BERTHA MORRIS:
Welcome to our interview Mr. Marra
ANTHONY MARRA:
Thank you. It’s my pleasure to be here.
BERTHA:
Mr. Marra, you are 28, but you seem simultaneously older and younger. You
have a rather boyish manner, yet your hair is already flecked with gray.
ANTHONY:
Ha, ha! I know; and yet I still have to finish writing school. I’m finishing up
the second year of a Fellowship at Stanford.
BERTHA:
And you have already published a novel and a number of short stories. Tell
me about your novel.
A Constellation of Vital Phenomena,
unusual for a first novel, is
purely a work of research and invention, without even a hint of autobiography.
ANTHONY:
Yes, but I’ll tell you something: I took a year off between high school and
college, during which I worked in a store. I missed my girlfriend a lot and began writing
short stories about a
lovelorn
guy working in the same store. One of them had three
pages on a single kiss! (He laughs)
BERTHA:
Does that mean you are no longer interested in autobiographical fiction?
ANTHONY:
Not at the moment. I quickly realized I lived the least interesting literary life
imaginable. My parents are happily married. There haven’t been any major traumas in
my family. I’m not sure that the story of my life would be much fun to read.
BERTHA:
So you had a rather
uneventful
childhood. How influential were your
parents in your decision making and your career?
ANTHONY:
My father once said to me:
‘
If you want to be a geologist, be a geologist.” I
can’t recall when, exactly, my dad said this to me. Maybe I was in high school, or it
could have been at someone’s graduation, at a
celebration, a place where the road
forks, where journeys begin. It wasn’t intended to be advice but the kind of thing we say
and hear and forget about every day.
BERTHA:
And did you follow his advice?
ANTHONY:
No! I’ve never had the
slightest
desire to be a geologist. But my dad did,
at least briefly. He studied geology in college. He served in Vietnam, went to
professional school, went to work, and the necessities of earning a living and
supporting a family narrowed
the field of geology to a corner of his office desk that held
a few quartz rocks. When I was a kid we went to a beach one afternoon to look for
prehistoric shark teeth. Instead we found all sorts of bizarre and beautiful rocks, and
my dad knew all about them. It was a fun day.
BERTHA:
It is true, isn’t it, that
our lives are often shaped by small, seemingly trivial
choices and the advice that guides those choices can come to us just by chance.
ANTHONY:
Indeed! When my father said, “If you want to be a geologist, be a
geologist,” what I heard were his words of encouragement, a paternal
blessing
. Now I
think of it less as advice than as a reminder to thank my lucky stars. Few people have
the privilege to do what they love for a living, and in that sense I am, in a way at least, a
geologist.
BERTHA:
Let’s go back to your novel.
Six years after starting to think about
Chechnya, the disputed Russian republic that became the setting for your acclaimed
new novel, you visited Russia for the first time. Until the Boston Marathon bombings
most Americans paid little attention to Chechnya. How did your interest on Chechnya
arise
?
ANTHONY:
My own interest actually began during an undergraduate semester
studying in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2006. I arrived there not long after the murder of
Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist who exposed Russian atrocities in Chechnya. At a
metro stop near my apartment, I could see Russian veterans of the Chechen wars,
drinking and begging for change.
BERTHA:
And what did you find there?
ANTHONY:
I didn’t know what to expect, I traveled with a guide and talked to
Chechens, many of whom were still trying to recover from years of war and occupation.
BERTHA:
So, although your novel is not autobiographical you did make a great deal of
research and documentation to be
accurate
about facts.
ANTHONY:
Oh, yes. Research is not an obstacle or something to be frightened of. It
can be one of the real joys of writing. Someone once said, ‘Don’t write what you know;
write what you want to know.’ But to make a book convincing, it’s less important that
the right tree be in the right place than that the characters are emotionally real. I did the
best I could to make the environment and the setting as realistic as possible, but I hope
it’s the characters and the emotional reality that make the book true.
BERTHA:
One literary critic, writing in The New York Times, called your book
“ambitious and intellectually restless.” Another fan of yours is Sarah Jessica Parker,
who in a review for Entertainment Weekly described it as “full of humanity and hope.”
So it seems you have fully succeeded.
ANTHONY:
I was deeply moved by the Chechens who were just trying to retain their
humanity. I’ll be pleased if my readers appreciate that.
BERTHA:
Anthony, thank you very much for sharing your time with us. And the best of
luck with your books.
ANTHONY:
That’s very kind. It’s been my pleasure.
945 words
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/30/books/anthony-marra-on-a-
constellation-of-vital-phenomena.html