A Conversation with Aimee Bender
Rent from DeepDyve- A Conversation with Aimee Bender
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Aimee Bender's first collection of short stories, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (1998), was a New York Times Notable Book that blended fairy-tale archetypes with the emotional complexity of literary fiction. The anxiety-ridden math teacher of her follow-up novel, An Invisible Sign of My Own (2000), was more grounded in reality, but Bender's playful, inventive sentences gave the world an air of the fantastic and cemented her status as a truly original stylist. Willful Creatures (2005), her second story collection, contained a number of widely anthologized stories. In her newest novel, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (2010), she gives nine-year-old Rose Edelstein the ability to taste other people's emotions through the food they make.
Bender received her MFA from the Univercity of California–Irvine. She lives in Los Angeles, where she teaches creative writing at the University of Southern California. Brian Beglin conducted this interview over the phone and through e-mail in May and June 2010. [End Page 59]
I don't know much about how you broke in. Did you go straight from undergrad to the MFA?
No, I took about four years off and taught elementary school. I taught language arts.
And when you got to Irvine, how did people respond to your stuff in those workshops?
It was a good workshop, an unusual workshop, where the range of style was really different. Alice Sebold was there, and Glen David Gold was there. We were picked by Judith Grossman, who has a very eclectic sensibility, and Geoffrey Wolff, who was just starting as head of the program. So there was this feeling of a new branch of the program beginning, and that was exciting. I think had it been at a different time it might have been harder for me, in some ways, to test out the waters. I didn't expect that they would respond well to the stories that were less realistic, but they were incredibly supportive, and that was a huge gateway for me.
What might have happened if the group had been less receptive?
It's hard to know, and I hope I would've found my way there eventually, but it helped to have a group of such distinct and inventive writers who enthusiastically pushed me toward the weirder fiction. I didn't expect it, and it was one of those Aha! moments for me. Really, what they were doing was pointing out where the language and voice felt more real, more my own. I think that's where a workshop can truly help—we can show the writer the work, in a way. We can say, "Look this is good, and that other part ain't so good, even though it's clear you think it's brilliant." I find that usually the parts I think are brilliant end up seeming strained to other people. Which is both humbling and liberating at the same time.
How much of The Girl in the Flammable Skirt came from those workshops?
About 90 percent.
What was it like to then switch gears and start on a novel? Or had you been working on that alongside the stories?
I started the novel my second year—and it was tough for a while. Workshopping novels is a tricky business. You have to give the writer a lot [End Page 60] of space not to know what she's doing, and sometimes the workshop asked me questions I couldn't answer. I remember stomping around a UCI field at some point, just trying to shake off my feeling like I had to know what I was doing. I didn't. With novels, that's how it goes. A workshop can say, "We liked this; do more of this"—and that can be the most useful. Geoffrey Wolff was very good at helping point the way. As a teacher, I like to tell students to follow the language—to trust the parts that show...
