10 Questions for Terese Svoboda
by Neil de la Flor
Terese Svoboda is the eldest of nine children, the one who collected stamps, wrote to penpals and pretended to live anywhere else than Nebraska. A year before obtaining her M.F.A. from Columbia, she traveled to the Sudan and lived with the Nuer people, subjects of anthropologist E. Evans Pritchard who founded the discipline of social anthropology on their culture. En route, she lived in the Cook Islands for six months and translated several Pukapukan songs, prelude to fulfilling a PEN/Columbia grant for Nuer song. She eventually published Cleaned the Crocodile's Teeth which was chosen by Rosellen Brown as a New York Times Writer's Choice. Her experiences in the Sudan inform both her second book of poetry, Laughing Africa, winner of the University of Iowa Prize, and her first novel, Cannibal. Publishers Weekly called her a "fabulous fabulist" for her most recent novel, Tin God.
1. Hi Terese, before we discuss your latest book, Tin God, tell us about your home state of Nebraska. What gives?
We're not about money. The poorest counties in the whole country abut my hometown. The average per capita income is a little over $6,000. People can't even buy at the chains. For some weird reason, this makes the state ripe for Republicans.
2. Tell us a bit about your latest novel, Tin God. For example, why the heck is God a Woman (blasphemy)? What's your beef with Pork? And who would play these central characters if you made the novel into a film?
I dreamt the conquistador story in Tin God and you might say I've been trying to get back to sleep ever since. God is a woman in the book but do we have to actually get chromosonal? Aren't we above those petty confusions of x and y? Let's go stem cell. According to the NIH, once a stem cell line is established from a cell in the body, it is essentially immortal, no matter how it was derived.
Pork is one of my main men in the book, a go-go dancer and all around airhead who tosses a bag of dope into the same field where five hundred years earlier, a conquistador fell off his horse. I didn't realize until five years into writing the book, that he was nicknamed after "porque."
Regarding the actors who would portray the film version-Kathy Bates is God. That Sutherland boy could play Jim and for Pork-I don't know. Who is that out to lunch?
3. Tom Cruise might need a job. Did you cut anything from the book you wish you hadn't?
I cut nothing from the book, zip, zero, zilch.
4. Readers may not know that you're also a poet, filmmaker, librettist, teacher, writer of proposals for new technologies, and an astronaut (she's not an astronaut). Can you dish about any new technology proposals you're working on?
I've been trying to launch a cell phone history/mystery called Phone Me that can only be heard on the Lower East Side at the creepy locations I've scouted. Trying, because teaching's been getting in the way, and finishing this book about my uncle who as an MP may or may not have witnessed the execution of black GIs in postwar Japan. Trying, because it's been so long since I thought up the idea I'm not that interested anymore.
5. On a personal note, how are the kids, the husband, the pets?
The dogs rule.
6. If not Hilary, then who in 2008?
Something with feathers, a boa, not a constrictor.
7. Now, back to your writing. I've read a bunch of positive and negative reviews about Tin God but not one, as far as I know, has asked about your writing process. How was the book conceived? Was it written linearly or stitched together like a collage of stories?
You didn't actually read that one bad review, did you?
After I had my Tin God dream, I wrote a poem about it which, after fifty rewrites, appeared in my last book of poems, Treason. It's called "Woman with God." Then I wrote this story about these two guys. That didn't go anywhere because it was too literal. Then I just started writing the book in alternate chapters. It was a relief to go from one to the other. Was that linear?
8. Sounds bi-linear to me. So, what are you working on now?
I'm rewriting a poetry manuscript called Woolly Bully. It's all about apprehension-"watch it now, watch it," an emotional state apropos of living in downtown Manhattan but really anywhere in hyped up BushFearville.
I can almost see the finish line on my memoir about my uncle. I went to Tokyo this summer to interview people who remembered the stockade he worked in.
9. How do you react or respond to readers who may be apprehensive
about reading 'experimental' fiction, by experimental I mean out of the norm
of what's expected of mainstream novels, like the 'Da Vinci Code', that follow
a definite arc of a plot, theme, etc. Would you say your work is a Da Vinci
to be decoded?
Put the word "experimental" in front of any art form and you can clear the house. All I ask is that you read all the words. Besides, all writers like to think they're experimental in some sense, even Mr. Da Vinci Code. My work is all Mona Lisa.
10. Here's the most important question of all. What's your favorite Frivole.com item and where would you wear it?
My favorite Frvole.com item is found in the swimsuit section. I would wear one of those guys very close, very very close and together we would frivole and dot and last but not least, com.
