P ORTR A IT BY A A r o n m a y e s
Maile Chapman explores the dark side of medicine in her debut novel.
[ PROFILE ]
‘If you saw my bookshelf, you’d think I was morbid.’ Who is she? Maile Chapman, a UNLV Schaeffer Fellow and young Las Vegas novelist on the rise. Her debut novel, Your Presence Is Requested at Suvanto, published by acclaimed independent imprint Graywolf Press, hits bookstores March 30. What’s it about? A convalescent ward in Finland in the 1920s. Characters include a practical American nurse, an embittered ex-ballroom dancer and an obstetrician whose quest to perfect a new surgical stitch drives him to some dark moral territory with his patients. Where’d she come up with that? The novel was inspired in part by one of Chapman’s favorite plays, Euripides’ The Bacchae — yes, that one, the bloody Greek tragedy featuring divinely deranged women on a murderous rampage. “In Greek drama, it’s almost like a machine,” Chapman says. “Once the machine is in motion, there’s no stopping it.” What she learned in writing the novel: “The idea of good behavior, civility ... it’s almost like a membrane over human behavior, and it’s very easily ruptured.” You see where this is going, right? Without giving away spoilers, let’s just say the Amazon.com blurb about Your Presence Is Requested at Suvanto includes the phrase “terrifying conclusion.” Hear for yourself: Chapman reads from her work 7 p.m. April 15 at UNLV’s Barrick Museum Auditorium. Still need convincing? Try this endorsement from best-selling author Junot Díaz: “Maile Chapman is one of my favorite writers and in Your Presence Is Requested at Suvanto she has given us an eerie gift of a novel. It is a superb hallucinatory piercing, an ominous dispatch from that Gothic frontier of the Female Body.” But there is a glimmer amid all this gloom: Chapman’s dual interest in medicine and literature has led to her becoming facilitator of the Literature and Medicine discussion group, a joint project between Nevada Humanities and University Medical Center. The idea: Recharging the batteries of stressed-out doctors and nurses with the power of books. “Medical professionals suffer a lot of burnout, a lot of anxiety, a lot of hardening of the self,” Chapman says. “Everybody who’s participated [in groups like these] welcomed this outlet as a way of reconnecting with why they were interested in working in medicine in the first place. So I’m not just a weirdo for reading old nursing books and looking at horrendous pictures from historical medical texts.” Hey, we didn’t say that. “Seriously, if you saw my bookshelf, you’d think I was morbid.”— Andrew Kiraly 10
Desert Companion
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