An Interview With Author Alexis Smith | John W. Barrios Interviews ...

John W. Barrios conducted this interview at the home of Portland-based author Alexis Smith.

ALEXIS MARGARET SMITH grew up in Soldotna, Alaska, and Seattle, Washington. She attended Mount Holyoke College, Portland State University, and Goddard College, where she earned an MFA in Creative Writing. Her writing has appeared in Tarpaulin Sky and on Powells.com. She currently lives in Portland, Oregon, with her son, two cats, and their beloved view of the St. Johns bridge.

John Barrios: As I read your book, Glaciers, I felt it was a novel of identity, specifically for Isabel, but also for Spoke in a much quieter way. Do you feel that she ever finds herself?

Alexis Smith: I think she?s on her way. I think in what is considered a quiet novel things happen in much smaller degrees. It?s a short book and it?s intended to be quiet and internal. Through her memories and through this subtle shift when she finds out that Spoke is going back to Afghanistan, I feel like by degrees she is becoming more aware of what it is she has been building and doing for herself with all of these habits of collecting little things, being fixated on cities or clothes or postcards. She is beginning to think about, by the end of the book, to take step into an actual existence. Not that she hasn?t been living, but moving more towards going to Amsterdam or whatever little thing it might be: she gets the dress, then maybe she?s going to go to Amsterdam (chuckles).

JB: One of the strong points of the book, I think, is she does that, she?s able to connect these varying pieces of nostalgia that may not always be her own, like the postcards.

AS: She really wants there to be something significant about these objects, but really they are only significant because she is making them that way. She?s looking for herself in all of these things that she brings together. Early in the book when she wakes from the dream she?s thinking about constantly dreaming of thrift stores and how when she wakes up it makes her want to go to thrift stores, because she keeps dreaming about them. What does that symbol mean? That?s sort of the question that?s answered by the end of the book. She?s walking towards an answer at least, by the party scene with the stories.

JB: For me a book is a story that is going before you start reading the book and continues going when you have finished reading the book. An author just drops you in at this point of the story and I like to feel that it?s not over because I read the last page. I feel like I can see her leaving the party and her friends and going home and continuing on and putting the dress away. I can see all that happening even though the written story is over.

AS: That would have been a great ending actually, Isabel hanging the dress.

JB: With the idea of the map and the postcards, like you have in your son Amos? room, it represents to me, her world, and then there are all of these dream pieces from all of the disparate places coming to her home, they all find their way to Isabel. It?s as if a piece of her history, the glacier, being ten years old in Alaska, that postcard comes back to her, the piece of her life in Astoria becomes a postcard and comes back to her and she is finding the connections in her life and they all bring it to a place that she is getting ready for but doesn?t know how it is going to end. Am I making connections that are intentional in the book?

AS: Yes, some of them. I don?t think I was conscious of every little detail, but there were definitely things that I set up to mirror each other, like the glaciers and the cities.

JB: The vision of Isabel hugging the melting glaciers, and the buildings, as you?ve mentioned, are eroding in their way yet she is rising up and becoming who she is going to be. As everything melts away, she moves into her next phase.

AS: That?s sort of how the human race is, reinventing itself constantly. Glaciers have geologically shaped the planet and human beings have shaped the planet and unlike the glaciers, human beings have a way of destroying and pretending as if it never existed and build something new in its place. Right after I moved to Portland, we still had dial up Internet and there was no MySpace, Facebook or YouTube. These things didn?t exist, but now it?s really hard to imagine the world without them. The human race is not just capable but seems hell-bent on just forgetting, leaving the past in the past, covering it up and building over it and pretending like it wasn?t important. Isabel is coming from a place of wanting to make something of that past and embody it. She wants to represent those things that are lost.

JB: I really enjoyed the character Spoke. Just his name alone evokes a lot of imagery. Spoke, like a spoke in a bicycle wheel, and more obviously, as if I just said something, or ?spoke,? yet he doesn?t say much. I love that irony. But it is also speaking to a larger world for Isabel, which includes the Afghanistan War, and his inclusion in that war.

AS: It was intentional. There was a time when I gave him that nickname and was working with it. There was a time when that character wasn?t going to exist, it was an experiment. Giving Isabel something to look outward to and towards the future rather than the past, and, well, obviously she needs to get laid (laughs), so we need to get a love interest in here. Originally I thought that Leo, her best friend, was going to be the person in her life that was going to make up for the postcards or vintage clothing or whatever, so I made up this character Spoke and chuckled to myself that I could never get away with that, like it?s too symbolic.

I knew his name was going to be related to a bicycle but I didn?t know how. There was something about him that the early readers of the manuscript really responded to. Spoke also gave me a reason and a way to talk about the war [in Afghanistan]. I had to find the courage to do this because I really felt unqualified to speak to the war. I was able to work from my experience of it which is extremely alienated from the actual war experience. I think it is a pretty standard experience for the creative class and my generation to go through it that way.

JB: I really look at this as a coming home novel, which is not its purpose, but certainly a part of it. One of the things I liked about Spoke is how the reader gets to know him through Isabel?s eyes, so you never really get to know what?s going on in his mind or how it?s affecting him. The book speaks about Americans at war without really talking about war.

AS: I feel like, after 911, people were in a place where they were more ready for grief and we?re still holding onto a lot of that grief, but we are so distant from all of those bombings and the people dying. We?re expected to go shopping. We?re dealing with our economy and recession. The feeling in America is that we need to just buck up and buy cars. That part of it for me is just sort of baffling. In my mind Glaciers takes place in the latter part of Bush?s second term. Back then things were much bleaker than they are now, and in some ways things are still bleak. For me, the alienation I felt from people going to war felt like a class distinction.

People who don?t see options for themselves; they can?t afford college, they can?t find a job, they are going to war for our country. And I know people who have options and still go to war. It seemed that it wasn?t fair to make assumptions of those other people and why they were going, or what kind of sacrifices they were making.

For a character who doesn?t say a lot, Spoke had to embody everything Isabel could imagine is going on in the heart of somebody who?s gone to war. There is a distance between them and she talks about it in physical terms, that they are bodies in orbit. They can?t actually meet unless they crash into each other. They are just spinning around each other. They are totally dependent upon the gravitational pull between them but they can?t actually meet and that felt to me like the pivotal point.

There is something about the classes and I feel it in Portland very keenly, where there are overly educated people working lower class jobs because there just isn?t any work. But we think of ourselves in really different terms than people who live in rural communities or who live in less progressive cities. I didn?t want Spoke to stand in for everybody in every war experience.

JB: You did a really good job of avoiding all the traps of talking about a place like Alaska, and that kept Glaciers grounded for me. You kept the descriptions personal for Isabel. When you put that tone into the book, was there something you were going for, something almost bare-boned?

AS: I?ve heard that description before. I don?t know if this is going to answer the question, but there was a time after I wrote the original manuscript and submitted it for my thesis and got all my feedback on that from faculty and I thought about writing the book in first person and just be in Isabel?s voice. It felt so wrong. It changed the story so incredibly that I had to go back to the third person, limited omniscience. It had to be in her head but also sort of outside of her. I can?t even describe why it felt wrong. It felt a little bit clich?d. I felt I couldn?t really examine this character as a representative of a certain generation of classes, a person who lives here and now in Portland. Although my history is in Alaska and her history is in Alaska, I really feel like it is a Portland book. I couldn?t really make her come to life if it was in her voice. Part of the book is about her not having a voice, not knowing how to speak about herself. Or how to speak to Spoke. I guess the distance comes from that desire to really capture a moment in the history of a place in a city through this character, at least that?s what I tried to do.

JB: I wanted to ask you about writing as a single mom. First of all, how did you find time to write as a single mom?

AS: There are different things going on. One is that when I was still working at Powell?s Books and I was trying to finish the book for Tin House, I had very few times during the week specifically set aside for writing. I usually had a babysitter come over and hang out with Amos and I would just go to a nearby coffee shop for four hours and work. I did some really good writing that way. I think it was the sense of urgency and the sense of this is the only time I have so I?d better make use of it. Some people talk about staying up late but I can?t do that, I need to sleep, you know.

JB: Knowing that you only have a few hours at a time to write, did you find yourself planning ahead what you were going to write or did you just let go?

AS: So much of it was already written when Tin House got a hold of it so a lot of what I was doing was rewriting and editing. But there are entire chapters that I wrote after Tin House bought the book. I was filling in gaps and working with Lee Montgomery. Readers would respond and I would respond. One scene is of Isabel and her father in the thrift store; that came in one sitting in a coffee shop. When I finished that scene I thought, well shit I wish I could write like this all the time. Part of it was knowing the scene, part of it was knowing the character really well. I had a very specific gap I needed to fill so I had something sort of mapped out. A lot of the writing time was really trying to work my way out of psychological puzzles and grammatical puzzles, it?s just the way editing is?grueling.

JB: It didn?t occur to me that Glaciers began before you were a mom, and then it sort of took its own life after you became a mom. Did you change in any way from becoming a parent as to how you approached the book?

AS: Yes. It was really hard to get back into the text after Amos was born because I wrote the book as Isabel, but after I had Amos, a lot of the naval gazing just didn?t fly anymore. In my own personal life the immediate needs were so much more important that all of that time wasted on pondering and fantasizing.

JB: There was a responsibility shift.

AS: Yes, absolutely. I think it improved my writing to understand the difference between the fantasizing about being a writer and the understanding that it needs to take time, that its work.

JB: There has to be something to that shift in responsibility in your life that makes you better at what you do.

AS: I think there can be, but I think it wrecks some people?s lives too in ways they don?t expect. I don?t think it?s a universal experience one way or the other. I know people who feel they should never have children and I fully support that. For some people it is important to have that shift, it teaches you. I needed to do what was in my heart, for me and for Amos. I guess I come out of that entitled generation where if I don?t do what?s in my heart how can I expect my son to do what?s in his heart and be the fullest expression of himself. That?s a lesson I don?t think I could have gotten any other way.? The expression of yourself is really important and it?s really fucking hard.

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Learn more about Alexis Smith at her website.

Purchase GLACIERS by Alexis Smith at Amazon now.

Learn more about GLACIERS by Alexis Smith on Goodreads.

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Posted by Matty Byloos on March 2 2012. Filed under Interviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

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