NBA Longlisters Sy Montgomery (Nonfiction), Ada Limón (Poetry), and Nell Zink (Fiction) on what they learned while writing their books
In the process of writing your book, what did you discover, what, if anything, surprised you?
Sy Montgomery (author of The Soul of an Octopus): In the process of writing this book, I was surprised at every turn: that octopuses taste with their skin. That most of their neurons are not in the brains, but in their arms. That their touch–one that many naturalists I admire found repulsive–was so soft, and that their suckers–dextrous enough to untie knots in surgical silk, and strong enough that just one sucker might lift 30 pounds–were capable of great tenderness. But what surprised me most was that a creature so unlike us was clearly capable of forming bonds with humans, and that my relationships with each individual octopus changed forever the way I understand what it means to think, to feel and to know.
Ada Limón (author of Bright Dead Things): When I was writing Bright Dead Things, I was constantly trying to push myself to say what was true—and sometimes unnerving—for me. I wanted to be as bare and as honest with myself without losing the music and the lyrical tension of the poems. I’d go for walks or drives and ask, “What are you scared of?” and when I found the answer, I’d find the poem. What surprised me the most during this process was how difficult it was to write about happiness. Finding a language for joy was intensely hard. It was easier to go into the pitch-black caves, to plummet into the colder, harder core of the self, than to risk admitting that there is pleasure in this life, that being alive in and of itself is an ecstatic thing.
Nell Zink (author of Mislaid): I remember another thing from during the writing process (or rather, immediately after it) that really surprised me. (I didn’t mention it because I feel like I’ve said it in a million interviews.) It was how many things I got right. I remembered black classmates speaking a dialect I couldn’t make head or tail of, and it turned out I may have been in the first class to be integrated starting with first grade. Which is SCARY, because I was born in 1964, the last year of the baby boom. That means most white Southerners are older than I am and grew up in a world where you could go for weeks and not see a black person, and that’s what they told me when I asked them. Segregation totally worked. My recollections of the various legal stratagems used to dispossess black landowners were all too true. (There’s a nice Wikipedia article on the formerly black town of Grove, Virginia that lays out the basics. I named the housing project in MISLAID after the historically black town of Centerville, near Williamsburg, where they moved the black population of downtown into a housing prjoect while I was a student at W&M. It’s still there, unincorporated and nonexistent, if tellingly located at the end of Centerville Road, just so you know it’s been there since the 18th Century. Without existing, because if people have addresses you have to do boring administrative shit like count them in the census.)
alwaysbringabookwithyou
