In the process of writing your book, what did you discover, what, if anything, surprised you?
Hanya Yanagihara (Fiction): One of the less-discussed perks (if one could call it that) of writing fiction is that affords you a perfectly good excuse to ask people all sorts of nosy questions about their jobs. Work – how it gives us an identity, how it gives our lives shape, how it can offer us a different way of seeing ourselves, and others to see us – is an important part of A LITTLE LIFE, and interviewing people (friends and friends of friends) about their careers in architecture, film, and the law was one of the book’s great pleasures. I was surprised, again and again, by my interviewees’ passion and eloquence and generosity, and fascinated by their descriptions of the various micro-societies in which they spent their working lives.
Rowan Ricardo Phillips (Poetry): I had never gone away to work on a book and I discovered in the process of writing Heaven that it suited to me. The isolation of the Colorado mountains, the absence of internet, the total surround of the natural world from sun up to sun down and then after in the star-studded night and snow, the always-one-step-ahead-of-you animals with their inherited daily routines––what surprised me was how much it reminded me of a city and how much, as a writer born in the city, I found more and more of myself in that natural world, how estranging and yet familiar it felt, and how there was nothing I wanted to do but read and write and look out onto that world because I knew I was witnessing a part of heaven and the refusal of heaven and I was fortunate and enhanced to hear it talk back to me.
Jane Hirshfield (Poetry): Any poem is a flushed covey of surprises. I don’t write a poem to set down something already known, I write to let a deepened attention and language itself unpeel something I don’t. And I write to find my way to that unpeeling. The last poem in The Beauty has some lines that come close to describing the sensation: “taking off the third skin, / taking off the fourth.” Every poem surprises me. If it doesn’t, it’s not yet a poem. If it doesn’t have to, it doesn’t need to be a poem.What did I discover in writing the poems of The Beauty, and then also in assembling them into the book? The answer is multiple. The degree to which war-grief is present—that grief now darkens three successive books of poems. That a new sense of stock-taking has entered my work—I’ve passed sixty, and a word that has come more frequently into my poems’ vocabulary is the word “fate.” In past books I’ve at times pondered fate in terms of others—how accidents of circumstance, place, and time govern all lives, how my own relatively good luck is not a matter of justice or merit. Now added to that is the more personal sense of the arc and pattern of my life. There are things I will not be able to go back and change, and some of the additions and subtractions of my life have had a line drawn under their figuring. One aesthetic discovery: the surreal and the strange have entered my pen much more. I’m more drawn to things can only be said by lifting from the realms of the paradoxical, implausible, impossible. This book also has more sense of the comic and what can only be said by its tongue. But I want to go back to fate, a word that is perhaps the book’s North star, beginning with its opening poem, “Fado”— a fado is a Portuguese song-form of love, longing, and outcastness. The word also means, simply, “fate.” That poem holds my sense of the interconnection of one person’s life, its course and perceptions and implausibilities, and the life of all… how, in unknowable ways, they are tied together, That the singer is in a wheelchair surprised me—but why not? Some of us are. This is not meant to be taken as any metaphor for woundedness—that reading of the image would rather appall me. It feels to me something more peripheral and matter of fact: things happen, blows come, and yet they are not always the central matter. As The Beauty’s title – especially when coupled with its cover image – implies, I find in the marriage of what is marred, flawed, and grievous to what is astonishing and numinous the only recourse we have against despair, numbness, and apathy. Poetry offers a way to say a more capacious yes to whatever in life is unanswerable by other means. It offers a navigation that does not make simple or blunt or superficial what is complex— which is any moment of a life, if you look closely. The relationship you have with the bones inside your hand. The humbling that accompanies any trip to the dentist. The alteration that enters when hunger is named as “fasting.” The poems in this book are a seismograph of such small and intimate recognitions as much as they are of larger personal events and shared cultural questions. My muse wants to investigate the full kaleidoscope of a human life. But I never have any idea of how that will happen. The poem itself tells me. That’s where the surprise lives.