Interview de Michael Swanwick

[jerome]

Voici une interview à lire en anglais et en ligne de Michael Swanwick ici.

Il revient sur ses débuts :
"Michael, you have a great story about your beginnings as a writer. Could you tell us that story, and the importance of that story to your work as a writer?
Michael Swanwick : I came to Philadelphia in the winter of 1973 with seventy dollars, a two-pack-a-day cigarette habit, no marketable job skills, a friend who’d offered to put me up for a few weeks on his couch, and the absurd and unshakable conviction that science fiction was the highest form of literature and that I could teach myself to write it.

Over the course of that long and bleak winter, I sold my blood, typed term papers for a dollar a page and ghost-wrote them for not much more, held down the kind of temp jobs where you have to physically harass your employer to get paid, and lost forty pounds from not having enough to eat. I vividly remember early one Sunday morning seeing a sack of Italian bread left at the door of a restaurant that wasn’t open yet and walking around and around the block, arguing with myself whether I was close enough to starvation to morally justify stealing a loaf.

I lived off the charity of art students, staying in rooms briefly left vacant between housemates, and in living rooms where I rolled up newspapers and stuck them between the windows to cut down on the cold winds blowing through the house. All the while I was trying to write, inventing words and imaginary grammars, imitating William Burroughs and Vladimir Nabokov and Gene Wolfe and Thomas Pynchon and Ursula K. Le Guin. Badly, of course. I hadn’t figured out how to actually end a story. I could only write fragments.

Come spring, I got a job as a Clerk Typist I for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. I took over a student’s lease on a room across the street from Sister Minnie’s Kitchen, which was no longer a restaurant but a flophouse, and next door to the Sahara Hotel, where the only furniture was a bed, the beds had no blankets, and the rooms rented by the hour. In the dark hours of the morning, I would sit in the window recording the screaming arguments between the whores and their pimps on the street below (contrary to what we’re told, the pimps never won!) and transcribing my nightmares. I went to open poetry readings and read lists of spaceships in orbital vacuum-docks, and mapped out elaborate worlds that were fusions of Delany and Ellison and Garcia Marquez. I wrote many, many story fragments, a few of which I still hope to complete someday.

Six years later I finally finished and sold my first story. I was twenty-nine years old, engaged to be married, and I’d just lost my job.

I look back on that young man today and realize that he was absolutely mad. There was no objective evidence that I had any talent whatsoever. But I was stubborn, and it was my good fortune that I was also right: As it turned out, and to my immense relief, I could teach myself to write fantasy and science fiction.

But it was a close thing for a few years there. "