Returning guest blogger Don Peteroy learned something from his interview with upstart novelist Marjorie Celona. If you mess with her, she will first outthink you, then put you in the hospital, then head to the kitchen to scramble some eggs.
Marjorie Celona‘s first novel ,Y, was published in 2012 by Hamish Hamilton/Penguin Canada and in 2013 by Simon & Schuster (US), Faber & Faber (UK), and Suhrkamp (Germany). Y is forthcoming from Gallimard (France), De Bezige Bij (Netherlands), and Juritzen (Norway). Marjorie is the recipient of the John C. Schupes fellowship and Iowa Arts fellowship from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the Olive B. O’Connor fellowship from Colgate University, and was recently writer-in-residence at Hawthornden Castle in Scotland. Her stories have appeared in The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Harvard Review, Glimmer Train, Crazyhorse, and elsewhere. Born and raised on Vancouver Island, she lives in Cincinnati with her fiancé, Brian, and their dog, Betsy Lou.
Question: Let’s make believe I have extraordinary powers. I decide to travel back in time to April 9, 2003. My mission: complicate your life. Before you wake up that morning, I move everything on Earth, except for you, over one inch to the left. How would this alter your life as a writer? Consider causality, and the butterfly effect.
MC: Why not just move me—but nothing else—one inch to the right? If you move everything but me one inch to the left, you’ll have to travel all the way back to the 90s in order to complete the task by the time I wake up on April 9 (a Wednesday, i.e., a work day, so we can assume I’ll be getting up ’round 7). That’s early! And who wants to relive the 90s? You? No, you do not. You might also remember that April 9, 2003, was the day that the Iraqis, with the help of some US Marines, slung a noose around Saddam Hussein’s giant bronze neck and pulled the big man down. I suggest, then, not moving everything over by an inch (who wants to “complicate,” as you say, the fall of one of history’s most notorious war criminals? You? No, you do not), but, rather, slipping into my bedroom circa 6:59 and giving me a gentle, one-inch nudge. I’ll tell you what happens next: I tell you to get the fuck out of my bedroom. I spray your face with mace. I beat you with the baseball bat I keep under the bed. Nothing changes for me, but a lot changes for you. Paralyzed and toothless, you beam yourself back to 2013, Don, while I wash the blood from my hands and go downstairs to make breakfast.
