Kristina Marie Darling: Tell us about your new book of essays, Reckonings. What are three things you’d like readers to know before they delve into the work itself?
Thomas Farber:
1. Like so many others, I was responding to our fraught American political moment. Also asking what I could do/should do as a writer. What’s the role of art? The meaning, say, of satire? Of rejoinder?
2. Also, I’d had two unexpected recent “epiphanies” about whether or not people can or cannot help being what they are. Questions about personal accountability I felt I had to explore when reading others, the self.
3. Finally, I was eighty (!!) years old when I began Reckonings. Of course, when heading toward one’s “second childhood” thoughts of mortality–and immortality–come to mind. So many friends gone or waning. What one makes of it all, what others make of it all. Age-appropriate considerations.
KMD: I admire your impressive command of hybrid forms, and find it revealing that you’ve chosen this particular vehicle for the book’s politically charged content. Could you say more about the ways in which hybrid forms are politically charged?
TF: In fifty-five years of writing books, I’ve never thought about genre or literary forms when starting or working on a project. Rather, my effort’s been finding how to say what, I’d slowly learn, had to be said. I’ve written what publishers and reviewers term short fiction, the novel, the epigrammatic, “creative nonfiction”, and screenplays. From the start, however, I’ve felt free–compelled–to bring to bear anything I could. Market categories, editorial judgments, or sales figures never concerned me. A reckless but imperative freedom. I was blessed with the example of my parents, poet Norma Farber and physician Sidney Farber, who did extraordinary things their own way.
KMD: You’ve cultivated an intriguing relationship between text and image in this volume, where image frequently complicates text or calls it into question—and vice versa. Would you like to say more about the role of visual art in your project?
TF: Over the years, I’ve worked many times with text and images–for instance, my three book collaborations with gifted marine photographer Wayne Levin. Responding, for instance, in different mediums to what he and I both saw in deep ocean at the same time.
Also, re visual art, my film scripts and screenplays were text intended to lead to image and sound.
With Reckonings, I’m blessed by what author-editors Frank Stewart and Pat Matsueda brought to interact with my words–images selected from the paintings of William Blake, Hieronymus Bosch, and others. Some of these images digitally altered. As I now reread Reckonings, they continue to dazzle, disturb. Complicate my feelings about the contemporary world I’ve used words to describe. Make for an enriching–provocative–dialogue.
KMD: It’s refreshing to see this innovation in a literary landscape where so many text and image projects don’t venture beyond mere illustration. What advice to you have for writers who struggle to create a complex, multifaceted relationship between text and image in their work?
TF: Find art that moves and inspires! In 1989 I sought out photographer Wayne Levin because his 1980s black-and-white in-the-water photography was extraordinarily innovative. Instructive. It inspired me to ask to meet him just as I was starting to write a book about ocean–whatever that was going to mean. I told Wayne we should collaborate, and so we did. From which emerged three books...
Otherwise, it’s always good to read Vasari’s Lives of the Painters, see how those lives in the arts were achieved!
KMD: In addition to your formidable achievements as a writer, you are also an accomplished and beloved educator. What has teaching opened up within your creative practice?
TF: I taught until age seventy-eight. Am now “Emeritus.” Was blessed both to teach and to teach only part-time, for decades leaving space to continue to be the productive writer the university had hired. Was very lucky to be able to discuss my craft and student work in ways that empowered these motivated and responsible young others. Thinking of what might guide them often helped guide me. Just sharing a favorite poem or page of prose with the seminar often reminded me of what I continued to aspire to.
KMD: What else are you working on? What can readers look forward to?
TF: I’m habituated to writing. A door opened in the late 1960s when the editor of an underground paper invited me to write down the story I’d just told. “Rapped,” as we bohemians and “freaks” then put it. I did write the story down, though only the gods know where that written voice came from. The editor then immediately published it, asked if I had others. I did. An editor in New York saw those stories, wanted to make a book of them. Without thinking, I went through the door that opened, have continued to do so. All of it meant to be, perhaps.
At age 81, however, I’m too well aware my time here is finite. Friends are waning, friends have died, friends are no longer themselves. The irreplaceable. My impulse still is to describe what I’m living, feeling, seeing. What I have to say. Have to say. To learn. Hope to describe, celebrate.
In my garage library I have shelves and shelves of books about aging, illness, death. They teach me. So many incredible voices! Or I sit in my front yard, again see–witness!–the two huge liquid amber trees. This week, a need to describe those last leaves on the trees, know just why they’re going to fall, to take the time to inspect just one leaf. Inspect what on the branches is already coming next. And...the lilies in the yard are unfurling! This miraculous world.
I also have “remains” to deal with. Countless published poems of my mother, for instance. She died eons ago, in 1984. Still a hunger to further describe who she was, what her vocation entailed...Meanwhile rereading my own books, remembering page by page what it was all about.
More, then, to hope to be able to live, and to tell.