Entrevista a Richard Ford (en inglés)

Richard Ford

Sacado de aquí

One on One with Richard Ford

Dave Weich, Powells.com

Before Richard Ford published Independence Day, the first novel to win both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, he twice read its seven hundred pages aloud to his wife, correcting rhythmical miscues and shades of connotation. Such are the lengths to which an author will go so readers meeting his sentences on the page will “think exactly what I imagine they would think.”

The son of a traveling salesman, Ford spent much of his youth living in an Arkansas hotel managed by his grandfather. After publishing two modestly successful novels he turned away from literature and tried sportswriting, instead, working for Inside Sports magazine until it ceased publication in 1982. When Sports Illustrated failed to offer a position he turned back to fiction. The result was The Sportswriter, which introduced readers to Frank Bascombe (who would return in Independence Day, and will again in The Lay of the Land). Soon after came Rock Springs, a stunning collection of stories that established Ford’s literary reputation.

In Ford’s new collection, A Multitude of Sins, he offers ten pieces “about the way people fail each other. Fail themselves, even.” From the simple, arresting vision of the collection’s opener, “Privacy,” to the consequential short novella at its close, “Abyss,” the stories dramatize private lives, couples coming together and apart, infidelities of both body and mind.

Dave: You wrote many of the stories in Rock Springs while you were working on The Sportswriter. Writing A Multitude of Sins, were you focused on just the stories?

Richard Ford: Exactly. I wrote “Privacy,” “Crèche,” and “Quality Time,” more or less separately. When I saw what those stories were about – they were beginning to add up – I thought, I think I know what kind of a seam I’m mining here. When other things came along that I could write (I was in a mood to write stories; I didn’t want to write a novel) I’d avoid them if they weren’t what I thought the collection was going to be about.

Dave: Do you see a shape when you’re heading into a collection like this?

Ford: No, I saw an aggregation of stories. After I’d written three, I thought that I would like to write ten. That was as much of a shaping as I saw.

A lot of people have said to me, “These are stories about adultery, aren’t they.” I never really thought that, and in a sense I prefer not to think it now. I never imagined it that way. Not that I argue that somebody wouldn’t house all these stories under a roof like that, but I thought they were about the way people fail each other. Fail themselves, even.

For instance, a story like “Charity” is not about adultery at all. “Privacy” isn’t about adultery in any way. “Crèche” is not about adultery. Those stories may contain a reference to an event like that, but I don’t think adultery was the enacting event that made them stories.

Dave: If you’re going to label any of these as “stories about adultery,” “Abyss” would certainly qualify.

Ford: “Abyss” and “Quality Time,” both of those.

Dave: And “Abyss,” being a longer piece and closing the collection, has more weight than the other stories.

Ford: And intentionally so. As I was writing “Abyss,” I saw where it fitted. I thought, This is the concluding chord. Insofar as all of these stories are about the ways that people delude and fail each other, this is the consequence. It’s the story of ultimate consequence for all of the other events in the other stories. It’s a falling into a kind of spiritual inanition.

Dave: Your characters tend to present themselves in groups of two or three. That’s the constellation that seems to work for you. In “Crèche,” a larger collection of characters is together in a car. As I was reading, it occurred to me how unusual that is in your fiction.

Ford: Two little girls, a man, a woman, and her mother.

Dave: Right, and it felt crowded to me. It made me stop and realize, Wait a minute, there are more people here all of a sudden. Is keeping the characters isolated a mechanism of control for you?

Ford: No. It’s something that’s entirely intuitive for me. You’re right – that is how I seem to work – but it’s not something I’m doing in any kind of self aware way. It may be that I feel most comfortable with those reduced character loads because then I can concentrate in the way that I’m most inclined, on the interior lives versus the surface lives of people.

When people like Tom Wolfe come along and say that nobody’s writing about big social themes and nobody’s Balzac anymore, nobody’s writing big sprawling novels of societal concerns, ebbs and flows, I always think to myself, Gee, that would be really boring to write, wouldn’t it? There’s somebody out in the world that thinks it would be great, but I’m just not that kind of guy.

What two people do in a room together seems to me to be the beginning of everything – everything familial, everything societal, everything political. Not that I’m trying to radiate out what I do with two people in a room together to the level of larger macropolitical significance, but I do think that’s where things start.

Dave: Independence Day is a giant book. It happens to be grounded in one man’s life, and our view is restricted to the point where his life intersects with society, but that novel offers a sharp contrast to these stories. The exhaustive nature of that book versus these self contained short pieces.

Ford: The stories are – in their affect, in their concision, in their conception, in how they get at what they get at – different. But that’s no big deal, to be able to write stories and novels. You can read both and appreciate them so why wouldn’t you be able to write them?

Dave: One of my favorites in this collection is “Reunion.”

Ford: That’s what I’m going to read tonight.

Dave: It’s a very small picture, but it opens up…

Ford: …much larger lives.

It’s funny, but when I think about the stories in Rock Springs, I know, because I’ve watched it happen, that they’ve gained a place in the literary intelligence of America – quite shockingly to me. Two or three of those stories get anthologized a lot, so they last. At least they’ve lasted for twenty years, which is a long time.

I read these stories that I’ve written in the last two or three years, and they seem so provisional. If I were to read “Communist” [from Rock Springs] to this group tonight, I would think, I know I’m reading a pretty good story and a lot of people have read it, but when I read these stories, I still have that feeling of Is this really a story? When I read this to you, I want to say, “Does this make a story?” That’s kind of how I feel about everything I write.

Dave: Is it the story’s age? Is it public acceptance? What makes it real?

Ford: It’s use. It’s the use that a readership can find for a story.

Over time, I have had people at readings and in other circumstances come to me and say they read a story from Rock Springs when they were in high school or in college, and what I mean to say is that I know those people have learned what literature was through the agency of my story. That makes me happy.

These stories, being so fresh, still seem provisional – until a readership finds a use for them. They would probably always seem provisional if a readership didn’t find a use for them.

I write stories so people will read them. I take pleasure and take a radiated sense of significance from not so much how much people praise me, but when they say, “I read your story when I was sixteen.” “I read your story when I was twenty.” I know what that’s like. When I was sixteen and twenty I read “I Want to Know Why” by Sherwood Anderson. I read “Indian Camp” by Hemingway. “A Rose for Emily” [by Faulkner]. That’s a use I had for them. Those stories stick with me.

Dave: You say you write them to be read, and it’s true that your books are a good example of fiction of the highest literary quality that isn’t necessarily off-putting to a typical, mainstream reader. There’s definitely an intersection. I appreciate that a lot, particularly as a bookseller. There’s a certain lack of use for a story that’s going to appeal almost exclusively to, say, a postgraduate readership. Which doesn’t make it use-less, but…

Ford: …it’s beyond us.

Dave: Right, it doesn’t make itself available to most readers. Whereas you do an excellent job of speaking to a large audience without oversimplifying. I read another interview in which you said that you want readers to read your stories and your sentences exactly as you mean them to be read.

Ford: And think exactly what I imagine they would think.

Dave: That seems to me a very difficult task if you don’t want to speak to a lowest common denominator.

Ford: The truth of it is, I think it’s just my nature.

I’ve been reading Libra [by Don Delillo]. A few weeks ago I read Atonement by Ian McEwan. They’re not alike, these two books, but they are wonderful books. Libra is a spectacularly smart book, and Atonement is, too. But I was on the plane with a guy today who was a doctor who loved to read. He was reading a Baldacci book. He said, “What are you reading?” I said, “Libra.” He said, “Is it a good book?” I said, “It’s a really good book.” And I thought to myself, If you read this book, you’ll stop on page five. And if you read Atonement, you’ll stop on page five. Now, I’m dying to read Libra – I haven’t read it before. But I don’t want people to do that with my books.

It has to do, in my mind, with the fact that writing for me is me working at the top of my abilities – because normally I think I’m right down in the warp and woof of ordinary life. Whereas I think a guy like Don is a real intellectual, and in order to make a book of his be as accessible as a book might be, he would have to do something he can’t do. I don’t want him to do it. I want him to write the books that he’s writing. But for that doctor from Escanaba, Michigan, to read Libra, something is going to have to happen that simply isn’t going to happen. I don’t think that devalues Don’s book at all.

Dave: He’s writing in his natural voice.

Ford: That’s right. Me, I’m always reaching up. Delillo, to do the same kind of thing, would have to reach down a little bit. And there’s no reason for him to do that.

He’s going to want to work at the top of his abilities just like I do. It just so happens that at the top of his abilities he’s a little bit out of the reach of that doctor, whereas I think at the top of my abilities I could maybe reach the doctor and also reach some guy who teaches literature at Yale.

I remember one time R.W.B. Lewis told me he was teaching The Sportswriter at the end of his year-long course in the American novel. I thought to myself, Son of a bitch! How did I get in there with Dreiser and all those others?

Dave: But I would argue – and I think on another day you might play devil’s advocate and argue, too – that your books, in some ways, are as distinctly as American as anyone’s. They cover an incredible range of geography, for one thing. And the people are distinctly American. I remember when Women With Men came out no one seemed to talk about the content at first; it was, Two of the stories aren’t set in America!

Ford: But those were American stories. Irrespective of what the mise-en-scène was, they were about taking Americans to a place where their moral qualities showed up in high relief.

Dave: There’s a line in “Charity,” I don’t know exactly why this one in particular stood out for me, but it seemed to be exactly the kind of sentence that teachers would use as an example of building scene and setting without diverting narrative momentum.

While Tom was talking (he seemed to go on and on and on), she was actually experiencing a peculiar sense of weightlessness and near disembodiment, as though she could see herself listening to Tom from a comfortable but slightly dizzying position high up around the red, scrolly, Chinese-looking crown molding.

The way that detail about the crown molding slips in at the end…it’s very efficient, a subtle means of building scene from interior monologue, and it reads as if it’s completely natural.

Ford: It means to try to be. That’s what I aspire to.

As a reader, I like to go into literatures that seemed stylized, highly contrived, full of artifice. Libra has a wonderfully stylized structure. It has a wonderfully stylized diction. I love that. When I was young and I tried to do that, however, I could do something that was analog, but it didn’t in essence allow me to channel all that I really knew. So I had to find a way of writing that actually took full advantage of who I was as a contributor to my own stories.

I haven’t read the review yet that’s in this coming Sunday’s Times, but apparently somebody [Colson Whitehead] took me to task for the very thing I want to do.

Dave: Which is?

Ford: To make all the words count, and to put the words in the right order. I don’t want to be e.e. cummings. I don’t want to be interesting because all of the words are in the wrong order. I want to be interesting because all the words are in the order that I think make sense to the reader. And at the same time not sacrifice complexity, not sacrifice good sense, not sacrifice felicity, not sacrifice intelligence.

Dave: I had a chance over the holidays to read The Sportswriter and Independence Day back to back. Obviously, Frank Bascombe’s career change is integral to the person he has become by the time we meet him in the second book, but elsewhere in your fiction as well, more than in most authors’ work, your characters generally grow out of their vocations.

Ford: That’s absolutely the truth. Characters to me, the ones I write, aren’t persuasive till I can postulate what they do for a living.

I’m sure that comes out of being from a family of working people. Being told all my life about what this guy did for a living and that guy did for a living, how he made his money, what he did before, what his aspirations were. That for me was the thing that made a person have a kind of anchorage into something other than the fluff of life.

Dave: How important was it to understand that Frank Bascombe was a real estate agent while you were contemplating a sequel to The Sportswriter?

Ford: It was only important in this way: I knew that I had to affect a change in his life from the first time I knew him, and I had to find something he could be doing that was plausible and that wouldn’t require him to go back to college or become somebody radically different.

To have him be a realtor, at least when I broached the subject, was a convenience. I knew some things about real estate, and very much like any writer sitting in his workroom, I thought, Oh, I know. I can make him be a realtor. And you think, Yeah, that’s good. You say it, and you feel it filtering into your brain without any details immediately presenting themselves. The decision says to you, Do that. Only later did it open up the possibilities to all of the speculation about national life, about the spirit of a community relying on its property values, all of those things I hadn’t any way to anticipate.

Consequently, when I began this third book called The Lay of the Land, I asked, What could I make Frank be next? And I finally decided that he can be a realtor. It seemed to me to be both plausible and to give rise to new speculative developments of his character. Obviously you can’t have him go back and do the same kinds of things – he has to have a whole different orientation to life, which is not difficult to do, really – but it wasn’t broke in the last book, so I think I don’t have to fix that.

Dave: What’s the motivation for going back to his character rather than starting fresh with someone else?

Ford: A Multitude of Sins and Women with Men were extremely demanding books for me to write. They took me into styles of writing, into formal decisions, into subjects that I had never really thought to write about. Settings for books I’d never thought of making mine. They were, in every way, excursions.

To write about Frank again is truly one of the pleasurable things I’ve gotten out of writing – that is to say, palpably pleasurable – so I’m writing about Frank as a gift to myself. I think it would be fun to write about him again and to see what my imagination can turn up for him. Who knows? Maybe I can’t do it. It’s always a possibility. Because you can write two doesn’t guarantee that you can write three. If I can’t, that’ll be okay.

Dave: Will Frank be in New Jersey again?

Ford: On the shore this time. Married, I think. Have left Haddam. This is much more involved with his daughter, Clarissa. Taking place on Thanksgiving in the year 2000.

Dave: A holiday again.

Ford: I gotta do holidays. They offer me so much. In particular, for me and the reader, a whole set of associations. If you write about Easter, if you write about the Fourth of July, something as important, almost invisibly important, as the temporal setting of a book…if the reader can say, “Gee, that’s a time I know. I have a whole set of memories and associations to bring to bear on whatever’s happening then,” you’ve got a lot going for you.

Dave: I was once driving down the Natchez Trace Parkway in the pouring rain…

Ford: From where to where? Nashville to Jackson?

Dave: Driving toward Jackson, heading south. A gorgeous road. An old blue Toyota had been left in the mud at the edge of a field bordering the road. When I passed, it was pouring rain, and a goat was standing on the Toyota’s roof, just watching highway traffic speed by.

Ford: It had probably been there a long time. For that goat to get on top of that roof signifies a certain indifference to the Toyota.

Dave: It’s a colorful place.

Ford: Most of Mississippi isn’t as park-like as that part of the state. The Trace goes from Jackson up to the Alabama border. It goes through the eastern part of Mississippi, which is quite pretty, but the heart of Mississippi for me is the Delta, where it’s all flat, looks like Egypt. It’s quite spectacular and dramatic. Verdant. Dramatic in the sense of seeming to hold something within. Full of conflict.

Dave: Do you find that drama in places you’ve lived more recently?

Ford: I don’t know. The drama that I, in a sensate way, feel to be in the Delta comes from history and comes from my particular position on that landscape. I wouldn’t try to write about it. It wouldn’t even occur to me to write that. But as regards other kinds of landscapes, I generally don’t feel that landscapes contain consequential drama. I think they can be made to hold it if what characters do in the foreground of them is dramatic. But for me, landscape is like looking at a postcard. It isn’t romantic. It isn’t imminent to me. It’s inert.

Dave: Would you say that a story like “Communist” could be set anywhere? I can’t think of anything that makes it distinctly a Montana story.

Ford: It could have been in Nebraska

Dave: Those characters are representative of how many people think of your work, certainly your older work. Richard Ford characters, Richard Ford settings.

Ford: Those are everyman characters. I was always kind of sorry that I got billed for a while as a Western writer, but it was a mixed blessing, obviously. I was just a guy doing what came naturally in the place and the moment I had to do it. I knew I was going to move on. I wasn’t going to leave that work behind, but at the same time I didn’t want that to be the signature of what I was doing. I knew I’d try to do something else. But if instead of moving to Montana Kristina and I had moved to North Dakota, or anyplace, I would have written stories that would have drawn on the landscape as much as those stories did, without trying to sum it up.

Dave: You went to the same elementary school as Eudora Welty, years and years apart.

Ford: Thirty-five years apart.

Dave: How did you meet her?

Ford: I met her at Princeton when I was teaching there in 1979. She came to read at Princeton. I had published at that time one book, and kind of thought she probably had known about it – and, because it was kind of a dirty book set in the South, hadn’t liked it. I met her when she came to visit, and I said, “Hi, Miss Welty. I’m Richard Ford. I’m from Jackson.” And she said, “Oh, really.” That was all she really ever said to me then. Kind of shook my timbers a little bit. Oh yeah, geez, I wish I could write a book that Eudora Welty would like.

I guess maybe we had very small contact after that. I published another book and she never wrote me a letter. I kind of always thought she would, in a way. But when The Sportswriter was published I did a signing at Lemuria, in Jackson. I was sitting there behind my little table, and all of my old neighbors were coming by, being nice to me. Nobody else was coming by. Suddenly I looked up and there was Eudora. She’d driven over to the bookstore. She had a deep voice – and I’m making her sound more imperious than she was; she was very sweet – but she said, “Well, I just had to come pay my respects.” And it was, I don’t know, just a wonderful moment to think that she had any respect to pay!

After that, in the years after – that was ‘86, I guess – we got to be quite good friends, and I became her literary executor.

Dave: Do you enjoy the editing projects for Granta and the rest?

Ford: I really do. They’re away from my own work. They allow me to do a lot of reading, which I might not have done. And they allow me to do something for other people. A life like mine, in which I don’t teach and spend most of my time doing my own work or nothing at all, I don’t do very much for people. I don’t have a sense that I’m a big contributor to the lives of others, and since I care almost exclusively, in a vocational sense, about literature, it gives me a chance to do something for my colleagues’ work.

Dave: Right now you’re working on The Lay of the Land?

Ford: I am this day working on the book.

Dave: You work while you’re on tour?

Ford: Yeah, it’s really fun. It’s nice to be on an airplane and write. Somehow you get in those public conveyances and all other stimulus goes away. Unless somebody’s sitting in front of me talking too loud, I can just work and work and work. I did today, and I’m sure I will tomorrow.

I first encountered Richard Ford’s fiction during my senior year of college when my Lit professor played a recording of William Hurt reading “Communist.” For years afterward, I read Ford’s stories and novels with the actor’s voice in my head. In fact (no surprise, really), Ford speaks with a soft, Southern lilt, nothing at all like the star of Body Heat and The Accidental Tourist.

Mr. Ford visited Powell’s City of Books on February 28, 2002. He read two stories: John Cheever’s “Reunion,” then the story of the same title from his new collection.

Entrevista a Isabel Allende

Isabel Allende

Sacado de aquí

Una clase de Historia con Isabel Allende

Entrevista de Laura Flanders/
Radio Working Assets/ San Francisco CA
WorkingForChange.com
Junio 9, 2003
Traducido del inglés por Ana Ugalde
Radio Internacional Feminista

“Esto es lo que sucedió con los nazis en Alemania… y la gente creyó que lo podía soportar. Si, lo podían tolerar siempre y cuando no afectara su vida personal. Tenemos que parar esto ahora. Tenemos que detenerlo porque se nos está saliendo de las manos. Este gobierno está haciendo cosas que no son permitidas por nuestra Constitución. Por eso tenemos que reaccionar. Por Dios, ¿qué es lo que la gente está esperando? Isabel Allende.

A la autora chilena Isabel Allende le tocó vivir una dictadura y ella no es de las que se va a sentar y mirar por segunda  vez cómo se roban una democracia.

En su última autobiografía, “Mi país inventado: un paseo nostálgico por Chile”, ella explora los recuerdos de su tierra natal, las lecciones de su propia historia y sus interpretaciones de lo que significa ser chilena, y ahora estadounidense.

Isabel Allende fue entrevistada por Laura Flanders y por la audiencia de Radio Working Assets, un programa radial con llamadas, transmitido de lunes a viernes en KALW-91.7 fm en San Francisco y en www.workingassetsradio.com. La entrevista se llevó a cabo el 29 de mayo, 2003.

Laura Flanders: Nos referimos al golpe de estado del 11 de septiembre de 1973 en Chile, que derrocó a su primo Salvador Allende y los ataques en esa misma fecha en los Estados Unidos. Usted dice que esas dos fechas, con una diferencia de casi 30 años entre uno y otro, han venido a representar toda una diferencia en su vida y que los ataques a los EEUU cambiaron su relación tanto con Chile como con este país, que es desde hace muchos años su hogar. ¿Puede explicarse?

Isabel Allende: Bueno. Un martes 11 de septiembre de 1973, tuvimos un golpe militar en Chile. Fue un ataque terrorista a una democracia, patrocinado por la CIA. Muchos años después, tuvimos un ataque terrorista en esta democracia, los EEUU, donde ahora vivo. Pienso que en mi mente, ambos eventos tienen un gran significado porque en el primero perdí mi país. Tuve que salir y viví en el exilio por muchos, muchos años. Y el segundo evento me hizo sentir que yo tenía – había ganado un país. Por primera vez afloró ese sentimiento; sentí que me podía relacionar con la vulnerabilidad que la gente estaba sintiendo.

Cuando vine a los EEUU hace 16 años, una de las cosas que le dije a mi esposo fue que este era un país muy arrogante. Consistía en una especie de optimismo infantil, una arrogancia infantil de que aquí no podía suceder nada, que todo el mundo estaba seguro. que podíamos prosperar indefinidamente y que todo sería cada vez mejor y mejor. Así no es como es la vida en el resto del mundo. Por eso siempre me sentía muy alienada. El 11 de septiembre del 2001, pienso que la gente por primera vez se dio cuenta cómo es la vida en el resto del mundo y entonces supe que con ese sentimiento yo sí me podía relacionar.

Laura Flanders: Cuando usted se traslada a Chile en los escritos de “Mi País Inventado”, la mayoría del libro trata del período anterior a 1973, en el cual, como usted lo describe, los chilenos, por lo menos los de su clase, adolecían de la misma negación, según lo describe usted: “ Nosotros los chilenos no teníamos ni idea de lo que significaba un golpe militar, pues contábamos con una larga y sólida tradición democrática”.
Y continúa diciendo: “No, eso nunca nos pasaría a nosotros, proclamábamos (señalando a las “repúblicas bananeras” de otras partes) que en Chile hasta los soldados creían en la democracia. Nadie se atrevería a violar nuestra Constitución.”

Isabel Allende: Pues sí, fue violada. En 24 horas, todo cambió. Puede suceder en cualquier parte. Sucedió en Italia, en España, en Alemania, ha sucedido en todas partes del mundo. Así que nadie es inmune a algo así. Pienso que es importante recordarlo. Que solo apreciamos las cosas cuando las perdemos. Eso puede suceder con la salud, puede suceder con la democracia. Eso es lo que pasó en Chile.

Laura Flanders: Tuvo usted conciencia, de manera inmediata, del cambio que había sucedido en su vida?

Isabel Allende: No. Todo sucedió tan rápido. Sucedió en un día, pero no nos dimos cuenta porque había censura. Todos los medios fueron censurados y no había noticias, solo rumores. Como teníamos una larga tradición democrática, pensamos que los soldados regresarían a sus barracas en una semana y que convocarían a elecciones de nuevo. Nosotros nunca pensamos – pienso que ni siquiera los militares – que pasarían 17 años y que tendrían las brutales características que tuvo. Fue una sorpresa.

Laura Flanders: Mucha de la familia de Allende – la más cercana, tal vez, salió inmediatamente después del golpe. Creo que usted lo mencionó antes; les enviaron un avión o un bote de México para que la gente se fuera. Usted no lo hizo. Se quedó, continuó haciendo cierto tipo de trabajo… ¿cuándo fue que se dio cuenta que tenía que salir y partió hacia Venezuela?

Isabel Allende:: Creo que fue como un año después. Me di cuenta… poco a poco, que había estado involucrada en cosas … por las que se podía perder la vida… como esconder a gente, pasar información fuera del país, tratar de llevar a algunas personas a embajadas para buscar asilo y ese tipo de cosas. Me fue dando más y más miedo. Sentí que el círculo de represión se acercaba cada vez más a mi cuello y hubo un momento en el que no lo pude tolerar más. Hubo señales de que me tenían en la “lista negra.” Todo eso eran, como dije, rumores. Nunca se pudo confirmar nada. Las reglas cambiaban todo el tiempo. La represión se fue haciendo cada vez más y más eficiente, más efectiva. Eso sucedió de manera rápida, pero por etapas.

Sabes, es algo muy extraño: se aprende a vivir con las cosas. Por ejemplo, si te quitan algo, digamos la libertad de prensa o… si, digamos que tu teléfono es intervenido y dices “Bueno, yo puedo vivir con eso” y al día siguiente te pasa otra cosa, y dice “Bueno, tendré que vivir con eso también” y así sigue la cosa. Y entonces después de muchos meses, te das cuenta que lo has perdido todo. Pero como que te has acostumbrado a eso. Y entonces llega un momento en el que estás hablando de tortura en el desayuno con tus hijos. Y de pronto estás ante esta epifanía o revelación en la que tomas conciencia de la clase de vida que estás viviendo.. . ese es el punto donde yo salí.

Laura Flanders: Al final, Pinochet sufrió las zancadillas de sus propios artilugios legales, dejando abierto el caso de los tantos, tantos y tantos desaparecidos; lo suficientemente abierto como para ser procesado. Cuando fue acusado, en América Latina particularmente, la expectativa era que la justicia por fin sería cumplida— y que finalmente se pondría un fin a esta cultura de impunidad. ¿Qué pasó con ese sentimiento?

Isabel Allende:: Bueno, yo pienso que sabemos que hay impunidad, pero hay impunidad en el mundo. Mire las cosas horribles que otra gente ha hecho – para empezar los Estados Unidos – , existe impunidad. Los que deberían ser castigados por sus crímenes no lo son. Y los que no han cometido crímenes van a la silla eléctrica. Así que el mundo es un lugar muy injusto y tenemos que vivir con eso. Históricamente, ha habido impunidad para la mayoría de los crímenes

Laura Flanders: Piensa usted que los estadounidenses en general sienten que existe, aquí mismo, una “cultura de la impunidad”?

Isabel Allende: No. Para nada. En los EEUU creemos que somos los mejores del mundo, que tenemos la mejor democracia del mundo, que la justicia siempre se cumple, que los malos siempre lo pagan, que los buenos siempre son recompensados, etc. Estilo Hollywood. Pero cuando analizamos la historia de nuestro país, nos damos cuenta que la mayoría de las cosas salen mal, muy mal.

Laura Flanders: Comenta usted que el 11de septiembre de cierta manera le dio a usted una misión diferente, una nueva misión… ¿en qué radica la diferencia?

Isabel Allende: Cuando llegué a este país, vine porque me enamoré o caí en redes lujuriosas de un tipo. No vine porque estuviera siguiendo el Sueño Americano. Ni sabía que existía el Sueño Americano; vine aquí con la idea de que en una semana se me pasaría el enamoramiento y entonces regresaría. Eso fue hace 16 años, él todavía sigue en mis adentros y yo me hice norteamericana.

Amo este país y me gustaría cambiar las cosas que no me gustan; pienso que tengo pertenencia y que tengo una misión. Mi misión es servir de puente entre dos culturas.

Hablo inglés y español. Escribo en español, mis libros son publicados en inglés. Todo el tiempo estoy con un micrófono, dirigiéndome a las audiencias. Por ello, tengo la posibilidad de hablarles sobre lo que yo veo en otras partes y que la gente de aquí ignora. Están desinformados o no les importa, porque no saben realmente lo que está pasando.

Laura Flanders: ¿Qué es lo más importante en la lista de cosas que quieres decir?

Isabel Allende: La paz. La paz está de primero en la lista, porque pienso que podemos ir a otro país e invadirlo y tenemos el derecho de hacerlo. Inventamos toda clase de excusas para hacerlo y ahora estamos inventando excusas para invadir Irán o Siria o lo que sea. Eso no es algo que podamos hacer con impunidad. Tarde o temprano pagaremos por eso. Y la gente tiene que saber eso.

Pregunta por teléfono:

Keith de Fairfax – ¿Se disculparán los EEUU?

Isabel Allende: No, los EEUU no pedirá disculpas y no se trata de eso. El punto es que no cometamos el mismo error una y otra vez. Porque lo mismo se hizo en Nicaragua y en Guatemala. Apoyamos a los “contras”, apoyamos a Noriega en Panamá. Hemos apoyado a los peores dictadores de América Latina. Hemos destruido gobiernos democráticos para instalar tiranos – la clase de gobierno que nunca toleraríamos en este país.

Eso es lo que necesitamos cambiar. Cuando sucedió lo del 11 de septiembre, por primera vez la gente se empezó a cuestionar “¿Por qué nos odian?”

Nunca se habían hecho esa pregunta, ni siquiera se daban cuenta de lo que pasaba fuera de aquí.

Para los estadounidenses, el mundo existe cuando estamos en conflicto con algún lugar. Y de pronto, Afganistán salta en la pantalla de TV y se convierte en un lugar. Y existe por tres semanas para luego desaparecer en la neblina. Luego emerge Irak para de nuevo olvidarlo y después nos enfocamos en otra cosa. Nuestro horizonte de atención es realmente pequeño.

Pregunta por teléfono:

David, hablando de La Casa de los Espíritus y cómo el fin lo desconcertó a él (reconciliación]

Isabel Allende: La intención de ese fin fue la reconciliación. Lo dice claramente el libro: no todo aquel que debiera ser castigado lo es. Y también dice que debemos sobreponernos… no podemos pagar con violencia. Debemos… nunca olvidar, y perdonar. Continuar con nuestras vidas. Pienso que eso ha pasado en Chile.

El final del libro fue realmente atacado cuando salió el libro. El tiempo ha demostrado que esa era la única manera de seguir adelante y de recobrar la democracia. Teníamos que dejar ir la idea… a veces hasta la idea de la justicia con el fin de mantener la visión en el futuro.

Sabe, esto fue hace 30 años. Me he encontrado con innumerables personas que habían sido víctimas de la dictadura. Nunca me he encontrado con alguien que diga: “Quiero violar al violador, quiero torturar al torturador, matar al asesino”.  Nunca. La gente no quiere hacer eso porque son diferentes, son mejores. Lo único que quieren es que se diga la verdad, que los muertos sean honrados y seguir adelante con sus vidas.

Laura Flanders: Usted por lo visto no olvida. ¿Perdona usted a los EEUU por lo que hizo en Chile?

Isabel Allende Los EEUU como país ni siquiera sabía lo que estaba pasando en Chile. Fue el gobierno. No se puede culpar al pueblo de los EEUU por lo que hicieron Kissinger y Nixon … o la CIA. Tampoco se puede culpar hoy a los EEUU por lo que está pasando en Irak. Porque la mayoría de la gente ni siquiera saben que lo que ven en la TV es un juego de video.

No sabemos verdaderamente lo que está pasando allá. Como gente educada, tenemos la obligación de conseguir la información, pero no todo el mundo lo hace.

Laura Flanders: La noticia que me ha llamado la atención esta semana es la de Bahía Guantánamo, donde dicen que los oficiales de EEUU están básicamente planeando convertir el lugar en un campo de la muerte – con su propia línea de fuego (death row? ), su propia cámara de ejecución.

Se nos ha dicho que este es un lugar para 680 detenidos sin juicio, donde habrá tribunales sin jurados ni apelaciones. Inclusive hasta se habla de la imposición de una pena de muerte.

Según su experiencia con lo que pasó en Chile, ¿cuándo será que digamos, aquí en los EEUU,  esto es muy parecido,? Tenemos que llamar a esto por su nombre, y ¿cuál es ese nombre?

Isabel Allende: Bueno, eso es lo que pasó en Alemania con los nazis. Poco a poco, sin duda, fueron apareciendo los campos de concentración y los campos de muerte por todo el país y otros países también. La gente creyó que lo podía soportar. Lo podían tolerar porque no afectaba sus vidas personales.

Tenemos que detener esto. Tenemos que pararlo antes de que se nos salga de las manos. Este gobierno está haciendo cosas que no están permitidas por nuestra Constitución. Por eso podemos reaccionar. Por Dios, ¿qué está esperando la gente?

Entrevista a Ursula K. Le Guin (en inglés)

Ursula K. Le Guin

Sacado de aquí

Driven By A Different Chauffeur: An Interview With Ursula K. Le Guin

An interview with Nick Gevers

November/December 2001

Ursula K. Le Guin has something of the quality of legend. She is the author of novels that are among the foundation stones of modern SF and Fantasy; her writing is extraordinarily wise and graceful, a salient influence on the style and subject matter of the speculative genres since the late 60s; she has won innumerable literary awards, and in the last twelve years has been revisiting in a fascinating manner the fictional milieux that generated her early and her lasting fame…

Le Guin wears many creative hats: as poet, essayist, translator, writer for young children, illustrator, mainstream literary author; but it is surely in her Fantasy and SF that her especial genius resides. Her two great series, the Earthsea and Ekumenical tales, are ample evidence of that. Earthsea, many-isled realm of composed and chthonic magics, of dragons and wizards, of frail arrogance and vast humility, was initially explored in the seminal volumes A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), The Tombs of Atuan (1971), and The Farthest Shore (1972); belated additions are Tehanu (1990), Tales From Earthsea (2001), and The Other Wind (2001). The Ekumenical or Hainish Cycle is complex SF, rich in utopian surmise and anthropological reflection; an initial trilogy of interrelated long novellas, Rocannon’s World (1966), Planet of Exile (1966), and City of Illusions (1967), was followed by the major novels The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and The Dispossessed (1974), the Vietnam War allegory The Word for World is Forest (1976), and several notable stories in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (1975); in recent years, the collections A Fisherman of the Inland Sea (1994), Four Ways to Forgiveness (1995), and The Birthday of the World (2002), along with the novel The Telling (2000), have exhibited the continued vitality of the Ekumen as a laboratory for sociological and gender thought-experiments. Le Guin’s non-series novels, such as The Lathe of Heaven (1971) and Always Coming Home (1985), are of major significance also, but as her recent work is largely pre-occupied with matters of Ekumen and Earthsea, it is there that the emphasis of this interview naturally falls.

I interviewed Ursula Le Guin by letter in November/December of 2001, in anticipation of the publication of her major new collection, The Birthday of the World and Other Stories, by Harper Collins US in March 2002. Le Guin is a subtly but firmly opinionated writer, and I posed her some deliberately provocative questions. She responded with all the vigour I hoped for, pouncing on many of my stated assumptions with the kindly didacticism for which she is famed. So: if some of the questions below seem naïve or crass, please remember, reader, that they were sacrificial in nature, and for all that, many people would agree heartily with their premises. Le Guin’s fictions are engines of thought, and much of that thought must run contrary to hers. — Nick Gevers.

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The Telling, Tales from Earthsea, The Other Wind, and The Birthday of the World and Other Stories: four major new books in under two years, including your first novels since Tehanu; probably your most prolific period since the 70s. To what would you ascribe this productivity?

This effect of immense industriousness is an artefact of the peculiarities of the publishing industry. I was writing along at about my usual rate for some years without being sure where to publish in book form (for various reasons — changes of editors, of literary agents, etc.). My new publisher, Harcourt, once they got onto me, were eager to print everything I gave them in very short order; and then my old publisher, Harper, suddenly decided I was still alive. So I end up with four books in two years (five, counting a long-delayed kid’s book, Tom Mouse, to come out in March.)Two of these new books assemble stories I wrote in the 90s but didn’t include in my 90s collections A Fisherman of the Inland Sea, Unlocking the Air, Searoad [1991], and Four Ways to Forgiveness. (Those last two, being story-suites, count, in my mind, pretty much the same as novels. Similarly, Tales from Earthsea isn’t a novel, but it carries the Earthsea series from Tehanu to The Other Wind without a break.) Then the two novels, The Telling and The Other Wind, came one right after the other at the end of the decade. One came slow, the other fast.

The hallmark of your work over the last decade has been a return to, a revisioning of, your original Hainish and Earthsea sequences. One should never speak too soon, but do you think you’ve now finished with Earthsea and the Ekumen, rounded them off conclusively?

Earthsea got revisited and revisioned, and certain obscurities were made clear. The Ekumen worlds merely got further explored, it seems to me.I don’t know that I’ve finished anything. Certainly not the Ekumen, which has no shape and, therefore, no end.

I seem to tend to avoid conclusive conclusions, as it were, she said, evasively and inconclusively. I like to leave doors open.

Your newest works have a strong reconciliatory air: not a compromise with patriarchy and tyranny, but a bringing together of masculine and feminine elements that seemed mutually alienated in your middle-period works like Always Coming Home and Tehanu. Have you mellowed? Or has your ideological emphasis simply shifted?

Thank you; I like “reconciliatory not compromising.”But I wonder why you find masculine and feminine elements “alienated” in Tehanu and not in A Wizard of Earthsea and The Farthest Shore, books which have no female characters of any importance. Absence is not alienation?

Tehanu is the beginning of a genuine reconciliation. The first steps are the hard ones.

As for the masculine and feminine elements in Always Coming Home, my own opinion is that it’s in that book, of all my works, that the reunion, cooperation, harmony of the genders (among the Kesh) reach perhaps the highest degree. Of course, this would not be visible to people who perceive gender harmony only as a result of either one being superior to or dominating the other. Such people insist on describing Kesh society as “matriarchal”, which is nonsense. Apparently their logic is: if it isn’t patriarchal, it has to be matriarchal. Hierarchism dies very hard, doesn’t it?

As for mellowing, I’d like to be good-natured and open-minded, but certainly do not want to mellow into mere mushiness. Like pears that rot from the inside. I’d rather be like Cabemet. Except that would involved staying bottled up for years…

As for ideology, the hell with it. All of it.

In line with the previous question: your style has shifted with time, from a rich mythic/epic register early on to the spare, precisely honed diction of your 80s work. Now, the two seem to combine, alternating or mingling in a stylistic reconciliation. How deliberate is this fusion?

Nothing I do is exactly deliberate.But I do work very hard and consciously at my craft. At the sound, the flow, the exactness, the connections, the implications of my words.

A striking contrast between the original Earthsea and Ekumen novels and their recent successors is the latter’s move from action to observation: The Telling and The Other Wind are contemplative and discursive rather than plot-driven. Why is this?

Probably because I was getting into my seventies when I wrote them. There is something about one’s body as it gets around seventy years old that induces — strongly — often imperatively — a shift from action to observation. Action at seventy tends to lead to a lot of saying ow, ow, ow. Observation, however, can be rewarding. As I never have been sure where my body leaves off and my mind begins or vice-versa, it seems unsurprising to me that the condition of one of them induces a similar condition in the other.Anyhow, I have never written a plot-driven novel. I admire plot from a vast distance, with unenvious admiration. I don’t do it; never did it; don’t want to; can’t. My stories are driven (rather slowly and erratically, with pauses to admire apparently irrelevant scenery) by a different chauffeur.

Ever since Always Coming Home, you’ve seemed to advocate a profound simplicity of life-style: communal, agrarian, sustainable. The Kesh of Always live that way, and then there are the folk of O, Ged in his goat-tending and turnip-cultivating retirement on Gont, et cetera. But isn’t this idea sentimentally nostalgic, and, in the wrong hands (Pol Pot) positively dangerous?

Could we have this question again? There is a genuine problem in it, but in its present form I cannot answer it; it seems to either answer itself or destroy itself. The terms are ideological and self-contradictory. A “sustainable” life-style is “sentimentally nostalgic”?A man in a non-industrial economy, who no longer has a source of income, but does have the use of a small piece of land, tends goats and (I’m sorry, I do not recollect any turnips in Earthsea [the turnips were rhetorical--NG]) a kitchen garden, poultry, fruit trees. What else would you suggest that he do, if he likes to eat now and then?

Of course the mere idea of the existence of a non-industrial economy may be what you are considering as “sentimentally nostalgic.”

The question of nostalgia deserves looking into. Much fantasy, and science fiction too, draws upon an apparently inalterable human longing for “the peaceable kingdom,” the garden Voltaire suggested we cultivate. But terms must be used carefully and respectfully in such a discussion.

Any refusal to accept the abuse of the world by ill-considered, misapplied technologies as desirable/inevitable can be labelled Luddite. All genuine alternatives to Industrial Capitalism can be, and are, dismissed as “nostalgia.”

All ideals are positively dangerous. All idealists are dangerous: Pol Pot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jefferson, Lenin, Osama Bin Laden, Francis of Assisi.

What is endangered, and how it is endangered may, however, vary.

And there may be a difference — a subtle one, a crucial one — between idealists and ideologues.

The fate of Earth in the Ekumen series is not exactly apocalyptic, but quite bleak, blighted, and theocratic, as hinted in The Dispossessed and shown in more detail in “Dancing to Ganam” and The Telling. How close is this portrait to your actual expectations for the planet?

I don’t know. Sometimes I think I am just trying superstitiously to avert evil by talking about it; I certainly don’t consider my fictions prophetic. Yet throughout my whole adult life, I have watched us blighting our world irrevocably, irremediably, and mindlessly — ignoring every warning and neglecting every benevolent alternative in the pursuit of “growth” and immediate profit. It is quite hard to live in the United States in 2001 and feel any long term hopefulness about the unrelenting use of increasingly exploitative and destructive technologies: not so much weaponry, at this point, as technologies that could and should be useful and productive — fuel sources, agriculture, genetic engineering, even medicine. And, of course, we keep breeding.Dark visions of a theocratic world have been fuelled by the rise, during the last two or three decades, of the fundamentalist side of every world religion, and the willingness of many people to believe that fundamentalism is religion.

I might point out that the unhappy Earth hinted at in some of the Ekumenical fictions would be only a dark passage on the way to the very far future Earth of my most hopeful book, Always Coming Home. Believing that we have no future but that of high-tech development, urgent expansion, urbanisation, and ruthless exploitation of natural and human resources — believing that we have to go on as we are going now — people tend to see that book as backward-turning. It isn’t. It looks at, but not back. It’s a radical attempt to think outside current assumptions, a refusal of them. It’s an attempt to portray a genuinely mature society. To imagine a “climax technology,” the principle of which would not be enforced growth, but homeostasis. To offer not a mechanical but an organic model for culture.

The Telling could be read as a science-fictional allegory of the plight of the Tibetans under Chinese rule, or more broadly of the suppression of traditional wisdom under Communism of a corporatist sort, as in China as a whole. Does this mean that such traditional wisdom (theocratic in nature in Tibet) is infallible, or exempt from criticism in its turn?

Actually, it was not Tibetan Buddhism, but what happened to the practice and teaching of Taoism under Mao that was the initial impetus of the book. I was shocked to find that a 2500-year-old body of thought, belief, ritual, and art could be, had been, essentially destroyed within ten years, and shocked to find I hadn’t known it, though it happened during my adult lifetime. The atrocity, and my long ignorance of it, haunted me. I had to write about it, in my own sidelong fashion.I don’t know why you ask if I “mean” that any traditional wisdom, or any theocracy, is infallible or exempt from criticism. The Telling is indeed shown as a flexible and rather amiable tradition, very attractive to our point-of-view character; but she and I and they leave infallibility to popes. The Telling has no clergy, even: only people who take on ritual function at certain times. The tradition has no god, gods, hierarchical worship, or prayer. Because she is in the process of discovering it little by little, and because it is a badly damaged, currently illegal tradition, barely clinging to existence, Sutty has no basis from which to criticise it, and no particular reason to do so. But she does remain on the look-out for religiosity of the kind she knew on Earth, which she detests and distrusts with all her heart. Surely the novel does not show the Unist theocracy governing Earth as wise, infallible, or above criticism?

Your question sounds as if you kept thinking “Tibetan Buddhism,” and did not believe what I was telling you in the book. An example of why the practice of “telling” takes quite a lot of practice… as it implies listening…

The Other Wind completes a retraction or renunciation, begun in Tehanu and Tales from Earthsea, of the premises of the original Earthsea trilogy: magic itself is invalidated to a great degree. How do you intend the first three books to be read now? In their spontaneous, shall we say, majesty, or with the qualification of hindsight?

Well, Nick, and when did you stop beating your wife?The assumptions stated in the first sentence of this question are simply wrong, which means that I can’t answer but can only retort with questions.

Why do you say magic is invalidated in the last three Earthsea books? On what evidence? Because Ged can’t do it any more — one man, who gave up his power knowing what he was doing and why? Has the School on Roke closed? Have the Old Powers died? Are the dragons grounded? Is the Patterner not still in his Grove, and is the Grove not the still and ever-moving center of the world?

I will not say how I “intend” the books to be read; I have and want no control over my readers, except, of course, the sway of the stories themselves. Different people will read my trilogies different ways and that’s as it should be. Because the first trilogy is more accessible to kids, they may stop with it, and then come back when they grow up, and go on with the second set.

But if the second trilogy invalidated, or retracted, or revoked the first one, I wouldn’t have written it.

The second trilogy enlarges the first, which is very strong but narrow, leaving out far too much of the world.

The second trilogy changes nothing in the first. It sees exactly the same world with different eyes. Almost, I would say, with two eyes, rather than one.

All the books are, in large part, fictional studies of power. The first three see power mostly from the point of view of the powerful. The second three see power from the point of view of people who have none, or have lost it, or who can see their power as one of the illusions of mortality.

Looking now at the stories in The Birthday of the World: “Old Music and the Slave Women” is a continuation of the Werel novella cycle already published as Four Ways to Forgiveness. Is “Old Music” a similarly-patterned fifth way to forgiveness, or does it differ in its essence from the earlier Werel/Yeowe tales?

Thank you for talking about new and recent work. So many people don’t, and I do get weary of answering questions about novels I wrote thirty years ago! Of course, I have developed nice glib answers to the more inevitable questions about them, while I may stammer a bit about the more recent works. “Old Music and the Slave Women” is a fifth way to forgiveness that didn’t get itself written in time to get into the book. It is, however, a bit bleaker than the first four. (See above re Idealists.) It is a mourning for the horrors of war. Old wars, new wars. Goya’s wars. Our wars.By the way, I have finally come up with a name for books like Four Ways and Searoad — stories that are genuinely connected by place and/or theme and/or characters. Such a book is a story suite, on the analogy of Bach’s cello suites. The story suite is a common enough form, particularly in science fiction, that I wish (dream on!) could be recognised as such — not labelled and dismissed as a collection, certainly not as a “fix-up,” but seen as a genuine fictional form in its own right, conceived as such not patched together, and with its own intriguing and complex aesthetic.

“Coming of Age in Karhide” is an unexpectedly direct return to the setting of The Left Hand of Darkness. Is it a sequel to that famous novel, or more of an anthropological footnote to it?

Well, a short story can’t be a sequel to a novel, but it can follow from it (sequitur) — no? If it’s a footnote, I wouldn’t call it so much anthropological as sexual. It seemed high time we got all the way into a kemmerhouse. With a native guide, instead of a poor uptight Earth guy trying to figure out what’s going on and being disturbed by it…. Left Hand gives the reader very little opportunity to experience being double-gendered, since Estraven is mostly in somer; there’s only a brief, though crucial, scene involving kemmer, and most of that is from Genly’s POV. I wanted to explore it as a natural, universal experience, instead of a weird alien condition. Back in 1968, I and most readers needed Genly Ai’s POV to mediate the strangeness. I don’t think we do, now. (Si muove lente, eppur si muove!)

“The Matter of Seggri” is perhaps the most experimental of your late Hainish tales, a particularly radical and affecting take on gender relations. What inspired its male-scarcity scenario, and your decision to employ such a multiplicity of narrative voices?

I kept reading about how many female foetuses were being aborted in India, China, and other societies where the only baby worth having is a male, and about the future surplus of men and deficit of women if the trend continues. My bent imagination bent this whole scenario around and produced a great surplus of women, which biologically speaking is of course far more practical, but humanly speaking…? Well, that is where the imagination actually gets to work. Producing a story. A set of stories. As many stories as there are people… Hence, perhaps, the variety of voices.Many of my works since the 80s have used multiple narrative voices in various ways. I often find this multiplicity an essential tool to story-telling at this point. Also, it can lead, paradoxically, to brevity; and I’m very fond of the novella length. There is certainly material enough for a novel in “Seggri,” but I liked keeping it short, allusive, suggestive. Have had enough of novels where one voice yatters on and on…

The O stories — “Mountain Ways” and “Unchosen Love” — are (like the earlier “Another Story”) set in a society divided into two elaborate moieties and practicing a profoundly cumbersome marital system. Would such a four-person hetero- and homo-sexual menage be practical? Or is this “sedoretu” system a thought experiment, a satiric or parodic construct?

Well, writing the stories, I thought of the sedoretu as pure thought-experiment — a highly enjoyable tool for exploring human relations and emotions. I hadn’t exactly thought of it as satirical. We are so good at making life difficult for ourselves, not least by inventing almost impossible customs. Monogamous lifelong heterosexual marriage is such a peculiar institution that it hardly seems to need to be made fun of. But of course if you make marriage even harder than it is, involving four people instead of two, and homosexuality as well as heterosexuality, it gets even more interesting. At least, it does to me. But I find all cumbersome cultural constructs and customs interesting. I am an anthropologist’s daughter, after all.You ask if the sedoretu would be practical. I don’t know. Is monogamous heterosexual marriage practical? I don’t know. My husband and I have done it for forty-eight years, but that could just be luck, and a bit of practice.

“The Birthday of the World”: is this a retelling of sorts of the Spanish conquest of Peru? Does the story form part of the Hainish Cycle?

Certain aspects of the society in the story were borrowed from Incan Peru, and the absoluteness and suddenness of the social collapse resemble what happened to the Incan Empire when the Spanish came, but it’s not meant to be a commentary in any way on that society and that event. I guess it’s partly a meditation on the also noteworthy fragility of our cultural constructs. Whether it’s an Ekumenical story I honestly don’t know. It could be.

Who, for you, are the finest SF authors now writing — both your fellow feminist writers and more generally?

First I am to list fellow feminists and then… non-fellow anti-feminists? Come on, Nick, let’s get out of the pigeonholes. If feminism is the idea that differences between the genders, beyond the strictly physiological, are an interesting subject of study, but have not been determined, and so are not a sound basis for society to use in prescribing or proscribing any proclivity or activity — which is what I think it is — then I probably don’t read any non-feminist SF writers, these days. Do you? Anyhow, I hate trying to answer this who-do-you-like-best question, because I always leave out people I meant to mention, and then kick myself later. Allow me to dodge this one, OK?

You’ve been writing fascinating “Interplanary” sociological portraits for a while now. When do you expect to assemble these into Changing Planes? And what other projects lie on the horizon?

Thank you for asking, and for calling those stories fascinating. I have been afraid people might find them infuriating. They certainly exemplify my fine disregard for plot. Perhaps they will puzzle some of my critics, who treat my work as if it had all the comic possibilities of a lead ingot. Anyhow, the manuscript is out; it is in the hands of the agents, the publishers, the editors, the Fates, the Furies, whoever. I hope there will be a book of Changing Planes.But changing planes isn’t quite what it was before the eleventh of September of this year, is it?

At the moment I am working hard to complete a translation of a fairly large portion of the poetry of the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral. After that, quien sabe?

Copyright © 2002 Nick GeversNick Gevers, an editor at Cosmos Books, writes extensively on SF for a wide variety of publications. He produces two monthly columns for Locus, and his reviews and interviews have also recently appeared in The Washington Post Book World, Interzone (the March 2002 issue of which he co-edited), Locus Online, Foundation, and Infinity Plus. He lives in Cape Town, South Africa.