By RICK de YAMPERT
ENTERTAINMENT WRITER
"Terese Svoboda's subject is human suffering."
So says a bio of the novelist, poet and memoirist, who will be one of four authors leading workshops and giving readings during the Blue Flower Arts Winter Writers' Conference next week. The conference is being presented by the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach.
A glimpse of some of Svoboda's poetry reveals some harrowing subjects: "The Dead Dance" revolves around sex and death as exploited in Polynesia. "The Ranchhand's Daughter" -- blank verse on incest. "Laughing Africa" -- the travails of Sudan. Her collection "Treason," says Svoboda's Web site, "concerns betrayal: child to parent, wife to husband, a nation to its people."
Her short story "ยค'80s Lilies" is included in "The Apocalypse Reader."
So, is Svoboda overly occupied with the shadow side?
"I'm interested in contradiction," Svoboda said with a laugh during an interview with The News-Journal.
That bio of Svoboda says her work "is often the surreal poetry of a nightmare yet is written with such wit, verve and passion that she can address the direst subjects." Indeed, during conversation Svoboda is quick to laugh and seems anything but sour and morose.
"I like to see two sides," Svoboda said. "I don't know whether we're slipping into the shadow side as you call it. In order to really see the bright side in full relief, I think both have to be apprehended."
Svoboda is the author of the short story collection "Trailer Girl and Other Stories," the novels "Tin God" and "Cannibal," and the poetry collection "Weapons Grade." Two more novels, "Pirate Talk or Mermelade'' and "Bohemian Girl," are scheduled to be published over the next two years.
Along with teaching at colleges across the nation and writing for such periodicals as The New Yorker, The New York Times, Atlantic Monthly and Paris Review, Svoboda has garnered the O. Henry (a short story award), a nonfiction Pushcart Prize, a PEN/Columbia Fellowship and other honors.
"The best of my work uses all the resources of language, regardless of genre," Svoboda said in an interview posted on her Web site.
An example of that is her book "Black Glasses Like Clark Kent: A GI's Secret from Postwar Japan," which won the 2007 Graywolf Nonfiction Prize. It's the strange, sad tale of her uncle, who served as a military policeman in occupied Japan, then carried a secret until, shortly after the revelations of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, he committed suicide.
The work is part memoir, part investigative journalism, part mystery and part engaging hodgepodge of observations, photos, quotes (from Kafka, Nietzsche, Faulkner and others) and drawings (even a Japanese manga cartoon kitten).
Svoboda's worldwide travels, to Sudan and the South Pacific, frequently seem to fuel her writing, yet she doesn't feel compelled to cast her foreign adventures into her work.
Instead, she said, writing is "just a job. You sit down and the write the words onto the page. I sometimes describe it to my students as 'You tip your head forward and pour a little out.' Because it's all there. One is always capable of speaking and to think you don't have anything to write is not true. You just have to begin."
ENTERTAINMENT WRITER
"Terese Svoboda's subject is human suffering."
So says a bio of the novelist, poet and memoirist, who will be one of four authors leading workshops and giving readings during the Blue Flower Arts Winter Writers' Conference next week. The conference is being presented by the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach.
A glimpse of some of Svoboda's poetry reveals some harrowing subjects: "The Dead Dance" revolves around sex and death as exploited in Polynesia. "The Ranchhand's Daughter" -- blank verse on incest. "Laughing Africa" -- the travails of Sudan. Her collection "Treason," says Svoboda's Web site, "concerns betrayal: child to parent, wife to husband, a nation to its people."
Her short story "ยค'80s Lilies" is included in "The Apocalypse Reader."
So, is Svoboda overly occupied with the shadow side?
"I'm interested in contradiction," Svoboda said with a laugh during an interview with The News-Journal.
That bio of Svoboda says her work "is often the surreal poetry of a nightmare yet is written with such wit, verve and passion that she can address the direst subjects." Indeed, during conversation Svoboda is quick to laugh and seems anything but sour and morose.
"I like to see two sides," Svoboda said. "I don't know whether we're slipping into the shadow side as you call it. In order to really see the bright side in full relief, I think both have to be apprehended."
Svoboda is the author of the short story collection "Trailer Girl and Other Stories," the novels "Tin God" and "Cannibal," and the poetry collection "Weapons Grade." Two more novels, "Pirate Talk or Mermelade'' and "Bohemian Girl," are scheduled to be published over the next two years.
Along with teaching at colleges across the nation and writing for such periodicals as The New Yorker, The New York Times, Atlantic Monthly and Paris Review, Svoboda has garnered the O. Henry (a short story award), a nonfiction Pushcart Prize, a PEN/Columbia Fellowship and other honors.
"The best of my work uses all the resources of language, regardless of genre," Svoboda said in an interview posted on her Web site.
An example of that is her book "Black Glasses Like Clark Kent: A GI's Secret from Postwar Japan," which won the 2007 Graywolf Nonfiction Prize. It's the strange, sad tale of her uncle, who served as a military policeman in occupied Japan, then carried a secret until, shortly after the revelations of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, he committed suicide.
The work is part memoir, part investigative journalism, part mystery and part engaging hodgepodge of observations, photos, quotes (from Kafka, Nietzsche, Faulkner and others) and drawings (even a Japanese manga cartoon kitten).
Svoboda's worldwide travels, to Sudan and the South Pacific, frequently seem to fuel her writing, yet she doesn't feel compelled to cast her foreign adventures into her work.
Instead, she said, writing is "just a job. You sit down and the write the words onto the page. I sometimes describe it to my students as 'You tip your head forward and pour a little out.' Because it's all there. One is always capable of speaking and to think you don't have anything to write is not true. You just have to begin."
Leave a comment