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Joan Leegant: The Life Around Them: Animating the Inanimate
- Red Hen Press
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140 Joan Leegant The Life Around Them: Animating the Inanimate In An Hour in Paradise, her collection of short stories, Joan Leegant explores themes of Jewish lore, wisdom, and religion. Inanimate objects breathe with life and develop personality traits and behaviors of their own. Characters seize moments of pleasure, moments of joy, when they are least expected. Mystical visitations and experiences speckle the narrative horizons. Some of the stories read like fables; others are more traditional. Louis Bayard in his New York Times review of this collection commented on the difficulties a fiction writer faces writing about religion. He said, “Fiction in its ideal form is an open system, suggesting without determining. Religion is at heart a closed system—a ring of certainty. Bridging those two worlds has been the mission of generations of writers, but only a few have kept their footing, their very survival a testament to the dangers they have passed. These are the perils that Joan Leegant in turn skirts, bows to, and transcends in her arresting new short story collection.” The stories in this collection were originally published in Columbia, Crazyhorse, Prairie Schooner, Nimrod and other publications. Her essays have appeared in the Forward, a Jewish newspaper, and elsewhere. Critically acclaimed, An Hour In Paradise received the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for the best book of Jewish-American fiction and the 2004 L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award for the best book by a New England author; was named a finalist for the 2004 National Jewish Book Award; and was a Fall 2003 selection for the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Program. Leegant’s stories have also won or been finalists for the following literary awards: the Lawrence Foundation Award, the Katherine Anne Porter Prize and the Tobias Wolff Award. Leegant is at currently at work on her first novel, a story of young Americans living in Jerusalem in the late seventies. Leegant is a recipient of an artist grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and fellowships from Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. She teaches writing at Harvard University. This interview was conducted on Ms. Leegant’s backyard deck Joan Leegant 141 under the late afternoon sun, amid resplendent greenery. Ms. Leegant lives in Newton, Massachusetts, with her husband and two teenage sons. Sherry Ellis: In the story “HowTo Comfort The Sick and Dying,” Reuven is both a yeshiva student and an individual in recovery from drug addiction and a womanizing lifestyle. He feels guilty about his past and has difficulty comforting a dying man who has AIDS, which prompts a crisis in his faith. How do you develop your characters? Joan Leegant: I coax them out and then I follow them. When the yeshiva student emerged, for example, all I saw was a young man in the doorway of a hospital room looking at a patient. I was interested in the patient, but I was more interested in the young man. He was in full Hasidic dress—black yarmulke, tzitzit fringes, dark suit—but I knew he wasn’t a born Hasid and that there was a story behind his dress. I wrote the story to find out what that was. Within the first few paragraphs, I discovered where he was coming from and why he was dressed that way, but it was through his interactions with the patient, through the rest of the story, that I discovered who he really was and what the story would be about. I didn’t know any of it until I wrote it. Ellis:In the story “Mezivosky,” a Russian Jew and an American Jew are neighbors who seemingly have nothing in common. After Mezivosky begrudgingly feeds a stray dog, he tells his neighbor. Later the neighbor asks himself, “What was a man to do? Ignore the seesaw of right and wrong, the grinding teeth of conscience?” By the story’s end the boundaries between the two neighbors are less rigid and a bond has started to develop between them, their conversations about the dog having seemed to bring them together. How do you develop your characters’ circumstances and the ways their lives intersect? Leegant: That story began after I finished an MFA program and was giving myself projects, little assignments. I saw an ad for a contest that was looking for culturally Jewish stories with a limit of fifteen pages. Since I usually write long, I told myself it would be a good exercise. I was also in the mood to write something...