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Jenny White, Author of “The Sultan’s Seal”
(W.W. Norton, February 2006) and “The
Abyssinian Proof”. This interview with Jenny White was first published in
February 2006. To find out even more about Jenny White, you can visit our Jenny White page.
Where were you
born and raised?
I
was born in southern Germany and emigrated to the US as a child. I have a Polaroid
of my mother and I standing on the deck of the ocean liner entering New York
City harbor, the Statue of Liberty in the background. My mother strains to see
ahead. I look quizzically over my shoulder at the person taking the picture.
After our arrival, we lived in New Rochelle, NY, where I went to grammar and
high school. I studied at City University of New York, the college set up for
immigrant children, studied for a year in Germany (where I met my first Turks),
then went to Turkey for my Master’s degree in psychology. Long before I knew anything about
Turkey or anthropology, I remember telling a high school friend I wanted to
travel and live long enough in each country to really get to know the people,
and that I wanted to go to Turkey – the most exotic place I could think
of.
What was it that
first got you into writing and when did you start writing?
I
always wanted to be a writer. You might say my career began on November 22,
1963 when I wrote “President Kennedy was shot today” in a little red notebook
someone had given me – my first conscious memory of writing for its own sake.
I
also had a bent for science, so opportunity and curiosity took me in that
direction, to graduate school and a career as an anthropologist. But over the
years, the two desires merged, as my ethnographic writing became more and more
literary (although not fictional), and now my ethnography and scholarship
inform my fiction writing.
Which writers
have influenced you the most?
Arturo Perez-Reverte, Sarah Waters, E. Annie Proulx, Marguerite
Duras, Gail Tsukiyama, for mystery Jody Shields, Anne Perry, Dennis Lehane,
Laura Joh Rowland, many others. I’m a voracious reader.
Where do you stand on the
nature v. nurture debate? Were you born a writer, or were there factors in your
environment that enabled you to become a writer?
I learned English as a second language, primarily from
books, so perhaps that nurtured my relationship with language. I read all the time. I have
always written obsessively. From my earliest days of learning English, I
carried around a notebook. The compulsion to sketch the world in words is
always with me. To be a novelist, I think an obsession with language, with
words, is probably necessary. You have to fuss over words all the time, you
have to need to do it. You can’t help
yourself. And I suspect that is nature, not nurture.
There are a lot
of courses teaching creative writing nowadays, but do you think that good
writing can be taught?
I think good writing can be taught, but the feel for what is
right at the cellular level of words can’t be taught. I think of it as
woodworking. You can learn to build a perfectly nice, adequate cabinet that
anyone would want in their home, but to design and finely tool an original
piece of furniture – really, a work of art -- is something in the hands and the
eyes, not just in the brain.
Have you entered
writing competitions? If so, have you won any prizes?
I
won a poetry award in fifth grade from the Knights of Columbus and was
co-founder of my high school newspaper where I also wrote a gossip column. My
most recent scholarly book, “Islamist Mobilization in Turkey” (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 2002), won the 2003 Douglass Award for the best
book in Europeanist anthropology.
Do you have any
short stories or poems published online? (If so, please provide the URLs):
This is a humorous short commentary about my experiences as a scholar
turned novelist:
http://insidehighered.com/views/2006/02/09/white
What kind of
things do you write?
My novel, “The Sultan’s Seal”, is literary historical mystery
fiction (I find the need to shoehorn myself into a single bookstore shelf label
rather perplexing). I also write ethnographies and scholarly articles about
contemporary Turkish society and politics.
What, for you,
is the best piece of prose that you have ever written?
“The Sultan’s Seal”.
What are you
working on now?
I’m writing a sequel, following the same Turkish magistrate
through another adventure in 1887 Istanbul.
What is your
writing day like?
I also teach, so my writing is squeezed into weekends and summers.
I like to get up around 7am, read the paper with my coffee and cereal, then sit
down at the kitchen table by my laptop and notes and start writing. If I’m on a
roll, I keep writing until the text seems to rock gently to a natural stop.
Sometimes that isn’t until late at night. It’s hard on your back, so every once
in a while, I get up and hobble around the apartment to stretch and grab a bite
of cheese to stay alive.
Where would you
like to be in 10 years time?
On my fifth Kamil Pasha mystery and on my second non-mystery
novel (I have some ideas I’d like to develop that are contemporary and don’t
involve mystery.) There also is another scholarly book on contemporary Turkey
that I’d like to write.
What’s the most
exciting thing about writing for you?
Just the writing, when everything starts to flow and my role is
reduced to running about with the bucket just catching what comes down. It’s
exhilarating, thrilling even. I have no idea where it comes from.
What’s the most
frustrating thing about writing for you?
Having to start from scratch after months of work because the
characters or the plot aren’t working out. But there’s the wonderful feeling
when you finally know where you’re taking it next.
What’s the best piece of feedback that
you’ve had from your audience?
I haven’t given a reading of my novel yet, so that is all yet to
come. A friend suggested I ham it up, so perhaps I’ll do that.
For scholarly talks, I tend to be rather serious. Years ago, when
I was a graduate student giving my very first public talk, a woman from the
audience came up to me afterwards and said, “You were a very good speaker,
except for one thing.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“When the moderator complemented you on finishing on time, you
bobbed your head and giggled. That ruined everything.”
I thought about that comment for a long time. Basically, the woman
was telling me that I ruined the image of a serious scholar, a person to be
taken seriously, by deflecting the praise in a child-like way that was common
feminine behavior, but in that setting was inappropriate and symbolized a lack
of professionalism. You can debate this forwards and backwards; it’s an
interesting commentary on gender roles and what it means to be “professional”,
among many other things. But I thought she was right and I never did that
again. So if I ham it up at my reading, it’s not going to end with a giggle.
Do you write for
a particular audience, or is your first priority to satisfy your own
creativity?
I write fiction for myself. Or rather, I write fiction
because I can’t help myself.
I write scholarly works for fellow colleagues, students, and what
I picture as a relatively well-informed “New York Times” or “Wall Street
Journal” reader.
Do you have a
homepage? If so, what’s the URL?
I’ll have one by March, some version of my name: JennyWhite
(.com is taken, so I’ll have to be creative).
Jenny White’s webpage is http://www.jennywhite.net/
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