Jay Lemming
Interviewed about literary fiction, by Jay Lemming
It was great to be grilled with some very cool questions about literary fiction, by author Jay Lemming:
http://jaylemming-author.com/2016/09/10/rohan-quine-conversation-writing-literary-fiction/
A big thankyou to him for letting me witter about the upcoming novel The Beasts of Electra Drive, and about touches of magical realism and dustings of horror, and even about lashings of beauty, darkness and mirth—something for all the family, in fact. Jay’s own books, literary and dark fantasy / horror, are here. The interview was part of a series of interviews with many #LitFic authors, from every continent except Antarctica, which you can also find on his site.
It’s a fun coincidence that Jay’s previous blog-post, about Bruce Springsteen, has an unexpected connection with our conversation: the town of Asbury Park (whose unofficial “godfather” Springsteen is, being so associated with it) happens to be the location for the vast majority of my novel The Imagination Thief. Springsteen doesn’t come into the novel, but when I settled down to start writing it, sitting alone at dusk at the window of the dimly cavernous Room 629 in the hotel on the north-west corner of Ocean and Sunset in Asbury Park, I was just across the street from the Convention Center where he has often performed. I’m happy to see the town is now in much better economic shape than it was then, but I was very alive to its enchantments at that time nonetheless, as I describe here and here.
LitFic shout-out, in interview with Jane Davis by Jay Lemming
The prolific energy, talent and inventiveness of novelist Jane Davis is a lovely thing to behold, and here she is in conversation with novelist Jay Lemming:
http://jaylemming-author.com/2016/08/20/jane-davis-conversation-writing-literary-fiction
I like a comparison she makes there, which I imagine will tend to spread a smile through the eyes of quite a few who are engaged in this gloriously barmy business of creating complex things from scratch (whatever the medium may be): “The structure for a novel might not reveal itself until I am several drafts in. Then, when you know your material really well, a single line might leap out at you—something that you thought was quite inconsequential when you typed the words—and you realise that it is the one line the whole novel pivots on. It’s how Howard Carter must have felt when he discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb.” (See my review of her These Fragile Things here.)
And big thanks to Jane for also making kind mention of Dan Holloway and me, in the interview:
“I think one essential element of literary fiction is the feeling that every word is in its perfect place. And I want to mention two indie writers here—Dan Holloway and Rohan Quine, both of them at the absolute top of their game, but at the same time you have the feeling that their best is yet to come.”
LitFic shout-out, in interview with Dan Holloway by Jay Lemming
Here’s an erudite, challenging and unconventional interview with the UK’s John-Peel-of-literary-&-underground-fiction, Dan Holloway, grilled with good questions from Jay Lemming:
It covers the kind of literary fiction that genuinely has something to say on a grander level and is fearless in doing so; the value of fanning a few rock-star flames in order to signal that this is where important stuff happens; and the fractured secrets and truths in his one-of-a-kind book Evie and Guy (see my review of it).
Thank you to Dan, for mentioning me in the interview, among others:
“if you’re an exciting new literary writer with something truly original to say […] fortunately, there *are* some [indie] people doing that. I’d single out the Pankhearst collective for embodying a fuck the word celebration of glorious failure; Rohan Quine for an imaginative ambition and scope that brings indie values to the largest possible creative canvas; […]. Someone on that list has the possibility to create a work that is truly important. Everyone on that list is contributing to an ethos that says this is where important stuff happens. We need more of that.”