Office at Night (8 page)

CF
: Did you ever disagree about the direction of the story?

LH
: The quick answer is no. The possibly more interesting answer is that we disagreed all the way through, but that disagreement took the happy form of writing into the collaborative, respectful freedom we had granted each other. Conversation is, after all, in its component parts, a kind of disagreement—a most interesting kind! And this was a conversation, to be sure.

CF
: Were there any surprises along the way?

LH
: There were so many surprises. Every time Kate sent a new section I was surprised in that best of all possible ways: seeing a first-rate writer galloping after her imaginings. And, of course, when you write the way I think we both do when we’re doing it solo, tending not to plan out the whole thing ahead of time, just the daily fact of writing is a constant
surprise. Years ago, when I was a student at the Naropa Institute (now Naropa University), attending the Summer Writing Program, I went to a lecture by Michael Ondaatje, who was asked if he made a detailed outline before he wrote his novels. He said that although he knew that worked for some people, it absolutely killed the thing for him. Writing, to his way of thinking—and I’m grossly paraphrasing—was all about discovery, about surprise. A novel was a kind of great journey. Clearly you thought ahead, but you didn’t think all the way to the end. I had been banging my head against the whole you-must-plan-it-out thing and was sold on this approach.

In the context of
Office at Night,
I had no idea that the narrator of the first section I wrote would turn out to be the phone, or that the chair by the door would be paranoid and lascivious, or that there would be an abandoned, loquacious paintbrush in the back of the desk drawer or, as Kate dreamed up for us, the story would end with a dance. It was only in the editing stage, when Chris put a series of great questions to us, that the idea of a chorus of frame, canvas, and pigment came to me. New ideas bloomed up for Kate at that stage too. So it was surprise, surprise, surprise all the way through.

CF
: How has your relationship to this painting changed over the course of your “residency” within it?

LH
: No doubt I have been reading the wrong ekphrastic poetry and fiction, but I have almost always encountered a kind of distance in the result, often distance of a rather pious variety. Here I am standing mournfully—or at least soberly but intelligently—before the great work, and now here are my thoughts . . . As I say, I have not read broadly enough! At any rate, the idea of inhabiting the painting with and through fiction was terribly attractive, and the playfulness with which we approached it made it possible, and even necessary, to spend a lot of time staring at odd details. At certain junctures, I actually found myself looking out into the room from different angles, as if I were sitting on the chair by the door, or leaning against the file cabinet, or leaning out the window. You come away from that kind of immersion colored—stained. I have always loved Hopper’s colors, so this is a happy state of affairs.

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C
offee House Press is an independent, nonprofit literary publisher. Our books are made possible through the generous support of grants and gifts from many foundations, corporate giving programs, state and federal support, and through donations from individuals who believe in the transformational power of literature. Coffee House Press receives major operating support from Amazon; the Bush Foundation; the Jerome Foundation; National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency; and from Target. This activity made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation Minnesota. Support for this title was received from the the McKnight Foundation.

Coffee House also receives support from: several anonymous donors; Suzanne Allen; Elmer L. and Eleanor J. Andersen Foundation; Mary & David Anderson Family Foundation; Around Town Agency; Patricia Beithon; Bill Berkson; the E. Thomas Binger and Rebecca Rand Fund of the Minneapolis Foundation; the Patrick and Aimee Butler Family Foundation; the Buuck Family Foundation; Claire Casey; Jane Dalrymple-Hollo; Ruth Dayton; Dorsey & Whitney, LLP; Mary Ebert and Paul Stembler; Chris Fischbach and Katie Dublinski; Fredrikson & Byron, P.A.; Katharine Freeman; Sally
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To you and our many readers across the country, we send our thanks for your continuing support.

KATE BERNHEIMER
has been called “one of the living masters of the fairy tale.” She is the author of a novel trilogy and the story collections
Horse, Flower, Bird
and
How a Mother Weaned Her Girl from Fairy Tales
(forthcoming from Coffee House Press in August 2014) and the editor of four anthologies, including the World Fantasy Award–winning and best-selling
My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales
and
xo Orpheus: 50 New Myths
. She founded and edits the literary journal
Fairy Tale Review
.

LAIRD HUNT
is the award-winning author of six books, including a short story collection and five novels from Coffee House Press:
The Impossibly
;
Indiana, Indiana
;
The Exquisite
;
Ray of the Star
; and
Kind One
, which was a finalist for the 2013 PEN/Faulkner Award and winner of the 2013 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction. Currently on faculty in the University of Denver’s Creative Writing Program, he is editor of the
Denver Quarterly
.