First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.
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In this episode, Mitzi talks to Karen Russell on her new novel, The Antidote.
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From the episode:
Mitzi Rapkin: You add magical elements into this novel. And I think that there’s something when you add the magical elements into your fiction that deepens it. But I think one could say, why don’t you write a realistic book? So, I’m curious for you, what the magic offers?
Karen Russell: Yeah, I mean, it’s the kind of work I love to read, too, and always have, and that’s such a fair question, right? I get this sometimes about nature writing, where it’s like nature is already so fantastical, so sublime, why would you need to write about it in a non-realist register? Why would you need to have to use a speculative conceit to get at truth? But I think that’s exactly it. I think for me, you can be so inured or benumbed to some of these things. I mean the violence that we live with every day. I can feel the cloak of benumbment I wear, right, just to kind of get through a weekday. Also, the possibilities that I think are occluded from our sight, because part of it is, like the onrush of time and, everybody’s obligations. I think a book gets you out of that kind of ordinary time. It really is different, like the whole world is just going as fast as your eye moving over the paper. So, you have this new ability to sort of process things or feel things that there isn’t that spaciousness for a lot of people, unless they’re in that art place. And I feel it writing, and I feel it reading, too. And I think you could write this book without women who are embodying and carrying these memories. I think it’s the way that my children understand their reality. It’s like literalizing something that’s so fast moving or so complex that it’s hard to kind of get a handle on it or see it, or think and feel your way through it, right? Like, for me, I just kept thinking, Gosh, this is happening to each of us privately. It’s so hard to really see an aggregate, how you get something like a mass denial, or how you get these omissions that become collective. That’s a long-winded way to say, I just think changing the lighting, it’s what I love about the Twilight Zone, also. You can see something about our natures that’s otherwise sort of invisible, you know. And Flannery O’Connor has that great quote, like, the truth is not distorted here, but a distortion is used to get at truth.
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Karen Russell is the author of six books of fiction, including the New York Times bestsellers Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove. She has received MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Born and raised in Miami, Florida, she now lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband, son, and daughter. The Antidote is her second novel.