Cynthia Zarin: 'You write out of the world that you're living in'

It's cold, it's wet, it's January. Time for another series of exclusive short stories and another series of podcasts. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be hearing from Rodrigo Urquiola Flores and his translator Shaina Brassard, as well as Tim Conley, Cynthia Banham and Samuel Rigg. But we kick off this winter series with Cynthia Zarin and Housekeeping.

Zarin reveals that both the houses in her short story are taken from life, but with a certain amount of embroidery.

"Everything is drawn from life," she says, "because what else is there?"

Her protagonist is torn between New York City and Cape Cod, her heart "in two places at once", the author continues, but that's hardly unusual. "Very few of us live lives that are not full of complication and conflict."

After five books of poetry and a glittering career as a journalist, Zarin says she fell into prose fiction almost by accident.

"I'd started writing, actually, a letter," she explains, "and then that letter just became something I wrote all the time. It started out as a letter to a specific person, but it became absolutely something else."

Zarin's novels Inverno and Estate are constructed in layers, with significant moments tolling through them like bells – a natural form for a writer who believes that "everything is about memory".

But it's a form that took some time to emerge. When she showed the work in progress to her friends they would say, "OK sweetheart, it's very beautiful, but what is it?"

Zarin says that she began to find out what her letter might be when the artist and writer Leanne Shapton told her to "Stop trying to put it together, take it apart." And she identifies a meeting with her agent, Luke Ingram, as another turning point.

"We started to talk about the structure," she recalls, "and we drew it on a napkin."

As a poet and journalist, Zarin says she finds prose fiction something of a liberation.

"The idea that you can have a character and you can decide that she has red hair – it's fun."

We'll be having more fun next time with Rodrigo Urquiola Flores and the translator Shaina Brassard.

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