Lucy Ellmann, "Olive Oyl"
It’s December 23. Lucy Ellmann, author of Ducks, Newburyport, can count beads with the best of them.
How would you describe your story?
LUCY ELLMANN: A riff on Popeye and his sweetheart, Olive Oyl.
When did you write it, and how did the writing process compare to your other work?
LE: This story was written and revised over several years. I write spasmodically, in fits and starts. I wish it were easier but it’s agony, actually! I used to think that made me not a real writer. Now I accept I am a writer, just not a very relaxed one.
What kind of research went into this story?
LE: Research, besmirch. I like the early days of animation (Betty Boop and so on) and had a thing about the cartoon “A Date to Skate” (1938). It’s very sweet and funny. Olive Oyl gets some great lines in it, and becomes a real entity. She may look like a doll made out of an old broomstick, but she’s got zest for life. Covid lockdowns fed into my sense of her unsettled solitude in old age, and her strange abode stems from a fantasy I’ve long entertained of living in a summerhouse in the woods somewhere. So far, the practicalities have defeated me, but they wouldn’t daunt Olive Oyl.
What, to you, makes the short story a special form? What can it do that other kinds of writing can’t?
LE: You can go kind of crazy, in ways that might not be sustainable in a novel. Stories are a place to play with some of your wackier ideas.
Where should people go to learn more about you and your work?
LE: My books, I guess! I think people should concentrate on the work, not the life. I am so sick of author interviews, particularly my own! I’m no great ad for my books, being quite reclusive and embarrassingly inarticulate. But this recording with CBC radio isn’t too bad maybe.
What's the best gift you've ever been given?
LE: When my last novel, Ducks, Newburyport, was rejected by Bloomsbury in the UK (where I live), my agent David Godwin suggested we try Galley Beggar Press, and this turned out to be the ideal publishing house for me. It’s run by two very passionate, very literary, hands-on editors who’ve got guts, a vital trait in a publisher. (My North American publisher for Ducks is yet another such fabulous outfit: they’re called Biblioasis, and are similarly sincere, kindly, and bold.) Through GBP and Biblioasis, I found my way to a sophisticated readership that I hardly believed still existed, people who really care about literature as an art form. It’s important to know there are people out there who can sensitively read stuff.
Independent publishers (and bookshops) are now the beating heart of the book trade, and hold all the moral high ground. The big corporate guys seem to aspire only to be sluggish large intestines—profit-driven, risk-averse, enslaved to shareholders and bestseller lists, as they defeatedly churn out a deluge of commercial fiction, self-help books, ghost-written celebrity misery-memoirs, and other unconvincing nonsense. Bah humbug.
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