…how much I adore Karen Joy Fowler? Great interview with her over at the Shirley Jackson Awards blog about her devastating short story "The Pelican Bar":
Although I traffic in the strange, I don't think of myself as leaving the real world behind when I do so. I think that I’m acknowledging how bizarre and unlikely the real world is. I'm a political person, not a spiritual one. I don't believe in magic or ghosts or gods or the power of positive thinking. I believe that Elvis is dead. I'm not happy about it, but there it is. But what I believe most of all is that the world will always exceed our ability to understand it.
Read the whole thing.
As someone whose work is about a politically alive time, I find myself loving her admission that she’s “a political person,” especially combined with her humility about what we don’t (and can’t)know.
That seems to me the right way to be political.
Thanks for this link – I loved what she said about loving and hating the world. I feel the same way.
Couldn’t agree more.
Karen is a genius.