Five Quick Questions with Eileen Pollack

Q: What are you reading now? What books will you be taking with you on tour (other than your own)?

I’m re-reading Jennifer Egan’s spookily good novel LOOK AT ME because she accomplishes in that book what I’m struggling to accomplish in the novel I’m writing now. But on tour I want to read books I can’t read when I’m writing because the voices would distort my own voice. So! I’m looking forward to reading Henry Green’s LOVING, LIVING, PARTY GOING trilogy, which was recommended to me by Deborah Eisenberg (whom I adore). Green was a master of the different levels of British dialect (the book is sort of Downtown Abbey told from the servants’ pov, with no sentimentality about their employers). And THE FORTUNES by our own Peter Ho Davies. In nonfiction, I’m reading EVICTED by Matthew Desmond and OTHER MINDS: THE OCTOPUS, THE SEA, AND THE DEEP ORIGINS OF CONSCIOUSNESS.

Q: Which section are you most likely to be caught browsing in at Literati?

Fiction, for sure. But also science, memoir, poetry, graphic novel …

Q: If we could conjure up any writer, living or dead, to join you in conversation after the reading, who would it be? And what would you ask them?

I miss my former teachers, John Hersey and James Alan McPherson. I would love to see either or both and ask what I could do to improve, to deepen my writing. Mostly, though, I just want to hang out with them and hear their voices again … such different voices! And both so true and honest and human!

Q: Is there a reading, anecdote, or piece of writing advice that’s stuck with you from any literary (or other) event you’ve attended?

Once, in a conference with John Hersey after I’d been criticized in workshop, Hersey looked out the window (you have to picture a very regal, white-haired son of a missionary) and said, “Sometimes, you just have to say you don’t give a f — — about what someone says about your writing.” In Jim McPherson’s workshop at Iowa, he said, “You have to humanize the assholes.” Oh, and Hersey said that if you wanted to make writing your life, you couldn’t desire anything that you wouldn’t be able to afford, which was pretty much everything.

Q: Literati’s Book Ninjas never waste time online — we’re too busy reading! — but since we’re here: what article or website have you lately found worth wasting time on?

Wise Women for Clinton!