Conversations with Joanna Scott

By Michael Lackey

Joanna Scott (b. 1960) has been one of America’s leading writers since the 1990s. Both critically acclaimed and winner of numerous prestigious awards, Scott’s unique and probing vision and masterful writing has inspired readers to adjust their perceptions of life and of themselves. Her fiction jolts and illuminates, frequently exposing the degree to which the perverse is natural and the ordinary is twisted and demented.

Conversations with Joanna Scott presents eighteen interviews that span two decades and are as much about the process of reading as they are about writing. Witty, probing, wide-ranging, and insightful, Scott’s off-the-cuff observations about literature and life are as thought-provoking as some of the most memorable lines and scenes in her fiction. Not only shedding new light on Scott’s fiction, Conversations with Joanna Scott also illuminates enduring areas of inquiry, like the challenge of trying to make art out of sentences; the effort to recover and imagine lost stories from the past; the changing status of the literary imagination; fictional portraiture and the productive possibilities that come from blending biography and fiction; and concerns about literacy.

Joanna Scott has made her name through brilliant, award-winning novels, but this volume clarifies why she is also one of America’s leading public intellectuals and an astute critic of literature and culture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Jul 23, 2020
• ISBN: 9781496829344

Book preview

Joanna Scott

Paul Perilli / 1996

From Poets & Writers 24, no. 3 (January/February 1996): 61–67. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Poets & Writers, Inc., 90 Broad Street, Suite 2100, New York, NY 10004. www.pw.org.

Yet, it is the nourishment that wonder seeks, life, states the narrator in Joanna Scott’s short story Concerning Mold Upon the Skin, Etc. which opens her collection Various Antidotes (Henry Holt, 1994) and was included in Best American Short Stories 1993 (Houghton Mifflin). While this statement is the narrator’s reaction to the initial microscopic study of a drop of water by the seventeenth-century Dutchman Anton von Leeuwenhoek, it also can be used to exemplify the sense of wonder that Scott creates through her own work and the wide range of subjects and characters that sustain her fiction.

History and information are sources of inspiration for me, Scott answers when asked where she finds the ideas on which she has based her four books, which include three novels. "They provoke me to imagine, to create stories around actual facts. I love the great encyclopedic novels like Melville’s Moby Dick and Life: A User’s Manual by Georges Perec. The way information is related in them through narrative is exciting and illuminating."

Concerning Mold Upon the Skin, Etc. is representative of the kind of challenging projects that Scott has developed using a precise historical context and language. While researching eccentric topics from the history of medicine, which is the loosely organizing subject of Various Antidotes, Scott was attracted to the outsider status of Leeuwenhoek’s character and career.

I liked writing about someone who wasn’t involved in the scientific vocabulary of the day, Scott says. It was interesting for me to try to explore the mind of someone who was working in intense isolation. And the metaphor of the microscope seemed rich.

The stories in Various Antidotes, which was a finalist for the 1995 PEN/Faulkner Foundation Award, are more than fictionalized accounts of those who made medical discoveries and advanced medical practices. They also include one or more characters who indirectly made a contribution to medical science. In Concerning Mold Upon the Skin, Etc. Leeuwenhoek’s daughter Marie also plays an important role. It is her dutiful, nurturing service that enables him to devote the time he needs to undertake his work, and their relationship is the story’s central focus. Indeed, Leeuwenhoek’s name is never used in the story as if to insist on both the importance of Marie’s character and the fictive nature of his own. I purposely forced characters who are not included in the history into these situations, Scott says. I felt they belonged to me. They were my inventions.

Joanna Scott’s creative inventions began to take shape when as a child she composed stories about the tiny clay characters that populated her dioramas. She grew up in Darien, Connecticut, where she was born in 1960 and attended public school. Her father worked in advertising, and her mother was a psychologist for the schools in nearby Stamford. Her brother Marco is a musician, Matt is the director of an independent television station, and Peter is an anesthesiologist.

Having three older brothers made me feel like an outsider, Scott says. As the youngest child and only girl I was not included in much that went on among them, and this forced me to try to make my isolation exciting.

As an undergraduate, Scott attended Trinity College in Hartford. She majored in English literature and studied creative writing with fiction writers Stephen Minot and Thalia Selz and poet Hugh Ogden. They encouraged the inherent idiosyncrasies of my fiction, and this gave me the support and confidence to continue with it, Scott says. During this time she spent one semester in Rome studying Renaissance literature and Italian film. She also enrolled in Barnard for a year as a visiting student. While there she helped to edit its literary magazine and took a semester off to work as a copy editor on the Miss Manners newspaper column and on comic strips and crossword puzzles for United Features Syndicate.

After graduating in 1983, Scott moved to New York City. Having spent many moments in Darien listening to the nearby commuter trains, cars, and trucks speed by on their way into the city, she felt this was the only possible direction for her to go. Those sounds were important to me, she says. Growing up outside of New York I thought everyone eventually moved there. I worked in the bakery across from the train station where I watched the commuters go into the city in the morning and always wanted to follow them in.

Scott went to New York knowing that she wanted to write fiction and once there attempted to find related employment to support it. I went to a career counselor at Trinity and was told I should be either a librarian or an advertising copywriter. She spent a year working for the Elaine Markson Literary Agency, a job she found from a posting on a bulletin board in the Barnard employment office. I was the assistant to Geri Thoma, Scott says. I answered the phone and read unsolicited manuscripts. But my favorite thing to do was to read the correspondence with authors and writers. It gave me an idea as to what really happens in publishing, how a manuscript turns into a book. I saw publishing as something that was possible rather than the magical transformation I’d previously thought it was. She shared an apartment with friends on West 111th Street. After work and on the weekends she wrote many failed short stories that she permanently filed away instead of mailing to journals and