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For February we interview Geoffrey Dahlquist, our Author of the Month and author of The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters |
1. The outline for your story came to you in a dream while you were waiting out a snow storm. Did your three heroes take you in surprising directions as you wrote them, or have they stuck to your vision?
My initial vision was more about the texture and density of an imaginary city than any real notion of the story itself. That came – and with it, a deepening of each character – only one step at a time, very organically, but still as much out of the sense of place as anything else. But everyone carries all kinds of secrets inside them, so when the more extreme sections of the book did erupt from the woodwork, it seemed like a perfectly natural development.
2. The breadth of your imagination and the vivid world you've created in The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters are astounding. Where do you draw your creativity from?
Like anyone else, I just look at the world around me. Immensely complicated stories are around us constantly in life, and we all carry around our own private mix–tape of hidden worlds, which overlaps (both too much and too little) with the world outside. My earliest childhood memories are of making up elaborate scenarios to be acted out by whatever was at hand – stuffed bears, rubber balls, toy soldiers – and to this day I cannot see human society (or history) as anything but a seething collision of narratives.
3. Have any particular writers, artists or events provided inspiration for your writing?
Certainly I have been most influenced by the writing of Harold Pinter, but also Nabokov and Alain Robbe–Grillet. I'm an enormous admirer of both Stanley Kubrick and Jean–Luc Godard – who seem like opposites of filmmaking, but both partake in their own way of a very Brechtian esthetic that I find moving. The painter Velazquez simply stuns me, and when I am beginning a new project, I will frequently re–read David Sylvester's interviews with Francis Bacon, whose insistence on a combination of improvisation, instinct and rigor I find clarifying and inspiring. When I write I always listen to fairly loud music, and since I grew up in the Pacific Northwest when I did, this is a mix of the art rock of Bowie and Eno, the crunch of Led Zeppelin, and the angry exuberance of Gang of Four.
4. Which character in the book do you think most closely resembles your own?
Like any author, I'm sure I see myself in all of my characters. In The Glass Books, Doctor Svenson probably resembles me more explicitly, simply because he's more a recognizable human being, with doubts, regrets, and a certain attention to manners. Cardinal Chang and Miss Temple are each fiercer creations, one driven by resentment and the other by privilege, and because of this extremity, whole realms of experience are closed off to them. I don't think I'm quite so willful in real life, though certainly the (very tempting) impulse is there.
5. Glass Books is set in an unidentifiable Victorian city and its environs. If you had the opportunity to swap your life as a New York novelist for the world of Miss Temple and her friends, would you take it up?
Not at all – I am too much a creature of my time, and I think we view the past with any sense of romance at our peril. As rife with problems as our own world is, I'm sure the poverty, the smells, and the brutal and pervasive injustice of the mid–19th century were especially appalling. But on a more personal level, I think it would be difficult simply because of the technology I'm accustomed to: access to music, to performance, to news, to images, to sounds, to voices would all be so drastically curtailed – it would be a significantly smaller world. And perhaps also a more genuine existence – perhaps I'm only being shallow (no more electric guitar?) – but I can't think it would be a good fit.
6. The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters is breathtaking in its energy and climax. Did you plunge yourself straight in to writing its sequel, The Dark Volume, or did you give yourself some rest and recuperation time before taking up the pen again?
I took about 6 months off from writing, but it was a very busy time. I wrote The Glass Books around a full time job, and just allowing myself to actually eat lunch at lunch time and go home and read a book after work was a very nice change of pace. That said, I was also lucky enough to spend a month traveling – teaching theatre in Berlin and attending a conference in London at the LSE – and then another two months producing a play in New York. Once the play was done I blew the dust off my laptop and got back to it.
7. What are you reading now?
I am currently reading Air Guitar, a great collection of essays by Dave Hickey, an art and music critic in Las Vegas. I just finished a novel by Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, which I had never read, though a good friend adapted it for the stage in Los Angeles. Like all of Dick's books, it's very prescient, provocative, and quite sneakily off–hand at the same time.
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Author interviews
