Cultural Reckonings

How different is Syracuse, New York from Anderson or Muncie or Columbus or South Bend or,even Fort Wayne? That's why I read Dana Spiotta on Turning to James Joyce for Inspiration and the Power of Cultural Reckonings; The Author of Wayward in Conversation with Jane Ciabattari. Here are soem things for Indiana writers to think about:

JC: This is your first novel set in Syracuse, where you’ve lived and taught. You layer Syracuse cultural history throughout. Sam is drawn to “unusual old structures,” like the abandoned AME Zion church, built 100 years ago to replace a structure dating to the 1840s, once a major stop on the Underground Railroad. What inspired you to use this setting? (And, as you point out, “Syracuse was the inspiration for the Emerald City.”)

DS: After Trump was elected, I had to revise my own thinking about American culture and what it was and has been. And a small run-down city seemed like a good way to explore those ideas. It could stand in for any small formerly prosperous American city. But to me, fiction works and has purchase on wider concerns, by anchoring itself in a very specific place, time, and people. I focused on 2017 in Syracuse and this eccentric middle-aged housewife. So much of the past of Syracuse is hidden in plain sight.

For example, the remnants of the 15th Ward, which was the thriving Black community that was torn down to build 1-81 and in the name of urban renewal. Eighty-one further segregated the city and created deep pockets of poverty. And Syracuse has a famously polluted lake and very long winters. But it is also beautiful, it has lovely parks, and with all its precipitation, the lushness of the spring here is breathtaking. Upstate New York, perhaps because of the Erie Canal, has an interesting history in the great 19th-century reform movements of abolition and women’s rights, but it also cultivated other interests: vegetarianism, temperance, spiritualism, cults, etc. I have always been fascinated by what Greil Marcus dubbed “old, weird America.” From the Burned Over district west of here, to the Shakers east of here, upstate New York has long had room for experiments in living and counterculture.

JC: You structure your novels often as collages of web pages, film scripts, blog posts, narrative chapters, news reports, and interviews, in keeping with whatever the latest digital innovations are. In Wayward you have a section of Syracuse archives, texts between Sam and Ally, texts, online news reports, social media, and a thread in which Sam connects after election night with a series of online groups, beginning with the Syracuse offshoot of a national movement called WWW (Women Won’t Wilt), and then to women attending open-mic comedy nights and using various new-tech devices to deal with midlife. Ally uses an etymology app based on Etymonline and all the high school screen options of 2017. How do you track the “new” elements that have entered our daily lives since 2016?

DS: In order to write about the present, or in this case, the very recent past, I had to incorporate prose versions of technology. We all engage all the time even if, like Sam, you are mostly offline. She still has a smartphone and texts. She listens to podcasts. She posts Yelp comments. The cultural moment we are in—the time since the country crossed over and Trump was elected—was and is shaped more by digital engagement than in-person engagement.

But beyond depicting tech in the novel, I like having prose replicate the mosaic, the fragments, that make up the human marks on the world. I like white space and a variety of formats. It is closer to how I experience the world. I like how John Dos Passos used newspaper headlines and how James Joyce used ads and song lyrics. The little paper flyers that appear in this novel were inspired by the “crumpled throwaway” that said Elijah is Coming in Ulysses and floats down the Liffey through the book. So against digital tech, there is really outdated tech: paper flyers, letters, a journal entry, a pamphlet, a cabinet of curiosities. They relate the past to the present in form as well as content. We are always trying to connect, trying to curate and aggregate the world.

What are our worlds out here in flyover country? They are what we make them to be - just like the lives of the people who live in this territory. It took me leaving the state to see what had been in my face the whole of my life. And I came back here to touch again on the reality of the place.