Madeleine Watts does not want a closure

Elegy, southwestThe novel by Madeleine Watts, follows a young married couple from New York during a two -week road trip through the American southwest in November 2018. While the Rage forest fires and the Colorado river faces the ecological collapse, the couple is struggling with personal disorders – Leswis cries the recent loss of his mother, while the Elue is slowly starting to suspect. Avoiding futuristic science fiction renderings of climate change, Watts represents a contemporary version of cli -fi, in which the routines of daily life – turning in love, sailing, being arrested for speeding – even as a disaster.

I spoke with Watts of second -person writing, private sorrow of living a reproductive life in America and ambiguous ends.

Marisa D. Wright: The epigraph of the novel is a quote from Roland Barthes which is read as follows: “You have gone (what I am it), you are here (since I am addressing you)”, and it seems to be connected to the way the novel is addressed to a particular character. In a Substantive position Last August, you wrote: “Epigraphs are a gesture of trust that I make towards myself.” What were you doing a gesture with this epigraph?

Madeleine Watts: When I read The speech of a lover In my 1920s at the beginning of the mid -20s, I highlighted a line addressed to “You”. During all the time, I wrote this book, I was very aware because I made an MFA that you should never use the second person. People don’t like it. I had tried to write the book in the first person, and I tried to write it in the third person, and it never worked. It started to go out in the second person, so I always tried to reason with myself for which it had to be the second person. I was trying to think and frame why the narrator spoke in this way. Because the book is so on sorrow and loss, my experience, at least, is that there is a kind of conversation that always happens in your head that is aimed at this person – as you may tell them that you may tell them that you cannot. What this framed epigraph was to speak to the lost person is to have them present and invoke them. He evokes through the language. The very act of speaking and telling a story can bring them back to life.

MDW: This novel has many components: a road trip across the Southwest, a climate crisis hiding in the background, a family loss and a wedding story. How would you describe your genre? Does “contemporary climate fiction” seem well?

MW: It’s a bit like a Mishmash genre. I started writing it during the pandemic, so I was physically stuck and I couldn’t leave the house, so there is an element of road trip. It is a love story, and it is also consciously on climate change. When I started writing this book, I would do interviews and events, and I was asked these big questions like “Do you think there is hope?” I was really trying to think about my answers to these questions. To a certain extent, this book is a response and a kind of extension of many things that I thought in the first book. At the same time, I started to teach and think in a much more academic way. If you write a realistic novel but do not mention climate change, it will always be there in your work because you live there. It is in the air that you breathe. I think everything I am going to write will have this consciousness because it is in the ambient atmosphere of my social relationships and the way I think of things.

MDW: In your first book, The inner sea,, The narrator says: “I liked this idea of ​​the writer (life); That I was in a way under cover in the real world, relating to the front line line of my own experience. ” Does this quote capture what it does for you as a writer?

MW: Yes, I think it’s always the case. When I wrote this line in the first book, I was a little more married to romance. I think there is a part of my brain that always writes. When I see the way others live their lives, I often think they are able to live something that I do not necessarily feel that I am able to live because I am always somehow writing in the background. I don’t think my sister, who is a pastry, necessarily goes through the world like that. I find it sad to some extent. I don’t like it, to be honest. And I think I thought I might like it more when I wrote this line.

MDW: Your two novels have representations of pregnancy and abortion. Why does this thread seem important to your work? How does writing on reproduction events differ Between your first novel, which takes place in Australia, and your second, which takes place in the United States?

MW: Some things will always capture my imagination. Writing and thinking about the body is really interesting. For me, it comes down to reproductive events. In the first book, there is an abortion and a traumatic event of implantation of the IUD, which concerns control, on bodily autonomy. This book is a matter of emergency. The narrator tries to regain control, but his body will not let it do it. The second book is different. It is I who think through these things seven to 10 years later in a reproductive life. I wrote the book when Roe c. Wade was overturned and living in America. It was horrible and it was so scary. I remember being on the metro that day and seeing women cry. People cry in New York who cry all the time in public, but it seemed that people were in mourning, and it also seemed that people were mourning alone. It was really, really private. And I think it’s a reality of reproductive events – they are incredibly deprived. All these kinds of things really make me sticky for me. I am interested in bringing to life to this kind of thing.

MDW: Interesting fact, you have included end of sources and reference notes, and each chapter is preceded by an index. Why did you make these editorial choices?

MW: It is a gesture towards being concerned with the community. This book is fictitious, but it is also deeply studied. I am a novelist, but I also write non-fiction. If I wrote a non-fiction book, I would name everyone and quote the sources that had made my thought. It started to feel dishonest that I did not call some of the books to which I referenced. If someone has influenced your thought, I think that even in thanks, you should thank him. Claire Vaye Watkins had a great influence on me, and she recognizes books that were important for her in her novel Famous citrus fruits.

Originally, I wrote the clues almost as a prose poem of what to expect in each chapter. You don’t need to read them to understand the book. They provide a kind of guide, and as the chronology begins to deliberately become more disturbed, it is a way to emphasize that this idea of ​​rationality – which comes from scientific travel literature based on forms of thinking of the Enlightenment of the 18th and 19th century. This world can be known, but this is not the case.

MDW: I will be vague here, but I want to ask you questions about the end of the novel and the mirror of personal sorrow with an ecological loss. The fate of one of the characters does not become clear until late in the novel. Can you tell me about writing to this kind of end?

MW: When I started writing it, I had absolutely no idea what the plot was. I started with ideas like the Colorado river, the South West and these two people, but I did not know what was going to happen to them. He became clear during writing, in part because I had to think about the reason why he was addressed to “You”. It became clear to me that this book was an elegy and that it was sorrow, so it became clear how it had to end.

It also became clear how this end had to be ambiguous. I already had one or two people asking me: “But what happened at the end?” You are not supposed to know. There is no closure. I thought a lot about sorrow and loss and how many of these things have no clear ends. The sorrow is sort of cyclical, and it presents itself and again, and it has these peaks and coulets. It never really ends. There is no conclusion – your life is starting to grow around sorrow.