Lauren Acampora and Lily King: Divining for Treasure
We devoured Lily’s King’s atmospheric novel, Euphoria, in a single sitting; same goes for The Wonder Garden, Lauren Acampora’s debut collection of ruthless short stories. While the two appear leagues apart on the surface — Papua New Guinea between the two World Wars, an upscale, unnamed suburb on America’s east coast in the present day — King’s novel and Acampora’s stories share similar emotional terrain, with both writers tackling themes of exploration and obsession, love and thwarted desire. Both Acampora’s and King’s fiction feature characters who don’t always understand how they’re perceived in the wider world, and the tension between their perceptions and reality is unforgettable.
So here are Lily King — winner of the 1996 Discover Award for her novel, The Pleasing Hour —and Summer ’15 Discover pick Lauren Acampora talking about the importance of capturing time and place in fiction, getting the details right, and the “obstinate human impulse,” creativity, in this wide-ranging conversation for the B&N Review. – Miwa Messer
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Lily King: I’m wondering how you came to writing about a New England suburb. I know you grew up in one, but I’m wondering if you rejected it as material, as I did mine, for a while, then came back to it, or if you’ve always found yourself there in your writing. Place can have such a hold on a writer. For a while in my late twenties, early thirties, I thought I could only write about France, that that was the only place that really inspired me, that brought out my best writing. So I’m curious to know about your journey to this fictional town, how you got there and how it felt to be there during the years of writing this book.
Lauren Acampora: My hometown in suburban Connecticut has always had a very strong hold on me. My connection to the place is primal, colored by a child’s quasi-mystical view. I was a Nature kid, always climbing the cherry tree in the yard or playing under the forsythia bushes. I spent a lot of time in the woods, looking for turtle shells, divining for treasure, finding old beer cans that were faded like artifacts. That natural landscape still holds a certain enchantment for me, and I’m continually drawn back to it.
All through my twenties and early thirties, I lived in New York City, and although I had a roaring time, I never felt really at home. There was just too much to take in — too many people and stories intersecting, too many lives being lived in such close proximity — and it made me feel anxious and overwhelmed. I began writing fiction more seriously then, and that provided a crucial pressure valve for me. It allowed me to just close the door, shut out the multitudes, and create my own world. Some of my first stories were set in the city, but then more and more were set in the suburbs. I kept choosing that setting for my characters. There was an ache for the trees and sky, the smell of cut grass.
Finally, after I was married and pregnant, I moved back to the suburbs. I have to say, it’s been a revelation to return to this environment as an adult. Beyond simply reclaiming my longed-for landscape, I’m now better able to grasp the psychology of the people here, and I’m fascinated by the conundrums that arise from day-to-day life in this privileged pocket of the world.
It was great fun to write the suburban stories in The Wonder Garden while being a suburbanite myself. As a new parent, I found myself instantly and authentically immersed in the culture, and I was able to explore the new kinds of insecurities and observations I found bubbling up in myself. I’d sometimes capture a rogue thought flitting through my head, and rather than dismiss it, I would pump it up and inject it into a character — then see what dramatic situations arose.
But my fondness for my home setting may also be partly due to laziness. It’s simply the place I know best. As Nabokov said, a writer should “know the names of trees.” I only know the names of the trees in this very small part of the country. I know the smells and the sounds here; I have a deep sense of the atmosphere of the place, including a shadow of how it may have been long ago, its wild pre-Colonial history before the trees were cleared and the land was divvied up into parcels.
But all that said, as much as I love it, I’d hate for my fiction to be limited to this minuscule piece of the world. I’ve managed to write a few things set elsewhere, which has been refreshing. And I’m working on something now that’s set in a radically different part of the country. Unsurprisingly, I’ve been spending a lot of time on Wikipedia, looking up the names of the trees! I’m hoping I can pull it off. I admit that I’ve had more than one project stall out because I couldn’t physically spend time in the place I was writing about (like Mongolia — long story).
There’s a point at which my imagination seems inadequate to fill in the details of a foreign place convincingly.
That brings me to something I’ve been wondering about your work. I’m struck by the incredibly rich sense of place you create, the almost palpable atmosphere, from New England to New Guinea. I’m sure you’ve been asked this question before, and I hope you don’t mind my asking it, but when writing Euphoria, did you travel to the South Pacific? Did you find you needed to spend a good deal of time there in person to capture the feeling of the place, the details, the names of trees — to create that setting with the same confidence as New England and France? Or did you mainly stick to research and let your imagination spring from that?
LK: I’m always a bit uneasy with this question because this is the first thing I’ve written for which I did not have any direct, hands-on familiarity of the place where it was set. I have never been to the South Pacific. To write Euphoria I did a lot of armchair traveling to Papua New Guinea. I read about the landscape, the tribes, the flora and fauna, the waterways. I read anthropological studies, memoirs, travelogues, histories, natural histories. I read as much as I could get my hands on. I often looked at how I might get there myself, websites that offered cruises up the Sepik River and promised trips into villages. But my children were four and six when I started researching this book. I don’t like to go down to Boston for the night without them, let alone fly across the globe for two weeks. Plus it would have been astronomically expensive. I didn’t have the money, and I had no guarantee that I would be able to write this book — it was nothing like anything I’d done before — and far less of a guarantee that I could make that money back with it. So I stayed in my attic in Maine and imagined heat and crocodiles and sago pancakes. I only had one experience to draw from, and that was a trip my husband and I took to Peru and to the Amazon nearly twenty years ago, before we got married. But all I remembered writing on that trip was one letter to my sister fretting about the relationship, trying to figure out what he was really feeling, because he’d gotten so quiet and I didn’t know how to interpret it. I did remember the heat and the humidity and what it felt like to walk through a jungle in which you knew there were snakes and insects that could kill you on the spot. Recently I had to go to California for work, and when I was through with my events, my family met me there and we flew to Hawaii. I found it almost painful to be there. I was on an island in the Pacific Ocean, as close to PNG as I’d ever gotten, and I couldn’t use any of the details. The novel had already been published. But the truth about fiction is that you don’t need a plethora of detail. You just need a few of the right details. One good detail will make a face, a river, a tragic moment come to life. So in my research I was just looking for those details, the ones that jumped out at me and helped me set a scene or feel a moment. I worked with those details; they sparked my imagination and helped me see into little corners of this world I was trying to create.
I’ve been thinking about what you said about place. You have several characters who love Old Cranbury not so much for its present but its past. You might call them slightly obsessed with, or nearly imprisoned by, the past. I think many people move back to small towns not only because it might be familiar to them but because it feels more like the past. Time doesn’t seem to move as quickly there; there’s almost a buffer from the onslaught of the present. I’m wondering about your own relationship with the past, personal and historical, and how it might have shaped this book.
LA: Oh, this was just the answer I was hoping for! What an achievement to have brought the setting of Euphoria to life from your attic in Maine, and rendered it so absolutely transporting. There is such authority in the description that I thought for certain you must have spent months there, and I was getting ready to drag myself over the coals for not having figured out a way to get to Mongolia when I had an infant. But what you say is so true, that “you just need a few of the right details.” In fact, what I often dislike about historical fiction is an author’s insistence on using everything he or she has learned, bogging the story down. One of the things I love most about Euphoria is that it feels so immediate — it’s written with the lightness and urgency of a story set in the present day — and becomes completely absorbing.
LA: In Father of the Rain, too, you’ve created such a full, engrossing world that I felt as if I’d adopted that character’s life and was almost disoriented when I re-entered my own. The story of Daley returning to her childhood home and getting stuck there — sucked in by the gravitational pull of her past and her father’s charisma — was actually quite unsettling to me.
In fact, your question about the past has struck a sensitive chord. It’s spooky that you ask it now, because the topic has been on my mind just this week. I went back to my hometown the other day, and was surprised at the emotional impact it had. I don’t think of myself as someone who clings to the past, and I rarely feel nostalgia for my hometown. And yet I wasn’t prepared for how drastically the place has changed in the twenty-odd years since I left. The library and high school have both been leveled and replaced with elegant new buildings. Old houses have been razed to make way for new ones, and the stately ones have grown even statelier. In short, the wealth of the community — always impressive — has rocketed out of the atmosphere. Of course I knew this to be happening over time, but something about visiting this week really hit me. The gates of the place felt tightly locked; there is no chance of return. And there was a moment when, exiting the new library, I came across a sculpture of a heron that had once stood outside the old building. Seeing that heron, it all flooded back in a Proustian instant — the feeling of being a child at the library; the rocky tide pools at the beach; the smell of turpentine in my father’s art studio; all the textures of the town as it used to be — and I felt a sharp sense of loss.
Driving home, I thought about how the longtime residents of my current town must also bemoan the defunct shops and landmarks, complain about how all the old textures have been polished away. It happens to every generation. Of course it’s a human trait to imbue places, objects, even people, with totemic, emotional significance. Perhaps we all want to recapture something of the past, whether we know it or not.
And so your question is remarkably perceptive. I hadn’t really thought of entanglement with the past as a thread through The Wonder Garden, but you’re right. Desperation to achieve the impossible is often what drives — and warps — the characters I create; it’s what brings them to a dramatic point of pathos and sometimes transgression. And the attempt to preserve or reclaim the past is certainly what motivates many in this book. Thank you for bringing this to my attention!
In fact, it occurs to me that many of my favorite novels are concerned with salvaging the past. The Great Gatsby, Lolita, To the Lighthouse, and most recently, The Goldfinch. And, of course, In Search of Lost Time. John Cheever’s short stories also deal very much with it.
Now I have to ask whether you’re able to detect unifying themes in your own canon of best-loved books that may or may not tie into your own work. Which books have stayed with you over the years? What kind of work do you gravitate toward; what most nourishes you as a writer? What do you open when you need a jolt?
LK: So interesting. All the same things have happened to my hometown, and to my high school, and to so many places I’ve lived. I spent two years in Palo Alto before the Internet boom. Even then it was the fanciest place I’d ever lived. I haven’t been back since but can only imagine the transformation. Time moves on and we are left clutching our little scraps of memories. I am quite obsessed with the passage of time in literature. To the Lighthouse, In Search of Lost Time, many novels by Faulkner, and more recently the work of Tóibín and Jane Gardam in particular satisfy this fascination. Gardam’s Old Filth is my idea of a perfect book, one that worries and worries a particular event in the past until finally comes free and into the light, fully exposed. I love that and it is so hard to do it well because the idea of someone having a secret in their past can easily be cliched and irritating, but done well the reader can enjoy the circling around it and not feel that it is being withheld but that the character has to move toward it slowly, and that it isn’t just a small little event but that the whole life that has been withheld and now is being lured out. I love huge leaps of time in fiction, love seeing characters at different stages, seeing how their relationships have played out. I recently read the novel Clever Girl by Tessa Hadley, another of my favorites, and the structure alone gave me so much pleasure as we followed this girl from childhood through middle age, through what might seem on the outside an unexceptional life but given our vantage point was rich and dramatic, an accumulation of moments that looped back and reverberated and were attached each to each to build something spectacular and surprising, yet, as I said, from the outside quite unremarkable. I have another favorite, The Evening of the Holiday by Shirley Hazzard. This takes place over the course of a few months in Siena, Italy, in the early sixties, a love affair between two people who cannot be together. It is never explained exactly why. It is a thin, stunning book and I wouldn’t have said it was about the passage of time but of course it is. I’m not sure anything isn’t really. The woman at the center is too young to be clutching onto the past, but the middle-aged man she falls for and her elderly aunt are both caught up in it, unable to see the present clearly through the web of their memories. To the Lighthouse, Old Filth, and The Evening of the Holiday are the three books I try to keep on my desk as I write, the books I turn to when I cannot remember why I do it or what good writing is. They remind and soothe me.
What about you? What do you turn to? And how did you turn to writing to begin with?
LA: Now I want to read the books you mentioned! I’m adding them to my leaning tower. Really, I despair at the passage of time myself, if only because I know I’ll never get to read every book I’d like to. . . . Because of that, and because I’m such a slow reader, I don’t reread things very often. I just dip into old favorites from time to time to be reminded of what great writing looks like and why it’s worthwhile. Flannery O’Connor is reliable for this. While I was working on The Wonder Garden, I had a half hour each morning between dropping my daughter at preschool and waiting for the library to open, so I’d sit on a park bench and read an O’Connor story. I couldn’t have asked for a better breakfast; once the library doors opened, I was primed and ready to go.
There are so many writers I admire, but I find that they’re divided into two groups. There are those whose work is brilliant in a way that inspires me, makes me feel that I can write, too, and prompt me to try harder. And there are those whose work is brilliant in a way that makes me just want to give up. When that happens, I have to run back to a known member of the inspiring species. George Saunders, Deborah Eisenberg, Michael Cunningham. And I recently read Donna Tartt’s The Secret History for the first time, followed quickly by The Goldfinch, and already I find myself opening one of her books when I’m feeling lazy, to remember why it’s worth spending time to find the right word, to carve the sentence more carefully.
And, it’s a little embarrassing to admit, but when I’m really stuck — feeling demoralized or distracted — there’s one funny little book that I can always count on to snap me into shape. It’s called Walking on Alligators: A Book of Meditations for Writers, and I keep it hidden in my desk drawer. I bought it on impulse years ago, when I was first trying to write fiction and was racked with insecurity. I had no idea how valuable it would become. Each page has a quote from a writer followed by a pep talk and an italicized mantra, like: Today, I’ll let go of pondering the greater meaning of what I’m writing. I will simply write the next line, and the next. They’re really good mantras! I seem to need them less often as I become a more confident writer, but it’s reassuring to know they’re in the drawer.
And truly it took a long time to gain the confidence needed to write fiction. I imagine every would-be writer needs to wrestle with the hounding suspicion that what they’re doing isn’t worth someone else’s time. I happily wrote stories as a child, but later felt that I didn’t have anything important to say. Instead, I wrote poetry. It felt less intimidating, purer and more playful. I enjoyed experimenting with the music and economy of words, and I enjoyed finishing a poem quickly. But the fact remained that I rarely actually read poetry. I was reading fiction. Eventually it became clear that I should write what I was interested in reading. My first efforts were more like elongated prose poems, but over the years they became less abstract and more like traditional narratives. Over the course of a two-year MFA program, I wrote a lot of dreamscapes, and only at the very end did I start producing character-driven stories. It used to feel that I had two different modes of writing, but they gradually melded into one, which I suppose is the unified voice I’ve ended up with.
I notice that you have a graduate degree in creative writing from Syracuse. I almost attended the three-year MFA program there, myself, but chose to keep my job in New York and go to Brooklyn College for night classes instead. As much as I valued that experience, I always wonder what it would have been like to have three years of unbroken writing time away from the city. But I also find that I tend to work more efficiently when there are other commitments breathing down my neck. I wrote the bulk of The Wonder Garden in two-hour increments, two or three days a week, when my daughter was in preschool. I’ve been to a number of residencies, but I find that most of my best work has come out of the daily grind.
Do you find that you’re been more productive in your writing when there are time constraints (i.e., jobs, children) or when you’re relatively unencumbered? What is your typical writing schedule like?
LK: I have to go out and get Walking on Alligators right away. I’m not sure writing ever gets any easier. You just get used to the rhythm of it, and life feels off without it. I went to grad school at Syracuse five years after graduating from college. I’d been scrambling to make a living while having enough time to write, and it wasn’t really working for me. The program at Syracuse at that time was two years and an MA, not an MFA, which meant I had to write both a creative writing thesis and a critical thesis to graduate. I wanted both sides of the degree. I was wary of the programs that gave you so much time to write and didn’t make you take a lot of classes. I knew that I wanted time to write, but not too much time. So it was a good choice for me. I made some great friends, got some valuable feedback, and read a lot of great books that I hadn’t gotten to in college. Then I was out on my own again, scraping by, juggling two or three part-time jobs, trying to make sure I preserved the early morning for writing. Now, years later, having married and had children, my writing schedule has shifted a bit. I’ve had to give up the early mornings, for the most part, although I am up early right now doing this. But when the kids were younger it was impossible to get up earlier than they did and stay sane. Now I write (and teach, but not all that much) when they’re at school. It feels simple now, but those years when they were really little and not yet in school, it was confusing. I wanted to be with them all the time and I wanted to write and I could never quite figure it out. Then they went to school and all was righted. I’ve always thought that when they go to college I’ll get some real writing done, but just the other day I was remembering how I don’t do well with huge swaths of time, and that I needed to stop with that delusion and do the real writing now.
Let’s go back to The Wonder Garden now. I see a theme, a big, roiling theme, of repressed creative desire, particularly in men. It’s sort of a pull toward nature and the creative impulse, and to give into it means destroying the comfortable, conformist life the person has built with a partner who is terrified of change. There are several men in these stories who struggle with this growing desire. I wonder if it’s something you were wrestling with yourself as you were writing them, and I wonder if that ambition does feel male in some way, if it feels like it threatens other parts of your life, and if it has been a struggle to find a balance between the urge to create and other aspects of your life.
LA: Your experience sounds familiar. And really, as clichéd as it sounds, it’s all about attaining the right balance, isn’t it? Each element of life is better appreciated thanks to the encroachment of the others. I appreciate my writing time more when they follow a hectic morning with my daughter; and after hours at my desk, I appreciate my daughter more when she comes home from school. She just entered kindergarten this year, and — oh, yes! — it’s like a whole world opened. At first I didn’t know what to do with all that time (I could write and read and take walks!) but then it somehow contracted again, and now the days fly by.
But it takes such effort to structure a life that both pays the bills and allows creativity to flourish. I’m married to an artist, so we have worked on this together, and (knock wood) have a pretty good thing going at the moment. There have been stretches, though, when one of us has had more time for creative production than the other, and it was hard not to harbor guilt and resentment. But we’ve found that over time the balance tends to shift back and forth, and that it pretty much evens out. And we realize that it’s in both our best interests to be sure the other is creatively fulfilled.
So I suppose it should come as no surprise that there’s a lurking (or, um, roiling) theme of repressed creative desire in the book. That’s a really interesting observation. It’s also an interesting question whether creative desire itself feels male. I suppose it does, in that freedom in our society has so often been a male privilege. And it’s no news that women tangle with their creative impulses intensely, as those impulses threaten the expected feminine role of self-sacrificing nurturer. But I also think that creative repression can be a big problem for men in our culture. There’s such pressure for men to be providers, to offer stability to a family. And of course creative pursuits are anything but stable, and rarely useful financially. I know that my husband feels this clash; he wrestles with his dueling identities as artist and breadwinner all the time.
My father, too, experienced this conflict. He was a hugely talented artist who stopped painting when I was born, the same year he won a prize from the National Academy of Design and had paintings acquired by museum collections. From that point on, he devoted his energy to providing for the family. He was proud of his successful art dealing business, but as he got older increasingly regretted not having fulfilled the promise of his art career. By the time he retired and was beginning to paint again, he found that the art world had moved on without him. I tried to help him find venues to exhibit his new work, but it was difficult. It got to the point where he despaired that his paintings were just taking up space in the basement. That feeling of regret, of stagnated creativity, haunts me.
I think of creativity as an obstinate human impulse that demands to be acknowledged. And it will find its way out, one way or another, whether in the acceptable guises of flower gardens, carpentry, figurine collections — or in less predictable ways. I adore the houses in my area that signal a restless creative soul inside, like the one with the colorful mandala painted on it, and the one with the huge metal rooster in the front yard. It’s a big statement around here. Because, whether male or female, it feels almost deviant to give oneself over to creativity in our culture, to flaunt conformist expectations. To me, there’s something irresistibly noble and exciting in it. There’s nothing I love more than a defiant freak flag posted on a quiet suburban street.
Being a writer can feel deviant, too. Like having some weird, private affliction. I did struggle with this while writing the book. My daughter was very young and I had to switch back and forth on a dime between being a writer and mom. To faithfully obey my creative impulses would absolutely have meant neglecting my family duties. The child had to be fed, the dishes had to be done, the floor had to be vacuumed. At least sometimes. And there could be a grinding resentment at being made to do these petty things. But when that resentment flared up, I tried my best to embrace it. I told myself that there was a truth in it, that it was a universal experience, and so it was valuable for my fiction. It was certainly valuable for this book.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that neither of us do well with large swaths of time. I suspect that to be lifted away from quotidian drudgeries, to be elevated to some rarefied platform of complete creative freedom, would be suffocating. Maybe I’m just trying to make myself feel better — or, worse, maybe the thought itself is a symptom of feminine brainwashing. And yet I can’t help but feel that there’s something beneficial in slight creative frustration, a bit of nagging tension. Something necessary and humbling. Not to mention that I do some of my best thinking while washing the dishes.
Miwa Messer is the Director of the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers program, which was established in 1990 to highlight works of exceptional literary quality that might otherwise be overlooked in a crowded book marketplace. Titles chosen for the program are handpicked by a select group of our booksellers four times a year. Click here for submission guidelines.