An Interview with Catherynne M. Valente
Catherynne M. Valente was born in Seattle, Washington in 1979, and grew up in Northern California. She attended UC San Diego and Edinburgh University, receiving her B.A. in Classics with an emphasis in Ancient Greek Linguistics. Currently (on hiatus from her graduate program in Comparative Literature) she lives in Yokosuka, Japan. She has had work published in a number of literary journals—and her chapbook, Music of a Proto-Suicide, was published earlier this year. The Labyrinth, her first novel—a picaresque, surreal fairy-tale—, has just been published by Prime Books (order directly from the publisher). She has a number of other books forthcoming from Prime.
This interview was conducted over MSN Messenger at the end of May.
Brendan Connell: Who are your major influences as a writer?
Catherynne M. Valente: I write a great deal of poetry—even my fiction is very informed by poetry. So Sylvia Plath, Lorca, and T.S. Eliot—classic though they may be—were always big influences. In fiction, Anaïs Nin, Milorad Pavić, Clarice Lispector. Diane Wakoski’s books are combinations of prose and poetry, and I have loved her work from the time I was a teenager. I’m also very interested by the cadences of non-English work: Greek and Latin, which I can read in the original; and translated works—Neruda, Pavić, Ahkmatova. The assumptions are different; the way language is used is just slightly off the linear path that English often takes.
Brendan Connell: So, you are very influenced by the Greeks?
Catherynne M. Valente: Certainly. It’s hard to study anything for such a long time and not have it become a part of your psyche. The mythologies and archetypes of classical culture are a profound influence on me. Stylistically, I would say they are less so. The unique rhythms of the Greek language really opened up possibilities for me in the use of English. Greek is fundamentally different from Latinate languages, their conceptions of colour, time, love, are wildly Other, and each of their words packs about a paragraph of English explanation into it. Exposure to such a radically separate language, in some sense, inspired the focus on language that always seems to dominate my work.
Brendan Connell: So which Greek authors do you like the most,—aside from Homer?
Catherynne M. Valente: Sappho, Euripides…. The philosophers I have a love-hate relationship with. Some of the pre-Socratics I like.
Brendan Connell: What about the historians?
Catherynne M. Valente: Oh, well, there I have to prefer Herodotus over Thucydides, and Xenophon’s Socrates over Plato’s. I always go for the better storyteller…. But I am a poet, too, so poetry is very important to me.
Brendan Connell: The Labyrinth actually reads a lot like a long prose poem. Even though you did not mention them as being influences—there seems to be a bit of Lautréamont and Baudelaire in your work.
Catherynne M. Valente: Baudelaire was one of my first poetic loves, actually. And you’re right, in some sense The Labyrinth is a long prose-poem. But I don’t think that prose should necessarily be as divorced from the poetic as it often is today.
Brendan Connell: So have you written many prose poems?
Catherynne M. Valente: Very few. I believe I’ve written two. One, of course, is extremely long for a poem, but it is certainly not fiction. Poetry is different, its more concentrated, it’s more focused and internal. But in my prose I want to use language in much the same way I do as a poet. Meaning I don’t want to toss it out the window because it would be easier to say “Once upon a time there was this girl who got lost in a maze.” Language and story for me are conjoined twins. One can’t live without the other.
