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With few words, you convey that this seasoned doctor is horrified by the extent of Mireille’s injuries. For me, one of the most powerful “descriptions” of what Mireille endures occurs in a late scene with a doctor.
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I also spent a great deal of time considering how to approach writing sexual violence and trauma in ways that served the story without being exploitative or gratuitous.ĮD: Well, you succeeded there. It was difficult to allow myself to “go there” as a writer. RG: The greatest challenge was writing about the darker parts of the story, particularly what Mireille experienced during her kidnapping and the aftermath. The short story was definitely the inspiration for the novel and I hope that they echo each other well.ĮD: What was the greatest challenge you encountered in writing An Untamed State? I wanted to know more about these characters and their lives so I began to flesh out the story and it turned into this sprawling novel. I could not get her, or Michael, or Lorraine, or Mireille’s parents out of my mind. When I finished the short story, Mireille and her experiences stayed with me. ROXANE GAY (RG): An Untamed State is the same story as “Things I Know About Fairy Tales,” only with the novel, I’ve expanded, and I hope, enriched the story. (We don’t discover the woman’s name in the short story, but it seems clear that she is in fact the same character as Mireille, the novel’s protagonist.) Did the short story precede the novel, or was it to some extent excerpted from a longer work then in-progress? Please tell us how Mireille’s story took shape for you as a writer, and how you see the relationship between the short story and novel. Like the novel, the story, too, features a Haitian-American woman who survives a brutal kidnapping episode while visiting her parents back in Haiti. That story, “Things I Know About Fairy Tales,” was also published in Necessary Fiction. She recently announced that she has accepted a position as associate professor at Purdue University and that she has been named Visiting Writer for spring 2015 at Florida Atlantic University.ĮRIKA DREIFUS (ED): As soon as I read a description of An Untamed State, I was reminded of one of the haunting stories in your collection Ayiti (Artistically Declined Press, 2011).
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Currently, she teaches writing at Eastern Illinois University. She is the co-editor of PANK and essays editor for The Rumpus. Roxane Gay’s writing has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, West Branch, Virginia Quarterly Review, NOON, The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, Time, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The Rumpus, Salon, The Wall Street Journal’s Speakeasy culture blog, and many others. (But, wait–that isn’t Roxane’s only book that’s being published this year. This time, the author is Roxane Gay, and the book we’ll focus on is her novel, An Untamed State, which Grove Atlantic is publishing this month. Someone whose work I’ve come to know and admire through the power of the Internet has agreed to answer a few questions about a new book.