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A Note to
Reading Groups
I love reading groups! It is especially gratifying
that all of my novels have been popular with many
reading groups in the past few years. Attention to
literary fiction can be greatly helped by book group
support and it means a lot to me personally. I would
be very happy to answer questions in email either
before or after any reading group discussion of one of
my novels. I welcome inquiries about visiting your
reading group, although there are certain times when I
can't put anything more on my calendar so that I can
devote myself exclusively to writing the current
novel. Some libraries have funded programs for
visiting writers, and groups can ask their local
library to invite me for a reading. If anyone in your
group has a relationship with a nearby college or
university with a visiting writer series, usually
through the English Department, a public reading and a
private meeting with your group might be possible to
arrange in sequence. Please email me (katweber@snet.net)
if you would like to explore the possibility of my visiting with
your reading group or
coming to your campus. |
Where do you get your ideas? Is your writing autobiographical?
Writing, putting thoughts and observations into words, is something that comes so naturally to me that I would have to say that the question of finding ideas for my writing is more about filtering out material than it is about searching for inspiration. Everything is potentially of interest to the fiction writer who works the way I do, like a magpie, snatching up glittering bits of detritus from the dirty sidewalk to take home to the nest. My fiction is not literally autobiographical, in that the characters are made up, the events described have never occurred -- but at the same time, the sensibilities of certain characters are authentically my own.
How do you teach writing?
There is a great deal of craft that can be learned in a writing class. I try to offer the kind of information and practical advice to my writing students at Yale that I would have loved when I was just starting out. I try to expose them to writers whose work inspires or infuriates. Beyond a certain point, of course a certain kind of talent is either there or not. But even the most brilliant natural writer needs to know rules of grammar and punctuation before she breaks them. I don't believe in the old chestnut "Write what you know," but I do take my friend Elizabeth McCracken's good advice that one should "know what you write."
What’s the best moment for you when you are writing?
The best moment is when I write the last sentence of a novel for the first time. I try to write in sequence, and although I have a very clear sense of the final elements of those last pages very much in mind before I write the first sentence on the first page, I don’t allow myself to write the final sequences until I have truly arrived there. It feels right to me to work this way, because then the final pages will fill with the true emotional weight and momentum of everything that has come before. I have come to this way of working on my own, intuitively, but I recently discovered that Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary, when she was beginning to write The Waves, “I am going to hold myself from writing till I have it impending in me: grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear.”
What’s next?
Two books, which will be published by Harmony/Shaye Areheart. The first is TEMPER, a multi-generational novel about a family’s candy business and the struggle, between father and son, over succession. The second is a memoir, SYMPTOMS OF FICTION. I will be writing about memory and perception and my childhood, so I will be writing about my grandmother Kay Swift, who wrote Broadway show tunes and was the love of George Gershwin’s life; my father, a crackpot filmmaker with an 800-page FBI file whose grandiose schemes usually came to nothing, though he did create the horribly unsuccessful movies-with-smells venture known as Aromarama; and my mother, the sort of Girl Scout leader who once led the entire troop through a hole in a parking lot fence at the New York World’s Fair to avoid paying admission.
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