Five Quick Questions with Fabienne Josaphat
Author of Dancing in the Baron’s Shadow
Welcome to Five Quick Questions, The Ribbon’s ongoing mini-interview project. We’ll send the same five questions to authors on their book tours, in advance of their readings at our store. Fabienne Josaphat visits Ann Arbor on August 31st!
Q: What are you reading now? What books will you be taking with you on tour (other than your own)?
I am just finishing Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, which is so magnificent it gives me goosebumps. And as soon as I am done I want to start reading Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi. I have heard too many wonderful things to pass up on the opportunity to read it.
Which section are you most likely to be caught browsing in at Literati?
I always go straight for the literary fiction section and I browse for multicultural novels, stories that transport me into another world.
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 would conjure up Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He’s my favorite author of all time, and I want to ask him to teach me how to write fearlessly, with wild abandon. He had no fears and he embraced the magical and the unusual with such passion that I want to absorb some of that mojo.
Is there a reading, anecdote, or piece of writing advice that’s stuck with you from any literary (or other) event you’ve attended?
I really love Hemingway’s advice about “writing the truest sentence you know.” It’s something you feel deeply when you’re in the zone, writing. You know you’re not there yet if everything you write feels like a like, or makes you feel like a fraud. But also, and I don’t remember where this piece of advice comes from, I think it’s important to not just stay in your comfort zone as a writer, but to branch out. Some say you should write about what you know. I think writers should write about what you seek to know, what they want to understand. Writing should be an exploratory enterprise.
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?
I sometimes read something completely out of my field. A few months ago I found myself obsessing over archaeology, and I learned a lot about pagan symbols of fertility excavated in Europe by surfing the web. That new material can give you great new vocabulary as well as new knowledge, and next thing I knew I was writing poems on archaeology.
