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I've searched high and low (well, for a few minutes at least) but I can see no sign that Jaimy Gordon has given any interviews since she won the National Book Award for Lord of Misrule last Wednesday (once again, here's my barely-pre-award appreciation). So instead, while you are waiting for your copy of the book to arrive (after the reprint), you can look back to a lengthy interview Gordon gave to the literary journal Gargoyle in 1983, as many folks have linked to recently (I first saw it in the Paris Review), and to a profile her local paper, the Kalamazoo Gazette, ran after her nomination. You get two quite different portraits of the artist, which I'm tempted to chalk up to two very different points in her career, although it could just be the difference between a literary journal and a local newspaper.
In Gargoyle, she's voluble and gleefully baroque, confident in her powers and even in her ability, should she choose to, to cross over into the mainstream:
This will sound odd, but I like having a mind, I like thinking, though I'm aware that I think eccentrically and often ridiculously, so that my thoughts threaten to isolate me even though they take shape in the common tongue. I do have confidence that what goes on in my mind, including but by no means featuring its review of personal experience, can be turned into something made of language that will be arresting to those who are susceptible to splendors of rhetoric....
In the past, as I hinted above, I have not pursued trade publication energetically, but I will soon, and don't expect to be turned away.
She mentions a book called The Adventuress as the book in progress she expects to make that pursuit with, but I'm not sure what happened to it. Did it become her next novel, She Drove Without Stopping?
In this year's profile, she comes across as someone closer to her own characters in Lord of Misrule, who have seen so many chances come and go that they almost don't believe the one that comes and stays:
"Certainly, for the last 10 years, I felt like I was going to end my career admired by other writers, but without much of a public reputation," she said.
"I'm getting up there in years, so I was really beginning to think, 'This is a career that is not ending with a big bang.' And I was just getting used to that idea. And all of a sudden, there was a big bang."
And, as many people have done with her underdog story but, understandably, with more depth, she recognizes the connection between her characters' stories and her own:
"What's really richly ironic is this book is exactly about that," she said. "It's about, as I say, trying to figure out what the shape of your luck on Earth is and, one way or another, come to terms with that.
"The best that most of the characters of the book do is survive, and some of them don't even do that. It's very much about courting that message from the gods that you were destined for something special, and most of the characters of the book have to settle for what they get."
--Tom
