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Interview
with Adam Golaski
The
Short Review:
How long did it take you to write all the stories in your collection?
Adam Golaski: Color Plates
demanded breaks be taken. I’d write a few stories and then put the
manuscript aside for months. Write something else. If we cut out all
the time spent on other projects maybe just a couple years? I wrote
the first "plate" in 2002 and wasn’t truly done with the book
until early this year. I’d still like to make some changes.
TSR:
Did you
have a collection in mind when you were writing them?
AG:
Strictly speaking,
Color Plates isn’t a short story collection. So the answer
to your question is sort of, yes, there was always a book in mind, a
structure I built with little stories, motifs I wished to explore
across a couple hundred pages, and a couple narratives. Since I
didn’t think of it as a short story collection, I felt free to
approach the plates differently than I would a short story.
TSR:
How did
you choose which stories to include and in what order?
AG: I wrote about eighty plates. Some didn’t work—too convoluted or built
on a cliché. Some were fine but weren’t true to the project. (My
favorite of the cut plates was Absinthe,
told from the point of view of a film director and made up entirely of
found text culled from articles and interviews that pertained to the
Kubrick film Eyes Wide Shut.)
TSR:
What
does the word "story"
mean to you?
AG: A gathering, culling,
and ordering of events by a "teller" designed to please an
audience.
TSR:
Do you have a reader in mind when you write stories?
AG: Sometimes John Cotter.
TSR: Is
there
anything you'd like to ask someone who has read your collection, anything at all?
AG: I would ask them to
tell me a story they think I might like.
TSR: How does
it feel knowing that people are buying your book?
AG:A little awkward?
TSR:
What are you working on now?
AG: I’m exchanging notes
with poet Anna Elena Eyre; for what, it’s too early to say. A poem
of some kind. The selected works of Paul Hannigan, edited by myself,
will be published (hopefully) this year by Flim Forum Press. At
present, only a rough manuscript is complete. Perhaps more
interesting to readers of The Short Review, I’m writing a
series of stories in which the protagonist is always named Adam.
There’s a novel, too. A blog called Little Stories.
TSR:
What are
the three most recent short story collections you've read?
AG: The Lais of Marie de France (translated by Glyn S. Burgess & Keith Busby), Voice of Ice/Voix de Glace by Alta Ifland, and An Elemental Thing by Eliot Weinberger.
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