Dawn Raffel 

interviewed by Dina Di Maio

   After reading your novel, Carrying the Body, released in October from Scribner, I have to say your style hooks the reader. It's refreshingly different. According to USA Today, "the reader is forced to work to make connections." Even your short story collection, In the Year of Long Division, published prior to the novel, was described by Publishers Weekly as "fastidiously control[ling] what is revealed." Do you think that's a good description of your style? How did it come about?

I'm more interested in evoking feelings in the reader and having her make her own connections than in explaining a story. I'd like readers to respond the way they do to, say, music, or to visual artwork that's not entirely representational.

I wanted to go into as dark and scary a place as I could and come out plausibly on the side of light. And I wanted to look at our universal failure to love completely and perfectly, and to look at how we might redeem ourselves. The title, "Carrying the Body" refers to the body of knowledge and feeling that we carry from one generation to the next. I believe that a good deal of our patterns of feeling, our ways of viewing life, and our ways of carrying our own bodies through the world are largely inherited, not entirely mindfully, from our parents and grandparents.

I studied with Gordon Lish, who taught me a tremendous amount about language and structure--and about putting your pencil in the right place. At the same time, I was working as the fiction editor of Redbook magazine. Doing those two things simultaneously--studying with a teacher who was right at the cutting edge while editing more conventional stories (and reading hundreds of stories each week)--forced me to question every election on the page.

I read a huge volume of fiction. Some of it was easily dismissible as just plain lousy writing. But there were also a whole lot of stories coming through that were skillfully put together--you couldn't really find fault with them in a workshop--but there was nothing to distinguish them either. And you could predict where they were headed. A story or novel that leaps out for me is one that has voice, stance, authority and a certain urgency--something is at stake. And there's a personality--almost a kind of charisma on the page. It by no means has to be a loud or outrageous personality--but there's a very clear presence.

You're not interested in writing only for yourself. You're an adviser to the "Words Work Network" or "WoW Net" through Webdelsol.Com. WoW Net was started to help promote writing in high schools. Tell me more about your role in that process.

I'm on the advisory board of Wow.net but haven't had a heavy involvement in it yet.

I love teaching but I don't have a class lined up right now.

I was part of the team that launched the magazine, which was an incredible experience--to be in at the beginning of something. It's a great magazine to work for, and a haven--in a deep caption world--for writers. Although we don't run fiction, we work with many novelists who also write essays.

I enjoy both; writing nonfiction gets me out into the world meeting interesting people. But when all is said and done, I prefer fiction.

I'm really not sure. I'm toying with a few different things. Not knowing exactly what's next keeps it interesting.