Michelle Elvy’s piece “Love, Story” is up at Metazen today. Interviewing her was difficult because as you will read she lives on a boat and all Metazen editors get sea sick easily but it was worth it. Michelle blogs (beautifully, we might add) at http://michelleelvy.wordpress.com/. Enjoy her unique voice!
Metazen: Go meta: tell us more about “Love, Story”. What’s with the comma?
Michelle: Well, it’s a story about love, and a story about a story, so the comma’s there
to indicate that there are at least two different things going on. I think there are lots of things happening here, in fact, but to get to the bottom of it, you’d have to ask the crazy woman who slept with that nutter in the first place (I mean, what was she thinking?).
But seriously, it would have been boring, and possibly even stupid, to call it simply “Love Story” now wouldn’t it?
Metazen: Imagine you’d stand next to yourself looking over your shoulder: what’d you like about what you’re doing and what not so much?
Michelle: I like a new set of characters who emerged from a recent email exchange with a Fictionaut friend – a loving duo team a la Captain and Tenille suffering through an identity crisis at the conclusion of their Electropoprockfunk/ rockabilly phase and currently considering a remake of “Schopenhauer” by the German punk band, Die Ärzte. I don’t like thinking about them plodding toward a conclusion: these characters are at their best and worst just now, facing crisis.
Metazen: Did you have (a) teacher(s), either dead or alive, known to you personally or not? You know, writers/editors, who walk with you?
Michelle: Well, there was my 7th grade English teacher, who was fanatical about grammar – I think he rubbed off on me in some small way. When I hear my wee kids talking about apostrophes and misplaced commas, I think of Mr. McClory and smile, and wonder if my children will grow up to be grammatical tyrants like their mother. Besides wishing for world peace, I wish that kids today still knew how to diagram sentences.
Metazen: Context is meta: what do you listen to when you write? What do you like to look at?
Michelle: I live on a boat, so I listen to whatever’s happening around me: my partner grinding fiberglass, or the wind whipping the grey tarp. Some days my kids play Findus the cat stories on the stereo (originally written as Petterson och Findus by Swedish author Sven Nordqvist). I can’t write when Findus starts talking, but I don’t mind: sometimes you just gotta stop the voices in your own head and listen to a good story.
As far as what I look at: nothing in particular. I don’t gain inspiration from a painting on my wall, if that’s what you mean (no waterlilies, alas, no Thomas Kincade). As I say, I live in a space that’s about as big as a walk-in closet, and while the idea of living years and years on a boat chasing after tropical paradise sounds romantic and inspirational, the reality is that when I write I sit at my breakfast-nook/dinner-table /desk, and I look up to see my partner sitting about four feet away, huddled over his laptop at the same breakfast-nook/dinner-table/desk, doing his own thing (he’s a freelancer/translator). At the moment he’s munching loudly on lemon cookies and muttering something about “die Besetzung der Rheinlande durch belgische und französische Truppen im Januar 1923…” (which I suppose answers both parts of this question at once). Frankly, I prefer him in the here-and-now to some wistful pastel cottage scene, anyway.
Metazen: What’s your view on meta fiction? Or if you don’t have any, why the hell not?
Michelle: I say YES to it. As a student of history, my favorite thing was the idea that you can tell the story in so many different ways. As a teacher of history, I tried to get my students to understand that the manner in which you tell the story is as important as the story itself – that history is not about one date or event following another (or about some trite notion that we can learn from our past mistakes, because what an obvious bunch of malarkey that is!), but rather about making order out of chaos (or, sometimes, more chaos), creating frameworks, understanding motivations, and, ultimately, searching for meaning in the whole undertaking.
All that is to say, studying history and writing fiction have a lot in common. Especially when it comes to meta-stuff.
Metazen: How will getting published by Metazen change your world? Or if it won’t, why not?
Michelle: What a silly question: It will ROCK MY WORLD.
Metazen: We are sure of that. Any famous last words, words of thanks or (more) shameless self publication?
Michelle: I’m shameless all the time, so I won’t do that here, but I should probably thank the editors of Metazen, and my loving family, and my bird Samson whose very existence inspires me every day, and my mother and my extended relatives even if some of them are nuts (especially the ones who are nuts, come to think of it), and my friends, and, most of all, the woman who smiled at me in the grocery store this morning.
Metazen: we’d like to thank you for agreeing to this interview and the woman who smiled at you (on general grounds of supportive behavior, which must be encouraged). One of us would like some of those lemon cookies and two of us fainted while trying to translate your partner’s mutterings. We all think that you’re in the middle of a love story there.