Diane Lefer - California Transit

Author Asks

1. “Naked Chinese People” includes sections of narrated memory, authorial commentary, and action. How does the structure work? Which scenes did I choose to dramatize, and what is the effect of these choices?

2. Did my references to race offend you or make you uncomfortable? Why? What are your own experiences in writing about—or choosing not to write about—race? As a reader, do you react differently to the content when you know the race of the author?

3. Some people have asked me whether “Alas, Falada” and “How Much an Ant Can Carry” are essays rather than fiction. Did you have the same uncertainty? Does it matter to you whether something you read is fiction or nonfiction? What expectations—including stylistic expectations--do you, as a reader, bring to fiction? To nonfiction?

4. How would your experience as a reader have changed if, in “At the Site Where Vision Is Most Perfect,” I had focused on Mirta and her family rather than on Cliff and hers?

5. Did “At the Site Where Vision Is Most Perfect” raise questions in your mind about real life issues of immigration and enforcement? Is there a role for political advocacy in fiction, or does partisanship inevitably undermine the quality of a work of art? Can you cite a book, film, play, painting, song that succeeds as politically engaged art? Can you name works that seem to you more like propaganda than art? Where and how do I fall into the propaganda pitfall (in this story or others)? Where and how do I avoid it?

6. What is the effect of the matter-of-fact narrative voice in “Angle and Grip,” when dealing with sexual content? What other kinds of tone and language might I have used, and how would those choices have changed the effect?

7. Did the story for you take a clear stand on late-term abortion? What is your opinion of and attitude toward the narrator?

8. I’ve adapted “The Atlas Mountains” as a short stage play because it seemed like a prime example of a “scene” – one person wants something from the other, the other isn’t giving it up, and it also has a subtext. On the surface, the narrator’s wish is to know what country the tech guy comes from. Beneath the question she asks and his failure to answer, what do you think each of them is really looking for?

9. When characters in these stories express opinions very different from your own, does this make you curious about them or does it make you feel excluded or unwelcome as a reader? Do you assume the opinions of my characters are my own opinions, and do you generally make that assumption about authors?

10. What are the different time frames and geographies in the novella, "California Transit", and how does the narrative move from one to another?

11. Where does the violence in the novella come from? Where does Anita’s violence come from? Can you find yourself understanding her actions without condoning them? Was her violence inevitable? Could her feelings have been channeled in a different way? How?

12. “The Prosperity of Cities and Desert Places” breaks with realism and is stylistically very different from the rest of the collection. Did the style seem appropriate to the content? What were the advantages of this approach? What were the disadvantages?

13. What role do non-human animals play in the collection?

By the way, there are no right or wrong answers to any of these questions. I mean them as an invitation to explore and articulate your own aesthetic values and to think not only about my work but about your own.