Desire
An Interview with Author Lindsay Ahl

Q. What inspired you to write Desire?

In part, I was inspired to write Desire because I was thinking about how we all want to understand and know the people we are close to: our parents, our lovers, our children, our friends, and yet so often this knowledge slips beyond our ability. Desire began as a question, how do we know what we know, and became a story about love. So often, to love someone is to think we know them; yet as people change, our knowledge of them must change as well, so that our knowledge is fluid. In Desire, a mother and daughter are unable to understand each other, and the daughter, Elena, is unable to be honest about herself with the man she loves. The story is about crossing the gap between people, and how so much of that crossing is a choice we can make. To really see someone, and thus to really love someone, is to step out of ourselves and into a kind of shifting chaos. This idea is the second inspiration for Desire, related to the part of chaos theory which discusses the idea that even that which seems random often reveals an order-an inherent cause and effect-so that every act we make can potentially alter everything. And if this is true, if our actions matter, we are caught in a web of responsibility and action, and Elena must decide how to live in this web.

Q. In Desire, you discuss Bob Dylan's album Blood on the Tracks. Can you elaborate on the significance of this music?

In the story, Elena thinks that she can only access her mother through someone else-and she chooses Blood on the Tracks to be the album that will help her access her mother. In my mind, it's a kind-of ironic play on how we communicate with one another-the way we don't know who we are except through the common experiences of someone else's life and music. I corrupted and expanded this thought by having Elena experience everything privately. She takes the words in the songs on that album and from them she forms an idea of her mother. Blood on the Tracks itself is a portal into the mid-1970s zeitgeist. It's an album that speaks a different language-confessional poet meets Sartre, the "he" of the songs and the "I" of the songs blended and separated. It's an album with a few of the same themes as the novel-like how to determine who it is that we think we love.

Q. Desire is a very cinematic novel. Does your background in film have an effect on the way you write?

When I was an undergraduate in college, I ran a movie theater with a friend of mine. He brought in films that I had never heard of, and it was these films that really changed my experience of cinema. It was an experience equivalent to that of reading some of the best literature. These films altered the way I thought, the way I saw, the way I processed emotions and ideas, just as literature had done for me up until college. I discovered the French New Wave about 25 years after it had taken place and fell in love with, specifically, Godard's and Antonioni's filmmaking. Godard with his politics intercut with sex, intercut with an ocean lapping on the shore, with sound bridges from other scenes-this was amazing to me. Antonioni impressed me with his pacing, his meditation on thought, and his existential state of mind. These and a few other filmmakers ruined me as much as Faulkner and The Waste Land ruined me-because WHAT can one write after The Waste Land and still maintain one's dignity? I felt the same way after seeing some of these films. They were for me a revolution in thought-they felt to me the same way that rock and roll was supposed to feel-like it would change everything.

What I took from Godard, in particular, was pacing, cutting, and juxtaposition. He exemplified the Eisensteinian idea of montage, which is when you put two disparate images side by side, your mind splices them together to make a new idea, in a kind of Hegelian synthesis.

Q. Desire has been compared to Jack Kerouac's On the Road. Did the great American road trip novels inspire you?

Immediately and consciously, I was playing with Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, which I think of as a kind of road trip. I love the gothic black humor of their journey, the pain and the loss of a mother who was never really there for those children in the first place. They take their mother back to "her people," who she hadn't particularly missed but insisted on being buried with, and this journey to bury the mother brings out all of her children's essential traits. I love how Cash is sawing Addie's casket below her window, and I love Addie's bitter knowing and her anger. A road trip is a kind of search, a journey toward our center as much as it is a journey outward.

Q. Your travels have taken you all over the world. How have your experiences and impressions traveling influenced your writing?

I think traveling, like spending time in deep wilderness, allows you to understand yourself, your limits, and who you are more completely. When the context of your culture is completely gone, when you are alone in a foreign land, with foreign people, you ask questions you wouldn't normally ask. Who you are outside of your culture is different than who you are within it. That's been my experience in general, especially when traveling to non-European places. This blank starting point-this position of vulnerability, I think is very useful for writing. It increases empathy and allows you to shift perspectives more easily.

Q. The ivory trade and its attendant background of excess, corruption, and poverty, play a large role in the novel. Are you drawing connections between the endangered elephants and the human spirit? To your knowledge, has the situation in Kenya improved?

Those connections are there, I think. Navigating within nature requires a maturity that takes time to arrive at. Nature can be overwhelming, dangerous, and unpredictable-and eventually revolts when exploited. But when understood in some of its complexity, I think nature nurtures and enhances the human spirit beyond most things. It also points us in other directions—spiritually, psychologically, and emotionally.

The elephants, used in both the fiction and fact sections, are creatures of intelligence, dexterity, memory, and very visible emotions, and they are being hunted and slaughtered in vast numbers, usually so that someone can get rich. I don't think of nature as being there so that we can destroy and exploit it—I see it as being there for us to enjoy and manage responsibly. Obviously, that's not a common view, but it seems reasonable to me, so I might describe myself as being mildly confused by the intense destruction and exploitation. So that is one of the questions I asked. Why the need for so much excess? Our instinctual response to nature is to dominate it. This comes in part from our fear, so I explored the side of nature that is ruthless, using smallpox and malaria and angry elephants as examples. Nature can wreak havoc on humanity, and people have to process this and decide how to respond.

As for the situation in Kenya, sadly, not a lot has changed. In many ways, the situation is actually worse. In spite of the 1989 ban on worldwide ivory trade, there are countries in Africa that do not abide by the rules, and there are plenty of buyers in Japan, China, and Korea to support the large underground ivory trade. What is happening now, that wasn't before, is that elephants are being caught young and sold to circuses and also killed for their hide-to make purses and shoes, which was very unusual in the 1970s.

Q. Elena studies petroglyphs and you are a photographer. Do you believe that art and image create false restraints on our memories?

It's true that an image can place memories associated with it into a time and place and therefore pin them down which can define the flow of memory. But it's also true that an image seen long ago and then seen again can open up memories that were otherwise dormant. It's an interesting question. We are so inundated with imagery that we can become desensitized to the more poetic and subtle messages in our visual world. The problem with too much imagery is that it can cap our own imaginations. Memory is always about loss; art and images are attempts to regain that loss. As long as something is internal, it is free to flow and change and reside unimpeded. Memories and imagination are internal. As soon as they become art, they have crossed over from the internal to the external. This passing back and forth between the pre-verbal or pre-image consciousness and the symbolic order of words and images is an action that people use to understand and define themselves. So to answer the question, I believe that art and image are a part of our attempt to externalize our imaginations and memories, and this action is an attempt to define who we are—and any definition draws a boundary and thus restrains, but without that boundary, without that definition, what exists is hidden.

Q. What drew you to seek out a smaller, independent press for the publication of your first novel?

Coffee House is committed to publishing high-quality work that might be missed by a more commercially oriented press. This allows them the freedom to publish books that might be unusual, intellectual, or innovative. I really value this freedom to explore possibilities of expression.

Q With two young children, was it hard to find time to write?

Oh, absolutely. My second baby used to wake up from about midnight to four a.m., smiling and happy and wanting to look at something, so I would hang out in my room in semi-consciousness and write while he cooed next to my desk. That worked for a while, for certain scenes. Other times, I just wrote when I could, early in the morning, when they were playing, however, whenever.

Q What are you working on now?

I'm working on two things—a novel about a small town guy who thinks he's the sexiest man in the world, and a collection of short stories ranging from domestic and teenage angst to characters that are stuck on a train with Henry Miller.