Lara Mimosa Montes + Miranda Schreiber
Abbreviated Interviews Round-up: Celebrating THE TIME OF THE NOVEL and IRIS AND THE DEAD
Recently I’ve been meditating on what exactly happens when I read.
Is the experience acquiescent or collaborative? Am I walking through a meadow or a storm? Is the text imparting color and feeling I wouldn’t otherwise think to name in my own life? Just as much, I’m thinking about what happens when I’m not reading: when I must part with the book, do the characters follow me into real life? Do I see them in line at the supermarket, waiting for the light to turn at an intersection? And what is happening to my body while under the influence of literature—does reading regulate the rhythm of my heart? Is it a meditation, an hour-long song, a reprieve or an immersion?
It’s all of the above, and more.
Last month on Instagram I introduced a new series of abbreviated author interviews. Offering more than a simple reading recommendation, this series will provide a concise format in which to highlight new (and older!) releases, allowing for featured authors to discuss a range of topics, from what inspired their book, to the writing and publishing process. Although the interviews in this series will be shorter than the full-length interviews, only so much can be shared in an Instagram caption! While one or two Q&A’s will be shared on IG, the entirety of these abbreviated interviews (typically three questions in total) will be published in the round-up here on Substack.
This month, I’m excited to share interviews with two authors whose books have provided hours of inspiration and reflection. Summer heatwaves bring with them a sense of delirium, and both novels play with an element of madness, inviting the reader to abandon typical ideas of form and function. To read them consecutively would make for a perfect pairing. Like the heat, these are novels that permeate, disrupt, and throw you off balance, all in the best way.
As always, thank you for your continued support of Girls on the Page. I’m looking forward to sharing more in the near future!
In Lara Mimosa Montes’s THE TIME OF THE NOVEL a young woman wishing to estrange herself from the banalities of everyday life quits her day job as a bookseller to delve into another, more enticing occupation: that of a full-time narrator.
“I resolved to meet the world with a greater degree of equanimity and attempt what I might now describe as an extended hiatus, one in which, for an unspecified period of time, I would watch the world happen.”
Montes’s writing swells with a luxurious sense of free-falling, inviting the reader to engage in a realm of imagination and possibility. A truly inventive, thought-provoking novella about perspective, creativity, and transformation.
How did the premise of The Time of the Novel arrive to you - what inspired it?
Lara Mimosa Montes: I knew I was going to write this book when I decided to quit my cushy nine to five job at an arts foundation. I kept telling myself, "This is stupid. You cannot quit your job." Even though I made the decision to leave, I felt like I had given myself over to fate. The story spun out from there.
What does it feel like when you're in the heart of a project?
As a writer, everything that happens between memory and fantasy is subject to revision. If it isn't obvious, my emotions usually run the show. I show up to the studio and my moods enact revenge on everything I set out to do. I have no respect for my previous drafts, notes, promises, or earlier ambitions. My process is one where I routinely forget, discard, erase, rearrange and reimagine all that I have done before. It's a miracle that I manage to finish, let alone publish, anything at all.
In the beginning of the book, the narrator shares that "In pursuing this fantasy of becoming a narrator, I wished to hover in the fray and observe."
What are your habits and behaviours in terms of observing the world around you as you're collecting inspiration for your writing?
I'm inspired by swerves, tonal shifts, spontaneous spaces of transition within narrative. There are moments in life for which there are no lead ups. Things happen. What may follow is without limit, so to call upon every and any form I know to describe what comes next is how I experience writing. Poetry, philosophy, critical theory, diary—these all inform my approach to literary practice.
The Time of the Novel is available from Wendy’s Subway.
A remarkable debut, Miranda Schreiber’s IRIS AND THE DEAD illuminates both the despair of longing and the trenches of depression—“the most fruitful topic on earth, other than love”—while examining the intricacies of abuse, intergenerational trauma, and queer identity as a young woman recounts the profound and disorienting impact of a relationship with her counsellor.
Schreiber’s writing elegantly pulsates between the confessional, historical, and preternatural: “When I started loving you I learned love subsumed vanity, even shame. The embarrassment of the situation ebbed in the periphery, but my god, I flowed with you. A contraction of your lips, and I vanished. I saw everything twice, by me and by you—you were always in front of me. I can’t capture it. In memory even, I fear it.”
A novel that, once finished reading, you’ll still hear breathing from the bookshelf.
Where did Iris and the Dead begin - when does an idea become something you know you must pursue?
Miranda Schreiber: I started the first draft just before the pandemic, lost it, and then began rewriting during lockdown. I worked on it every Sunday. One place I think it actually came from was a deep, deep desire to speak over a doctor I knew who was making art about his patients. For whatever reason to be taken up as matter for his art projects was a sort of higher-level objectification that I didn’t feel was supposed to happen. I don’t feel that way anymore so much.
The project felt very time-sensitive. I felt like I had maybe a year to capture certain knowledges before everything became too soupy and congested in memory. I didn’t know if anyone would read it other than a few friends but it was enough for me to just say it, even if it just stayed on my computer in the end. I think that’s how I got around putting so many hours into it.
Your writing is breathtaking, every sentence a raw nerve. How did it feel to write this book?
Thank you for saying that!! I think I felt ready to write something this long when I felt that I finally wasn’t copying anyone. I didn’t feel like I was just trying to sound like Virginia Woolf anymore, and I thought that hopefully some kind of genuine tone and rhythm had emerged. I took a lot of notes in the years before I started that I referred to all the time while I was writing. I was really open to being influenced by anything, by any kind of document. I was trying to look in surprising places all the time for new perspectives.
It was definitely intended as a bit of a courthouse testimonial. I was hearing victim-impact statements from documentaries and such while I was writing. I think this had a helpful structuring effect, given how winding the prose can be at times. It also made it into more of a love letter in the sense that the narrator believes that Iris will listen if she can just put it properly; as in, Iris loves her enough to hear her out if the story is perfectly told. And I felt there was something kind of adolescent - not necessarily in a bad way - about believing that if something can simply be said there will be justice. It does have a bit of a coming-of-age aspect so I think I wanted to open it with the narrator’s expectation of resolution or maybe purification through confession, even if at some level she knows it won’t fully work. I liked that idea for a first book, as something to maybe challenge later in other writing. As if this was the first universe to work through and that other universes with different systems of justice could circle out from this primary one.
Can you describe how the book changed—whether in concept, form, or something more abstract—as you wrote, and how it feels now that it’s published and in the hands of readers?
It started off much more as an essay. I included a bunch of photographs and it was more accusatory and probably more experimental. It felt a bit younger initially; it wanted a place to speak from rage, in service of justice. I think I also sort of documented that development in the folktale of the dead family taking up the project of writing, how they start out with a kind of underdetermined frustration they’re expressing that is eventually tempered and clarified into a final story.
I do think the book has a thesis that has persisted through every draft. I wrote the pages that I would consider the most explicitly argumentative back in 2020. I think that’s been grounding as different people have read it, in that, of course reading requires an intentional participation and images are brought in by the reader, but there still should be hopefully an explicit, articulated claim that comes through: that no matter how complicated it feels, Iris has done harm. I just wanted to reassert reality in the midst of objectivity being challenged and subverted by so many forces. There were claims I wanted to make about asymmetrical relationships and autonomy of mind, especially.
Iris and the Dead is available from Book*hug Press.
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Adding both to my TBR! These found fantastic!