Maile Chapman interviewed by Natalie Rogers and Chanelle Benz

First published in Salt Hill 28 (2011).

Interviewer’s Note: Maile Chapman's haunting first novel, Your Presence Is Requested at Suvanto, is set during the 1920s in a women's hospital in Finland, and follows an American, Sunny Taylor, who has taken a position there as a nurse. The New York Times hailed Chapman's debut as, “utterly specific and original,” calling her prose “almost laparoscopic in its closeness and precision.”

Salt Hill: What role does writing play in your life?

Maile Chapman: Writing is the pole star. Even when I’m failing at everything else, I have a thing that I do, and that’s writing, and if I actually do that thing, I’ll be okay. The problem is allowing any interludes to go by without sitting down and doing it. Bad times ensue.

SH: Do you have any form of ritual preparation before writing?

MC: I write in cursive and my hand gets too tired if I use a pen that drags, so I like rollerballs with gel ink. It’s hard to get motivated if I don’t have a nice inky pen to look forward to. I trade off between blue and black, so that later I’ll know where one day’s work ends and the next begins.

SH: What kinds of sentences do you aim to write? What goes into crafting your sentences?

MC: I studied playwriting years ago, and if I get stuck I look at how characters negotiate the constantly shifting balance of power between them. That influences a lot of the dialogue I write. And I always read sentences out loud to myself because that’s how I catch the wrong notes. Anyone within earshot of my office must think I’m peculiar, always muttering to myself, often the same phrases over and over, like Jack Torrance in The Shining—all work and no play, all work and no play....

SH: Were there any direct influences or inspirations for “Foreign Wedding”?

MC: A few years ago I went to Aix-en-Provence for one of the International Gothic Association conferences. The panel presentations were wonderful and creepy, and yet outside it was a beautiful, warm summer in the south of France. All the hotels were booked to capacity with tourists and travelers from Europe and everywhere else—so many nice, normal people having un-Gothic experiences. When I wrote the story I was thinking about that contrast, and remembering how it felt to walk through crowds of strangers, who were tossing coins into fountains and carrying ice cream cones while my own brain was teeming with Poe-like thoughts.

SH: Your female characters are interesting and complex, and at the same time, they are often unlikeable. How do you want your readers to relate to your characters?

MC: I always start with characters that are wonderful people, noble, interesting, trustworthy, good-looking. And then I remember that a story full of nice people isn’t interesting, and I start prodding the characters for idiosyncrasies and weaknesses. In the case of Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto, I knew I didn’t want the older female characters to be nice grandmotherly figures just because they had reached a certain age. I’ve been lucky to have a lot of older family members, and age doesn’t necessarily smooth out our personalities automatically.

SH: In a previous interview, you mentioned that when you began working on Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto, you already knew what was going to happen in the final scenes. How did your understanding of the final scene affect the way you approached your characters at the beginning of the project?

MC: I only knew because I was looking to The Bacchae of Euripides for a structural guide. In that play, a male relative insists on witnessing a women’s religious rite that is supposed to remain secret, and they punish him. I invented all of the female characters, and it was liberating to know where they were headed before I knew whom they would turn out to be.

SH: Can you talk a little about your predilection toward ambiguous endings?

MC: In Greek drama, which I was using as a model for Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto, all the violent action takes place offstage, whereas the lead-up and repercussions are what you watch unfold. I always feel like I’m being way too obvious, and then someone else will read and say they have no idea what’s going on. I like subtlety and ambiguity, but for me they often point to the absent scenes I don’t want to write because I know they’re going to be hard. I make myself write past the places where I naturally want to stop. I hate doing it, but I’m usually glad afterwards.

SH: What kind of experience do you want your readers to have with your work, and how might that differ from film?

MC: I think novels can get away with being messy and chaotic in ways that a movie can’t pull off. I like creepy psychological and/or supernatural stories, and it absolutely infuriates me when the rules change midway through. In the beginning of a crappy movie maybe the ghosts can’t actually touch you, and then midway through, they suddenly can physically hurt you, with no explanation, and the story degenerates into an over-the-top terror chase, with no regard for logic and too much reliance on atmospherics and special effects; I hate that! Movies are especially prone to this, and maybe in a novel there’s more room to fix those problems, to sew up the holes, eventually if not immediately. I love novels that twist around while still firmly pulling you forward, like: The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins; Fingersmith, by Sarah Waters; Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell; Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials Trilogy; and my favorite Gothic novel, Uncle Silas, by Sheridan Le Fanu. These are books in which strange events are happening, but you’re in such good hands that nothing jars you back into yourself because there is internal consistency in the fictional world. You look up, and four hours have passed like nothing. I would love to be able to create a world like that. The last book that hooked me in this way was The Passage, by Justin Cronin. I had it with me on a delayed flight, and I was so engrossed that I didn’t care about the long wait.

SH: Where would you like to see American literature heading?

MC: Feeling entitled to speak one’s mind is a very American trait, and I’m so glad I grew up with the absolute right to express myself. But the flipside is that I’ve had to learn that not everything I say or write is automatically of interest or importance to others. And now I ask myself, when I’m writing: why should someone take the time to read this story or novel or whatever? Sometimes I feel like literary fiction avoids that question, and while I’m all in favor of art for art’s sake, I daresay that can be impractical. It’s my job, our job, to try to create something literary but also engaging. I love medical nonfiction written by doctors, nurses, and researchers who know things I never will and who can distill meaningful experiences into a narrative. It’s a question of reading about issues that, by any scale in the world, really matter—life, death, and the major decisions that we do or don’t get to make. When I’m reading I want to feel that something is at stake, not just in a quiet, private, novelistic sense but also in some clear, serious, unambiguous way. It’s hard to accomplish that.

Maile Chapman is the author of the novel, Your Presence Is Requested at Suvanto (2010), short-listed for the Guardian First Book Award and a finalist for the PEN Center USA literary award in fiction. Her stories have appeared in A Public Space, Best American Fantasy Writing, Dublin Review, Boston Review, and GRANTA Online, and elsewhere. She received her MFA in fiction from Syracuse University and her Ph.D. in English from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.  She has been a fellow at the New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, as well as a Fulbright Grantee to Finland.