As you know, I had retired the literary Would You Rather interview series, but didn't want to stop interviews on the site all together. Instead, I've pulled together 40ish questions - some bookish, some silly - and have asked authors to limit themselves to answering only 10 of them. That way, it keeps the interviews fresh and connectable for all of us!
Today, we are joined by Dawn Raffel. Dawn is a writer, developmental editor, and creative writing
teacher. Her sixth book, Boundless
as the Sky, will be out January 17, 2023. Her writing has been
published in O, The Oprah Magazine, BOMB, New Philosopher, The San Francisco Chronicle, Conjunctions, Black Book, Open City, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, Arts & Letters, The Quarterly, NOON, and numerous other
periodicals and anthologies.
Why do you write?
I write for the same reason I read: I’m looking for a
ticket to someplace new. That “someplace new” might be geographical, cultural,
or historical, or it might be a previously unseen corner of a place I’ve
inhabited all my life.
What do you do when you’re not writing?
Edit. Teach creative writing. When not staring at words,
I teach yoga nidra.
Describe your book in three words.
Contents under pressure.
What is your favorite way to waste time?
Twitter. Still. For now.
What is your favorite book from childhood?
The Little House by Virginia Lee Burton. Look it
up.
What are you currently reading?
Grendel by John Gardner.
What’s the single best line you’ve ever read?
“…seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst
of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”
—Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities.
If you were stuck on a deserted island, what’s the one
book you wish you had with you?
I’d have to go with War and Peace. I will never
understand the genius it took to write that.
What would you do if you could live forever?
Kill myself.
Seriously, why would I want to outlive not only everyone I love but also
all of their children and grandchildren?
What is under your bed?
Only
the dog knows.
Dawn Raffel’s Boundless as the Sky is a book
of the invisible histories that repose beneath the cities we inhabit, and the
worlds we try to build out of words. The first of its two parts, stories of
real and invented cities, some ancient, some dystopian, is a response to Italo
Calvino’s Invisible Cities.
The second part comes together into one narrative, taking place in a single
city—Chicago—on a single day in 1933. It is based closely on a true event, the
arrival of a “roaring armada of goodwill” in the form of twenty-four seaplanes
flown in a display of fascist power by Mussolini’s wingman Italo Balbo to
Chicago’s “Century of Progress” World’s Fair. The 7000-mile flight from Rome to
Chicago was lauded by both Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Hitler, at a time when
aviation made banner headlines across the US, and news of the Nazis was often
in a side column. The novella follows a few of the many thousands of Chicagoans
there to witness the planes’ arrival. These two panels of Raffel’s poetic
diptych call out to each other with a mysterious and disquieting harmony, and
from history and fantasy to the dangers and dark realities of the current
moment with startling insight and urgency.
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