A Quote by Siri Hustvedt
I'd been writing poems for many years, but most of them I didn't like. Then, when I was 23, I wrote one I did like, sent it to 'The Paris Review' - the highest publication I could think of - and they accepted it. No other moment in my literary life has quite come close to that.
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I was writing everything. I grew up in Albany, New York, and I was never any farther west than Syracuse, and I wrote Westerns. I wrote tiny little slices of life, sent them off to The Sewanee Review, and they always sent them back. For the first 10 years I was published, I'd say, "I'm a writer disguised as a mystery writer." But then I look back, and well, maybe I'm a mystery writer. You tend to go where you're liked, so when the mysteries were being published, I did more of them.
I think you could say every pastor is writing this book, Max on Life; for many it just never gets published. All I did was collect a few of the questions I've been asked through the years, write up a brief response and put them in this publication.
We have just had the most amazing time. Every now and then, we'll come across a review where the person didn't like it and we're like, "What? Really? How could you not like it?" All of us like it so much, and we have such a great time at work. We've just been really blessed, and we're all standing here going, "Wait a minute, how did this happen?" It's been awesome.
I always wrote as a vehicle for expression but did not try writing for publication until my mid-thirties, at which time I started writing for magazines. I wrote essays and then short stories, then moved into novels.
My mother had died when I wrote my first book. I was twenty-seven, so it was right at the beginning of my writing life. I don't know if she had lived, if I would have done it, certainly not quite like I did. But, you can't rethink it. You wrote what you wrote, it meant something to other people, and that's your good.
Though it does seem like I have written an immense amount of work, over the years I have pushed the pause button. I have poems that I haven't sent out for publication, mostly based on political/social issues.
I always did drawings. Then, few years ago, I started working with large-scale paper. It's an extension of performance, because the pieces are the size of my full body. I use pencils, acrylic, watercolors, and I also incorporate textual messages. I did most of them in a monastery in Spain at the top of a mountain. I lived there a bit like a monk. I meditate quite often. At night, which is when I like to work, I like to think I have conversations with Francisco Goya. He died so many years ago, of course, but somehow, his ghost is always with me.
If you push in every time there's a big moment, then the tenth time you push in, you're not going to get the same effect. Or if you have too many close ups, then when you have a big moment and you want a close-up in order to make a point, it doesn't mean anything because you've already been doing close-ups. It's like writing in all capitals. Then after a while that doesn't mean anything. So, just because you can do something with a camera doesn't mean you should.
Metallica came along for me at a time and had an affect on me that I feel is the most pivotal moment of my life. I don't think there's been anything else that's even come close that's affected me in the way that that band did when I was a child when I was 11 or 12 years old, and where it went from there.
I think all poems are commissioned. They just come to me without somebody outside commissioning them. The idea comes and I will live with them 'til I get it as close to what I mean. I've never been totally satisfied. I've come close a few times.
I have been trying to think of the earth as a kind of organism, but it is no go. I cannot think of it this way. It is too big, too complex, with too many working parts lacking visible connections. The other night, driving through a hilly, wooded part of southern New England, I wondered about this. If not like an organism, what is it like, what is it most like? Then, satisfactorily for that moment, it came to me: it is most like a single cell
I've been writing fiction since I was a kid. From the age of 15 to 25, I probably wrote more than 50 short stories, one of which was published in 'The Paris Review' in 1989.
I still think 'The Lord of the Rings' is the greatest literary achievement in my lifetime. Like so many other people, I couldn't wait for the second and then the third book. Nothing like it had ever been written.
In the ordinary jumble of my literary drawer, I sometimes find texts I wrote ten, fifteen, or even more years ago. And many of them seem to me written by a stranger: I simply do not recognize myself in them. There was a person who wrote them, and it was I. I experienced them, but it was in another life, from which I just woke up, as if from someone else's dream.
I wrote those poems for myself, as a way of being a soldier here in this country. I didn't know the poems would travel. I didn't go to Lebanon until two years ago, but people told me that many Arabs had memorized these poems and translated them into Arabic.
In my life, looking at other women who have been pregnant while writing, I always feel like it's kind of their most musical or the closest to themselves. I think for me it's such a validating moment, you know. I always knew I wanted to have kids, and I've been making music all my life.
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