What do you see as the value of digging around in those dark places? He looked a little like Oscar Wilde.īurke: Your characters are often grappling with difficult issues-infidelity, illness, addiction. I saw this character very clearly-his great height, his full lips. There’s a terrible character in Prosperous Friends, a simply horrible man, and I don’t have trouble coming up with horrible men. I liked this character so well I gave him some success. Then there was this quality my younger son had when his hair was long, and then there was someone I was making up: a handsome young man with a side-part. I bought it at the National Portrait Gallery. Schutt: When I was creating one of the characters in Prosperous Friends, I looked at a postcard picture of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. I look at something for a long time and roll over words right to the occasion.īurke: Is that also true when you’re creating a character? Does the character come from an imagined scene or image? Schutt: Sometimes there’s an image, yes, and the language comes so fast on it. I wanted to get a sound that would call up or be right for those stones and that place.īurke: Is that how you start a new novel or story-an image catches your attention and you find the sound from there?
He wants to surprise her and be sexually risky. I thought about that a lot, and I thought about what the couple was doing. I was remembering my own experience at that age, being in those sorts of churches, and the stones, and the moss on the stones, and the coldness of it. I had this idea that there would be a couple in their mid-thirties outside of London, maybe in the Fens, near a priory or a church. I’m thinking of the way my new book, Prosperous Friends, begins. To what extent are you thinking about sound when you’re writing? She lives in Cincinnati.īurke: One of the things I admire most about your writing is how it sounds. Burke is the author of Horse Loquela, winner of the 2007 Red Mountain Review Chapbook Series Award. Her new novel, Prosperous Friends, will be published by Grove Press on November 6. She is also the author of two novels: All Souls, which was a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize, and Florida, a finalist for the 2004 National Book Award. With Diane Williams, she edits the literary journal NOON. Christine Schutt is the author of two short story collections, A Day, A Night, Another Day, Summer and Nightwork.
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