review


Yakich, Mark and John Biguenet ,eds.  Interviews from the Edge: 50 Years of Conversation about Writing and Resistance.  New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.



Two keywords caught my attention.  Conversation.  Resistance.  Decent conversation is hard to come by in the Age of Social Media and other technologies designed  to keep people remote from one another even as they connect them.  A real conversation can have immediacy  and be focused on now as much as a tweet, but a conversation is not to be rushed.  Decorum prevails.  Two or more people, in proximity to one another, gradually  work through problems or seek to refine ideas or kill time with memories.  Whether comic or serious or somewhere in between, a conversation is an act of communion.



An interview, on  the other hand,  is a probing, an interrogation; it can invade privacy and occasion confessions. Lacking the animation of body language, the supplemental gestures which convey emotions,  interviews  abbreviate pleasure.  If they are skillful, interviews can deliver a surprising amount of information. Yakich and Biguenet  were quite intelligent in selecting twenty-four of them from the many published in New Orleans Review over a period of fifty years.  Writers who live in New Orleans take it for granted the city is a site for the production of cuisine, music, frivolity, and decadence, but few of them think of their home place having a role in the documenting of what is cosmopolitan with regard to literature.  Interviews from the Edge offers a bit of corrective evidence.



Reading  a range of authors is very different from the single author collections most famously represented by  the University Press of Mississippi's well-know "Conversations With……" series, because one gains a keener sense of why Ernest Gaines, Eudora Welty, Jorge Luis Borges, James Baldwin, and John Ashbery  are more likely to be studied in a world literature course than would be the case with Catherine Stimpson, Carolyn Heilbrun, Harold Jaffe, Anaïs Nin, and Viet Thanh Nguyen.  It would be a spoiler to list the reasons why.



Let it suffice  that the phrase "in conversation" is a substitute in academic writing  for saying "I am examining  a possible relationship between A and Z.  Often the  spin that belongs to conversation in literary territory is adverse  to the functions of conversation in everyday life. Noticing as much brings the second keyword into view in relation to the twenty-four writers. The word resistance is vague but inviting. It whets curiosity. One wants to know  how the editors have manipulated the genre of the interview to depict continuity or change or both among diverse  writers, writers  resisting something over a period of half a century.  Resisting compared to what?  Resistance is a fabulous word. At one moment it is sankofa; at another, Janus-faced.  And it is rewarding to discover why Bertrand Tavernier,  Luisa Valenzuela, Jack Gilbert,  and Helen Prejean are capital examples of writers who have resisted.



 In 2019 when resistance is at once necessary and fashionable, Interviews from the Edge provides catalysts for thought and  action.



Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            August 20, 2019

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