On Wed, 9 Apr 1997, Nalo Hopkinson wrote:
> On Tue, 8 Apr 1997, Michael Marc Levy wrote:
>
> > As Nicola Griffith said in an earlier post, more or less, how far can we
> > trust an author when her statements about a story seem contradicted by
> > the story itself?
>
> NH: I see this happening often, with all kinds of artmaking. Sometimes
> the artist is not the best person to ask for an analysis of her work; a
> lot of it happens on an unconscious level.
>
> -nalo
>
I'm reminded of an interview I did with the children's fantasy writer
Natalie Babbitt for a book I was writing about her work. My wife, Sandy
Lindow, who took part in the interview suggested that the plot of
Babbitt's most recent picturebook, Nellie, A Cat on Her Own, sounded very
similar to Babbitt's own life and that the cat's name--Nellie--sounded
similar to Natalie. Babbitt's immediate response was to look blank and
then say that she thought that the name similarity was probably
coincidental because it was a last minute substitution. All the time
she'd been writing the book, she'd been planning on calling the cat by a
different name, Nettie. After she said that, we all sort of looked at
each other for a minute, then Babbitt, with a bemused expression on her
face, said something along the lines of "Oh my! You don't suppose..."
And then we all laughed.
Mike Levy
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu May 25 2000 - 19:05:59 PDT