Does ALL SOULS draw on your real life experiences as a teacher?

The choral sections, where unattributed speech serves as a scene, draw on real life exchanges I have overheard as a teacher. 

“We didn’t know you were coming.”

“I tried to save you a place.”

“She couldn’t invite you; she could only have six friends.”

The literature taught in the novel is literature I have taught to seventeen-year-olds; and more than once I have heard the complaint that nothing happens in To the Lighthouse.  From middle school on the big books are all about death, but death in books.  In All Souls, a school community, uncommonly small, privileged, insular—another ruined garden, if you will—confronts death outside of books.  In math class Marlene Kovack, one of the sick girl’s classmates, muses, “Astra Dell’s dying: What did it mean to them all in this overheated room?” The book is bent on answering this question. 

Do you worry about what your students might think of your work, and what they might extrapolate (erroneously or otherwise) from it?

My earlier books, the two story collections and the novel, Florida, I would like kept on a high shelf until my students come of age, but All Souls, I hope, will amuse them for being familiar; moreover, it is a more accurate portrait of the school than may be seen on TV.  The author of the Gossip Girl series is a former student of mine, a good writer, who, by her own admission, spent her weekends riding horses; nevertheless, her depiction of school life tends to be sensational. All Souls is in part a response to the stereotypically repugnant, empty, pretty-girl models most often paraded in novels about private schools.

Your prose is beautifully succinct.  Do you edit yourself ruthlessly?

I do edit myself ruthlessly and rarely move forward until the passage is right. 

There’s also a kinetic energy though.  Is it difficult to balance the editing and control with intensity and daring? 

I don’t usually think of myself as balancing control with intensity; the struggle is to move characters, create scenes; the struggle is to stay interested in the scene.

Do you feel a strong affinity to poetry?

As has been true for many writers, poetry came first for me; I wanted to be a poet but despaired of achieving an evolved soul, fully believing then and now that poets live in a purer atmosphere that will not sustain lesser mortals.  I don’t think novelists ever reach the slopes of Parnassus although some have come close. 

What motivates you?  Do you have any rituals when you’re writing?

Reading is a provocation.  Reading other fiction or poetry is as much an inspiration as experience.  As to rituals, none beyond securing some privacy and time, but I do not write on trains or planes.

What are you working on now? 

I am working on a very difficult long something that I sometimes call a novella even though I don’t understand what a novella is exactly.  This long-something is to be part of a third short story collection.  Most of the stories have been published in NOON, a literary annual. 

Thank you Christine!

Click here for part one of Christine Schutt’s Q & A