Q: How did you make the time in the rhythms of your individual writing lives to create this novel together? Were you also working on other, separate projects?
Ira: We had talked about writing together again for many years, but we always put it off because we were working on individual projects. Either Marge would be in the middle of something or I would. Sometime in 1997 we found ourselves, oddly, both free at the same time. Marge had just finished City of Darkness, City of Light, and I had just finished another novel. For the first time in twenty years we were in sync and could actually consider a joint project. Storm Tide thus became the main project we were working on, and we each devoted our full time to it. This meant roughly six hours a day, sometimes together, sometimes at different computers.
Marge: During the era of working on the novel, I did not write any other fiction. I am always writing poetry, and I wrote a fair number of poems during the various drafts of Storm Tide. I was also doing research for my next novel, which I wrote alone.
Q: How did the co-authorship affect the daily ebb and flow of your shared domestic life?
Marge: It had little influence on our domestic life. The things that have to be done, get done. We do our work like any other job, and then we do other things--garden, take walks, read, see friends, go to movies, play with the cats, clean the house, shop, whatever.
Q: What did you learn about each other in the process of this co-authorship?
Ira: Piercy is a world-class novelist. I knew this, obviously, and yet, I was her husband and husbands don't always see their wives clearly. A husband, as enlightened a man as he may think he is, is still a man in a very intimate role with a woman and (am I really saying this?) thinks he knows better in many instances. Because we are both writers and because literature is as common a subject with us as cooking or finances, it's easy, as a husband, to assume the same attitudes, i.e., I know more about literature and cooking and finances. Working together renewed my great respect for Piercy. I learned, moreover, to trust her judgment about plot and character.
Marge: The last time we had written together was in the late seventies, on the play The Last White Class. Since then, Ira's mastery of fictional form, of dialogue, his discipline, and his seriousness have grown immensely. I knew that, but working with someone, you experience their abilities in a very direct and daily way.
Q: The theme of erotic love is strong in Storm Tide as well as in your other works of fiction and poetry. Readers have celebrated you both for this "earthiness." Why is it important to write about this aspect of life still avoided in many literary works?
Marge: I find sexuality and emotionality two of the ways I can grasp a character. People are strongly individual and strongly themselves in those aspects of their lives. They may lie about sex. In fact, I think it is an unalienable right of all Americans to lie about sex. We begin to lie in grade school: I know what that means. I've done that. Or later, Oh no, I've never done that. I'd never do that. Later still, That was the greatest! That was wonderful. But in writing about sexuality, we cut to the quick. We can grasp our characters in those moist irrational interstices between intention and act, between pretense and greed and need. It may not be and often isn't the most important part of a character, but it is a portal into that character that I find enormously useful.
Ira: It would be as difficult for me to ignore a character's sexuality as it would his family: two areas completely ignored by writers who have written very fine books. Sexuality interests me; I'm not afraid of it. Who a character may appear to be with his clothes on is often very different from the man with his clothes off. How better to see inside and through a character than to see him in bed, where power relationships often change, where childhood obsessions are very often brought back to life.
Q: The physical world--nature, bodies, food, houses--figures intensely in your fiction. Beyond the power of sensual description, how do these tangible parts of life function for you as metaphor?
Ira: We live in a time, in a society, in which people are obsessed with their bodies. How people view themselves, especially young people, is often symptomatic of how they view their bodies. I can't imagine writing about any Americana under thirty for whom physical appearance does not function as a metaphor for how they see themselves fitting into the society. To a lesser extent, a person's possessions define him/her. Crystal's image of herself as fat, unattractive, and therefore undesirable drove her to view sex as her only weapon. Johnny was slender and tall, and always saw himself as towering over the people in town. He was always aware of the power of symbols: careful, for instance, not to let the car he drove set him apart from others. The physical world is often a function of how people view us and how as a result we are forced to view ourselves . . . and then, how we act.
Q: You have lived on Cape Cod for many years. Its shapes and textures are integral to this novel. Much is said these days about "a sense of place" in an artist's vision. Please talk about how the world immediately around where you write contributes to the worlds of your fiction.
Marge: I have loved this place since I first saw it, many years before I moved here. Now I have lived on the Cape for close to thirty years. Before the Cape, I had always lived in cities, in the center of cities. The Cape has changed a lot since I moved here. It is more built up, there are more amenities, a lot more traffic, more year-round people, more shops. I think the Cape has influenced my poetry far more than my fiction. I had little sense of nature, of my place in a natural setting, of myself as a natural being, before I had lived here for a few years. I am now ridiculously closely attuned to seasons, tides, weather. We are experiencing a terrible drought this summer, and it affects me strongly. But I have written about the Cape before, especially in Summer People. I'm sure I'll do so again.
Ira: I was born in New York City and raised on the south shore of Long Island. My experience of the world, when I first moved to Cape Cod, was of the people, not the natural world that impresses newcomers to the Cape. With all its history of being a haven for people in the arts, the Cape was not an easy place to make friends. Had we had children in the school system, or had I had a job as a builder or a plumber or an electrician, I would have met people in my daily life, but as a writer, stuck behind my typewriter, I found it extremely difficult to make new friends. I felt for many years like an outsider. It was this experience of place that I brought to the character of David--a fellow who was not quite trusted by the locals, who was always on the outside.
Q: Both of you have spoken and written forcefully and eloquently about the connection between art and politics. How does that connection manifest itself in, and with, Storm Tide?
Marge: I see the politics of the book as partly feminist--different ways of relating to men, to sexuality, to work. I see it as more about the politics of a small town than about larger political issues, which I've dealt with in many other novels and poems. The politics in Gone to Soldiers is international. The politics in Vida is national. The issues in Storm Tide are partly ecological, and how such decisions impact on a local economy. But finally in a novel politics occurs as it is personally experienced by a character or characters. I never use viewpoint characters. No one person ever is my mouthpiece. The truth of a novel--the political truth as well as the psychological or philosophical or spiritual truth--comes together in the reader's mind as she blends the various viewpoints and experiences of the different characters together and finds her own truth for that particular novel.
Ira: Fiction enables me not so much to mirror the political world but to give it a shape; to show actions and consequences over a long span of time, but time greatly condensed. The time span of Storm Tide is roughly one year. In that time the political structure of a town changes from one run by a Boss (not unlike Boss Tweed, or Mayor Daley or Pendergast in Missouri or Boston's James Michael Curly) to a government run by a new, more liberal coalition. Fiction allows one not only to speed up the process and see it whole but to add nuance and personal motivations to characters. I see Storm Tide as a microcosm of these larger events, similar to New York City or Chicago but in a smaller, graspable frame. Art enables us to grasp the larger world and shrink it--in time, in space--to a size in which a person, in this case a reader, can encompass a real-world event. Of course, art always enables the writer to cast the event in her/his own vision. Another writer, one who believed in, or profited from, the benefits of government run by a boss, would have cast the David/Judith/Gordon coalition into the role of ruining the town.
Q: So much of Western literature assumes a Christian cultural perspective. Please talk about the centrality of Judaism in Storm Tide
Ira: Jews have long been written as outsiders and seen themselves as outsiders in literature, and for that reason have interested readers who are not Jewish. There is not a lot about David that is Jewish: he hardly knows any Hebrew; he's indifferent to ritual; his looks are likened to a fair-eyed native American. Readers relate to David less as a Jew growing up in a Christian town than as an outsider. For me, the Jewish aspect of Storm Tide is the Jew as outsider.
Marge: Judaism has an aspect of connection to the natural year, as does all of my writing, including this novel. Also, the novel is built in part around Jewish holidays, particularly Rosh haShona, the new year. Judith is a woman for whom the Jewish holidays are meaningful and important, and she has brought that into her husband's life as she brings it into David's. She is strongly identified as a Jew, and she teaches that to people around her. She is not living in a place where there are a lot of Jews, and she has to improvise a lot. I think one of the aspects of Judaism that impacts my writing is my preference for multiple viewpoint. In the Zohar, a kabbalistic text, we learn that all Jews not yet born were present at Sinai for the marriage of the Jewish people and haShem and that every Jew there learned and experienced something slightly different--and the truth is not complete until every bit of the truth that every individual has to offer is finally put together. Judaism is a religion not of the individual so much as of the group.
Q: Might Storm Tide be considered "a marriage of your imaginations"? What does that phrase mean to you?
Marge: It was a marriage of imagination, of work habits, of vision, of our different conceptions of plot and character. In a true cooperation, a true collaboration, every scene is a blending of the different visions and different talents of the two writers.
Ira:Storm Tide was the most fun writing that I've had in twenty years. I had worked in theater before I started fiction writing and adored the experience of "co-laboring" with other people, learning to trust other people to solve problems and more, marveling at what they could come up with that I could not. I left theater when egos began to strike against each other like swords. It was much easier, and much lonelier, to work by myself. Storm Tide is a good novel, I think, because it dramatizes the clashing of characters who are so very different--just as Marge and I are so very different and yet able to work and live together. So what you have in the book (what we have in our lives) is a marriage of great differences, enormous contradictions, that somehow complement and respect each other.
Q: Please talk more about why, as you explain in the Afterword, you have distinctly different preferences for point of view.
Ira: David is an uncertain character. During the course of the book he grows more sure of himself, but a good deal of the book's suspense is the fact that we wonder if he'll make the right choices. He's immature, much more so than Judith and Johnny. David is written in the first person so that the reader can fumble along with him, wonder if he's really going to screw up again and again. David is not able to distance himself from the world in the same way that Judith and Johnny are. They are experienced attorneys. They are older. Third-person point of view gives the reader a sense of wisdom, of the ability to separate from a situation and think it through, that David simply does not have.
Marge: I am most comfortable in the third person, and I usually work with multiple viewpoints. Occasionally with multiple viewpoints, I will use a first person, as in Jacqueline's diary in Gone to Soldiers. I wrote one novel, Braided Lives, in the first person, because I wanted the direct address to the reader available in first person. But generally, I find it too loud somehow. I like to work in the third person, in the mental voice of the character rather than in their physical out-loud voice.
Q: Why did you choose to begin the novel with David looking back in pain, keeping the identity of the dead woman a mystery?
Ira: We thought it was an interesting variation on the who-done-it: a who-bought-it? Both women were dear to David; he was passionate in different ways about each of them. We realized that either one could have died, and it seemed an intriguing mystery, so we set it up that way. Any reader could have easily flipped forward to solve it, but I think most people thought they knew who died in the beginning and then became gradually unsure.
Marge: Choosing the precise point of entry is the single most crucial choice in a novel. We discussed endlessly where to begin, and that struck us as apt to do what a beginning must, in order to succeed: arouse the reader's curiosity and interest.
Q: Why did you choose the world of baseball for David's claim to fame?
Ira: I knew very little about baseball and treated myself to the opportunity to learn more about it. It's one of the perks of the fiction writer that he/she can immerse him/herself in strange things for months, learn something about it, and move on. You would think that would make writers interesting at parties.
Marge: Woody chose that. It was a sport we both knew an equal amount about, probably the only sport besides horseracing and boxing I know much of. I am pretty ignorant of basketball and football, although on occasion when Ira is passionately involved, I will take an interest. I'm not much of a sports fan. He is.
Q: Which character(s), if any, did either or both of you find most interesting to watch evolve?
Ira: For me it was Crystal. I simply did not know from day to day how far this woman would go.
Marge: If I couldn't identify with and find interesting any major character, I wouldn't be able to write about that character. We both wrote all the viewpoint characters. In first draft, I wrote Johnny and Judith, and Ira wrote David. In second draft, we switched off. In subsequent drafts, we did it all together at the computer, except for individual sections that one or another volunteered to take away and work on according to agreed-upon criteria and aims.
Q: Any words of advice for other pairs of writers--whether couples or friends--who might consider co-authorship?
Marge: A common intention is paramount. You have to be intending to write the same novel and not each lobbying for a different novel. A great deal of serious and honest conversation beforehand and a fair amount of compromising even before you begin is absolutely essential. Respect is the virtue most necessary to successful collaboration--respect and the ability to actually listen to the other person.
Ira: Be prepared to be told that co-authored books will never do as well as those with one author. People look to the novel for a singular vision. But if you're passionate about the project, proceed. You always have the option, later on, to invent a pseudonym.
Q: Please talk more about how you began to invent "a whole new persona to author the novel" before you decided simply to reveal your own names. You say you gave this persona a name and a biography. How did this process compare to the invention of a novel's characters? Might this persona ever emerge as one of your characters in future work?
Ira: Many writers I've talked to have the fantasy of creating a new persona: a young, fresh voice; a new discovery, wise beyond her years. Never entirely seriously (living, as we do, two hours from the airport and Boston, we do a lot of driving, and have lots of time to talk), we created an amalgam of our names (always different), a sort of demographically perfect generic young writer. God help us if the book did well and she had to tour!
Marge: It was far more perfunctory than the dossier I standardly create for a major character in a novel. I can't imagine using her, but who knows?
Q: You tell us that as a tight couple you talk to each other "endlessly" about what you are thinking and doing. Did this ease with orality enter into the composition process? Did you read sections aloud to one another?
Marge: I always read poems aloud and hear them in my head while I'm writing them. I do pay attention to the rhythms of prose, but not in the same primarily oral sense as poetry.
Ira: Mostly we talked about the work when walking or sitting at the computer. I don't believe we ever read it out loud. I read it over and over to see if it has a rhythm for the reader, but never aloud.
Q: Have you given shared public readings from Storm Tide?
Marge: Yes, we have. A number of them.
Ira: We did a tour when the book came out and did many public readings, alternating David and Judith chapters. It worked out well.
Q: Is there another joint project yet underway? What new titles of yours--individually--should readers be looking for soon?
Marge: We have no joint projects in mind, except for the workshops we teach together in fiction and in personal narrative, and a possible book based on our techniques. I had two books of poetry published in 1999: The Art of Blessing the Day: Poems with a Jewish Theme, from Knopf; and Early Grrrl--my early, out-of-print, and uncollected poems--published by Leapfrog.
Ira: No joint projects are underway at the moment. Marge's next novel--out from Morrow in October 1999--is entitled Three Women. It's an absolutely contemporary saga about the deep complexities of love among three women in the same family. It will break your heart.
© Copyright 2009 by Marge Piercy and Ira Wood. Reprinted with permission by Fawcett. All rights reserved.
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