Read Online Flirt: The Interviews by Lorna Jackson - Free Book Online

she was a tender, keeping the puck out of the net whenever she could see it coming, sometimes a butterfly flail to keep it out. But remote, elitist, too smart for the rest of the team. My mother survived, but not in a way that could be considered useful to a writer. Time may change my mind.
    I like the idea that your father’s death is still with you in the essays you write.
    â€”Oh yeah, I haven’t written about it sufficiently in a way, because I did write about my mother’s death and my mother’s life in the eighties. I
haven’t written about my father’s life and my father’s death in a way that really puts it to rest for me.
    â€”My father was simple, in the best aesthetic sense of that word and I, too, want to sustain my life with him through art, or maybe to finish our relationship with appropriate closure, the kind only a taut short story provides. But when I try to write about him, he becomes so complex he’s pointillist, he’s feathers on a Barred Rock: black and white but layered thick. This man was an auctioneer who played tennis and golf and loved les Canadiens, his only outrage a bad call by the linesman: “Ah c’mon fellas!” He loved a good – or bad – pun, women’s ankles, “Up a Lazy River” by the Mills Brothers. He anticipated the sports news at eleven o’clock. But he was also once a fair-skinned high school drop-out off to war and then caught and kept in a German POW camp. He once feigned suicide – the newspapers fell for it – just to get away from us, just for awhile. The best thing my father did for me was be like feathers.
    In this new collection, the mood is much different, more elegaic. But the prose is different, too. You’ve always put simple images into complex contexts, but now there seem fewer details, and the context seems simpler. Much less scene-setting choreography as in, say, The Sportswriter . Is that because of the themes, or is it just part of your evolution?
    â€”Well, that’s how you read them. And so you must be right about the way you read them. But yours is an opinion, nothing more.
    â€”I was going to say you’re becoming more Hemingway-esque.
    â€”Oh please, I hope not. That would certainly disappoint me.
    â€”I thought that would make you mad. I said, “I was going to say” it, but I didn’t. Don’t be mad.
    â€”If I’m not better than Hemingway I should give it up. The world gets complexer and he doesn’t. Basically, particularly with those stories of his, as good as they are and affecting as they are, basically the point of view is that of an adolescent.
    â€”You mean Hemingway’s point of view?
    â€”Yeah, of a kind of suppressed maturity.
    â€”Hence, his suicide?
    â€”I wouldn’t know about that, but probably. Yes, in general suicide – or
its repeated and more public attempts – might be seen as the expression of a kind of suppressed maturity.
    â€”You said in an old interview that the inclusion of the opthamologist in the story “Rock Springs” was accidental. The interviewer pushed you to say something about sight and blindness and all that, but you wouldn’t. I’ve found at least two others in the new book. Now, are these more than accidental? What’s with all the opthamologists?
    â€”I think it’s a word. I just stick the word in a sentence. Whenever I see other words that one likes in a sentence, I’m pleased, I’m happiest, and so I’m not putting them in for anything that has to do with vision, or blindness. Again, you could say moral blindness and you could get a lot of PhD students to agree with you but you wouldn’t get the author to agree.
    â€”But you’re not making fun of those PhD students?
    â€”Nope.
    â€”When I moved to the country, to a shingled cabin on Becher Bay and a community linked by hayfields and free range eggs, I had been recently released