This month our Featured Author, David Vann, answers questions from The London Book Groupies.
Q: Why did you introduce the 'new' chapters/short stories to surround the original short story?
A:I wrote the novella, Sukkwan Island, last. I felt I had been cowardly in the other stories and not come close enough to my father and his despair that led to his suicide. So I tried, in this fictional setting of homesteading on a remote Alaskan island, to discover that despair and know him better. I didn't intend the story to head in the direction it did, but it shows what I love most about fiction: its ability to surprise and speak back to the author, its unconscious patterning and cohesion and connection. This is what I understand as the "creative," and it's why I write.
Q: Some parts of the book are particularly grotesque, what was your intention behind this?
A:The brutality in the book is all a way of trying to accept what really happened, I think.
Q: The reader is repeatedly confronted with disturbing images and events and their expectations confounded resulting in a rather aggressive relationship between author and reader. What did you hope to achieve by this?
A:I never imagined a reader or wanted to do anything to a reader. I was simply struggling with my father. And my experience of suicide bereavement was fragmented. Each of us in the family had a different version of events we told ourselves for comfort, and none of these versions matched up. There was no truth to be found anywhere. So in the book, there are different versions of his suicide and his despair, written in different styles, a kind of debate that, taken together, represents the experience. And for all of us in the family, the debate continues. He won’t fully die until all of us are gone.
Q: Who are your favourite authors/who inspires you?
A:I love authors who find character in landscape, so I love Elizabeth Bishop’s poems, especially the ones set on the water, and I love Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News, and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.
Q: What research did you do for ‘Legend’?
A:I worked on Legend of a Suicide for ten years, and I talked with all of my family, but my stepmother was the most helpful, the most clear-sighted, and I also had my father’s suicide notes. I revisited Alaska many times. I didn’t do any research about suicide generally, or any other abstract research.
Q: Overall, what did you hope to achieve with ‘Legend’?
A:I think the only real aim in art is the beautiful. I was aiming for truth, also, of course, and for many other things that I needed personally in my own bereavement, but really I was trying to take the ugliest thing in my life and transform it into something beautiful.
