John Reed is the author of nine books: fiction, non-fiction, poetry and drama, (Delacorte, Simon & Schuster, Roof, MTV Press, Melville House, Penguin, C&R Press, Profile, Outpost19, Palgrave Macmillan); MFA in Creative Writing, Columbia University; Associate Professor and Director of the MFA in Creative Writing at The New School.
KMD: What is the biggest misunderstanding that people have about Orwell? The biggest myth surrounding his life and work?
JR: The biggest misunderstanding is that he was an outsider. He’s often described as a lone voice in the crowd: in fact, he was very much a voice of authoritative positions—he worked for the BBC for years, and if you troll through his daily commentaries of that period you’ll discover a man who was very often, if not always, writing to the “talking points”; as far as his outsider status in literary circles, he quite determinedly found his way into the good graces of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a larger soft war / cultural intelligence operation for the Western World led by the British Foreign Office and the CIA—and he used that affiliation to position Animal Farm as the most widely translated work of fiction (propagandistic in nature) in human history; personally, of course, he was a policeman as a younger man and the badge never tarnished—he always remained something of a cop; and finally, politically, he was not a man of unflinching convictions, but rather, a rat, turning over names to the British Secret Service—nobody knows today exactly how many, but somewhere from the tens to well over 100.
KMD: Many excerpts of the book were initially published in literary magazines as essays. From a practical standpoint, what are the advantages of writing a nonfiction book in magazine assignments? Can you speak to the value of this approach for building audience and community around the book?
JR: Some of the essays in there took a long, long time to complete. The Harpers piece about the origin of Animal Farm, a little-known short story by a Russian/Ukranian scholar (which may have been copyrighted when Orwell cribbed from it), took about two years to sort out. There was secondary source research, primary research, and translation. And, beginning with the Paris Review piece—a timeline of Animal Farm, the CIA and the British Foreign Office, I kept thinking I would never write about Orwell again. These were imagined finish lines; sometimes you need those to keep running. Even today, I find myself wondering if I should go back to the stories I missed.
KMD: Tell us about the book’s illustrations. Why was it so crucial to include these?
JR: I don’t know if it was crucial, but I really wanted to draw them. There is something revealing about how any writer handles a line—makes a figure, and by extension conceives of a letter. Publishing with an academic press, I also hoped to bring something at least a little more punk rock to the project.
Hmm, oh, and also, I think the history of imagery attached to Animal Farm is so established that the text felt a little incomplete without the images.
I should say, incidentally, that it was very difficult for Palgrave to produce the images without doing really ugly formatting stuff. As an academic press, they were not set up in their template for “illos.”
KMD: In addition to your achievements as a prose writer, you are also an accomplished poet. What can poets learn from nonfiction writers about innovation on the level of ideas? On the level of style?
JR: Ha, well, to be honest I’ve had a bit of the reverse experience. I’ve learned so much from poets and poetry about nonfiction. Umm, one thing, every extra word costs you ten dollars. Um, another: sometimes an investigation which feels incidental is extremely important. Our instincts often guide us when we don’t have an answer or a reason or we’re missing crucial data. In research, trusting a feeling, trusting a curiosity about an unusual image, trusting, uh, haha, a distrust (as in “that’s weird.”) can bring about the most thrilling revelations and discoveries.
KMD: What else are you working on? What events, workshops, and projects can readers look forward to?
JR: I have this AI romance I’ve been working on. A kind of quick novel. Dunno. A longstanding historical novel, which I’m finally closing in on. Sort of a throwback to my first novel and my very “American” family. Last thing, I’m also pretty close to having a second collection/sequence of sonnets. I’ve also, ha, been trying to give more time to reading books by friends.