Virginia Pye’s debut novel, River of Dust, was chosen as an Indie Next Pick by the Independent Booksellers Association. Carolyn See in The Washington Post called it “intricate and fascinating;” Annie Dillard says it’s “a strong, beautiful, deep book;" and Robert Olen Butler named it “a major work by a splendid writer.” Virginia’s essays can be found in The Rumpus and forthcoming in The New York Times Opinionator blog and she’s been interviewed at The Nervous Breakdown and The Huffington Post. Please visit her at www.virginiapye.com
An excerpt from her novel River of Dust appears in Issue Forty-Six of The Collagist.
Here, Virginia Pye answers interview questions "in the form of excerpts" -- with further excerpts from her novel, explained. Enjoy!
1. What is writing like?
Writing is the uncovering of consciousness—that brief moment when you first wake from sleeping and separate what you know from what you dreamt, what you remember from what you wish. Of course, writing is also the hard, plodding labor of getting out of bed, brushing your teeth, making your bed and pulling on your pants, one leg at a time.
In River of Dust, a passage near the end of the novel captures that dream of consciousness. Grace imagines herself in her husband’s study late at night. The Reverend is writing at his desk, unaware of her:
She followed the Reverend’s gaze across the room and was startled to see little Wesley seated on the floor in the corner….
“That’s a good boy,” she whispered. “Let your father concentrate on his work. He has much business to attend to.”
Grace rested her hand on her husband’s shoulder. The Reverend started slightly, although, like Wesley, he did not seem to see her.
“Oh, love,” he sighed.
It made Grace’s knees weak to hear his trembling voice. “Yes?” she answered.
Although he couldn’t hear her, he must have sensed a certain attentiveness surrounding him there in the shadowy study.
Writing is that attentiveness.
2. What isn’t writing like?
Now that I have defined writing as a vast notion of consciousness, there is nothing that writing isn’t. But, I’ll make a stab at it: how about if writing isn’t purely arbitrary list-making. Instead, writing is about the ordering of the world. We can’t help but define the world and that impulse and subsequent decision is writing. Because my novel is crafted and hopefully no part of it has been left untended to, it’s hard to find an example of what writing isn’t from within it. But, here’s a moment that comes close:
…The Reverend pulled his knee close to his chest and released his leg in a mighty kick behind him. There came a crack: the furious blow had landed on something solid yet yielding, and it broke. Yes, the Reverend later explained, it was sickening satisfying—the same sensation he had felt as a boy when crushing rotten pumpkins in the fields with his boot.
Arbitrary violence should fall outside the realm of the ordered world. But then, to compare it to an innocent memory from childhood is a supreme act of naming. Even in trying to offer a moment of randomness the hand of the author (me!) is still very much present. Perhaps nothing in writing can be about not writing.
3. When you do it, why?
By it, I’m going to guess you mean the act of writing. I write because that’s how I make sense of things. I write because I have fun with it. I write because I’ve been doing it for decades and couldn’t possibly stop now. It’s how I frame my life—the chapters of my life are defined by the books I worked on at that time.
In River of Dust, both Grace and the Reverend try to keep order in their minds through religion and custom. When that starts to fail, they flounder, but the impulse to understand their world persists, even when it makes less and less sense:
One mild and moonless evening, as Grace sat by the closed window, she thought she heard bells—high, tinkling bells of the sort camel drivers tied to their beasts to keep them from becoming lost in dust storms. She cocked her head and listened and waited for the sounds of voices. She felt certain she would recognize her children because they would be brought home to her by a chorus of angels, or, given the bells, perhaps camels, or both.
Her urge to order (thank you, Wallace Stevens) is gently teased in this passage. Grace and the Reverend have little concept of how silly they become as they try to maintain dignity in a rapidly deteriorating world.
4. When you don’t, why?
When I don’t write, I’m sick, or busy, or distracted by life. When my children were young, I stopped writing longer works of fiction for close to a decade. In retrospect, I wish I hadn’t stopped for that long, but in a way I couldn’t help it. I was immersed in life--up to my elbows in it. I didn’t have the proper distance to write about anything. I practiced what came to be known as “attachment parenting”—now an almost derogatory term, but a practice which suited our family just fine—and so I was pressed up against another human being pretty much day and night.
To write, you need a sense of separation, individuation, even isolation to let your imagination come forward. Still, I loved those years—the immediacy of them, the realness of being always in the moment, and the complete exhaustion and dizziness of it all. Grace’s post birth experience captures that hazy state in which she, or I, didn’t have a prayer of being able to write:
Grace’s children came to her in a swirl of dust and sunlight. Motes of light floated behind her closed eyelids, and when she opened them the sun danced low over the sill before her, bringing with it the children. She thought she heard them crying. She dozed and dreamed and woke again and heard them crying again, this time from quite close. She squinted down at the soft bundle beside her. Rose. Her Rose. Grace’s heart welled up, but her arms were too tired to life the baby to her breasts.
The birth scene in my novel, too, is close to my own experience, except that I gave birth in a Philadelphia hospital and not a Chinese village. I drank herbal potions, though not administered by anyone remotely as magical and maniacal as Mai Lin. Still, in Grace’s state, or my own in those years, writing was a distant goal and dream. Thank goodness, the fog eventually lifted and I was able to look back on that childbearing time and even create a story in which it plays a large role. River of Dust, among other things, is a mother’s own story.