Five Questions with Novelist Maya Lang - Oklahoma Center for the Humanities
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Five Questions with Novelist Maya Lang

Maya Lang_Renata SteinerAs part of this year’s annual Bloomsday celebrations, the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities in cooperation with the James Joyce Quarterly is delighted to welcome novelist Maya Lang to Tulsa.  Her first book, The Sixteenth of June, draws on Joyce’s Ulysses to tell the comic yet moving story of two brothers and the woman they both love–a set of relations that come to a head on a single, pivotal day.  It has been called a “generous and big-hearted novel” that will appeal both to those who love Ulysses and those who have never heard of James Joyce.

Lang will lead a writing workshop in Tulsa on June 15th and then read from her work and talk about Ulysses at the Bloomsday Pub Crawl through the Brady Arts District on June 16th.  All these events are free and open to the public.  To prepare for her visit, we put five questions to Maya about her writing, her interest in Ulysses, and her beautiful first novel.

OCH:  Tell us a little something about your first encounter with Ulysses. When and why did you first read the book? What did you find most interesting or frustrating? What made you decide to return to it as you crafted The Sixteenth of June?

ML:  I first read Ulysses in grad school and wanted to throw it across the room. I thought of all the people I’d met who raved about it, and I wondered if they’d even read the thing. Would they pass a quiz on Ulysses? Did they truly love it, or did they love what it said about them? What makes for genuine love when it comes to art?

I was relieved when I read Virginia Woolf’s diary entries. She had little patience for Joyce and was irritated by the great fuss being made over him—but her feelings are expressed privately, in her diary. This made me wonder about private and public reactions. Are there things we love in secret versus loves we broadcast? Ulysses—and its lore—raised so many questions for me. These were the basis for The Sixteenth of June. Ultimately I came to love Ulysses, but this was inadvertent, a happy accident after much initial resentment.

OCH:  Like Ulysses, your own novel is set on a single day—a day on which not much seems to happen. What are the challenges you faced as a writer in trying to fit this rich story of intersecting lives into so narrow a space?

ML:  Because this was my first novel, I found the structure of squeezing everything into a single day helpful—maybe like only having a single day in a foreign city. The time constraint made me aware of what I needed to accomplish. The challenge was the tightrope walk between past and present. I had to introduce enough history and background to make the reader care about the characters, but I didn’t want to pause the action too often or have the momentum slow. There was a constant battle between gas pedal and brake.

OCH:  You dedicate The Sixteenth of June to “all the readers who never made it through Ulysses (or haven’t wanted to try).” Do you see your novel an attempt to make Joyce’s work more accessible, more modern, or more up-to-date?

ML:  I chose that as the dedication because I hated the thought of readers being put off by the Ulysses connection. I wanted my novel to be warm and inviting, and I had no interest in intimidating anyone. I see The Sixteenth in conversation with Ulysses, arising from a set of questions it prompted, but I have no agenda for Joyce’s work—except perhaps that people stop pretending to love it, unless they truly do.

OCH:  There are, of course, any number of parallels between The Sixteenth of June and Ulysses, but also one notable departure: the grandmother, Hannah Portman. There’s really no one like her in Joyce’s novel and she becomes the emotional pivot around which so much of your own novel turns. Can you tell us something more about this character and why you found her essential to your re-working of Ulysses?

ML:  The questions I mention above about genuine love versus posturing play out through the relationships in The Sixteenth of June. Hannah Portman, the uncouth grandmother, is Stephen’s private love. He’s very close with her, but hides his enormous affection for her out of fear—just as June Portman loves Monet but pretends to love the more hip Damien Hirst.

What’s funny is that Hannah Portman actually didn’t exist in the first draft of The Sixteenth. She was unnamed, an anonymous grandmother, because I needed a funeral for the plot! As I wrote and rewrote, she took on life. If Ulysses is a metaphor for all that we pretend to love, for all of the feelings we think we “should” have, Hannah Portman is its counterpart: relentlessly unpretentious and real. Stephen isn’t supposed to love her but does. She wasn’t supposed to become a main character but did. Life is filled with such closets, the reality of our feelings versus our intentions.

OCH:  James Joyce called Ulysses “an epic of the human body.” Your book cares deeply about the body too, lingering beautifully over Leo’s fading athleticism, Stephen’s asceticism, and Nora’s hair pulling. Tell us more the bodies you invent in The Sixteenth of June and the way they communicate things the characters cannot say.

ML:  “Everything speaks in its own way” is one of my favorite lines from Ulysses. Our bodies betray us, undermine us, and reveal us. It made sense to me that Nora, grappling with acute grief, would have her feelings come out in some way. So much of the novel is about what doesn’t get said but still shows itself. Later, it occurred to me that Nora’s “pulling” is also a dirty joke of sorts, given how Joyce’s first date with Nora Barnacle ends (a joke I suspect Joyce would love). Leo is very much “in” his body, aware of its hungers and desires and needs. Like Bloom, he is visceral, human. Cerebral Stephen, like Dedalus, is more removed from physicality. Prone to insomnia and to skipping meals, his body is more nuisance than pleasure to him.