Interview with E.H. Lupton, author of The Joy of Fishes
E.H. Lupton lives in Madison, Wisconsin with her husband and
various pets. In her spare time, she pursues a number of hobbies including
running, baking, making things up, and taking naps.
Her novella, The Joy of Fishes, was published by Battered
Suitcase Press in December of 2013.
When did you first
realize you wanted to be a writer?
I was about twelve
or thirteen and having an argument with my father about a TV show we both
liked. I didn’t like the direction it was going in. My father challenged me to
write my own version. I haven’t stopped since.
Why do you write?
I feel like I have
stories to tell. Also, I don’t have a TV, and if I run too much my joints get
angry, so I have to have a “sitting down” hobby.
Is being a writer
anything like you imagined it would be?
No. When I was young
I thought all writers just wrote full time. Also, I’m guessing I thought
writing was easy. In fact I still want to believe that, because I am
continually surprised by how difficult writing is—I keep hoping I’ll come
around a bend in the road and suddenly find everything is a cinch.
What do you think
makes a good story?
It has to have
compelling characters and a good plot. Artistry of writing is nice, and if the
story fails on plot, sometimes artistry can get you pretty far (I mean, look at
Ulysses). But if it fails on characters, I don’t care about the rest.
What's your favorite
genre to read?
Probably mysteries.
I read a lot of genres, because I’m always reading things that people recommend
or that I find somewhere, but left to my own devices I look for a mystery
novel. I’m especially fond of hardboiled detective novels.
Who is your favorite
author or poet?
This is a hard question.
Raymond Chandler is up there. Salman Rushdie. James Joyce. Zora Neale Hurston. Thomas
Pynchon, especially his more recent stuff, like Inherent Vice. I’m
probably leaving out a lot of worthy names here, but I think if you’ve read any
of these writers you might begin to detect a trend: I like incredibly
well-written works with interesting characters and (in most cases) dense,
complex plots that are funny and heart-wrenching by turns.
What books or stories
have most influenced you the most as a writer?
Probably the biggest
influence was James Joyce’s Ulysses. I learned from it that books don’t
have to stick to a single topic; you can put all of life into them. This book,
more specifically, was influenced also by Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five,
Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and by Wandering
on the Way, a collection of Daoist stories translated by Victor Mair.
What books or stories
have most influenced you as a person?
I started down the
path to study philosophy when I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
Maintenance by Robert Persig. I think a lot of my work is deeply rooted in
philosophy in general, though it’s not always as apparent as it is with The
Joy of Fishes. As an undergraduate, I studied philosophy and Chinese, which
led to me taking the class in Daoism that inspired TJoF.
More prosaically, my
mom used to read me Kipling’s The Just-So Stories and a lot of the works
of James Thurber, and I think both of those had a big influence on me.
Where/how do you find
the most inspiration?
When I’m lucky (that
is, when I’m not recovering from an injury), I do a lot of thinking when I’m
out running. When I’m not able to run, driving or biking can have a similar
effect. (I live in Wisconsin, so the window for biking is pretty small.)
What does your family
think of your writing?
I think they’re
proud. Maybe a bit surprised that this is what I do, but proud.
What is your work
schedule like when you're writing?
While I was
finishing my thesis recently, I would get up around 5:30 and write until 7ish
(sometimes pausing earlier or later depending on whether the puppy needed to go
out). After I took the dogs out, I put the thesis away and went to the gym for
an hour. Then I’d be ready to go to my day job. I find it easiest to get things
done in the morning when there are fewer distractions. I’m sleeping in a little
later now though.
Do you have any
writing quirks or rituals?
I really like to
write off the computer—I write longhand quite a bit, and when I have the
opportunity, I like to write on my grandmother’s old typewriter. It is about
fifty years old and probably weighs twenty or thirty pounds. I really like the
feeling of connecting with the keys. Also, I like being away from the Internet.
Is there anything you
find particularly challenging in your writing?
The Internet.
Especially when things get difficult, I have a hard time focusing. Also, I know
that in the course of writing a first draft, there are going to be boring bits
that will have to be cut out later. But I hate writing them down. I have to
force myself to press forward.
What are your current
projects?
I have a short story
I’m rewriting, and a novel I’m doing the first draft of. There are probably a
few other things, too. I pick stories up and put them down all the time.
What are you planning
for future projects?
I don’t really know.
Someday I’d like to do a graphic novel, if I ever meet an artist with whom I
could work. But I don’t always know what I’m going to do ahead of time. I
squirrel away little bits of information for the future all the time, but I
don’t usually have a plan of what I’m going to do with them.
Do you have any
advice for other writers?
No. I know enough to
know that I know nothing.
Where else can we find your work?
I have a blog at
pretensesoup.com where you can find all of (or a lot of) my comic “Em ơi!,”
which chronicles my various adventures in a somewhat piecemeal and occasionally
imaginary fashion. I’ve been drawing it since 2008ish, and have amassed nearly
four hundred comics at this point, making it probably my longest-running work. I
have had a story published in issue 6 of Greatest Uncommon Denominator/GUD
(“Salad Days,” which can be found here: http://www.gudmagazine.com/vault/6/Salad+Days).
And I have had a story published in issue 5 of a magazine called Wilde Oats,
but it appears to have been archived and isn’t on their website right now
(looks like it will be in the future though).
Mara Daniels is a physicist doing cutting-edge research into the nature of reality at the University of Chicago. She’s an astronomer. She’s an amateur student of Chinese philosophy. And she’s still recovering from last summer’s car crash that killed Benjamin Zhu, her fiancé. It’s a slow process; she can walk without a cane now, but she still suffers from migraines, nightmares, and seeing Zhu’s ghost everywhere she goes. The novella The Joy of Fishes follows her through the day on which these threads begin to unravel.
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