependent feel in my work seems to happen unconsciously, that 90 percent of my writer self is independent.<\/p>\n

You spoke earlier about your revision process. You said you compose up to 50 drafts of a novel.\u00a0 I was wondering\u2014how do you know when to stop writing? When are you ready to say, \u201cthis is the draft that is the one?\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

You know, I keep on going until I can\u2019t think of one more thing to write. Or until my editor says\u2014\u201cAll right! It\u2019s time!\u201d My editor has described having to go to various cities to wrest a manuscript away from its author.\u00a0 So I know that if I don\u2019t give it up, my editor will be here to claim it.\u00a0 However, I have faith by the time my editor would want to do such a thing, that the novel really is done.<\/p>\n

What are you currently reading?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Mostly nonfiction. Right now in my bag I have Orhan Pamuk\u2019s Istanbul: Memories and the City. <\/em>I\u2019m about halfway through. It\u2019s wonderful. There are lots of pictures, so that\u2019s always fun.<\/p>\n

What is next for you in terms of writing projects? Any upcoming publications we should watch for?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m working on a nonfiction book.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gish Jen is the author of four novels, a short story collection, and a volume of lectures. Jen\u2019s work has appeared in many notable venues, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Best American Short Stories. Jen has received many accolades and awards, including the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, a Guggenheim fellowship, […]<\/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":[7],"tags":[23],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Jypy-2oy","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9210"}],"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=9210"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9210\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11787,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9210\/revisions\/11787"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}