Novelist Ellis Avery will return to Buffalo to read from her new novel, The Last Nude, at Talking Leaves Main Street store on Wednesday, February 22, at 7 PM. In 2007, New York Press named her in Best of Manhattan, 2007, the Best Writer You’ve Never Heard of But Should Go Read Right Now.
Published by Riverhead Press, The Last Nude is an expansive historical novel about a real era—the time between the two world wars, real people—an artist and her model, and their relationship. The reading is free and open to the public, and the book will be available at Talking Leaves for signing.
Ellis Avery will also speak at Buffalo State College at 12:15 on Thursday, February 23, in the Social Hall of Campbell Student Union. Buffalo Books interviewed her by telephone on Friday, February 3, 2012:
Linda Chalmer Zemel: So you are on leave from Columbia this semester, right?
Ellis Avery: I get to promote, then I get to do jury duty, and then I have some time off.
LCZ: Jury duty!
EA: I know! Sometimes I think there should be Jury Duty: The Musical! Lots of people, everybody has their story, everybody has something they wish they were doing instead, and they are all brought together in one drama.
LCZ: What a fantastic idea. Better write it up before somebody hears. Can I put that in this article?
EA: I’m not really a songwriter, so I think you should!
LCZ: So let’s start with that question, because sometimes writers always wanted to be an author and sometimes they started in some other direction and segued over. I’m wondering what was your situation.
EA: I did always want to be a writer, but I did other kinds of work, like non-profit and restaurant work, but always in a less committed way than really I had any business doing. All I really wanted to do was write and teach. Now I can do those things, and it’s really a blessing. And you see kids who only want to do music, or dance, or basketball and it drives their parents crazy because you work hard but you won’t work hard on everything.
LCZ: You were that kind of kid?
EA: I only wanted to write.
LCZ: Tell me about the nonprofit and restaurant gigs. Were they in support of your writing?
EA: I wasn’t very committed, but I felt I should have some job other than writing! I was just starting out, and I think I felt a little ashamed that all I wanted to do was this sort of ridiculous thing. As part of writing my first novel about the Japanese tea ceremony, I lived there and studied the tea ceremony very extensively.
I had a scholarship, and it wasn’t completely a good fit for me because I just wanted to be writing. But what I noticed was that attending the tea ceremony school, I felt bad about the things I was doing--writing novels--and when I got there I saw people who were devoting their lives to a level of detail and perfectionism and every little thing about tea ceremony right. I just sort of abandoned the guilt and thought, you know, people do the darndest things, and the only thing in my disapproval is me.
LCZ: How cool.
EA: Live and let live. The people who are going to do their tea ceremony and the people who are making perfume in their perfumers will do so. You can disapprove of that. Or you can just ignore it. Why not?
LCZ: So for The Last Nude—set in Paris—did you go and live in Paris to research that?
EA: I did. It was the result of two periods of living in Paris, one when I was actually working on the book. The first period of living in Paris, I was sixteen years old, the age of my narrator. It was the summer between high school and college, and I was very young, very open to everything, the architecture, the food, the trees, everything was exquisitely mind-blowing to me—I was from suburban New Jersey.
And furthermore, I was taking this class in literature from the ‘20’s and 30’s from Noel Riley Fitch,who wrote a meticulous biography of Sylvia Beach. Beach was the owner of the bookstore that was the epicenter of the literary world in the 20’s, and she was also the first publisher of Ulysses. I took this class about her world with her biographer! We read Stein, we read Hemingway, we read Fitzgerald, and it was this whole world was being given to me in this class. I just soaked it all up, loved it, and thought I’d come back there some day. And I did.
I saw a painting in a London show done by Tamara de Lempicka, which was a beautiful Rafaela from 1927, absolutely stunningly gorgeous, and furthermore, this girl became her model and her lover. And their brief relationship yielded all these paintings. I was absolutely flabbergasted—that was thrilling. The very last painting she was working on when she died was in 1980.
LCZ: So this created for you a nexus for what could grow.
EA: The Sylvia Beach of the 1920’s and 30’s and the paintings and the Rafaela story came together in my mind, a kind of mash-up.
LCZ: You also have written an award-winning memoir, right? That’s quite different from writing a novel.
EA: It is. It is about life in lower Manhattan right after the 9/11 attacks. It comes more out of keeping a journal than writing a novel; it’s a distilled set of journal entries. I would say that the process that holds true in both memoir and novel—and I’ve also been writing a lot of essays—is a kind of observation.
I’ve also been writing a haiku every day for the past thirteen years! And so the training you have in just looking at something small and specific and seeing it clearly and writing about it compactly is something that comes through in both nonfiction and fiction.
LCZ: What an interesting task to set yourself. Is there a story behind how you started writing haiku?
EA: I saw this book called The Haiku Year, where friends, including the lead vocalist of the rock group R.E.M., Michael Stipe, sent each other a haiku every day for a year on a postcard. I grabbed the book. And some of them were great and some of them were so-so, but just that they would show up and do it day after day--whether they were prepared or not—was really meaningful to me. I had always been intimidated by what might count or not as a poetic subject.
Suddenly with what counts as a subject taken away because your job is to find the poem in the everyday—I felt liberated to think it was sufficient to be attentive to this gorgeous world--like I was walking around with a butterfly net and something would fly into it every day—this wonderful way of seeing the world as poetry.
LCZ: Where did you go to college yourself?
EA: I went to Bryn Mawr College, outside of Philadelphia, and then I did a residency and MFA at Goddard College.
LCZ: When you teach students fiction-writing, when students ask for advice—the students who really want to make this their focus—what do you tell them?
EA: I have three favorite bits of advice. One is try to write something every day. Try to read as much as you can of what you love. And love what you read. In terms of professionalization, get a subscription to Poets and Writers. There is so much in there—residencies and contests you can enter. It’s a way to getting published and being seen by other people in the field.
And in terms of fiction-writing as a craft, ask yourself what the characters’ obstacle is to getting what they want. Do they get what they want or don’t they? And that’s the spine of your story.
For more Buffalo Books author interviews, try these:
Buffalo Books: Lauren Belfer on becoming a novelist
Buffalo Books: Diane Abu-Jaber on the cages we live in
Buffalo Books: Norma Kassirer finding the whole world in the crumbs of the day
Buffalo Books writes about events, books, writers, and publishers with a Buffalo link.
Contact Linda at writer14221@yahoo.com
Check up with Linda’s Buffalo Alternative Medicine Examiner column.
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