A Conversation with Madeleine Watts
Firstly, I want to congratulate you on the novel. It’s such an important piece of work in terms of how it grapples with ecological themes and the human experience. It feels like the most accurate representation of climate anxiety at this specific point in history that I’ve read.
This is a novel about grief and confronting the truth of mortality, but the narrator’s personal experiences of grief serve as a microcosm for the collective grief we all feel right now for a collapsing planet. This parallel between personal crisis and global crisis is really effective, because it renders the abstract suddenly very specific. Do you feel that that’s the role of literature? To take the abstract and break it down into relative experience?
I don’t always like to outline the role of art because that can be playing into the hands of big tech who think that art needs to be justified or quantified.
This book is in some ways a Covid book, because I started writing it in lockdown. Whilst the book doesn’t address Covid directly, I think that particular period when people were dying and the world felt really unstable and scary was a similar crisis to climate change, but one that was easier to hold in my head. Grief was so ever-present but also ambiguous and it felt like a really concentrated way of thinking about grief.
At the same time, during these long periods of lock-down, I was personally re-evaluating why I want to be a writer. I think there’s a certain period after having published a book where you wonder whether you’ll ever do it again, whether you have it in you. Making any kind of art is really hard, emotionally, psychologically, physically, financially. So that period of Covid when I was thinking about this book made it really clear to me what was important and what made being a human worthwhile and to me, that was art. I remember the first time I went to a gallery after lockdown and it was this incredibly intense, visceral experience of human connection. All the art that humans make is what makes us human. What literature can do that nothing else can is let you into the experience of being inside another person’s head. No other kind of art lets you do that. I grew up as an only child and often felt lonely, so being inside other people’s heads was always the thing I loved most as a kid. Often, when I’m despairing about what I’m doing with writing, I come back to that because there’s something really consoling about being in connection with someone you’ll never meet and being able to communicate. There are things that I put into the book that I’d never be able to say to my friends or my parents or my husband. It’s communicating to broader humanity and that’s something that I am interested in doing: just being a place of consolation.
The novel in many ways feels like catharsis, as though we are in a period of mourning now for the planet. Did it feel cathartic to write?
No! I thought when I started writing that it would be cathartic because people tell you that, right? People talk about writing as though it’s therapy but therapy is so different to making art. The idea of writing in a therapeutic sense, like writing a diary, is a form of catharsis, but everything I’ve ever written hasn’t been at all.
Because there is a long period between finishing a book, editing a book and publishing a book, I went through so many different states of mind writing Elegy, Southwest. You have the beginning when the stuff that’s coming out of you is so crap you almost can’t read it, but it’s the building blocks. Then comes the second part which is more fun, where you have stuff to work with. Then you have the end when those drafts are coming through quite quickly and you’re really fine-tuning. So by the end of it, when I was submitting the novel, I had been thinking so much about technical things like grammar and editing the index that I felt really far removed from the content of it. Maybe in a few years time I’ll actually be able to feel that catharsis. I hope it can be cathartic for other people, reading it, though.
One of the things I really admire about Elegy, Southwest is the way in which the real climate disaster, the fires in LA, for example, occurs on the periphery of the novel, quite literally. The narrator smells the smoke and catches a glimpse of the blaze as they’re driving along and they hear clips of the news reports on the car radio. Climate disaster never fully impacts the narrator’s experience, but you know that cataclysm will occur eventually. You do a brilliant job of capturing that helplessness by juxtaposing this sense of desperation with every-day rituals of making coffee, eating fast-food, sending emails. But it does make disaster feel inevitable and our ability to affect change inadequate. That’s why I mentioned that the novel feels more like catharsis rather than activism. Do you feel like we’re beyond the activist novel now? Are we in the age of mourning? And how can literature serve us in that?
Between my first novel that came out in 2020 and now, I’ve been doing creative writing teaching and a lot of my teaching is on ‘writing about climate change.’ This question of activism comes up a lot. This is the example I use all the time: if I was writing about difficult female friendships then the question of whether that writing should affect change just wouldn’t be part of the metric, right? So when you’re making art either about or on the periphery of politics, why should the benefit of the work be measured in change you can see? I find it really hard to sit down and think about the thing I am making, when I am at my desk, as activism. My writing can have a relationship to activism, but it’s not activism. There are things that I can do, that we can all do more of, that are activism, but I don’t feel that literature needs to be, or that it is very helpful for it to be. The easiest proxy for this is to think about war. Novels can be about war but is All Quiet on the Western Front a failed novel because it didn’t stop war? These are questions that are impossible to answer. I don’t want the book to feel breathless but it is a sad book and I was writing from a place of sadness. I think I was finding it really hard to feel positive, which isn’t to say that I don’t think there are positive outcomes possible in the world, but in terms of what this book was and where it was going, I really wanted to replicate a feeling of sadness and the ambiguity of a particular kind of grief that is often not necessarily represented in art, a grief that doesn’t necessarily have a clear-cut ending.
Another point about these daily rituals is that so many of them are modes of consumption. The way in which you describe the food that the narrator eats seems deliberate, particularly because often they’re eating fast food, drinking coffee, all of which are prime products of the capitalist trade network that is so destructive to the climate. But this is offset by scrutiny of harmful government schemes such as the poisoning of water supplies through the testing of atomic bombs in the desert. Do you feel like humans are complicit in climate change because of their consumption or simply victims of a wider structure they cannot escape? You shouldn’t feel like the spokesperson for climate change, by the way, just because you’ve written a novel. I understand you are a novelist, not a climate scientist or sociologist.
This is the thing. If you write about climate change, then you’re asked all these immense questions. A) I’m not a scholar and b) I’m not a scientist. I do have thoughts about this, though. The way I chose to structure this book was partially a response to some of those questions.
There’s a book by Daisy Killyard called The Second Body that continues to be really important to me. I think about it all the time. She writes about how in your life you make individual choices and there are certain things that you do with your body, such as eating, drinking coffee, and you can see their effects. Your second body is this eco-system body. You’ll never see the impact of the things that you do with your first body on that wider eco-system body, but they have an impact in Iceland, in Pakistan, in the bodies of whales, in the circulation of micro-plastics in the Pacific Ocean. Those things are so difficult to wrap your mind around until you have these moments when the second body collides with the first and those are rare, but that’s part of climate change. I haven’t often encountered the intersection between my body and the ecosystem body and when I have it’s been the after-effects of damage rather than the real event, for example, walking through a patch of land that has been burned out or seeing that there’s been a flash flood. It’s really hard to talk about climate change when it is so enormous. You can make individual changes in your life, for example consume more responsibly, but if there isn’t a global structural response, then it kind of doesn’t matter. That’s what’s so frustrating about climate change, watching ineffective politicians and national governments not responding properly to an international crisis.
With the book, I was trying to tell a story about one individual life that also had the ability to explore more than that. There’s a thing, particularly in realist literature, where if you want to write about fires, for example, you’re expected to place your character in a situation where she is actually in the fires and sees them, but that’s just not how we experience the world because the effects of climate change are bigger than all of our individual lives. So there needs to be a way for us to tell stories that cover thousands of years before a character’s time span and also, beyond her time span. The histories that intersect with [my protagonist] only really do so because she is moving through a place.
I was really interested in exploring that as a problem that writers writing about climate change have. I think it’s an interesting creative problem to solve. We have the ability to create new interesting responses that can accurately represent what it is to be alive right now. So that’s what I was trying to do, but beyond that, I don’t really have an answer to that question.
No and you shouldn’t have to have one. I don’t think any of us do. That’s where literature has such an important role, in conveying the complex areas where there is no concrete answer.
Can we talk about this being an American road-trip novel? Because the legacy of the American road-trip is that the open road is freedom, but you do a great job of breaking that down and highlighting how actually, we’re so reliant on petrol, food and water that the open road without those things is annihilation, death. There’s some fascinating dissections of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road now which break down its profession to be about freedom and a rebellion against late-capitalism whilst being so reliant on petro-culture which isn’t of course sustainable. I would argue that your novel appears to be the antithesis of that novel because it is so hyper-aware of the limitations of freedom, in the same way as Italo Calvino’s ‘The Petrol Pump’ or Gloria Steinem’s My Life On the Road which was a feminist subversion of that kind of American dream. What did using the road-trip as a narrative structure allow you to do with this novel that you couldn’t have achieved otherwise?
It’s an interesting narrative because it is so seductive and insidious at the same time. Everyone who lives outside of America has been exposed to the American road-trip narrative, so I had an understanding of those landscapes long before I moved to America [from Australia]. Because I was a bookish kid, On the Road was a book my father gave me when I was 15. He also took me to see Easy Rider when I was 18. So I was familiar with these two quintessential road-trip narratives which are both about the freedom of the individual, but, even as they purport to be these outsider narratives, they dig into that society further. There’s this libertarianism that is threaded right through them, this idea of manifest destiny, of America as something that is not just the physical geography of the United States but the America that people are singing about in songs. At the same time, when I was researching what would later become Elegy, Southwest, I was consuming a lot of outsider narratives, like Nabokov’s Lolita, which is the great road-trip novel. He notices all these things about America that, as an outsider, I noticed. Or Wim Wender’s movies, Paris, Texas and even Alice in the Cities, which begins in the US but then transplants to West Germany, which I really loved because it demonstrates that the American road trip is a purely ideological narrative that doesn’t need to be tied to the physical geography of the United States. So, it is a narrative structure that I love, I love the aesthetics of it, but I also don’t trust it, because I’m an outsider to it, essentially, and I’m never not going to be an outsider to it.
When you talk about the American landscape and its ability to precede itself as a line of perpetual progress, when you talk about the damming of the Colorado river and this concept of endless growth, I can appreciate the thing that is beautiful and utopian about that and it creates this sort of impossible landscape that also happens to be this landscape that I love, but also, it’s a castle built on sand. It can’t be sustained, particularly in the way in which it is headed at present.
So on the one hand, it was just really fun to play with that genre, but it was also a genre I had spent so long thinking about and dissecting in my head that it became quite easy to critique it from within the genre itself.
I also want to add that I loved how this novel is a detailed guide to a specific chunk of the US. I felt I was being given a vivid tour of the area, as you were so specific with street names and bars and landmarks. I found myself searching for all the locations you write about on Google maps. Your enthusiasm for the area really shines through in your writing.
Before I moved to America I was very critical of it. And then I moved there and I was like ‘oh, I love this!’ And it’s still very much home to me.
George Saunders once said in an interview that he sees the role of the author as a kind of curator. And I feel like Elegy Southwest is the perfect example of that in action. It really feels like a curation of so many different pieces of social and geopolitical history, of indigenous legends, pop culture references. I learnt so much from it. Did you enjoy that experience of researching the novel? And was it difficult to organise it, to know what to include and where?
It’s just the way that I write. I’m a very research-based writer and I believe that you can’t write anything unless you read a lot. It’s important not just in terms of form and structure, but content as well. I now realise that there was a period of intense research work but at the time it just felt like 8-10 years of obsessive interest in something. I didn’t know that I was researching. Then [when I was writing the novel] I’d suddenly remember something about Georgia O Keefe, for example, and I could go to my book of O Keefe and find it there.
I’m aware that it’s unusual to have a fictional novel with a bibliography, [but] sometimes when I read other writer’s books I will see the books that they’ve read but because they’re not using direct quotations they don’t reference them. It feels like they’re not doing the other writers a good turn. We live in an ecosystem of knowledge and I wanted to be really mindful that if I had read something that contributed in any way to the making of this book, that it was referenced, because I love following up on footnotes. There are definitely books in that bibliography that I came across because other writers had recommended them. It was a gesture to a community and to the vaster spread of knowledge.
A writer who you reference in a particularly profound way is Elizabeth Bishop. Her work appears to have had a real influence on you.
I went through a phase a few years ago, before my first book came out, when I was reading a lot of biographies of women who were artists and writers. I think I was trying to visualise what my life could look like, what sort of decisions I could make that would allow me to make art but theoretically still be happy. Elizabeth Bishop and Georgia O Keefe were the two people I was reading a lot about in that respect.
One of the things that I kept remembering was this incredible relationship to loss that Elizabeth Bishop’s life had that you rarely see in her work. Her poems are often like glass beads, so impenetrable that you feel something from them, but they’re not confessional. They often resist a biographical reading which is a kind of reading of literature that I find really frustrating. The poem that I was really influenced by was one that Bishop never published. There were drafts of it but she could never complete it. I remember precisely where I was when I read that poem. What I liked about it was that it is so different to other Bishop poems; it’s really emotional, there’s a howl of grief that you can hear in the rhythm of the poem. It articulated precisely the thing I found interesting about the nature of the elegy itself: its limitations. Elegies are about the relationship between the writer and the thing they are elegising but the thing they are elegising is always shadowed by the writer writing it. Your shadow as a writer always falls across your work. The Bishop reference was something that came when I was writing the second draft of the book, so it came later but it was like a key.
Oh, I see. Were there any other aspects of the novel that weren’t added until later drafts?
There were a lot of things. The entire land artist thread wasn’t in the first draft. The ending wasn’t precisely there. With any work of literature you try to create this contained, sustained thing but it takes like, three years to write a book and you change over that period of time. I went through an enormous amount of change. I moved countries, I got married; things were in such a state of upheaval. The book had this kind of elastic quality to it where things changed and expanded as life kept throwing boulders at me.
When I was selling the book, there was a huge rainfall event in the US and I remember someone in the UK telling me the drought was over and I was like, ‘no I don’t think it is.’ And now, suddenly, in the last month before the book comes out, [the recent fires in LA] happen. But I don’t want to be prescient in that way. And also there is no way I could possibly predict that a month out from the book being published it would have this real world echo.
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