Q&A With Tara Roeder

The novel is structured in a really interesting way, weaving between multiple perspectives and time periods. What was the impetus behind writing this particular story? What made you want to tell this story this way?

The novel starts out with Charles, a writing professor in his office reading student papers, and this was my reality for so many years, so I was in that sense I was writing what I know. I wanted to write about what it felt like to be a teacher and to engage with students and their lives and stories and to a certain extent their writing. So many things happened with students that made me imagine what their lives were like. I wanted to show the intersection of student and teacher lives and humanize them. Charles is a Black man and making him the main character was taking a risk for me—why aren’t you writing about a Black woman, and how to do you know what it feels like to be a man, but I wanted to write to understand what it feels like and also to create a character that was not stereotypical. He can be paternalistic and even macho to a certain extent, but he is also sensitive and vulnerable. Like Toni Morrison I wanted to show the inner life of people, all the characters. When I started out, I started out telling myself the story and that’s why it’s in the 3^rd person, but I tried through various iterations and revisions to keep it close to the character’s perspectives and to write in a way that the voice sounded like them and different than the voices of the other characters. There is a book by Jean Rhys—Wide Sargasso Sea—that I love and that’s a prequel to Jane Eyre about Antionette Cosway. Part two of that book she alternates between the pov of Antionette and Rochester, and I think I got that technique from her. I’m also someone who loves collages and sometimes has a hard time making explicit connections between sections of writing, so I let the reader make the connections. I also found it easier or possible to tell the back story by attaching certain dates to it. I just tried to figure how to fit it all together somehow. There was no master plan. And when I was writing the different characters I tried to be them, almost like an actor.

As you mentioned in your Bio poem, there are a lot of conflicting messages around “the writing process.” How would you describe your process writing this novel? (I can also ask I think there’s a lot of power in resisting the gatekeeping practices of traditional literary publication. Do you want to talk about your own road to publication and the decisions you made during that process?)

I’m a little embarrassed to talk about this. My process was pretty idiosyncratic. It took me many years. When I look back at my documents parts of it are almost 20 years old. I would go back to it during vacations and breaks but I did not work on it continuously until I had a research leave a few years before I left St. John’s, and I wrote the very end of it shortly before I published it last year. I remember writing one section about Rosetta, the colleague Charles has an affair with in the Writing Center during a faculty writing retreat. I started looking for an agent after the bulk of it was written but without success and I still didn’t know what the ending was. I’ve rewritten some of the sections 5 or 6 times. I really enjoy rewriting—maybe too much. It can become an end in itself. I find that my language can sometimes be too formal, and I use too many words, and they’re in the wrong places so I craft and recraft my sentences. I also tend to hear the words as I write, and the rhythm of sentences is very important to me. I have to rewrite until I get the rhythm right. I also find that because of the sound thing, I tend to repeat certain words, so when I edit, I try to look for infelicitous repetitions. Once I retired I went back to the book and thought at least I have the time to bring it to completion. I have a cousin who writes what they used to call urban fiction, and he told me that he started publishing his own books because he didn’t like what the editors did when he was published by a traditional publisher. I remembered what he said and decided to publish the book myself using a platform and program for the purpose and I created my own imprint—ICan Press, and I did. I had complete artistic control, lol. I designed the cover. It’s based on a photograph I took of a building in Harlem and. I got my writer friends to read the book and make suggestions. Traditional publishing did not open its gate to me. There seems to be a place for very, very good writers like Adiche, say, who cannot be denied, and for cheesy formulaic writers whose books sell because they are entertaining and don’t make excessive demands on the reader. I consider myself a writer of literary fiction which is not to be snobbish, but to me it is as much about the language as the story and that’s not always the case with commercially viable fiction.

The novel is really significantly character-driven. Can you talk a little bit about how you developed your characters? What’s your invention process like, and did they ever end up doing things that surprised you?

I’m mentioned Charles, earlier. In the first chapter when he encounters Rosetta in the mailroom he tells her about his retirement and what he wants to do and that was actually based on a conversation I had with an older colleague in the mailroom of the one the colleges I used to teach in. The colleague told me not to let the University take advantage of me. That stuck with me, so I put it in Charles’ mouth, but I did not build Charles character on him. Keisha, the student who comes to Charles’s apartment on the eve of 9/11 with her young daughter and leaves her there was modeled physically on one of my son’s friends. But her story and situation is made up. I think one of the themes of the book is about parenting and just how difficult it is and how the wrong kind of parenting can harm children and about intergenerational trauma. There’s a scene when Keisha and Bianca are in Charles’ kitchen and Keisha slaps Bianca and I think that surprised me that she did it when I first wrote it, but it was in character. I made lists about the characters and looked up dates and thinks to make sure the timing was accurate. But once I heard their voices, in dialogue, it was easy to come up with their back stories. I was inspired by family stories, accounts of Black life by writers like Baldwin, my aunt Paule, Isabel Wilkerson and places I lived in and visited in Harlem and other parts of the city. I really like writing dialogue and what I said in the bio poem about stealing language is something that I do. The way I describe Quintasia a character who only appears once but is important in helping to reveal Charles’s emotional state and to plot development later, was born from the name tag of a cashier in a grocery store. There’s a part where Charles mentions her lifting her heels out of her shoes and that’s something I noticed someone doing once.