Some Notes on Kate Christensen and Valerie Martin

September 23 Visitors to the Writers Institute

Lentil Stew with Merguez Sausage and Artichoke Hearts
Kate Christensen talks about the central role of food in her fiction in an interview on bookforum.com ( http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/014_03/845 ):

BF: Teddy, who is perhaps the most sexually vibrant septuagenarian in the novel, can seduce anyone with her cooking. You started integrating food writing into your fiction with your last novel, The Epicure’s Lament.

KC: I like food and sex so much: I think it takes a simultaneous sense of sensuality and cerebrality to get it on the page and put it into language. M. F. K. Fisher drives me absolutely insane because usually what she is writing about is not immediately accessible to the reader, and you have to go out and get the ingredients and make it. But she gets me to cook [laughs]. And I invent all of the recipes in my novels. In a way, it’s the same as imagining, say, a conversation between people.

BF: You didn’t test the meals before committing them to the page?

KC: No, not until recently. I’ve been making them all, like tonight. Teddy’s chicken stew came out incredibly well. But the lentil stew with the merguez sausage and the artichoke hearts was so-o-o good. When I write, I think: What would be incongruous yet sound good on the page? Because readers have an inner mental palate.
Note: Kate Christensen will be making a joint appearance with author Valerie Martin at the Writers Institute on Tuesday, September 23, 2008. They will hold an informal workshop at 4:15PM in the Standish Room, Science Library, on the University at Albany’s uptown campus, 1400 Washington Ave. They will also present a reading of new work, and offer a Q&A at 8PM in the Assembly Hall, Campus Center on the uptown campus. Free and open to the public.
Friday, September 19, 2008

Poachers Welcome
In a discussion of her newest novel, Trespass, Valerie Martin relates how she transmutes the “found objects” of personal experience into fiction. This is from the website of her UK publisher, Orion Books ( http://www.orionbooks.co.uk/interview.aspx?id=11297 ):

“Wandering through the wild woods around her country house, Valerie Martin stumbled across a man carrying a gun. He was a poacher and his presence was not wholly unwelcome. ‘I just stumbled across him,’ she recalls, her voice cool and emotionless. ‘I had the impression that he had an accent, and it turned out that he was Albanian.’ The reason she sounds cool and collected is that the encounter inspired her. Athough readers of her new novel Trespass will shudder with recognition of the scene. An encounter between a mysterious poacher and middle-aged artist Chloe Dale is a pivotal point in the plot of the novel, a dystopian tale of family life and strife. But this is no domestic tale of dysfunction. As Valerie’s many fans have come to expect, in Trespass she deals with far bigger issues than those on the home front and in doing so reminds us that the personal and the political are never far apart – in this case in the form of the Balkans War and US policy in Iraq.”

“Another inspiration for the novel was the discovery through her partner of an enclave of that troubled Eastern European area tucked away in the Deep South. ‘I found that all the oystermen in the very bottom of Louisiana were Croatian and had come there many generations ago – around 1915,’ recalls [Martin, a New Orleans native]. ‘They had been there for generations but continued to speak their language.’ Following the bloody war in Bosnia, relatives of the oystermen fled to America to seek refuge from the suffering in their home country, just like the Drago family in Trespass.”


Note: Valerie Martin will be making a joint appearance with author Kate Christensen at the Writers Institute on Tuesday, September 23, 2008. They will hold an informal workshop at 4:15PM in the Standish Room, Science Library, on the University at Albany’s uptown campus, 1400 Washington Ave. They will also present a reading of new work, and offer a Q&A at 8PM in the Assembly Hall, Campus Center on the uptown campus. Free and open to the public.