Jayne Anne Phillips Interview 1/27/09
Faulkner: I have to ask this, because I’m just blown away by it. I hadn’t gone to your
website. I didn’t even know that you had one, and I feel like just two days ago I found
“A Secret Country.” That was a mind blower. Tell me about that. It was like – this is
where it all comes from.
Phillips: It’s not exactly where it all comes from, but it is a resource. There are certain
photographs that I’ve used and certain things that I’ve looked at a long time, and of
course, the work is not figuratively, literally real. Some of it was things I put together
after the fact that connected in a logistic way, but I hope to expand that to include a whole
thing on Lark and Termite. That’s in the future. I haven’t had a web master for a long
time, and I didn’t know how to do it. I just found someone, and we’re going to do some
stuff.
Faulkner: That’s really amazing. When I found the birthday cakes…
Phillips: Oh, the pictures of the birthday cakes.
Faulkner: Yeah. They were from your childhood.
Phillips: I can’t remember right now what novel the birthday cakes were in. Was it
Motherkind?
Faulkner: Yes.
Phillips: There were a couple of those birthday cakes.
Faulkner: That’s amazing and then seeing the family pictures – it was like picking up
some sort of stone and then finding these magical things. I was so impressed by it. It
also made me think a little bit about the kind of eerie feelings that I would get reading
Seibold. Do you know what I mean? Have you ever read any of his stories?
Phillips: Yeah, I like his work a lot and the fake photographs. I like the idea of using
fake photographs. I’ve never used photographs before in a book, and this sort of
happened by accident with Lark and Termite. When I was researching the book, I was
writing to travel books writers, who had written books on Korea. I was trying to connect
to someone on the internet, and this wonderful guy said that he was in Korea at the time.
He said he would go to the tunnel and take photographs for me. So he took a series of
color snapshots and mailed them to me. I’m sure he thought he’d never hear of me again.
I gave Knopf a bunch of research materials – the little moon pitcher that Termite is so
attached to is something that I have had for ages. The drawing was a drawing that a
friend of mine, Mary Sherman, gave me many years ago. I had a series of photographs of
the alley where in fact I did see a boy thirty years ago, who in my mind became the nexus
to the story of Lark and Termite. I also gave them Robert Neilson’s photographs. I
wanted to use that drawing of Mary’s at first as the cover, but Knopf said “no” to that,
thankfully I think because I love the cover they came up with. It is going to be the UK
cover of the book. I really just gave them the photographs to set the scene, but they
turned them into black and white, and they cropped them tighter and tighter as the end of
the book comes closer and closer. I like the way it works, so all of that will be part of
“The Secret Country” of Lark and Termite eventually.
Faulkner: I’m still reeling from that. I don’t know exactly why. I think on some level,
it’s really just the forthrightness of it and the honesty of it. It’s as if you say, “Oh, reader.
Did you think these things just sprung into my head out of nowhere?”
Phillips: Well, most things do, but if there’s something that I have a literal representation
of, like the birthday cake, that belongs in “The Secret Country.” And it is a secret country
because, as you say, not that many people know to look at it.
Faulkner: I feel lucky to have figured that out. So then just to finish on that, you’re not
really using those photographs as some sort of vague memoir or incitement to tradition.
They usually come and confirm something.
Phillips: I only put those together for the website. I don’t go looking up photographs of
things in order to refresh my memory about them, because my memory of them is very
contextualized and angular. That’s the sense memory that I work with, but I went back
afterward and found these pictures and put them on the website.
Faulkner: What have you been up to since the last time that you were here?
Phillips: I was last here about nine years ago when Motherkind came out. This book,
Lark and Termite – I’ve actually been working on it for about fifteen years. I had written
part of it, and I had written part of Motherkind. It was around 2000 or ’99 that I finally
signed a contract with another publisher after Sam Lawrence died in ’94. It was for a two
book contract; I had plans for both the novels. Knopf thought Motherkind seemed more
marketable, and they asked me to finish that first. As it turned out it was best that I did,
because I think every book prepares the ground for the next one in a particular sense. So
I finished that book, and I went back to working on Lark and Termite. Four years ago, I
took a major change of direction by accepting a job at Rutgers-Newark designing a new
MFA program for them, which involved writing a proposal and getting it through several
state agencies. After starting the program two years ago, we now have forty-four
students. We have a great reading series called Writers of Newark that I curate and
courses that are connected to the series called Writers of Newark: Contemporary
American Lit. We’re working with that reading series as the basis for a lot of community
outreach; we’re working with several high schools in Newark. It’s a huge undertaking.
Our students are probably the most diverse MFA group in the country. Almost half are
students of color. Over half are non-traditional students that range in age from twenty-
one to sixty. Many of them have had careers; they have ongoing careers now. We do all
of our classes at 5:30 and later so that people can actually have jobs and families and be
in the program. Our students this year are publishing in McSweeney’s, Granta Young
Voices, and Paris Review, so it’s very interesting. It’s really too interesting, too
compelling.
Faulkner: That pulls you away from writing?
Phillips: Yes, it does, but I had kind of settled into writing in the summers anyway even
before I took that job. I think if I get either older or deeper into my own material, I really
have to be shut off from outside cellulose and forced to go to writers’ prison, where the
meals are served and everyone’s working. One feels very guilty if one isn’t working.
There’s isolation, and there’s community at night, which blunts the loneliness.
Faulkner: You talk around stuff like this in the journal section. I don’t think I’ve seen a
book that’s been reviewed as extensively and consistently enthusiastically in literally
years. It’s quite the home run. Did you have a sense that you were touching all the bases,
hitting all your marks, that this was something that was going to garner the connotation it
has, or is it, as one of my friends says, the wheel turns and sometimes it lands on you?
And at other times with something of equal significance, you might not be heard.
Phillips: I don’t know. I always write in a very layered way, but I don’t always resolve
things as specifically as things are resolved in this book. It connects with the reader in a
very specific way, maybe because of that. Intentionally, sometimes I leave things a bit
more open, and while Lark and Termite suggests a future beyond the book, it connects in
so many ways. Most of those connects were not necessarily planned from the beginning.
I work very much inside the material and let the material dictate the form and follow the
material into the form. That’s very much what happens in this book. Initially I intended
this to be a short little book composed of Lark’s voice and Nonie’s voice. Nonie’s voice
was going to be short fictions, one or two page fictions. My initial plan got more and
more complex. From the time that I tried to embrace the idea of working with parallel
worlds with the 1950s section and the ‘59s section, it got endlessly complicated. There
were times when I despaired of ever sustaining those two worlds. Fortunately, I’m
extremely persistent. The book had a very compelling hold on me. I felt as though I just
had to stay with it until I got there. The ending of the book was a surprise leap. I wanted
to know who that boy was that I saw sitting in that chair thirty years ago looking at an
empty alley holding this piece of blue dry cleaning bag in front of his face and blowing
on it. I wanted to know what he was doing, and this book answers that question. It
works with the dimensionality of past, present, and future in a way that I’ve always been
fascinated with. It resolves in a very particular way, and it suggests certain things that I
think have been surprising. You never know what reviewers are going to do, and I don’t
connect myself to that process. It’s about the book, but the way I feel about it is that I’m
glad Lark and Termite are on their way. They’re in transit.
Faulkner: The whole thing about this piecing of yourself – basically I see your point and
agree with you about how this work could only come out of your capacity to really learn
how to face yourself and remain persistent across nine years of distractions and pulls in
other directions. And to be able to not really fight them, but actually use the transitions
and interruptions as design vehicles.
Phillips: Well, I wish that it worked that way. I think it wasn’t so much that the gaps in
time were a help. It was more that it necessitated going over and over the work. I’m
very line orientated and many of the lines remained the same for years. But the layering
and the way one thing connected to another, the cutting up of the sections and the way
they moved into one another did change over time.
Faulkner: You’ve spoken in interviews more factually about how you came to
incorporate the Korean material, and it wasn’t part of the original design. It sort of
discovered you. Could you talk a little more about how you found it valuable
strategically? How you found it useful as part of the expansion of the story?
Phillips: Lark’s section of the book was the beginning of the book. Her first section of
the book defines a lot of things about the town, what she knows, what’s kept a secret
from her, what she thinks about Termite, and what she thinks about herself. She states in
that first section that Termite’s father was killed early in the Korean War, and that they
never got his body back. They had to hold the service around a flag that was folded up,
which of course is an echo of what happened to Billy in Machine Dreams. The world
that I invented for the children was very much West Virginia based, and of living behind
it, across the tracks, near the train yard, the alley, and the river. Termite has a fascination
with trains and particularly for this double railroad tunnel that is very similar to a lot of
WTA constructed chiseled stone (almost monumental) structures in West Virginia. So
there was this double railroad tunnel with these double tracks that went across the river.
On September 30, 1999, the AP Martha Mendoza and her team of AP reporters wrote the
story of No Gun Ri, which had been hidden for fifty years. There was a big color
photograph on the cover of The Times with this stone tunnel that looked exactly like what
I had been imagining in the world of these children. I knew that his father had been
killed in the Korean War early on, and I looked at that tunnel and knew that was why they
had never found him. Then I began doing a lot of research into that incident and the
beginning of the Korean War in general. I patterned everything that happens to Leavitt
after what happened. This did not factually happen, but it could have happened. Of
course, the children that he’s trying to help are counterparts of Lark and Termite or
echoes of them. The idea that Leavitt enters into the boy’s perception momentarily at the
beginning and then more as his senses expand as he grows closer to the transition, or
however you want to term that passage.
Faulkner: That’s amazing, all these symmetries and transitions and impacts, powerful
forces that go beyond the immediate. It gives it tremendous depth.
