This month The Romance Readers Connection is honored to have Jardine Libaire, first-time novelist, as of the Month. Ms. Libaire has had her stories published in Fiction and Chick Lit, an anthology. HERE KITTY KITTY is her debut novel.
CM: Ms. Libaire, as a new author, please tell us what got you interested in a writing career?
JL: I’ve always, somewhere pretty deep inside, wanted to write not just as a career but as a way of living, of being. That’s melodramatic, but true. We all have, I believe, a skill or love or capacity that unlocks the door of ordinary life. That allows us to escape from the limits of our own selves and our lives. Writing has been that for me since I first tried it, and so it’s always interested me, sometimes even saved me. I was born shy, and hyper aware, and writing has always been a form of freedom.
CM: How long have you been writing?
JL: I started writing long before I could spell. I have little notebooks full of stories—written in crayon—about dragons and ladybugs and houses. My parents would read to me and my brothers all the time, and they valued and supported imagination as much as intelligence. They also taught us to be alone on occasion, to be solitary, and that skill definitely comes in hand when it’s time to think and write.
CM: Writers are told to find their “voice.” Give us some background on how you developed such a distinctive writing style for HERE KITTY KITTY.
JL: For most of my life I only wrote poetry. Poems, and the lines of poems, the images in poems, are still my building blocks. Besides that, I’ve read a wild array of books, from comic books to crime noir to science fiction to old classics, and I find myself, like a magpie, picking tricks and strategies from all of them. An exercise that will never cease to be useful is mimicking another’s writer’s style or method; my own voice has grown stronger and more capable by having been challenged to do something new. And often I fail to properly “copy” a master; it’s one thing to recognize Emily Dickinson’s voice, and another to replicate it. But even failure is valuable in this case because I’ve used muscles I didn’t know I had. Writing for me involves a tremendous amount of cutting. I boil things down. What results in one paragraph began its life as three pages. A few of my favorite writers do a kind of long and lanky storytelling that I love, but I can’t do that. I keep removing words until I’m left with the bare minimum.
CM: How did you choose the title for this book?
JL: I love figures of speech. I collect them. “Here kitty kitty” isn’t exactly an idiom, but it’s one of those phrases so often repeated in our culture, in our language, that it’s one piece. There’s something slightly naughty to it, as well as ominous, or sly. And to me the title reflects a sort of beckoning the protagonist must do at this point. Lee has to coax back her own self to life. She has to coax back her own dignity. And it’s hard to manipulate a cat. They see through us, and require we give them something real.
CM: Are the experiences of Lee, based on some you know, or events in your life?
JL: The anecdotes in the book are often things that happened to me or to my friends. (A few examples...... My father told me the story about a man shredding gladiolas in a ceiling fan. I did work as a chambermaid on Cape Cod. My friend and I did get locked up on a roof with a bunch of strangers one night.) And the locations are almost all true, local places where I spend time. The issues and crises the characters experience are largely the ones I’ve gone through in the past few years, and watched my friends handle. For example, when is it cowardly to compromise, and when is it courageous? When is it right to commit oneself to working on imperfect love, and when is it right to give up love in order to work on oneself?
But Lee goes to extremes I hope never to visit. In some ways, she was a psychological experiment for me: what if I didn’t have all the support and family I have, and I wasn’t able to reign myself in, to say no when it mattered? What would happen if I chose this, or if I chose that? Lee tried certain things out so I don’t ever have to.
CM: What books have most influenced you?
JL: During my short life I’ve fallen in love with hundreds of books. Most of them I can’t recall, but would get butterflies if I discovered in some bookstore again. I like books that wear their hearts on their sleeves, and I’ll take a faulty but earnest book over a polished but false one any day. I’ve been influenced by classic books like The Great Gatsby, biographies of Diane Arbus and Nixon, anthologies of poems, books on art like Robert Henri’s The Art Spirit, noir books like the Maltese Falcon or The Talented Mister Ripley, books of essays like Slouching Towards Bethlehem, the diaries of Anais Nin, the Sin City series by Frank Miller, and psychology or philosophy textbooks. I find the more open-minded I am, the more often I’m happily surprised.
CM: What books are you currently reading?
JL: I just read the autobiography of Miles Davis, which is a crazy, brutal and elegant book. Read A Cook’s Tour, and loved it. Also have a book of poems by Jean Valentine out from the library right now, and am totally bewildered and entranced by it.
CM: Who are your favorite authors, and why do they inspire you?
JL: The answer to this changes weekly. Right now I often read a couple of pages of John Berryman’s Dream Songs before writing, because he so quickly and effectively breaks up the logic of ordinary language, and makes me feel free to do anything. I just got a book of Helmut Newton photographs, which I adore. They have such a razor’s edge and I feel inspired to break rules. Colette is an idol not just for her books, but for her amazing life. She definitely didn’t bow down to fear or convention. I love Walt Whitman right now, and Robert Crumb, and Elizabeth Bishop. Bishop, for example was my favorite years ago, and then I lost touch, and now I’m in love with her poems again.
CM: How did you feel when your first novel was accepted?
JL: Like I’d been invited to come in from the cold. I’d been ready and willing to go for a long time without any sign from the world that what I was doing was worthwhile. But that’s a hard place to be. Once a book is accepted, of course, there’s a whole new tier of challenges: will anyone relate to it, or love it , or buy it? Can I write the second book the way I want to write it, or will I feel self-conscious now? But that stuff doesn’t dent the gratitude, the pleasure, in sending the book out. I told a friend that writing this book felt like writing a love letter to the world. Now it’s time to mail it. A terrifying and amazing moment.
CM: What advice would you give to writers just beginning their career?
JL: I protected myself by staying away from “lifetime deadlines”, i.e. forcing myself to be published by a certain age, or trying to make money from writing, or putting pressure on myself to write a book geared primarily to sell. I paid my rent with jobs unrelated to writing, which preserved writing as my own territory. I avoided competitive situations, like workshops with bad energy, because it brought out the worst in me. I kept writing to myself. This isn’t how everyone does it, nor is it how everyone should do it. But no matter how private or communal your writing life, let yourself luxuriate once in a while in your own ideas, your own work, your own images, without giving anyone else the chance to judge them. Make a ritual of occasionally writing something and showing it to no one.
CM: Do you have any current projects?
JL: I’m working on a second novel, tentatively called “7 Minutes in Heaven”, which uses characters from Here Kitty Kitty. Writing a column for Nerve.com, which is called Love Letter from Brooklyn: Notes on Life Sex & Death. And just playing with notions, imagining possibilities. I want to make a graphic novel with an artist friend, and I want to explore creative nonfiction, and I want to discover new things to want.
CM: Tell us a bit about yourself. We would love to know more about you!
JL: I live in Brooklyn, but have been struck by wanderlust in the past couple years. So I spend time wherever I can put together a place to live for the short-term. I’ve spent a couple months recently on Vashon Island off Seattle, and in Houston, and in Montauk, and on Martha’s Vineyard. I really love being a stranger in a new town. I do all kinds of jobs still, and they make me part of the world, which I need. Sitting in a room alone and thinking and writing must, for me, be balanced against living. So I try to keep art and life in the right proportion to each other. There’s nothing as good as spending a solitary day, distraught and thrilled by whatever I’m writing, and totally caught in my own head, and then taking a hot shower and meeting friends and drinking wine and eating dinner and forgetting that there is such a thing as writing.
Thank you so much for being The Romance Reader’s Connection Author of the Month!
(Click for a
review of HERE KITTY KITTY)
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