MELANIE RAE THON : THE LADY OF THE LAKES

Down to earth and head up high, meet Melanie Rae Thon, subtle author whose stories depict unflinchingly a cruel reality. Sweehearts are made of this...

-MRT : I think that every piece of writing is a combination of fiction and non fiction, I don’t think it’s ever true to say that something is purely fiction or purely a memoir either because people add things and combine characters even when they’re writing something that is highly autobiographical, so there’s definitely people I know inside the book, deep inside the characters ; there are historical figures in the book ; and those are based on real people, but the main characters are invented.

-What was your own background ? Are you more a country girl or a city one ?

-MRT : I lived in a very small town, in the north western corner of Montana, far west of the United States, very close to the Canadian border, high in the mountain, so it’s very settled, but the landscape just outside the town becomes quickly very wild...

In your books, which is normal, female characters are very strong, and specially mothers, all mothers, even if they are distant from Iona, from Cecile, dead, deaf, divorced, away. Do you think, like many writers of the past century did, that the mother is the main piece of the family and the puzzle ?

-MRT : I think that really often mothers are the central piece, even if the fathers have more power in the external world. In the private world of the family, mothers rules more, in fact. They are known as people who know the secrets, who keep them even if they’re rather silent, in the two books.

-What seduced you first when you discovered you wanted to be a writer ?

-MRT : I think it’s because there were so many things I couldn’t say out loud, which is very much similar to the people in my book. I realize now, being older that there were things that I saw, that I found about the world that were very hard for people to hear me say out loud, and I realized that if I wrote it down in a way they couldn’t hear me, I could tell many things. We feel more free that way, and more by the way of fiction : without be interrupted, without being contradicted !

-You wrote that daring women, in speech or action or love, are attractive for men but dangerous too, and so maybe more attractive : were you looking for that kind of approach from men ? Or was it more to make them understand their power upon women, which is sometimes close to slavery ?

-MRT : I don’t think I was driven by ideas, I don’t think that I had an agenda about what I wanted to communicate to men, I wasn’t trying to give any message across. I think that if you want to love somebody, you have to let them be as they are and not try to shape them in your own culture, your own language, and that maybe, is the force of the collision of native Americans and white settlers, or just men and women or children and parents, people trying to own other people and try to make their feelings or imagine their feelings as being similar, when they really aren’t.

-In Iona Moon, in a way, everything was really symbolic, you didn’t know if people were white or black or indians, but in « Sweet Hearts », the things are really more clear from the beginning : what way do you think is more efficient, more powerful ?

-MRT : I wasn’t trying to be symbolic at all in Iona Moon, I thought that most of the American readers would assume that the people were white because they live in Idaho and everyone who lives in Idaho is white, so there was no question for them if they’re black or Native American. The general readers would assume they’re white people !

-Anyway it’s a good thing, because you can’t say that the « good » or the « bad » are black or white, the rules of the game are changing in the process...

-MRT : Yes, and we even don’t know if we’re black or white, we’re all mixed or we could be and may not understand where people came from.

-Does the news on paper and tv inspire you or are you more attached to the life of people ?

-MRT : Both : Iona Moon came from a story that a friend of mine told me, a big great Montana man with big broad shoulders, big beard, very very strong, told me about being attacked by a young girl when he was a teenager, and the scene happens in Iona Moon when she tries to seduce Willy and in fact attacks him. But this huge man, telling the story of being attacked by a young girl, he was a boy at the time but still a big person, and at the age of 38 he was still angry about it, still obsessed about it. This story had a powerful effect on me : I wondered who’s this man obsessed by this situation ? And, when I was working on « Sweet hearts », I read a story about a boy in my hometown who had set a marina on fire, a whole cluster of boats on fire, a hundred boats, it was tremendous. So one of the ideas came from this child who was only six years old, and the people of the town were outraged, not only against him but his whole family, and I was very struck by the anger of the community and by the way of people leaping to the solution to get rid of the bad elements, cutting the evil out of them, they wanted those people to leave their town, and because it was so close to where I’ve grown up, I felt very connected to those events : I know these people, those who are angry and those who have transgressed somewhere ; this is our community and we don’t understand that. We are part of the same community, we’re not separate people, not good and bad people, you can’t take evil and remove it from your community and exile it !

-It’s like the story of Cecile and Flint when they run away : they meet all sorts of people...

-MRT : Yes, and in that case, Flint could be bad and Cecile could be good...

-And the only one person who could have been good for them, ready to give everything, is the one who’s shot by them...

-MRT : Destiny, sometimes...

-This is a very authentic material you’re attached to, you couldn’t write thrillers or science fiction for example, you need your stories to be attached to reality ?

-MRT : I need to hear stories from people I care about, and feel attached to hear stories that somehow trigger a big mystery for me. Sometimes, when I read things in papers, they don’t mean anything to me, but sometime they strike my heart and I feel very close, I think there’s a mystery here that I need to understand and the only way I know to explore it fully is to do that through my writing.

-Do you still hear those « external voices » when you write ?

MRT : Not so much : I used to worry a great deal about how others would see my work or judge it, or just think that I didn’t have the right to speak in certain voices, that remark came in specific reference to a story I have written from the point of view of a black man, and I was afraid of people thinking that I didn’t have the right to speak in that voice, and so I realized that fiction is about imagination and compassion and what we find out by trying to reinvent ourselves through another person’s life, that’s what interesting to me. I think that every other person is a mystery, whether they have different culture, or race or gender, every human life is sacred and different in some ways, but we share a great deal too ! It makes no sense to say that I can write about all white people because I’m white : that’s ridiculous !

-Novels and short stories : what is the most exciting for you ?

-MRT : I like them both very much, I like to move between the two of them, they teach me different things : when I work on a novel, I think I’m immersed in a big landscape, in a group of people, in a family for a long long time. In a short story, I try to compress things to their most essential things, what we need to know about people in order to feel familiar with them... I hope my short stories will be published in France, I keep telling everyone to write a letter to l’Olivier and tell them to publish the short stories. Everyone says that short stories don’t sell that well in France, but everyone love them, that’s what they keep saying. But maybe the publishers don’t like short stories !

-It took you 8 years, in 77, to achieve your first short story : what is your rhythm today : do you write every day or do you have periods of intense work ?

-MRT : When I was younger, I worked every day, but I can’t do that now, because I have a very heavy teaching load and I travel a lot, when my books come out, and so I have to adapt my strategy for approaching my work. Now I have the tendency to transfer stuff through my work for my imagination through making notes, through doing research, and then save the big writing time for separate spaces, which is hard in some ways : if I could, I’d prefer to write every day, I feel better when I write every day, it’s a deep need, like a prayer for me.

-Have you been tempted by other forms of writing : theater, scripts, ...

-MRT : I’d love to write for movies and making money, I’d like to make poems and be profound, and I’d love to work in theater, it would be a great adventure, but so far I haven’t had the time to learn those other forms, it takes all my energy and imagination to do what I do, and I think that maybe, sometimes, yes. And now, more than anything, I need to learn another language, I have to speak French, for instance ! I can say a few phrases and I can read a French newspaper because it’s clear and direct and I know enough of the news to be able to follow what they are talking about, but anything complicated, novels or poetry in French and I won’t be able to translate it. But I can hear it, speaking is the problem !

-In your books, there’s a lot of water : river, lakes, etc ; do you share this Japanese belief that water, and most of all seas and oceans, mean death ?

-MRT : I love that idea, I find it beautiful. I don’t think of it as a direct symbol : for me, water is a symbol of a possible transformation, and in Eastern culture, transformation is often something like death, as a metaphor or in reality. But really, where I grew up, the landscapes in my books have many rivers and many lakes, so it's a real landscape for me. I think water is a magical place, we come from water, we’re born from it, our bodies are more than eighty per cent water...

-And water is an element, like fire, it depends what you do with : in the books, some people are dreaming, other are running away...

-MRT : Absolutely !

-What is the main thing for you in the fact of teaching : exchange and sharing of the styles, of ideas, creative writing ?

-MRT : I love to be around people who are learning anything because they are so exciting when they learn something, they feel free, open, bigger than they’ve been in the past. So, for me, the most important part of teaching is encouraging people enough, so that they feel confident to try new things that were scary for them, and to get them to the point where they’re using language, their imagination, their senses more actively. So I want to stimulate people, and get them confident. I teach literature and writing, even though everyone says you can’t teach writing in France, which is a strange idea. I teach them both !

-Is it difficult for you to be a writer and a teacher at the same time ?

-MRT : It’s difficult because it takes so much time to be a good teacher, and I’m very passionate about my teaching and invest a great deal of my spirit and my time in the work. But it feeds me too, I love to teach, to be with students, it challenges me and so it’s good for the writing : it takes away from the writing and feeds it at the same time, so both things are happening. Many writers in America teach too. I try to focus on my students, so it’s very different from going in and talking about my own work, which I would never do in my classroom, it’s neither interesting nor helpful for me. When I’m teaching, I’m looking first of all at the students' work and trying to help them understand their own visions as writers and help that vision grow, not to impose my vision upon them, or my attitudes, or my judgments, or my rules, but, as I say, here’s what I think you’re trying to do, here’s some ways you could try to explore that, so my teaching comes very much from the students' own work and vision. It’s an exchange, it’s not a one way process. In that way, teaching in America in general is very different, even in my literature classes : sometimes, I lecture, if I have a lot of material, but I need to give them a lot of factual material. In American classrooms, students expect to have an exchange of ideas with the teacher, in the classroom, they expect to be able to discuss things among themselves in the classroom, which is very very different.

-Would you stop to write or teach if you had to ?

-MRT : In my perfect life, I would like to continue to teach, but do about half as much as I do now, so much lighter teaching load, much more time for writing. Right now, my balance is off, I spend a lot of time working with my students, which is good but draining me too much now that I’m older, and I feel I would like to devote more time to my writing. More time to other kinds of explorations, of learnings, as I said : being in France makes me painfully aware of the fact that I need to learn French, and I need to learn enough of any languages so I can travel and feel confident and allow other people to feel comfortable with me. At the moment, I’m teaching, I’m in the middle of my semester...

-Montana, James Crumley, Missoula area : is it an influence for you?

-MRT : I know James Crumley by name, I know a few of them, but I didn’t read them, in fact !

-What does writing mean to you today ? Collecting memories like the oral traditions in the past ?

MRT : That’s absolutely right, I feel that the narrator, who strangely enough is deaf, and not speaking out loud and is someone who tries to recover an oral history, a history that hasn’t been written down and only passed on in fragments of stories, and she can remember some of them and read about some things in historical books, she can observe the world, read newspapers and learn about all the people involved in events that happen in the present and try to understand that. But finally, to put it all together, she has to be completely inventive, she has to imagine her way into each person’s life, and had the stories that they haven’t told her, that they can’t tell her and may not even know, so I'm trying to recover that history through memories, through stories, but I’m also trying to create a history, more complete memories through the character of Marie.

-Would you do some more political writings if you could ?

-MRT : I’m so interested in individuals that I think that when you start working with politics you get trapped in ideas, in abstractions, you find yourself generalizing and if I start doing that, I feel I’m lying, this can’t be true, this is not what I believe, what these people believe, there’s not such things as people, as Them, this was only a particular person, very much affected by a whole web of other people and a whole web of history and events and the present. I’m interested in discovering who people are in each situation and I think political ideas emerge from that, and other people may read as I say that this is a book about... and summarize, but it’s not how I enter my work.

-But, when you read « Sweet hearts », and especially the character of the deaf woman, sometimes, we feel that you would like to say many more things, but it’s not the purpose of the book, so you stop. It’s like a flow coming, those histories from the past and the things you have to say about today...

-MRT : I think that’s true, and I want to respect my readers, and I like to think that they’re intelligent people with ideas of their own, and if they read the story, they see the people and come to know them and through my work become less afraid or more curious about who the people are, and that they’ll come to their own ideas about the world, and don’t need me to come in and say : « this is what I mean and what you should believe », to allow people their own freedom and their own space to understand.

-And would you like to write a full book about Indian culture, about all those stories ?

-MRT : I don’t think I’ll be ever qualified to do that, I’m very curious about Indian culture, I want to continue to learn more and more about it, but I read thirteen different books to do the short bit that is in the novel and so, for me, the process of learning and compressing and presenting it in my own way is so lengthy ! I would have to be five hundred years old in order to do it !

-Are all the facts depicted true ? It’s not very known in Europe, anyway...

-MRT : Yes, everything is true, but it’s not that much known in America either, and I tried to choose elements that were unusual, striking, surprising, and try to put them altogether. I think it’s a very isolated culture, the Indian tribes, the ones who are still active, still living in any kind of ritualistic way, of culturally identified way, stay in groups, and the ones who are coming to white culture are very often quickly assimilated, and so, people don’t learn about the history of Indians, at last they go to reservations and make an effort to try to understand those people, which many people don’t, obviously ! But I think there’s more and more interest now in Indian culture, sometimes romanticized, idealized as if it were the perfect way : it’s not the good way, it’s The best way !

-Who are the most interested in this culture ? The white people or the native indians ?

-MRT : I think both, but the most interest comes from the Indians themselves ; they say that they’ve lost this piece of their history with some of their rituals, they’ve been separated from their own language and culture and now they wish to reclaim it. Many Indians have been very active in that process.

-What did writing teach you after those years since you’ve first been published ?

-MRT : The most important thing I learned was I couldn’t be subject to anybody else’s ideas about what writing should be, that if I wanted to say things, they were true for me, that if I wanna explore my people honestly, I had to find my own stories and my own way of telling them. And that writing was the most important thing and publishing was secondary, I had to tell the stories first, and anything that would happen in the public round was separate from what was happening in my private discovery.

-Iona Moon had a rather optimistic ending for the three main characters, despise all the horrible things happening : do you see the end of « Sweethearts » more that way ?

-MRT : I’m so glad that you see this is optimistic, because many people don’t ! In all this blackness, the end is rather good, we don’t know what will happen to Iona and her two friends, but they reach a step. That’s where I always hope to bring my work, to that step where the reader can imagine these people will survive, and the reason that they’ll survive is that they try to communicate with one another and love one another and remain curious about one another, and I think that is what happens in the end of « Sweethearts » also. But many people see it as a very dark book, which I don’t : for me, at the end of the book is great hope that comes through, the relationship between Marie and Cecile. Marie offers to take Cecile and communicate with her and give her her language which will allow her to speak freely, with ambiguity and love for Flint.

-And so, do you think to write mainly on children and teenager is a way to hope in the future ?

-MRT : I’m interested to see people in all differences phases of their lives, and I think too often in American culture at least, and I don’t know how or why, people devalue the experiences of the childhood and see it as not as important as what we do as adults. I’ve never felt that was true, I feel in childhood is where our lives are the most intense, that’s when we experience things for the first time, everything if full of wonder and fear and delight. You see children who are incredibly curious and interested in other people and in the physical world, and that’s why I’m so drawn to portray young people as well as older people who are still alive, who love their life, really. People getting older are so invested in making money, owning things, getting more things, without fantasy or imagination. It’s very sad : I would like all of them to wake up ! That’s one thing I try to evoke in the book, we’re a community, not just with other people but with all the living creatures, the living plants, the rocks and the rivers, it’s all part of one environment...

-Yes, as you can say : « Oh , why put music in a hotel, it’s not a concert hall » ! Yes, why ?

-MRT : Because it fills my heart ! ! !

Interview made in Paris 4/10/2001

Thanks to l’Olivier