Literary Blogger Shell Flower Interviewed Diana Wallace in January 2016.  Shell's blog is currently under re-construction, so the interview is re-posted here for your enjoyment.  

Shell:     You have a PhD in Comparative Literature. Wow! What motivated you to study literature so intensely?

DW: I should preface my answer to this question by explaining that I consider myself an existentialist, and for me this means that in the face of the inherent meaninglessness of life, it is my responsibility to create meaning for myself on a daily basis.  Every decision I make about my life is based on this premise: does it make me feel meaningful?  Literature has always made me feel meaningful, and sharing my love for it with others even more so.  So I knew that I wanted to be teacher and a writer since my early twenties when I began grappling with the question of how best to create meaning in my life, and manage to make a living at the same time. Now you might ask, why does literature make me feel meaningful?  Besides the beauty and bravery of it, when it is at its best, I see literature as one of the most important cultural artifacts we have as humans – the preservation of our stories – and I am particularly drawn to early literature (classical, medieval, renaissance) because it transports me back so vividly in time to those people and their lives.  Literature – well  all art, really – is the magic in my world.  Theater, dance, visual art, the written word, all have the magical power to transport me into a state of ecstasy: and by that I mean what the ancient Greeks meant by the word – ex stasis – literally  standing outside the self or ego in a state of pure contemplation or emotion.  This is the level of pleasure I take in literature, it is a form of rapture.

Shell:    Do you remember when you started writing? How did it all begin?

 DW:   I’ve been writing stories, poems, and in a journal since I was a little girl. And of course as an English major and doctoral student I wrote hundreds of pages of literary analysis for years. Writing seriously, and non-academically, as an adult took several different stages.  Poetry came first, in my early twenties, and has stayed with me as a way to express in words the emotions that are often too raw to express in speech. The essays started when I turned thirty, as a way of coping with some family secrets that had recently come to light and had cast my whole sense of identity in a new perspective. 

    A friend of mine, another writer, had coined the phrase “Autobiomythography” to describe a writing project that re-tells one’s own life through the framework of all the myths and legends that our families create – the secrets, lies, and legends – as well as through the myths of our culture, in order to understand them more clearly. And that is how I conceived of my essays. Keeping with the theme of lives lived through myth, I started writing my first novel (about a girl named Herculine) the month after I finished my dissertation for my PhD.  I had been writing for six hours a day for three years, and as that project drew to a close, I realized that my head was bursting with stories, and I had the discipline in place to begin writing them.  It was an exciting time.  Those stories eventually morphed into what is now Herculine: A Mythic Romance.

Shell:     I see that you write essays, poetry, and fiction. Do you have a favorite, or does it just depend on your mood when you sit down to write?

 DW:   I’m sure it’s different for every writer, but I wish I had the luxury of “sitting down to write” and then deciding, “Hmmm, which mood am I in today?  Shall it be a poem, an essay, or a novel?”  That sounds heavenly.  No, it’s more the other way around for me: kind of like a “Muse Attack.”  Suddenly – in the shower, in my car, out on a hike, in the middle of a conversation with a friend – I will be struck with an inspiration, and I have to stop what I’m doing, pull over to the side of the road, turn off the shower – whatever – and start writing.  I love the “voice memo” function on my phone and use it when this happens and for some reason I can’t physically write down my idea.  I make a voice memo about it, like I’m taking dictation from my Muse or something, and then I email it to myself and transcribe it when I get home.  It’s like what writer Ann Patchett said when a friend asked her if she had ever considered committing suicide.  Horrified, she answered, “No – how could I do that to my characters that I haven’t finished writing yet? They’d die too!”  I love that.  I seriously feel like I have poems, essays, stories, and characters clamoring inside me to be written.  Luckily, they’re very polite and well behaved and don’t mind waiting to take their turn while another one is getting all the attention.  However, I better live to a ripe old age, because the waiting line is quite long and I would hate to die before they’ve all been written. 

Shell:     It seems like you are quite interested in myths, and that is reflected in your writing. Do you recall a particular myth that first captured your interest? 

DW:    In one of the essays from my collection called Views from the Edge: An Autobiomythography, I write about the fact that after my dad died when I was ten, I read a book in his library called Bulfinch’s Mythology – a compendium of Greek, Roman, and Norse myths.  I was enthralled with the Greek myths in particular, and especially loved the story of Perseus, the hero who used Athena’s shield and Hermes’ winged sandals to kill the Medusa by flying backwards into her lair and only looking at her in the reflection on Athena’s shield so that she couldn’t turn him to stone.   After he cut off her head, he flew off to rescue the beautiful princess Andromeda who was chained to a cliff and was about to be eaten by a sea monster, but Perseus showed the Medusa’s head to the sea monster, who turned to stone. It wasn’t until decades later, when I was in graduate school and read Ovid for the first time, that I found out the truth about Medusa. She was originally a beautiful virgin priestess in Athena’s temple, but Poseidon saw her and raped her, thus desecrating the temple, and Athena – instead of punishing her uncle, punished poor Medusa, turning her into a hideous monster with serpents for hair and a gaze that would turn men to stone.  Later, after Perseus killed the Medusa, he gives Athena her head, which Athena affixes to her shield, and uses it in battle to turn entire armies to stone.  Freud has a field day with the myth of Medusa, as does Helene Cixous, a prominent French feminist psychoanalytic theorist, and when I read their works in graduate school I began to appreciate the ways that myths permeate our lives in deep, symbolic ways – yet another reason I decided to write an Autobiomythography.

Shell: Name three authors that have made you want to write and why.

DW: Sharon Olds is my favorite living poet, and it was discovering her poetry when I was twenty-two that made me start writing poetry myself.  If you haven’t read her collection called The Naked and the Dead, please do.  It is some of the bravest, most beautiful, raw, powerful poetry you will ever read.  When I was twenty-seven I read A.S. Byatt’s novel Possession, and that book was the inspiration for writing my first novel, Herculine, which – like Possession – is a literary quest novel that takes place in several different time frames and from multiple narrative view points.  Granted, Possession is a masterpiece, and my book is very much a “first novel,” but I like to think they share some similarities: the characters in both books have conventional and unconventional romances, and cryptic poems that need to be decoded are at the heart of both stories.  Sometimes when I am trying to describe Herculine, I say that it is like A.S. Byatt’s Possession meets The L Word.  Finally, back in the late ‘90s, Anne Lamott’s work – especially her early novels, like Hard Laughter, and her book on writing called Bird by Bird, played an important role in building my confidence as a writer.  She is so earthy, funny, honest, and brave in everything that she writes that she made me want to be that kind of writer too.

Shell: Do you have favorite book?

DW: Yes, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. This is her gender-bending love song to English literature, and I could read it every single day.  It is joyous, eloquent, daring, and funny, and is a time traveling fantasy novel too.  It is quite unlike anything else that Woolf ever wrote. There is a movie based on this book, starring Tilda Swinton, which is quite charming, and it actually comes close to capturing the magic of the original.

Shell: Who is your favorite literary character and why?

DW: So difficult to choose!  I would have to say either Viola in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, or Léa in Colette’s Cheri. The reasons why are two sides of the same coin: Viola is a strong, plucky heroine who is caught in a gender double bind – she is a woman disguised as a young man, and this places her right in the middle of a love triangle: she loves Duke Orsino, who loves Lady Olivia, and Olivia (thinking Viola is a man), is in love with Viola!  But then there is also a suggestion that Duke Orsino begins to have homoerotic feelings for Viola when he thinks she is male.  It’s wonderfully confusing, sexy, and funny, and Viola’s heroism (along with her good looking twin brother) manage to resolve the conflict harmoniously (and heterosexually) in the end.  I’ve always been fascinated by androgyny, bisexuality, and blurring the lines between conventional expectations of gendered behavior.  But the other side of the coin is Léa in Cheri: she is the most powerfully, sensuously feminine character in literature that I have ever encountered.  She is a very beautiful, aging courtesan, and takes as her last lover the twenty year-old son of a friend of hers: handsome, spoiled, and dissipated young Cheri.  They have an incredible romance, and I love the older woman/younger man power play between them – she dominates him in many ways, but he still has a great deal of power over her too, and he knows it, but in a strange way their power over each other is perfectly balanced.  There is a “Part Two” to Cheri that is very dark and tragic, and I don’t like it nearly as much, romantic that I am, I like to imagine these two characters forever suspended in their perfect selves in Part One.

Shell: What is your drafting process like? What about editing? Do you have a critique group or first readers that help you?

DW: I outline extensively, and then I start writing.  Then I take breaks from writing to research any questions that came up during the writing process, and then I go back to what I’ve already written with a fresh eye so that I can edit it.  I have professional editing experience from several years of working on an alternative newspaper, so my “first drafts” are actually quite polished by the time anyone else sees them.  I have worked with a writing group, a writing partner, and a professional editor – and all of these experiences have been really valuable.  The writing group met twice a month for about five years. We took turns submitting our work (rotating every other week), and we would send it to the other group members in advance of each meeting so that we could come to the table with constructive feedback for each other.  I met my writing partner in that group, and we branched off for a few years, meeting once a month with at least ten pages of new writing to share with each other, and her feedback was essential to the clarity and strength of my revisions.  I was also a member of the original Red Room Writer’s Society that met in the Archbishop’s Mansion Inn twice a week in San Francisco, and it was there that I wrote the bulk of my novel.  It was an incredibly elegant place, and we all sat around a really long table in a formal dining room with red velvet curtains, tall windows, and really high ceilings. They would serve wine and appetizers and tea, and we’d write for hours in total silence, and it was completely magical.  I would go into “the zone” as soon as I sat down at that table, and it was practically an out of body experience.  I seriously felt like I was channeling the Muse, like the words and story was just pouring out of me without even being fully conscious of my fingers on the keyboard.  There are certain sections of my novel that I can barely even remember writing!  Finally, when the book was finished, I worked with a professional editor who went over the whole manuscript with a merciless eye for self-indulgence, and she really whipped it into shape: from 460 pages down to 325.  Yikes!  These days I mostly rely on friends to read my work, but my writing partner contacted me recently, and I think we’re going to start meeting together again, which is really exciting.

Shell: What has your publishing journey been like? Did you query and go the traditional route? Do you self-publish?

DW: I did try the legitimate route of querying agents when my book was ready, and here’s how it went.  Out of the 60 agents I contacted, 50 of them expressed interest and asked for the first 50 pages.  Of those 50, about 30 asked for the complete manuscript.  Of those 30, none of them said “yes,” but they all said that it was a good story; they just weren’t sure how to market it since it was too academic and unconventional.  About 10 of them said, “This has potential, keep me posted when you write your second book.”  So, all in all, it was pretty discouraging.  The process of querying is also quite time consuming!  I had a spreadsheet, and printed up special letterhead and envelopes; I consulted every possible book about writing good queries and even had an agent edit my letter.  Finally, I decided that the stigma against self-publishing was lifting, and decided to do it myself.  I’ve never been “in it for the money,” as they say – I write because I love to, and I’d like to share my words with others.  So when a friend told me about her positive experience self-publishing with Amazon.com’s CreateSpace interface, I took the plunge, and I’ve been really happy with the results.  It was so much fun to create my own covers for my books, and to learn about page layout.  And the fact that my books were immediately available on Kindle was a huge benefit too!

Shell: If you could spend 24 hours with any author living or dead, who would it be and why? Also, what would you do?

 DW:   Twenty-four hours means spending the whole night together, which could involve sex, so that rather changes the answer from the one I’d give if you’d asked me which author I’d like to spend merely the day or evening with… This possibility in mind, I’m thinking that writer Patricia Highsmith – when she was in her late twenties or early thirties – would have been a very exciting person to spend twenty-four hours with.  When she was young, she was gorgeous, gay, smarter than anyone else in the room, and – to judge by the photos of her during those years, really sexy and wild too.  Her book The Price of Salt, a lesbian romance, recently made into a really successful indie film called Carol starring Cate Blanchett, also gives me the impression that she was an incredibly sensuous, passionate person as well.  So, as long as I could hold her intellectual interest and she found me attractive too, I think it would be a “night to remember.”  We would walk around Paris, eat delicious food, look at art in museums, try on sexy clothes in boutiques, walk along the banks of the Seine, take a nap on the grass in the Bois du Boulogne, write fragments of poetry and read them aloud to each other, go dancing and listen to jazz at a night club, and then go back to her apartment and make love until dawn. My goodness: quite the fantasy twenty-four hours!

Shell: Where do you find ideas and inspiration? Do you have a muse?

DW: When it comes to poetry, yes: I only seem to write love poems, and they are usually inspired by a particular person with whom I am in love.  For the duration of that relationship, that person is my Muse for poetry.  As for essays, they are often inspired by conversations with my family and friends, or by something that I have read that jolts my consciousness into seeing my life in a new light.  For novels, my inspiration has been either other novels, like Possession; great performances, like the production of Medea that I saw at Berkeley Repertory Theater in 2004, starring Sinead Cusack; or even the witty Canadian TV series Slings and Arrows, in which the lives of the members of a Shakespearean theater company start to resemble the plots of the plays they are performing.  These last two were the inspiration for my second novel, called The Tragedians.

Shell: What is your current writing project? Can we look forward to more works being published any time soon?

DW: My current writing project is finishing my second novel, The Tragedians. It is a story told in five parts about a modern production of the ancient Greek tragedy Medea, by Euripides, during which the lines between the play and the lives of the company members become quite blurred.  Most of the book takes place in 1990, in Greenwich Village in New York City.  Each of the five parts follows the course of the production: part one is the auditions, part two is the rehearsals, part three is the opening night, part four is the mid-run crisis, part five is the closing night.  Each part contains five chapters told from different points of view, four of which repeat: the director, the diva, the leading man, and the ingénue.  In each part the fifth chapter is a “wild card” told from a completely different point of view: Aristotle as he writes his treatise on tragedy called The Poetics, Euripides as he writes Medea, a male actor in Ancient Greece who is playing the role of Medea, Friedrich Nietzsche as he writes The Birth of Tragedy, and finally – in the last section of the novel, the legendary enchantress Medea herself.  It’s really fun to write, and I’ve completed three of the five sections.  My goal is to have it ready for publication by the end of this summer.  Wish me luck! : )