quarterly conversation

maud newton
...a conversation about sanity, focus, fun stuff, and boarding (or not boarding) the boat...

Joyce Carol Oates has said that “ideas have come from the strangest of places.”  Where do your own ideas for stories come from?

Anything that strikes me as absurd is likely to wind its way into my writing.  

If my coworker sees fit to walk from office to office, modeling a corset she’ll wear for her role as a wench at a Renaissance faire, she’s just asking to end up in a story. Don’t you think?


If you were to give advice to a beginning writer, what advice would that be?

The usual advice is pretty good. You know, read good books, write every day, keep a pen and paper at the ready. But I think it’s equally important to write in a way that feels natural, to let a story unfold as it will.

When I was starting out, I took a writing class with Padgett Powell. I turned in a ponderous, droning story about a girl who moved in with her grandmother because she didn’t want to marry her boyfriend.

Powell liked the climax - when the grandmother tore open her shirt to reveal her bare, deflated breasts to the narrator.  But he advised me to get rid of everything I’d slaved over, all the mechanical parts that advanced my preconceived storyline.

The sections he admired most were the parts I thought of as throwaway asides: some men who ran through a station to catch their train and crushed the grandmother’s glasses in their stampede, the radio station that always seemed to be playing “Feliz Navidad” even though it was summertime. Things like that.

Powell taught me that the fun stuff to write is the fun stuff to read, and I think it’s important for any writer to keep that in mind.


Why do you write?  What motivates you to keep the words flowing?

I have an obsessive personality. I turn conversations and events over and over again, like rocks, trying to figure them out. Somehow writing helps me do that.  

When I don’t write, I’m consumed with worry over ridiculous things. Whether my friend might be mad about something I said at a bar last week. Why my nose isn’t as cute as it used to be. All the reasons I shouldn’t have asked that one ex-boyfriend never to call or e-mail me again.

For my sanity, and the sanity of my loved ones, I write.


Here’s another quote:  “To be at peace with ourselves, we need to know ourselves” (Caitlin Matthews).  Does your writing help you in the ongoing process of knowing yourself?  If so, how?  

Definitely, but not in a way I can pinpoint, and never in the ways I might expect when I sit down to write.

The narrator of Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair, a novelist, says that most of writing “takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on paper. We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them.”

I think there’s something to this. Some of my best writing comes just before bed, when I’m caught in that space between sleep and consciousness, struggling to get just a few more words on the page.   


What do you hope to accomplish with your writing?

For me, writing is mostly about exploring the way things make me feel, or, more precisely, about struggling to evoke those feelings on paper.  

Sometimes writing a story feels almost like constructing an argument. When I bring a character and her predicament to the page, it’s okay that she starts feeling a certain way and doing crazy things, but only if those feelings and actions seem inevitable in the context of the story.


What does your writing hope to accomplish with you?

I think every piece I’ve started and then shoved into some dark file folder would like to grab me by the collar and shake me and say, “Focus, damn it! Finish me before you start anything else.”


One last quote:  “The world is made up of stories, not atoms” (Muriel Rukeyser).  What stories make up your world?

I’m drawn to things that are disturbing, unfair, profane, or tragic in some way. I think I’ve always been like this.

When I was a toddler, my favorite book was about a duck named Ping who gets separated from his family on the Yangtze River because he doesn’t want to be punished for being the last duck to board the boat they live on.

At the end of the book, after Ping has avoided various calamities, escaped from some people who want to eat him, and managed through sheer luck to catch up with his family again, he boards the boat last and is punished anyway.  

I guess that’s the kind of truth I’m always trying to puzzle out in my writing: that sometimes bad things happen whether you board the boat now, board it later, or never board it at all.

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MAUD NEWTON's nonfiction has appeared most recently in Mr. Beller's Neighborhood.  Her fiction appears in insolent rudder, Eyeshot, Pindeldyboz, storySouth, and elsewhere.  She lives in Brooklyn, New York, much to the dismay of her southern parents, who believe civilization ends at the Mason-Dixon line. Visit Maud on-line at http://www.maudnewton.com.