On Sept. 26, novelist Jenny Offill kicked off the Bates Literary Arts Live series with a reading from her latest novel, Weather. An exploration of a college librarian’s anxiety about her family, future and global climate change, the book takes on a fragmented form Professor Jessica Anthony described as “bricolage” in her introduction. A series of paragraph-sized anecdotes and trains of thought, it’s witty, unexpected and somehow light and whimsical despite its dark subject matter. Offill’s presence reflected this tone, with her grimacing apologetically at a coughing audience member as she read her joke about sick people in libraries. She also spoke candidly about the cruel—though hilarious—things her daughter said to her at the age of three. Though she describes herself as a “depression-era-writer” due to her economical, sparse prose, Offill is funny, undeniably so.
In the question and answer section following the reading, Offill spoke about her ideas, processes and developing her signature collage style of small seemingly disconnected paragraphs.
“It felt clearer and closer to the way I think,” she said in response to a question about its origin, “I mean, it’s like you’re having a thought, and then maybe another, and then a snippet of a song, and then you doubt yourself and there’s a switchback…” She trailed off, leaving the audience to imagine their own collaged thought processes. She likes to do this in her prose, too; she laughed when asked about the large empty spots after paragraph breaks in her novels, calling these empty spaces, “space for the reader to rest.”
Looking at her career, three books, all released with decades more or less in between them, one might assume Offill takes her time to rest, too. However, listening to her list her inspirations and describe her writing process, it became clear that she is always at work. She researches extensively, devouring books, poetry, podcasts and articles on climate science.
“I’m a porous writer,” she says, “everything comes in.” Paring things down is where the real work begins. She seemed like she was letting the audience in on a secret when she told us that her books rarely break the 200-page limit, despite what her publishers “want.”
“What was in when I was younger were these sloppy, door-stopper books,” she says, “mostly by men.” Offill was not a fan. Instead, she turned to wisdom from her poet friends. “He said, ‘Why don’t you keep maybe 10 or 20 things from this book?’” she said, relaying advice that her friend gave her after she decided to scrap a draft of her novel and start over in this collage method, “After that, I felt more free.”
Literary Arts Live will continue this semester on Oct. 30 with a reading from novelist and nonfiction writer Heidi Julavits.
