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be possible for you to craft these suspended realities without the presence or functioning of realism? Or, to put it another way, to what extent does realism become a kind of binary referent that works to illuminate the reallife-humanity of, or within, the alternate worlds you create? . GS: I think it would be impossible to do those stories without realism. What Woods is saying is simply that realism is what we expect-maybe what we are neurologically designed to want: the use of familiar symbols, in a pattern that is mimetic of "real" life-or at least our habitual way of talking/thinking about real life. But realism is also, we've come to realize, false. Or at best it is merely partial. When we say: "Jim walked down the street towards the dry cleaners," we are positing that "Jim" is a distinct, permanent entity. Well, we know that Jim is not that. Jim is comprised of some number of atoms etc, Jim will eventually die in a plane crash, Jim was formerly 300 pounds heavier than he is right now (where is that part of Jim now?), Jim once gnawed on the bars of his crib, the dry cleaners was once a Wendy's and in ten years will be a vacant lot-and this is only realism's failing on a gross physical level. So to be truly "realistic"- that is, to really show life for the multiple, various thing it is, we may feel we need to do more than "mere" realism. But realism is always the base, whether we like it or not. When we say something is 'experimental' we are implicitly measuring this thing against something: realism. And personally I have no problem with that-the trick, as far as I'm concerned, is to do something that whacks the reader right in the heart, and I don't care how it's done, only that this happens, and the story functions more as a tool than as a documentation of something.
JJ:
In an interview published in the Missouri Review, 2000, you say that, "I'm realizing more and more that it's not fiction's job to be photographically representative of reality." The worlds you create exist in a kind of suspended reality. They resemble our own, but the old rules, our rules, don't necessarily hold up. Things work differently, as in your novella Bounty, or the story CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, and yet there is a humanity and a compassion and a vision that unmistakably encompasses the world, this world, that you and I exist in. Can you talk a little about this relationship? Do the worlds you create make it easier to say the things you want to say about our world, our culture, our society? GS: It's hard for me to answer that question ... I mean, thank you. I don't really have anything I want to say about our world or culture. Or, rather, I don't know what I want to say until I've said it, and the way I say it, is to involve myself in the fun of creating a world that is roughly our world, but with certain aspects exaggerated. And I don't know which ones will get Winter 2005
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