m review - author interview
Author Interview: Marjorie Sandor
Interviewed by Alisha Sumpter
Marjorie Sandor is the author of two story collections — "Portrait of My Mother, Who Posed Nude in Wartime" and "A Night of Music" — and a memoir, "The Night Gardener: A Search For Home". Her short fiction has been anthologized in "Best American Short Stories" (1985 and 1988), "The Pushcart Prize XIII" and "The Best of Beacon 1999."
Her writing has been published in journals such as The Georgia Review, The Southern Review and The New York Times Magazine. Awards include a 1998 Rona Jaffe Foundation Award for Fiction and the 2000 Oregon Book Award for literary nonfiction.
Sumpter: Your story collection, "Portrait of My Mother, Who Posed Nude in Wartime," is centered around family secrets that are being told by Rachel, a narrator who has never received the "whole story" in regard to her mother. In "Orphan of Love," on page 64, Rachel speaks of a "father who couldn't end a story and a mother who refused to begin." You illuminate two types of secrets in this collection: the ones that are spoken (by the fathers/males) and the ones that are hidden (by the mothers/females). How did you decide to leave the mother's voice out or hidden? Do you feel this lends to the idea of how secrets are kept within families?
Sandor: I confess I didn't do it deliberately — and it's always a nice shock to see what comes across. But it does seem to be the case, doesn't it, that the fathers confess their tales, and the mothers "keep mum." On the other hand, notice that the storytelling father is on his deathbed in one case, and a ghost in the other. So in this sense, the father has the motive and the luxury to tell his side of the story, while the mother has good reason to be reluctant: she's the survivor, still on the planet, trying to impart practical life–lessons to her child. She's the one who's going to be around to experience the repercussions of stories that are less constrained or less "appropriate" — those romantic stories the daughter is so hungry for. From generation to generation, there's a bit of the immigrant's carefulness and fear in the New World here: the mothers are too busy keeping things together to sit around spinning yarns about escapes and adventures and romantic interludes. In the end, whether they're kept secret or not, both parents' stories seem to me equally haunting to the narrator. One last irony on this score: in my family — for the most part — my father was the reticent one, and my mother the storyteller.
Sumpter: When you finish a story or essay, how closely does it resemble the idea that you started with? Does this change from start to finish excite or frustrate you?
Sandor: I don't usually start with an idea, so there's very little frustration on that score. I begin either with a sentence that seems to arrive rather mysteriously, a fragment of a story once told to me, and sometimes an image. If the story survives my frustration in the long middle period where I'm constantly trying to get the "right beginning" — a matter mostly of ear — then I feel a tremendous elation at the end, and the sense of having been taught something about the process of writing. That is, you have to put yourself under the spell of the story or essay, and let it teach you where it naturally wants to go. It seems that I have to learn this lesson anew with each new piece.
Sumpter: I read that you will be teaching a seminar at the Nebraska Summer Writers Conference titled "Haunted Houses" an exploration of the settings of childhood. Setting seems to have an important place in your work and I wonder if your initial work on these "Portrait of My Mother..." stories started with settings or with secrets? How did you decide to move between these two entities?
Sandor: The stories did actually start with a strong sense of place — of parlors and kitchens and bathrooms all kept dark, ostensibly to keep out the heat in summer, but creating this other effect altogether: of a weird lonely quiet, a place that to me speaks of lost stories. I don't know why this is, though our own house was kept dark in summer, and I was always struck by the shock of coming in from playing football in the hot smoggy Southern California weather, to be confronted with its absolute opposite: stillness, the cool dark, and silence. I think I was always trying to fill that quiet with stories, and imagining there was "more there" than there probably was. A romantic temperment from very early on. As for secrets: I didn't really set out to write about them at all. But I love them, because before you know "the real story," you can imagine almost anything to be the truth. And afterwards, there's always the hope of another version.
Sumpter: I know that you lead a hectic life (with writing, teaching, reading student papers, etc.); I wonder how you find time for your own writing when outside influences are vying for your time? Do you follow a discipline such as writing everyday, setting goals, etc.? Do you feel it is important for a writer to have a disciplined plan?
Sandor: I do. Ideally, two or three hours first thing in the morning make me feel almost sane. "Just show up," is the phrase I hear ringing in my ears on the days I don't make it, always for perfectly reasonable reasons — childrens' dental appointments, a big batch of midterms, you name it. But I think it's also important not to beat yourself up about it. As the Irish poet Seamus Heaney once said to me about novel writing, "It's a long road." His tone suggested, on the one hand, don't freak out, for God's sake, and on the other, you have a long way to go, kid, so you'd better stick to it.
(The staff of M Review and Marylhurst University would like to extend our heartfelt gratitude to Marjorie Sandor for taking time to speak with us... Thank you.)
