Kate Christensen won 2008’s PEN/Faulkner Award for her novel The Great Man. She lives in Greenpoint, BK, and much of The Great Man is set there. I interviewed Kate via email for a story about the neighborhood. The resulting Q and A proved an impressive stand alone document, and I’ve printed it below. PS: Read The Great Man ASAP…
1. What affect does your neighborhood have on your writing?
In addition to the low, unassuming buildings, big sky, proximity to water, and rough-and-tumble history, I’m constantly soothed and inspired by the melange of people in Greenpoint, the combination of big-city open-mindedness — an implicit but very real-feeling tolerance of eccentricities and differences — with a small-town feeling of familiarity and being known. I have something of a dog’seye view of the place; I know all the lampposts and fire hydrants –I walk my dog every day, twice a day, for miles, over to the Newtown Creek, up to my tiny work-studio on Morgan Avenue, through McCarren Park. We traverse the whole neighborhood.
2. When and why did you move to Greenpoint? Approximately where in GP do you live?
I first moved to north Brooklyn in 1990, when I rented a one bedroom above a laundromat on Graham Avenue for $450 a month.Then I lived with my husband in a loft in Williamsburg for the first seven years of our marriage, until we realized (in 2003) that we were suddenly old enough to be everyone’s parents, and that we’d saved enough for a down payment on a house. We found our houseon Calyer Street by what felt like a stroke of amazing luck; we could (barely) afford it, it was exactly where we wanted to live and exactly the house we wanted, a little row house with nineteenth-century details under drop ceilings and shag carpets and paneling. We renovated it ourselves; anyone else who has done this knows what this entails. We tell each other that we’ll never move again because it was so much work to get ourselves here, and in fact we might very well stay here till we die, unless the neighborhood changes radically and becomes too crowded and corporate, which I fear it might, like everywhere else…
3. Your latest novel won the Pen/Faulkner, placing you alongside Henry Miller, Paul Auster, Norman Mailer etc as a major award winning Brooklyn writer. (A google search of “great brooklyn writers” finds a link to you SIXTH! WTF?) How did it feel to get thePEN phone call? Were you really doing laundry in the Greenpoint?
WTF!?!?!!? It must be because of the word “Great” in my title. The washing machine was indeed in use when I got the call — does that count as “doing laundry”? When I learned that I had won, I almost fainted. The shock was so great I came down my first cold in about eight years and still have it, a month later. The PEN/Faulkner wasnever even anything I had daydreamed about winning. It’s still hard for me to believe it.
4. Writing is an intensely personal and difficult act, which you say “causes an enforced manic-depression.” Can you describe what Greenpoint does to lift your spirits? Is there a certain time of day when the sun hits a certain flower pot or something?
Ha! I love that image. But — not to harp on this — what unfailingly lifts my spirits, twice a day, is walking my dog, Dingo. He’s what some of us locals call a Brooklyn Brown — a mid-sized yellow-brown mutt with huge ears. I got him from BARC; he was evidently a wild street dog for at last three years before someone “rescued” him, and although I could see right away how smart, scrappy, and adaptable he was, he wasn’t housebroken or trained. But the instant he arrived in our house he was obviously determined to do the right thing so he’d be allowed to stay. He is now a loyal and stellar companion, but because of his difficult past, he (like me) is prone to occasional fits of melancholy and worry. So even in the worst weather, we go out together morning and evening, and because of this, we both stay (relatively) sane.
5. Food is a major character in The Great Man. Where do you eat/shop in GP?
I go to the Associated up the street, on Manhattan Avenue. And Freshdirect delivers…
6. Hollywood. The place is insane. Can you describe the feeling of returning to GP after a meeting in LA? (And is the Great Man being developed? If so by whom?)
The Great Man is not, to my knowledge, in any sort of development, because no one seems to realize how many brilliant actresses of a certain age there are, being wasted, while 22-year-old lookalike starlets rule the world. Hollywood is insane mostly, to me, becauseno one will say anything negative there. I went out for two series of meetings after I wrote the script for “The Epicure’s Lament,” and after all that fairy dust blowing out of everyone’s mouth, I found it deeply refreshing to come back to Greenpoint, where everyone seems willing to tell it as they see it.
7. Anything you’d like to add about being a writer in Greenpoint…
I feel lucky to live here. I hope the rough edges don’t all get smoothed over; this place feels like an endangered enclave of present and historical authenticity in a spreading unstoppable sea of corporate homogeneity.
8. Hillary or Obama?
Ugh. Do I really have to choose? They both seem like crass, calculating game-players to me. I don’t like either one of them, or any politician, or the political system. I’m a crank who wants revolution. Where are the philosopher kings?
As far as other Greenpoint writers go — I honestly don’t know of any. Am I the only one? Do you know? I would love to know of others…poets or playwrights, novelists…
TAGS: Brooklyn, dog, HBO, Hillary, Manhattan, NSA, obama, political, war, wasted, williamsburg
SUBSCRIBE TO RSS
May 10th, 2008 at 12:08 pm
[...] Kate Christensen Q and A22 Apr 2008 by Ray LeMoine Kate Christensen won 2008’s PEN/Faulkner Award for her novel The Great Man. She lives in Greenpoint, BK, and much of The Great Man is set there. I interviewed Kate via email for a story about the neighborhood. … [...]