I would like to believe that I could be as brave as the scientists during the siege, but I cannot imagine starving to death without eating anything I could get my hands on. One of the ideas I explore in Hunger, though, is that we don’t know who will turn out to be brave under extreme pressure. Timid and annoying people can act with grace, strength, and bravery, while people noted for their courage can prove themselves cowards. Ultimately, we can’t imagine wearing such different shoes; I can’t say what I would have done.
What sort of influence did your parents — both botanists — have on the shaping of this novel?
My childhood exposure to botany primed me to be interested in the story. I first learned of Vavilov’s story in a publication of the Seed Savers Exchange. There was a photo of the herbarium at the Vavilov Institute, with wooden cabinets with narrow rows of drawers. It evoked rooms in which I spent a lot of time as a child, even brought back the smells. My mom did run down some information for me during the writing of Hunger, but I certainly can’t blame my parents for the shape of the novel.
A reviewer claimed that the narrator of Hunger has “no redeeming qualities” as a person. Do you agree with this assessment?
My assessment of him is more generous. I set out to write him as a rather nasty piece of work, but my compassion grew. First and easiest, he has the redeeming quality of being human. People are capable of insight and change; that potential is always there. Though not a majority view, a few people have suggested to me that my narrator was right to pilfer seeds and survive. And he does, in one sense, earn his survival by developing a technique that saves lives in future famine situations. His arranging to have Albertine deported, while not selflessly motivated, gives her a better life. And while the narrator tries to pass himself as better than he is, he’s not quite so horrible as he deeply believes. Along with the selfishness and gluttony, he possesses the admirable qualities of intelligence and reflectiveness. But what redeems him most in my eyes is his passion for life and will to experience. These may not make him a good guy, but they make him hard to simply dismiss.
As a first-time novelist, have you been reading the reviews of your book? If so, what effect has that had on you?
It’s tempting to say that I haven’t been reading them, but the fact is that I’m too curious not to. It’s too early to know what effect it will have. My confidence about having my work in the world has grown some — simply by learning that at least a few people like some of what I’m doing. But it’s also disconcerting and a little embarrassing. If a reviewer really creams me, it will hurt — all the more so if the criticisms are on the mark. I hope that I can learn from criticism without getting distracted, without damaging my very intimate relationship with what I am working on.
You are currently working as a copywriter for Princeton University Press. What has your experience been like working at an academic press? What are your impressions of Princeton? (Should my little sister go there?)
Academic presses are great places to work, offering as they do intelligent colleagues interested in ideas. I’ve learned a lot — or, more accurately, I’ve learned a little about a lot. (If your sister has a full scholarship or your family is wealthy, she could do worse than Princeton. I’m the product of state education and a bit of a populist, so perhaps she shouldn’t take my advice anyway.)
You attended the MFA writing program at the University of California, Irvine, and in the fall you are joining the writing faculty at Boise State. What was your motivation for seeking out a teaching job? Do you think you learned more about writing during the time you were studying at Irvine or during the time you were writing Hunger?
I like teaching, and I am looking forward to having my day job center on fiction and writing. (And of course I crave those summers of intense writing.) What Irvine provided more than anything was the time and support to write and the pressure to read, but also I learned important craft lessons from teachers and peers. The sense of shared enterprise is a wonderful thing. Yet writing is not a collaborative activity. The crucial understandings come only from that bloodletting that goes on when I am alone with words.
When can we expect your next book?
I plan to complete it in about eighteen months, and I certainly hope it finds its way to library and bookstore shelves quickly after that.
The complete text of Matt Borondy’s conversation with Elise Blackwell first appeared at IdentityTheory.com on May 18, 2003. Reprinted with permission.
SEEDS OF A NOVEL
by Elise Blackwell
I was living on several acres south of San Diego, working as a food writer, journalist, and freelance translator. On the side, I started to garden and, with my husband, to raise exotic fruits — cherimoyas, guavas, macadamias, jujubes, and others. Though both my parents are botanists and I grew up with some knowledge about plants, I had very little experience growing anything other than houseplants. I don’t remember where I first heard of it, but I learned about the Seed Savers Exchange — an international network of small farmers and gardeners who preserve and trade rare, traditional, heirloom, or otherwise interesting fruit and vegetable seeds. I began to grow all sorts of vegetables — red okra, speckled blue beans, yellow pear tomatoes, tiny eggplants — and to trade seeds with other people around the country. I came to deeply value the things that I was growing and to appreciate the people who had collected them, brought them to this country, and kept them going.
Every year, the Seed Savers Exchange publishes a collection of essays and papers on the seed-savers movement. One morning while flipping through one of these, I was struck (and I mean struck as if physically hit) by two photos. One showed a herbarium full of wooden cabinets. It resembled rooms in which I had spent a great deal of time as a child, looking at plant specimens, waiting for my mother to finish working in her lab. The other was a prison photograph of a man’s face, intelligent and still defiant but also haunted and doomed. It was Nikolai Vavilov. I read there the story of what had happened to him and how his colleagues had protected his collections during the siege of Leningrad. I knew right then that I would write a book about it.
Although I knew I wanted to write about the siege of Leningrad and had a true story on which to hang my book, the idea marinated in my brain for a long time before I knew who would narrate, what the fictional story would be, why the material resonated for me, and what I wanted to make and say with it. During that time, I did some very conscious thinking and some very direct research, but I was able to find out very little about what happened during the siege. Some of the sketchy accounts I found focused on Vavilov and presented those who remained at his institute after his imprisonment as bad scientists or as people who had slandered their colleagues during Stalin’s purges. Others, focusing more on the siege, portrayed the remaining scientists as great heroes, comparing them to the workers who preserved the artwork in the Hermitage — a better-known story from the siege. I guessed that the truth was much less black and white. Lacking the linguistic and financial resources to interview people in Saint Petersburg, I wrote to a number of people who might know some of the details I sought. None of my letters was answered. At the time, I was frustrated that I couldn’t find out more. But as I waited and thought and took notes for the book, the fictional story began to materialize.